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social development into studies of children’s lives. Social psychologists such as Martin Woodhead (1999) and Erica Burman (1996) have challenged the idea that “social constructionism” and “psychology” are mutually exclusive terms and rejected the idea that children’s development can be viewed as a universal, unidirectional process of maturation which can be identified in a single cultural setting with simple experimental studies. Increasingly too, psychologists from Africa and Asia are beginning to question the use of the Western child as the developmental norm (Serpell & Marfo, 2014).
There is also a growing recognition that some psychologists have, since the 1970s, and indeed long before the rise of the New Social Studies of Childhood, argued that social development should be seen as a series of culturally and environmentally situated and transactional series of processes (see Chen & Eisenberg, 2012) and that these need not be incompatible with child‐centered research. This is particularly the case with the increasing use made of cultural‐ecological models within the New Social Studies of Childhood, especially those developed by Urie Bronfenbrenner (1997). His bio‐ecological model of human development, generally presented as a set of nested circles radiating out from the child, representing the contextual systems in their environment, definitively places the child at the center of research and recognizes the interplay between the levels of influences and – implicitly – the child’s agency (Tatlow‐Golden & Montgomery, 2021). Other psychologists have also used cultural‐ecological models to cross disciplinary boundaries. Barbara Rogoff (1990, p. vii), for example, in her cross‐cultural work with children, coined the phrase “‘guided participation” and stated that: “child cognitive development is an apprenticeship – it occurs through guided participation in social activity with companions supporting and stretching their understanding of and skills in using the tools of culture” – a conclusion similar to that detailed in the work of David Lancy. Her subsequent work (2003) has reinforced the idea that individuals and cultures shape each other, and that development is a continual and lifelong process of transformation through both adults’ and children’s interactions with cultural practices and institutions.
This turn towards interdisciplinarity has not been one‐way. There have been concerns that the anthropological notion that childhood is socially constructed has become a “theoretical orthodoxy” (Wyness, 2015, p. 19) and descended into cliché (Alanen, 2015). After all, childhood (however it is defined) is a distinct stage in the human lifecycle and anthropologists have found no cultures which do not distinguish between children and adults and, on a “common sense” level, people can usually recognize a child even if they cannot analyze or articulate what the category “childhood” means. Alan Prout, whose work was seminal to the development of the New Social Studies of Childhood, has cautioned against rejecting developmental and biological understandings of children and childhoods: “However illuminating it is to regard childhood as a social phenomenon, it is not and has never been purely social. In fact it is hard to envisage what a ‘purely social’ phenomenon would look like” (Prout, 2005, p. 2).
Other orthodoxies, once central to the New Social Studies of Childhood, have also been challenged and rethought in the new millennium. The idea that children are social actors in the here and now, who needed to be theorized as people in their own right – the human “beings” of the New Social Studies of Childhood rather than the human “becomings” of developmental psychology or the subjects of socialization – has ultimately proved to be yet another limiting binary as it reinforces the notion that adulthood is a complete, stable, and independent end point, which is not subject to change over time (Uprichard, 2008). Lee (2001, p. 103) argues that in a postmodern world, both children and adults experience lives that are changeable and unstable, “fundamentally dependent and incomplete,” and that differentiating between being and becoming, whether psychologically or anthropologically, makes little sense.
Other work which has tried to bridge the disciplinary gap, and which has drawn heavily on anthropological studies, has come from recent work on psychology and children’s rights. This acknowledges the intellectual problems that psychologists have struggled with over the concept of children’s rights (struggles that have been shared with anthropologists, see Montgomery, 2017) such as whether principles such as morality, dignity, equality, or respect are Western‐based philosophical notions which have limited meaning outside the West; whether any human is really truly rational (or a mass of instincts springing from evolutionary processes); or whether children are largely the subjects of socialization or active agents. Recent work on rural and urban Chinese children’s view of rights, for example, and their relationship to development, socialization and well‐being (Helwig & Turiel, 2017) has successfully synthesized ethnographic accounts of socialization from the American tradition, understandings of children’s agency and their importance as informants from the New Social Studies of Childhood, and psychological theories of moral socialization. In such work, social development and cultural processes are seen through the lens of children’s perspectives rather than adult socialization practices, and are overlaid with questions about universality and cultural relativism. While neither anthropologists nor psychologists can answer these definitively the fact that they are asking the same questions and drawing on the learning and experiences of the other discipline is grounds for hope for future dialogue.
Conclusion
The relationship between anthropology and social development is a complex one; at times, and in some traditions, mutually enhancing, at different times and in different traditions, mutually suspicious, even hostile. Yet despite this, there are large areas of overlap and anthropologists, whatever their background, with their emphasis on the collection and analysis of detailed ethnographic data, have undoubtedly made significant contributions to studies of all aspects of children’s development. As psychologists incorporate genuinely contextual and cultural approaches in their models of childhood, important new insights are adding to a fuller understanding of children and young people’s experiences and responses to them. These are further expanded as psychologists begin not just to talk to children and young people, but also to listen and to hear them, understanding them not only as future adults but also as people in the present, seeking to identify their meanings and interpretations of their worlds and using these to inform research. At the same time, anthropologists have begun to recognize the need to learn from psychology and to apply their knowledge and theories to studies of children’s social development. It is to be hoped that, in future, there can be greater dialogue and that studies of social development become multidisciplinary projects, characterized by different ways of looking at and understanding children which, while they differ in epistemological and methodological background, nevertheless contribute equally to more holistic studies of childhood and children’s lives.
References
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