[Paper spotlight] Ages and Stages: Child learning, exploration, and helping behaviors in foraging an

For the next couple of weeks, we’ll be posting abstracts from the session Ages and stages: Child learning, exploration, and helping behaviors in foraging and transitioning populations. This session was presented at the American Anthropological Association 2018 annual meeting in San Jose. Two fantastic scholars organized the panel; Helen Davis, currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, works on schooling and cognition among Tsimane forager-horticulturalists (Bolivia) and Twe pastoralists (Namibia). Alyssa Crittenden is a professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and works on nutrition, and foraging among Hadza foragers (Tanzania). Get ready for some killer abstracts by the panelists!

Abstract: Hunting and gathering is, evolutionarily, the defining subsistence strategy of our species. Furthermore, many societies are in the process of transitioning from hunting and gathering to market integration, either by choice or by external pressure. Studying how children learn in these societies can, therefore, provide us with key data to test theories about the evolution of human life history, cognition, social behavior, adaptive learning responses, and culture change. However, at present, many assumptions in regard to normative teaching and learning behaviors among children are based only on data from what have been coined Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic (WEIRD) societies. In line with this year’s theme Change in the Anthropological Imagination, we aim to expand the dialogue on, and articulate the ways in which, current anthropological research may support or refute long standing ideas about how children learn, when and what they learn, from whom they learn, and how cultures are maintained and changed across generations.

For this session we will focus on learning behaviors in foraging and transitioning populations during middle childhood and adolescence. Middle childhood (about age 6-11) marks a turning point in development, both hormonally (adrenarche) and socially, as children in all cultures broaden their social sphere and engage in more gender-typical roles. Adolescence (11-19) is a time of great motivational and emotional changes, and marks the transitional stage from childhood to adulthood. We are interested in both how forager children learn and explore during these periods of development, and how cultural and social transitions affect traditional modes of childhood learning, confidence and exploration, as well as subsistence behaviors.

[In the news] Variations in play between cultures warn west against ‘one-size-fits-all’

Read this article by Jaipaul L. Roopnarine in the Child & Family blog here. 

“However, in many societies, fathers don’t do roughhouse play. Yet their children have close, well-attached relationships with them and also learn to control their feelings and manage social relationships. A good example is the Aka hunter-gatherer community in the Central African Republic. In this collectivist, egalitarian culture, fathers don’t roughhouse with their young children. Nevertheless, Aka fathers are reckoned to have the closest child-father relationships in the world – they are very gentle caregivers, holding their babies 22 per cent of the time, according to Barry Hewlett’s research. No need to teach Aka dads to roughhouse – they clearly have different pathways to successful child development.”

[In the news] If this is a park…

By Fiore Longo from Survival International. Read more here. 

“The Baka stand ready to fight, both for their own sake and that of the greater good: “We cannot accept the park. It’s useless. Everything is there: food, life, health, all of this you can find in the forest. If we give it away it would be a sacrifice, we would be sacrificing the lives of our children, of our parents, of ourselves — it would be like committing suicide.” It would be a sacrifice for us too: we would lose tribal peoples, the environment and perhaps also our humanity.”