The most frequent motive for direct infanticide reported cross-culturally is that the infant is

Fertility Control

People in all cultures since prehistory have had ways of influencing fertility, including ways to increase it, reduce it, and regulate birth spacing. Some ways are direct, such as using herbs or medicines that induce abortion. Others are indirect, such as long periods of breastfeeding, which reduce the chances of conception.

INDIGENOUS METHODS Hundreds of direct indigenous fertility control methods are available cross-culturally (Newman 1972, 1985).

Research in Afghanistan during the 1980s found over 500 fertility-regulating techniques in just one region (Hunte 1985). In Afghanistan, as in most nonindustrial cultures, it is women who possess this information. Specialists, such as midwives or herbalists, provide further expertise. Of the total number of methods in the Afghanistan study, 72 percent were for increasing fertility, 22 percent were contraceptives, and six percent were used to induce abortion. Most methods involve plant and animal substances. Herbs are made into tea and taken orally. Some substances are formed into pills, some are steamed and inhaled as vapors, some are vaginally inserted, and others are rubbed on the woman’s stomach.

INDUCED ABORTION A review of 400 societies found that induced abortion was practiced in virtually all of them (Devereaux 1976). Cross-culturally, attitudes toward induced abortion range from absolute acceptability to conditional approval (abortion is acceptable but only under specified conditions), tolerance (abortion is regarded with neither approval nor disapproval), and opposition and punishment for offenders. Methods of inducing abortion include hitting the abdomen, starving oneself, taking drugs, jumping from high places, jumping up and down, lifting heavy objects, and doing hard work. Some methods clearly are dangerous to the pregnant woman. In Afghanistan, a midwife inserts an object such as a wooden spoon or stick treated with copper sulfate into the pregnant woman to cause vaginal bleeding and eventual abortion of the fetus (Hunte 1985).

The reasons women seek to induce abortion are usually related to economic and social factors. Pastoralist women, for example, frequently carry heavy loads, sometimes for long distances. This lifestyle does not allow women to care for many small children at one time. Poverty is another frequent motivation. A woman who is faced with a pregnancy in the context of limited resources may find abortion preferable to bearing a child who cannot be fed. Culturally defined “legitimacy” of a pregnancy and social penalties for bearing an illegitimate child provide long-standing motivations for abortion, especially in Western societies.

Some governments regulate access to abortion, either promoting it or forbidding it. Since the late 1980s, China has pursued a rigorous campaign to limit population growth (Greenhalgh 2008). Its One-Child-per-Couple Policy, announced in 1978, restricted most families to having only one child. The policy involved strict surveillance of pregnancies, strong group disapproval directed toward women pregnant for the second time or more, and forced abortions and sterilizations. In 2014, the Chinese government loosened its policy and said that a couple could apply to have a second child if the mother or father was an only child (Levin 2014). Religion and abortion are often related, but there is no simple relationship between what a particular religion teaches about abortion and what people actually do. Catholicism forbids abortion, but thousands of Catholic women have sought abortions throughout the world. Predominantly Catholic countries have laws making induced abortion illegal. This is the case in Brazil where, in spite of Catholic beliefs and the law, many women, especially poor women, resort to abortion. In one impoverished shantytown in the city of Recife in the northeast, one-third of the women said that they had aborted at least once (Gregg 2003). Illegal abortions are more likely to have detrimental effects on women’s health than safe, legal abortion services. Several local studies conducted in the northeastern part of Brazil, the country’s poorest region, report high percentages, up to one-fourth, of maternal deaths due to complications from illegal abortion (McCallum 2005).

Islamic teachings forbid abortion. Abortion of female fetuses is nonetheless practiced covertly in Pakistan and by Muslims in India. Hinduism teaches ahimsa, or nonviolence toward other living beings, including a fetus whose movements have been felt by the mother. Thousands of Hindus, however, seek abortions every year. In contrast, Buddhism provides no overt rulings against abortion. Japanese Buddhism teaches that all life is fluid and that an aborted fetus is simply “returned” to a watery world of unshaped life and may later come back (LaFleur 1992). This belief is compatible with people’s frequent use of induced abortion as a form of birth control in Japan.

