Technological Change and Child Behavior among the !Kung

Abstract

How does change in one part of a social system affect other parts? This is the central question that must be answered in order to understand the process through which culture changes. This paper is about a small piece of the problem. It investigates how changes in subsistence economy affect child behavior and the relations between parents and children among !Kung Bushmen of Western Botswana. We will show that the adoption of a sedentary life style and a new technology of food production is associated with changes in the social interactions between parents and children and between children and their peers. The social and physical settings of everyday life also change with economic practices. We will describe these differences and discuss their implications. Among the IKung, foraging and settled groups differ markedly in child behavior and in social interactions between parents and children. Compared with bush-living children, sedentary children do more work, range farther from home, show more sex differentiated behaviors, and interact more with peers. These changes are especially interesting since they appear to result from changes in economy and adult work roles, not from a conscious change in child socialization by adults. These findings shed light on the ways in which social and economic changes affect individual behavior and lead to new normative patterns. ENVIRONMENT AND SOCIALIZATION There is a growing literature that describes how social and physical settings influence the social behavior of children. This literature focuses on the ecological contexts in which children are reared and the ways in which features of the environment influence children. Parents have a major influence on children's lives, yet both parents and children are embedded in socioeconomic structures that themselves shape the nature of parent-child relationships (Whiting and Whiting 1975; Wohlwill and van Vliet 1985; Whiting 1980).

Girl helpers and time allocation of nursing women among the Toba of Argentina

“…Women's labor throughout the world depends considerably on the availability of helpers, be they daughters (Goddard 1985;Mason and Palan 1981;Robertson 1984), co-wives (Marcoux 1997), or foster "grannies" (Bledsoe and Isiugo-Abanihe 1989). In turn, labor involvement of the mother, along with other cultural and social developments such as technological innovation (Draper and Cashdan 1988), can modify girls' time allocated to schooling (Fuller and Liang 1999; Marcoux 1997) and their availability as helpers. A longitudinal study comparing the activities and contributions of girl helpers and their effects on women's energetic expenditure and fertility across different types of Toba settlements would help to bridge a substantial gap in our understanding of the effect that girls' labor has had on women's productive and reproductive function throughout human history.…”

Women’s work, child care, and helpers-at-the-nest in a hunter-gatherer society

“…These older girls and young women (prior to giving birth to their own children) may have provided help to their mothers that improved the older women's fertility or survivorship of their children. This effect, if present, would not have been revealed in the behavior observations conducted on infants and toddlers (Konner) and on children 3-14 years of age (Draper 1972(Draper , 1975Draper and Cashdan 1988;Konner 1972Konner , 1976Konner , 1977. It is also possible that sex of child is not relevant to detecting a helper at the nest effect.…”

“…(1) Given the economy and environment in which Ju/'hoansi lived we do not expect parents to have profited from having early-born daughters. Neither girls nor boys were given tasks that could be construed as economically useful or helpful to mothers in the form of child-tending (Draper and Cashdan 1988). (2) Previous ethnographic reports based on systematic observations of children of various ages specifically indicate that adults and not children are the primary caretakers of younger children (Draper 1976;Konner 1972Konner , 1976Konner , 1977.…”

“…Turke's previous analysis of the relationship between sex of firstand second-borns and mother's fertility is potentially flawed because he did not exclude first-or second-borns who did not survive long enough to be of help to mothers. We deal with these two issues through an examination of data on Ju/'hoansi fertility, survivorship, birth order, and offspring sex collected by Draper in 1987Draper in -1988. The Ju/'hoansi, also known as !Kung, are a well-known population of former hunter-gatherers living in northwestern Botswana and eastern Namibia.…”

Children as a Reserve Labor Force

“…The !Kung experienced a similar but less severe transformation, but one consequence again was that the period of dependency and freedom from responsibility was drastically shortened for !Kung youth (Draper and Cashdan 1988). Heather Montgomery studied Baan Nua, a type of squatter community in Thailand.…”