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The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood offers a large, mural-like portrait of childhood across time, culture, species, and environment. Even a casual reading of the literature on childhood will persuade one that learning is a very important topic that commands the attention of tens of thousands of scholars and practitioners. Yet, anthropological research on children has exerted relatively little influence on this community. This book will change that. The book demonstrates that anthropologists studying childhood can offer a description and theoretically sophisticated account of children's learning and its role in their development, socialization, and enculturation. Further, it demonstrates the particular contribution that children's learning makes to the construction of society and culture as well as the role that culture-acquiring children play in human evolution. Chapters have been contributed in archaeology, primatology, biological and cultural anthropology, and cross-cultural psychology.
Sibling Interaction Across Cultures is a collection of studies focusing on the role siblings play in the social, emotional, and cognitive development of their younger siblings. Unlike much previous research on sibling relationships, these studies share the underlying assumption that social interaction plays a significant role in the acquisition and transmission of cultural knowledge and social understanding. The contributors evaluate the advantages as well as limitations of current methodological issues directly affecting sibling research and assess the various theoretical perspectives underpinning these methodologies. Drawing from empirical, cross- and infra-cultural research, this volume lays new groundwork for identifying universal, environmental, and culture-specific aspects of the role of siblings in child development.
Enriched with anecdotes from ethnography and the daily media, this revised edition examines family structure, reproduction, profiles of children's caretakers, their treatment at different ages, their play, work, schooling, and transition to adulthood. The result is a nuanced and credible picture of childhood in different cultures, past and present.
This collection is the first to specifically address our current understanding of the evolution of human childhood, which in turn significantly affects our interpretations of the evolution of family formation, social organization, cultural transmission, cognition, ontogeny, and the physical and socioemotional needs of children. Moreover, the importance of studying the evolution of childhood has begun to extend beyond academic modeling and into real-world applications for maternal and child health and well-being in contemporary populations around the world. Combined, the chapters show that what we call childhood is culturally variable yet biologically based and has been critical to the evolutionary success of our species; the significance of integrating childhood into models of human life history and evolution cannot be overstated. This volume further demonstrates the benefits of interdisciplinary investigation and is sure to spur further interest in the field.
In Learning Without Lessons, David F. Lancy fills a rather large gap in the field of child development and education. Drawing on focused, empirical studies in cultural psychology, ethnographic accounts of childhood, and insights from archaeological studies, Lancy offers the first attempt to review the principles and practices for fostering learning in children that are found in small-scale, pre-industrial communities across the globe and through history. His analysis yields a consistent and coherent "pedagogy" that can be contrasted sharply with the taken-for-granted pedagogy found in the West. The practices that are rare or absent from indigenous pedagogy include teachers, classrooms, lesso...
In this volume, Eve V. Clark takes a comprehensive look at where and when children acquire a first language. All the major findings and debates are presented in a highly readable form.
Brings together studies from language acquisition and developmental psychology. This title addresses topics such as: gesture use in prelinguistic infants with a focus on pointing, the relationship between gestures and lexical development in typically developing and deaf children and even how gesture can help to learn mathematics
This volume examines the development of communication from infancy through the early school years from the perspectives of ethology, anthropology, social psychology, psychiatry, linguistics, and interactional analyses. The focus of the volume is based on a view that communication is of central importance to the development of the individual and to the structure of the interactions, relationships, groups and communities that comprise the environment of human growth.
Theorists of child development, for the most part, have taken white, middle class, Euro-American children as the norm. These "typical" children, however, are exposed to two major enculturating influences that are by no means common across cultures: formal schooling and parents who consciously attempt to serve as teachers at home. Providing an important contribution toward a more universal understanding of child development, this book concentrates on children of the Kpelle-speaking people of West Africa, who grow up neither spending thousands of hours in quiet study nor receiving a heavy dose of parent tutelage. Acknowledging the centrality of play in children's lives, the Kpelle expect their...