In Japan, people regularly visit and decorate mizuko, small statues in memory of their “returned” fetuses.

THE NEW REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES Since the early 1980s, new forms of reproductive technology, or methods that seek to bypass biology to offer options for childbearing to infertile couples, have emerged and are now available in many places around the world.

In vitro fertilization (IVF), in which egg cells are fertilized outside the womb, is highly sought after by many couples in Western countries, especially middle- and upper-class couples, among whom infertility is high. It is also available in many cities worldwide (Inhorn 2003). As IVF spreads globally, people interpret it within their own cultural frameworks. A study of male infertility in two Middle Eastern cities—Cairo in Egypt and Beirut in Lebanon—reveals the close connection between masculine identity and fertility (Inhorn 2004). While married couples want to have children, if the husband is infertile, IVF is not a clear option. In these cities, infertile men face social stigma and feelings of deep inadequacy. In addition, third-party donation of sperm is not acceptable according to Islam. These couples are trying to balance their desire for children with Muslim values.

Infanticide

Infanticide , or the killing of an infant or child, is widely practiced cross-culturally, although it is rarely a frequent or common practice. Infanticide takes two major forms: direct infanticide and indirect infanticide (Harris 1977). Direct infanticide is the death of an infant or child resulting from actions such as beating, smothering, poisoning, and drowning. Indirect infanticide, a more subtle process, may involve prolonged practices such as food deprivation, failure to take a sick infant to a clinic, and failure to provide warm clothing in winter.

The most frequent motive for direct infanticide reported cross-culturally is that the infant was “deformed” or very ill (Scrimshaw 1984). Other motives for infanticide include the infant’s sex, an adulterous conception, an unwed mother, the birth of twins, and too many children in the family. A study of 148 cases of infanticide in contemporary Canada found that the mothers convicted of killing their offspring were relatively young and lacked financial and family resources to help them (Daly and Wilson 1984).

A study by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, carried out among the urban poor of northeastern Brazil, found that indirect infanticide in the late twentieth century was related to extreme poverty (Scheper-Hughes 1992). From the 1960s through the 1990s, Brazil experienced what Scheper-Hughes calls the modernization of mortality. In Brazil, the modernization of mortality means that infant and child mortality is class-based, mirroring a deep division in entitlements between the rich and the poor. Economic growth in Brazil in the latter part of the twentieth century brought rising standards of living for many, and the infant mortality rate (deaths of children under the age of one year per 1,000 births) declined dramatically. This decline, however, was unevenly distributed with high infant death rates concentrated among the poorest social classes of society. When Scheper-Hughes did fieldwork in the later twentieth century, poverty forced mothers to selectively, and unconsciously, neglect babies who seem sickly or weak, sending them to heaven as “angel babies” rather than struggling to keep them alive. People’s religious beliefs, a form of Catholicism, provided psychological support for indirect infanticide by allowing mothers to believe that their dead babies went safely to heaven. In an update to her earlier research, Scheper-Hughes reports that young women in her fieldwork area now, in the early twenty-first century, give birth to only three babies, and most of them survive. A major factor creating this change is government-provided health services. Unfortunately, while the infants now have a better chance of surviving, as adolescents they face new challenges of drug-related gang violence (2012).

A mother and her malnourished son in Bom Jesus, a shantytown in northeastern Brazil. Nancy Scheper-Hughes first lived as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bom Jesus in the 1960s and then returned to do fieldwork in the 1980s. At that time, extreme poverty meant that mothers could not provide good food for their children, and they had to deal psychologically with frequent child death. Now, children in northeast Brazil are more likely to survive, but adolescent boys especially experience high mortality because of drugs and violence.

