FCS members explore kinship learning at Children’s Acquisition of Kinship Knowledge: Theory and Meth

FCS’s Sheina Lew-Levy and Noa Lavi were at the Children’s Acquisition of Kinship Knowledge: Theory and Method Workshop in Bristol recently, exploring kinship learning among foragers in Congo and India. We were very grateful for the thoughtful and provocative conversation surrounding learning kinship and kinship terms. We are looking forward to exploring these ideas further!

Three Mbendjele cousins. Their mothers are sisters. They refer to each other as older and younger siblings. 

Changing relations, changing terms: Learning dynamic sociality and kinship among South Indian Nayaka foragers 

By Noa Lavi

Abstract: Kinship provides a framework for social organisation and order. As such, its terminology is usually learned by children as they begin to make sense of their social surroundings. Learning the proper kinship categories for each relative helps children locate themselves in the social network to which they will belong throughout their lives. However, the case of the Nayaka, a hunter-gatherer community living in the forested hills of the Nilgiri district in South India, presents an alternative usage and understanding of kinship concepts. Nayaka do not use fixed kinship terms. Kinship terms are flexible and change according to ad-hoc social relations. This pattern of relationality is not limited only to kinship terminology but is actually a fundamental notion that structures many aspects of people’s lives, including their notions of knowledge and knowledge acquisition. In fact, the entire process of Nayaka’s children development is based on the gradual learning of the ability to maintain such ad-hoc relationships. Among other things, children must learn to alternate between different kinship concepts according to the circumstances and relations at any given moment. The case of the Nayaka, therefore, highlights the complexity and diversity of kin concepts among different social systems.

Play and teaching among Mbendjele foragers

By Sheina Lew-Levy

Abstract: As more studies are conducted on social learning cross-culturally, and on social learning among hunter-gatherers specifically, researchers are coming to understand the importance of child-to-child transmission, through play and reciprocal teaching, to the learning of skills specific to food getting tasks. However, less is known about how forager children learn cultural and social norms, such as kinship terms. In this paper, I will outline some of my recent findings regarding the ways in which Mbendjele forager children from the Congo Basin transmit foraging knowledge to each other through play and teaching. Then, by summarizing results from a meta-ethnographic review conducted on how forager children learn social and gender norms, I will show that, unlike learning to forage, learning about kinship is primarily transmitted by ‘teaching play’ from adults to children. Finally, I will describe how two kinship terms, ‘mbanda’ and ‘ndoyi’ are taught to young children through word play among the Mbendjele, and how the transmission of kinship terms is similar to, and differs from, learning to hunt and gather.

FCS presents at the Social Inequality Before Farming? Conference

FCS’s Rachel Reckin recently presenting our paper entitled Learning Egalitarianism: A Cross-Cultural Review of Forager Children at the Social Inequality Before Farming? conference in Cambridge, U.K. We had a blast, and our looking forward to sharing our eventual book chapter on the topic with you all!

Abstract: Though archaeologists have long explored how immediate return, egalitarian foragers transitioned to delayed-return, non-egalitarian practices, the role of children in this transition has routinely been ignored. This is surprising, since evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists alike have noted that children’s participation and innovation in daily life may be the starting point for important cultural and subsistence changes. In order to address this gap, the present paper explores how social relationships and ideas that account for egalitarianism and inequality, shape the way in which forager children learn to hunt, gather and socialise. In order to do so, we use a meta-ethnographic method, and describe the various ways in which egalitarianism tempers how children in immediate return foraging societies learn, and the role children play in the diffusion of innovations. We then explore the role that children may have played in the transition from egalitarian immediate-return foraging to delayed-return non-egalitarian systems, an important precursor to farming.

[Guest Post] Learning to fish: How do perceptions of risk in the environment affect learning among t

This blog post is the first in a series outlining the presentations from our AAA panel All play and no work: (Re)defining play and work among hunter-gatherer children

By Renée Hagen (UCLA) and Mark Dyble (University of Cambridge)

Forager children learn most subsistence skills in middle and late childhood, and often they need to learn how to survive and subsist in dangerous environments. How do children learn under different environmental constraints? In this study we focused on the effect of risk on learning pathways of fishing: we examined how different perceptions of threat in the environment affect who children learn spearfishing from and expected to find that children in low-risk environments learn mostly from their peers in mixed-age and gender playgroups, while in high-risk environments, children learn from their parents who protect their offspring, or from high-skilled non-parent adults. Research took place among the Agta foragers of the Philippines. The Agta live in the Northern Sierra Madre rainforest and subsist mostly on hunting, fishing and gathering. 40% of the Agta in this region live along the coast, where spearfishing in done behind the reef flats. This is a dangerous environment: the water is deep, fishermen are exposed to high waves and currents and there is a fair risk of shark attacks. In addition, people are scared of sea monsters that lurk in the ocean Around 60% of Agta live in the forest interior and these Agta fish in rivers: relatively safe environments with low risks of drowning or predation. In both environments the same tools (metal spear propelled with rubber bands) are used. How do pathways of knowledge differ between these environments? Data on the composition of fishing groups was used as a proxy for opportunities for learning pathways.

Agta children fishing (Photos by Renee Hagen)

We found that men, women and children from age 6 and upwards fish, but women fish less in the high risk marine environment compared to the low-risk river environment. Riverine fishing groups are larger than marine groups, but unlike our expectations we did not find more opportunities for parent to child or non-parent-adult to child learning pathways in the high-risk than in the low-risk environment. This might be related to the fact that many experienced men fish alone in this environment: marine fishermen over 30, who we expected to be important teachers, usually fish alone (44% of all observations) or in small groups of two or three people. A possible explanation for this is that marine fishing may be more efficient alone: large groups can scare away fish, as opposed to the river where groups can cooperate to drive fish towards each other. Experienced marine fishermen may also suffer high opportunity costs when taking along a learner means they must go to less productive areas. We did however find that when going in small groups, these men take along learners 42% of the time, and in these cases they most often take their own sons, and also non-kin learners. This suggests that they are willing to take some costs to provide learning opportunities for young fishermen. More research will examine per capita returns as a factor of group size in marine fishing.