Content area
Full Text
Key Words
Activity Culture - Developmental pathways - Ecocultural theory
Abstract
Every cultural community provides developmental pathways for children within some ecological-cultural (ecocultural) context. Cultural pathways are made up of everyday routines of life, and routines are made up of cultural activities children engage. Activities (bedtime, playing video games, homework, watching TV, cooking dinner, soccer practice, visiting grandma, babysitting for money, algebra class) are useful units for cultural analysis because they are meaningful units for parents and children, and they are amenable to ethnographic fieldwork, systemic observation, and interviewing. Activities crystallize culture directly in everyday experience, because they include values and goals, resources needed to make the activity happen, people in relationships, the tasks the activity is there to accomplish, emotions and motives of those engaged in the activity, and a script defining the appropriate, normative way to engage in that activity. The Ecocultural Family Interview provides a window into children's and families' daily routines and activities.
1I studied anthropology at Reed College and then in the interdisciplinary program in the Department of Social Relations (Harvard University, with John and Beatrice Whiting, psychological anthropologists interested in children and families around the world). I did fieldwork among the Abaluyia of Western Kenya, where I explored sibling caretaking of children and the influences of rural-urban migration on child and family life. I've studied the influences of culture, family lifestyles, and poverty on children, ever since. I've always used mixed methods, and often worked in interdisciplinary teams at the interface of the disciplines of human development and psychological anthropology. I have a joint appointment at UCLA in the Department of Psychiatry (Center for Culture and Health) and Department of Anthropology.
Children grow up in a wonderful and remarkable diversity of cultural communities around the world [Weisner, 2001]. Every cultural community provides developmental pathways for children within some ecological-cultural (ecocultural) context. Cultural pathways are made up of everyday routines of life, and routines are made up of cultural activities (bedtime, playing video games, homework, watching TV, cooking dinner, soccer practice, visiting grandma, babysitting for money). Activities are useful units for cultural analysis because they are meaningful units for parents and children to understand, they are amenable to ethnographic fieldwork, systematic observation, and interviewing methods, they are...