1. Have you studied bonding theory in a psychology class? What did you learn?

Personality and the Life Cycle

1. 4.3 Identify how culture shapes personality over the life cycle.

Personality is an individual’s patterned and characteristic way of behaving, thinking, and feeling. Cultural anthropologists think that personality is formed largely through enculturation (also called socialization), or the learning of culture through both informal and formal processes. They study how various cultures enculturate their members into having different personalities and identities. Cultural anthropologists also investigate how personalities vary according to cultural context, and some ask why such variations exist. Others study how changing cultural contexts affect personality, identity, and well-being over the life cycle.

Birth, Infancy, and Childhood

This section first considers the cultural context of birth itself. It then discusses cultural variations in infant care and how they may shape personality and identity. Last, it deals with the topic of gender identity formation in infancy.

THE BIRTH CONTEXT The cultural context of birth affects an infant’s psychological development. Brigitte Jordan (1983), a pioneer in the cross-cultural study of birth, conducted comparative research on birth practices in Mexico, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United States. She studied the birth setting, including its location and who is present, the types of attendants and their roles, the birth event, and the postpartum period. Among Maya women in Mexico, the midwife is called in during the early stages of labor. One of her tasks is to give a massage to the mother-to-be. She also provides psychological support by telling stories, often about other women’s birthing experiences. The husband is expected to be present during the labor so that he can see “how a woman suffers.” The woman’s mother should be present, too, along with other female kin, such as her mother-in-law, godmother, sisters, and friends. Thus, a Maya mother is surrounded by a large group of supportive people.

In the United States, hospital births are typical. Some critics argue that the hospital-based system of highly regulated birth is extremely technocratic and too managed, alienating the mother—as well as other members of the family and the wider community—from the birthing process and the infant (Davis-Floyd 1992). This critique has prompted a consideration of how to improve the way birth is conducted in the United States.

BONDING Many contemporary Western psychological theorists say that parent–infant contact and bonding at the time of birth is crucial for setting in motion parental attachment to the infant. Western specialists say that if bonding is not established at the time of the infant’s birth, the infant will not develop later. Explanations for juvenile delinquency or other unfavorable child-development problems often include references to a lack of proper infant bonding at birth.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992) questions Western bonding theory on the basis of her research in northeastern Brazil from the 1960s through the 1990s. She argues that bonding does not necessarily have to occur at birth to be successful. Her observations reveal that many low-income mothers at the time did not exhibit bonding with their infants at birth. Instead, bonding occurred later, if the child survived infancy, and when the child was several years old and clearly likely to survive. Scheper-Hughes proposes that this pattern of later bonding is related to the high rate of infant mortality among poor people of northeast Brazil at the time. She suggested that, if women were to develop strong bonds with their newborn infants, the mothers would suffer untold amounts of grief. Thus, Western bonding is adaptive in low-mortality, low-fertility societies in which strong maternal attachment is reasonable because infants are likely to survive. Close bonding would be disastrous for mothers in contexts where infant and child mortality rates are high.

The Western medical model of birth contrasts sharply with non-Western practices. Sometimes they come into direct conflict. In such situations, anthropological expertise can mediate the conflict by providing what medical specialists now refer to as cultural competence , or awareness of and respect for, among Western-trained professionals, beliefs and practices that differ from those of Western medical practice (Gálvez 2011).

GENDER IN INFANCY Anthropologists distinguish between sex and gender (see Chapter 1). Sex is something that everyone is born with. In the view of Western science, it has three biological markers: genitals, hormones, and chromosomes. A male has a penis, more androgens than estrogens, and the XY chromosome. A female has a vagina, more estrogens than androgens, and the XX chromosome. Increasingly, scientists are finding that these two categories are not airtight. In all populations, up to 10 percent of people are born with indeterminate genitals, similar proportions of androgens and estrogens, and chromosomes with more complex distributions than simply XX and XY.

