Paper short abstract:

Cultural schemas and models drive practices in ecocultural context. The use of these conceptual frameworks and diverse integrative methods in our field contribute to child development research on change, intervention, inequality and well-being.

Paper long abstract:

Psychological Anthropology brings rich conceptual frameworks of culture and context to studies of change, inequality, interventions, and well-being. Psychological Anthropology also supports arguably the strongest pluralistic suite of diverse research methods not only in Anthropology but across the social sciences, including many varieties of ethnography and qualitative inquiry; multiple fieldwork designs and methods; mixed qualitative and quantitative research; as well as integration with clinical methods, psychology, and sociolinguistics. There is a long history of outstanding work in this field by many of us. A productive psychocultural framework starts with children’s lives as organized into a situated, local daily routine which is constituted by activities and practices in ecocultural context. These activities consist of scripts and norms shaped by cultural schemas and models. Participation in such cultural practices is essential to the scientific study of learning itself. Activities include emotions; the resources needed to do them; the history, social structures and institutions around them; the social relationships of those involved; the goals, values and moral direction for development captured by the activity; and the predictability of activities. Now put that daily routine and its many activities making up the child’s developmental path into motion across time—biological/maturational, developmental, chronological, and culture-historical time. I will illustrate with examples from my own research focused on children: families with children with disabilities; children diagnosed with ADHD; families with children with autism in India; interventions to reduce poverty in working families; supporting communities in Kenya and Ethiopia affected by HIV/AIDS; effects of rural-urban migration in Kenya.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I refer to socializing emotions as an analytical concept which was derived from cultural schema theory and Quinn’s work on cultural transmission. I mostly draw on ethnographic examples from my own research in Taiwan but also on my colleagues’ research in Indonesia and Madagascar.

Paper long abstract:

The research project Socialization and Ontogeny of Emotions in Cross-Cultural Perspective (2009-2014, Freie Universität Berlin) was located at the interface of social anthropological and developmental psychological research. It aimed at investigating to what extend cultural factors affect the transmission of emotional knowledge, patterns of emotional behavior and emotion regulation from birth to puberty. Long-term anthropological fieldwork was carried out in Madagascar, Indonesia and Taiwan (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2013; Röttger-Rössler et al. 2015). The project’s theoretical assumptions had been influenced in multiple ways by the writings of Naomi Quinn, especially her 2005 article Universals of Child Rearing in which she assumes that caregivers in all societies prepare young children for later lessons to come by making use of emotionally arousing socialization practices. My colleagues and I discovered that in each socio-cultural setting there are one or two distinct socializing emotions (e. g. „fear“, „anxiety“; „shame“) which play a leading role in the formation of culturally-specific emotion repertoires. Furthermore, our analysis shows that early emotionally arousing childhood experiences, which are interwoven with ontological beliefs and social structures, do not only shape the socialization process, but also have an impact on the formation of other emotions such as „anger“. The existence of several socializing emotions leads to a revision of developmental psychological assumptions of universal emotional development. In this paper, I present some results from our research, mostly drawing on ethnographic examples form my own research among the Tao in Taiwan (Funk 2020).

Paper short abstract:

Telling the story of an adopted little girl in a Taiwanese village, this paper rediscovers and establishes a dialogue with a historically significant fieldnote archive. Combining multiple methods, it reveals how cultural modes of family and gender affect the moral world of marginalized children.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is part of a larger project that aims to rediscovers and establishes a dialogue with a rare, unpublished fieldnotes archive: The late anthropologists Arthur P. Wolf and Margery Wolf collected thousands of pages of field-notes on children’s social life in familial, communal and school settings, during their fieldwork in a Hoklo village near Taipei (1958-1960). Designed as an improved replication of the Six Cultures Study of Socialization, the Wolfs' work was the first anthropological research on Han Chinese children. This archive occupies a significant niche at the intersection of psychological anthropology, Chinese studies and Taiwan studies. My paper draws from cognitive anthropology theories, including Naomi Quinn's works on cultural models, childrearing, and patriarchy, and triangulates data from systematic observations, interviews, and projective tests. Combining ethnography with data-science techniques, it tells the story of an adopted girl (5-7 year-old) who was harshly treated by her adoptive mother but doted by her paternal adoptive grandma. By tracing her experience of navigating family relations, sibling-care, school transition, and peer network, this paper provides a rare glimpse into adopted daughters' childhood journey in a patriarchal society at a critical time of social change. It not only complicates long-held assumptions of "the Chinese family," but demonstrates how cultural models of childrearing, through multiple socialization agents (including adult caregivers, siblings and peers), figure into young children's moral and emotional development.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a case study analysis of how cultural schemas operate in the context of preadolescents' gender role socialization from an intersectional standpoint.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I draw inspiration from Naomi Quinn’s longstanding interest in understanding how psychocultural processes associated with cultural schemas may contribute to producing, perpetuating, and transforming gendered inequalities and disparities. I explore this concern through an ethnographic case study of a British émigré family who resides in the Los Angeles, California metropolitan region, and whose members include female and male fraternal twins, age eleven. I employ discourse and narrative analysis to demonstrate how these two preadolescent siblings are socialized into gendered hierarchies and power differentials that are shaped by culturally available schemas involving gender roles and norms.

Analysis is informed by 58 hours of ethnographic, videotaped interactional and interview data that derive from a larger corpus collected by the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) and that document the daily lives, routines, and cultural values of 32 ethnically diverse, middle-class, dual-earner Los Angeles area families.

Data analysis additionally interrogates how cultural schemas that involve gender intersect with – and mutually influence – other cultural schemas that are salient in the twins’ lives (e.g., developmental phase, social class, race, and immigration status). The paper therefore sketches out how cultural schemas that index relative privilege (i.e., male gender, whiteness) and relative marginality (i.e., female gender, immigrant status) combine to produce complex, intersectional subjectivities and positionalities as the twins differentially enact, and innovate upon, the available cultural schemas imparted to them.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of compensatory mentors in helping lower middle-class, American youth overcome structural barriers to social mobility. The psychic defenses of idealization and identification along with individuation emerging from dependency on the mentor are analyzed.

Paper long abstract:

(co-authored with Naomi Quinn). Drawing on data from a larger project, this paper analyzes ten life stories from young Americans who perceived themselves to be insecurely located in the lowest rungs of the middle class and who aspired to upward mobility. These individuals explicitly discussed the class, ethnic and gender barriers they faced when trying to pursue professional careers and consistently identified mentors, of a type we label compensatory, as crucial to helping them. Part of our larger argument is that this process was difficult for them precisely because they lacked the kind of praise and support that upper middle-class parents routinely provide their children within the dominant-dependent schema of American middle-class child-rearing (Whiting, 1978, Weisner, 2001). Instead, respondents reported being criticized frequently by caregivers for their failure to measure up to middle-class standards. They often experienced crippling anxiety and a sense of “being stuck” and unable to confront and handle the discrimination they faced. In these situations, compensatory mentors provided needed support but also proved crucial to the resolution of the mentee's psychic conflict. Respondents used the psychic processes of idealization and identification to merge with and introject some of the mentor’s desired qualities into their own senses of self thereby changing their ways of being and perceiving the world. We argue that this re-finding of dependency with the mentors led to the emergence of the individuation respondents perceived as necessary for confronting structural barriers. We consider the implications of these psychological processes in situations where individuals confront hierarchy.