Children of Six Cultures

A Rajput boy grows up in a house full of relatives; his mother is cloistered in the back courtyard with other wives; he learns the values of the land-owning, warrior Rajput caste. A New England-born Yankee boy, half-way round the world, grows up in a small family where the sexes are far more equal, the houses are widely spaced and everyone has more possessions than he can use. Although their lives seem so different, a common thread runs through both boys' experiences. Both cultures are egoistic. The children would rather dominate others than give useful advice and they more often seek help and attention than offer it. Why these children should share a pattern of egoism while others-from villages in Kenya, Mexico and the Philippines for example-are altruistic, was a question requiring years of painstaking, detailed research which is still going on. Some cultural force had apparently been working on the raw human material in roughly the same way. But the anthropologist searching through culture for basic causes is like a neurotic searching through his life history for personal revelation. He can take any number of dead end streets and be misled by interference from extraneous issues. Only cross cultural projects in depth can cut through the confusion. Such research has been undertaken on six cultures since the early 1950's by anthropologists at Harvard, Cornell and Yale Universities. Teams of scientists spent 6 to 14 months interviewing parents and children in six cultures, including a village in Okinawa as well as the Rajput, Kenyans, Yankees, Mexican Indians and Filipinos. In addition to personal data, they assembled a comprehensive profile of each culture-its history, economy, class structure, family patterns, religion, child rearing habits and other features. The object of this decade of research has been to isolate basic cultural forces shaping the emotional makeup of children. Assuming, for instance, that childrearing is a basic cultural force, they wanted to find out what circumstances mold the parents' treatment of children and what are the consequences. The children, 134 in each society, were tested in nine dimensions, among them altruism, egoism and aggression. More is known at the moment about the first two than about aggression, but it is already clear that while egoism and altruism are in fact opposite traits, aggression bears no easy relationship to either one. For whatever comfort it may be to Americans concerned about violence,