Gender, in contrast, is a cultural construction and is highly variable across cultures (Miller 1993). In the view of most cultural anthropologists, a high degree of human “plasticity” (or personality flexibility) allows for substantial variation in personality and behavior. More biologically inclined anthropologists, however, continue to insist that many sex-linked personality characteristics are inborn.

Proving the existence of innate (inborn) gender characteristics is made difficult by two factors. First, it is impossible to collect data on infants before they are subject to cultural treatment. Culture may begin to shape infants even in the womb, through exposure to sound and motion, but current scientific data on the cultural effects on the prenatal stage are slim. Once birth takes place, culture shapes infants in many ways, including how people handle and interact with them. There is thus no such thing as a “natural” infant.

Second, it is difficult, if not impossible, to study and interpret the behavior of infants to try to ascertain what is “natural” and what is “cultural” without introducing biases from the observers. Studies of infants have focused on assessing the potential innateness of three major Euro-American personality stereotypes (Frieze et al. 1978:73–78):

· That infant males are more aggressive than infant females

· That infant females are more social than infant males

· That infant males are more independent than infant females

What is the evidence? Studies conducted in the United States indicate that boy babies cry more than girl babies, and that some people accept this difference as evidence of higher levels of inborn aggression in males. An alternative interpretation is that baby boys, on average, tend to weigh more than girls at birth. They therefore are more likely to have a difficult delivery from which it takes time to recover. So they cry more, but not because of aggressiveness. In terms of sociability, baby girls smile more often than boys, and some researchers claim that this difference confirms innate personality characteristics. But culture, not nature, may be the explanation because American caretakers smile more at baby girls than they smile at baby boys. Thus, the more frequent smiling of girls is likely to be a learned behavior. In terms of independence or dependence, studies thus far reveal no clear differences in how upset baby boys and girls are when separated from their caretakers. Taken as a whole, studies seeking to document innate differences between girls and boys are not convincing.

Cultural anthropologists who take a constructionist view make two further points. They note that, if gender differences are innate, it is odd that cultures go to so much trouble to enculturate offspring into a particular gender. Also, if gender differences are innate, then they should be the same throughout history and across all cultures, which they clearly are not. The following material explores cross-cultural cases of how culture constructs gender, beginning with childhood.

Socialization during Childhood

The Six Cultures Study, mentioned in Chapter 3, was designed to provide cross-cultural data on how children’s activities and tasks shape their personalities (Whiting and Whiting 1975). Researchers used similar methods at six sites (Figure 4.4), observing children between the ages of 3 and 11 years. They recorded the children’s behavior, such as caring for and being supportive of other children; hitting other children; and performing tasks such as child care, cooking, and errands. The data collected were analyzed in terms of two major personality types: nurturant-responsible and dependent-dominant. A nurturant-responsible personality is characterized by caring and sharing acts toward other children. The dependent-dominant personality involves fewer acts of caregiving, more acts that assert dominance over other children, and more need for care by adults.

Of the six cultures, the Gusii children of southwestern Kenya had the highest frequency of a nurturant-responsible personality type. They were responsible for the widest range of tasks and at earlier ages than children in any other culture in the study, often performing tasks that an Orchard Town, United States, mother does. Although some children in all six cultures took care of other children, Gusii children (both boys and girls) spent the most time doing so. They began taking on this responsibility at a very young age, between five and eight years old.

In contrast, Orchard Town children had the highest frequency of the dependent-dominant personality type. The differences correlate with the mode of livelihood. In the research sites in Kenya, Mexico, and the Philippines, all reliant on horticulture, children were more nurturant-responsible. Livelihood in the sites in Japan, India, and the United States was based on either intensive agriculture or industry.

How do these different modes of livelihood influence child personality? The key underlying factor is women’s work roles. In the horticultural societies, women are an important part of the labor force and spend much time working outside the home. Their children take on many family-supportive tasks and thereby develop personalities that are nurturant-responsible. When women are mainly occupied in the home, as in the second group of cultures, children have fewer tasks and less responsibility. They develop personalities that are more dependent-dominant.

This study has many implications for Western child-development experts. For one thing, what happens when the dependent-dominant personality develops to an extreme level—into a narcissistic personality? A narcissist is someone who constantly seeks self-attention and self-affirmation, with no concern for other people’s needs. Consumerism supports the development of narcissism via its emphasis on identity formation through ownership of self-defining goods (clothing, electronics, cars) and access to self-defining services (vacations, therapists, fitness salons). The Six Cultures Study suggests that involving children more in household responsibilities might result in less self-focused personality formation and more nurturant-responsible people.

The transition from “childhood” to “adulthood” involves certain biological events, as well as cultural events, that shape the transition to adulthood. Cultural anthropologists provide rich data demonstrating how this transition is at least as much a cultural transformation as a biological one.

IS ADOLESCENCE A UNIVERSAL LIFE-CYCLE STAGE? Puberty is a time in the human life cycle that occurs universally and involves a set of biological markers. In males, the voice deepens and facial and body hair appear; in females, menarche and breast development occur; in both males and females, pubic and underarm hair appear and sexual maturation is achieved. Adolescence , in contrast, is a culturally defined period of maturation from around the time of puberty until the attainment of adulthood, usually marked by becoming a parent, getting married, or becoming economically self-sufficient.

Some scholars say that all cultures define a period of adolescence. A comparative study using data on 186 societies argues for the universal existence of a culturally defined phase of adolescence (Schlegel 1995). The researchers point to supportive evidence in the fact that people in cultures as diverse as the Navajo and the Trobriand Islanders have special terms comparable to the American term “adolescent” to refer to a person between puberty and marriage. Following a biological determinist, Darwinian model, they interpret the supposedly universal phases of adolescence as being adaptive in an evolutionary sense. The logic is that adolescence provides training for parenthood and thus contributes to enhanced reproductive success and survival of parents’ genes.

Other anthropologists view adolescence as culturally constructed, highly variable, and thus impossible to explain on only biological grounds. These researchers point out that people in many cultures recognize no period of adolescence. In some others, identification of an adolescent phase is recent. Moroccan anthropologist Fatima Mernissi (1987), for example, states that adolescence became a recognized life-cycle phase for females in Morocco only in the late twentieth century:

The idea of an adolescent unmarried woman is a completely new idea in the Muslim world, where previously you had only a female child and a menstruating woman who had to be married off immediately so as to prevent dishonorable engagement in premarital sex. (1987:xxiv)

Another line of evidence supporting a cultural constructionist view is that, in different cultures, the length and elaboration of adolescence varies for males and females. In many horticultural and pastoralist societies in which men are valued as warriors, a long period between boyhood and adulthood is devoted to training in warfare and developing solidarity among males of similar ages. This pattern occurs, for example, among the Maasai (sometimes spelled Masai). The Maasai are pastoralists, numbering over 500,000, who live in a large area crossing Kenya and Tanzania (Map 4.4). The extended adolescent period for males has nothing to do with training for parenthood. Maasai females, by contrast, move directly from being girls to being wives with no adolescent period in between. They learn adult roles when they are children.

In some cultures, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and the Amazon region of South America, girls go through lengthy adolescent phases during which they live separated from the wider group and gain special knowledge and skills (Brown 1978). After this period of seclusion, they reemerge as women, get married, and have children.

A cultural explanation exists for whether a young male or young female goes through a marked adolescent phase. Cultural materialism (Chapter 1) says that a long and marked period of adolescence is preparation for culturally valued adult roles such as worker, warrior, or parent. Confirmation of this hypothesis comes from the finding that an extended adolescence for females in nonindustrial societies occurs in cultures where adult females are important as food producers (Brown 1978). Whether or not this theory holds up in industrialized societies has yet to be examined. Some scholars might argue that an extended adolescent period among middle class youth in wealthy countries is a way of deferring their entry into a saturated labor market where jobs for them are scarce.