Why Don't Anthropologists Like Children?

LAWRENCE A. HIRSCHFELD

Why Don't Anthropologists Like Children?

ABSTRACT Few major works in anthropology focus specifically on children, a curious state of affairs given that virtually all contem-

porary anthropology is based on the premise that culture is learned, not inherited. Although children have a remarkable and undis-

puted capacity for learning generally, and learning culture in particular, in significant measure anthropology has shown little interest in

them and their lives. This article examines the reasons for this lamentable lacunae and offers theoretical and empirical reasons for re-

pudiating it. Resistance to child-focused scholarship, it is argued, is a byproduct of (1) an impoverished view of cultural learning that

overestimates the role adults play and underestimates the contribution that children make to cultural reproduction, and (2) a lack of

appreciation of the scope and force of children's culture, particularly in shaping adult culture. The marginalization of children and child-

hood, it is proposed, has obscured our understanding of how cultural forms emerge and why they are sustained. Two case studies, ex-

ploring North American children's beliefs about social contamination, illustrate these points. [Keywords: anthropology of childhood,

children's culture, acquisition of cultural knowledge, race]

THE TITLE QUESTION of course is only half serious andclearly incomplete. Half serious in that anthropologists

as individuals presumably enjoy the company of children asmuch as anyone else. Incomplete in that my intention is notonly to draw attention to the marginalization of children,but also to persuade that there are good, indeed quite com-pelling, reasons that children deserve a broad-based scholarlyregard.1

Many readers might object that anthropologists havedone a good deal of research on children, as the substantialliterature concerned with the intersection of culture, chil-dren, and childhood attests. As one observer put it, there are"enough studies of children by anthropologists to form a tra-dition" (Benthall 1992:1). To cite a few examples familiar tomost anthropologists: the work of Margaret Mead (1930,1933); Beatrice and John Whiting (1975; Whiting 1963;Whiting 1941); Brian Sutton-Smith (1959); Mary Ellen Good-man (1970); Helen Schwartzman (1978); John Ogbu (1978);Charles Super and Sara Harkness (1980); Robert LeVine(LeVine et al.1994); and linguistic anthropologists BambiSchieffelin (1990; Schieffelin and Ochs 1986), Elinor Ochs(1988), and Marjorie Goodwin (1990).2 Critically for the dis-cussion at hand, this work has not coalesced into a sustainedtradition of child-focused research. Nor, as a chorus of re-searchers have lamented (Caputo 1995; Hardman 1973;Schwarz 1981; Stephens 1998; Toren 1993), has it succeededin bringing children in from the margins of anthropology.

Admittedly, mainstream anthropology (tacitly) acknow-ledges that work with children is a reasonable pursuit. By and

large, however, it is accepted that it is a pursuit that can be ig-nored. I believe that it cannot. My goal is to address, ques-tion, and suggest ways to redress the neglect. In this article'sfirst section, I review this curious marginalization, considerwhy it is so widespread, and suggest that there is ample rea-son to believe that child-focused research should occupy theattention of both specialists and those in the mainstream. Ina second section I offer a brief empirical case study illustrat-ing this last point. With it I attempt to show that attendingto children, their singular cultural forms, and their uniqueconceptual architecture paradoxically reveals significant in-sights about the nature of adult cultural experience. Manyadult cultural beliefs, I suggest, are sustained precisely be-cause of the way the child's mind is organized and the wax-children organize their own cultural environments. Manycultural forms are stable and widely distributed just becausechildren find them easy to think and easy to learn (Sperber1996). Pursuing this argument affords an informative yet un-appreciated perspective on the relationship between individ-ual psychological phenomena and their role in the constitu-tion of cultural forms.

In the briefest terms, mainstream anthropology has margi-nalized children because it has marginalized the two thingsthat children do especially well: children are strikingly adoptat acquiring adult culture and, less obviously, adept at creatingtheir own cultures. Although it is uncontToversial that children

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acquire the wherewithal to participate in the cultures theyinhabit, the processes by which this happens has drawn rela-tively limited attention—presumably because most anthro-pologists consider these processes unremarkable and unin-formative to the field's principal concerns. Children alsocreate and inhabit cultures of their own making, culturesthat in significant measure are independent of and distinctfrom those of the adults with whom they live. In makingtheir own cultural traditions, children deploy singular con-ceptual skills that significantly constrain and mold not onlytheir own cultural productions but also those of adults. Byviewing children as vehicles into which culture is poured, an-thropology has put the cart before the horse. In this article'ssecond section I empirically flesh out this argument. By ne-cessity, however, this presentation is brief and illustrative;my goal is simply to demonstrate one way in which children,their cultural acquisitions, and their cultural productions canbe studied and suggest ways that this knowledge can be used toextend our understanding of cultural environments generally.

As I just pointed out, anthropology's indifference tochildren is not a function of an absence of child-focused re-search. What is disappointing is the modest effect this re-search has had on the mainstream. According the AmericanAnthropological Association's 2000 AAA Guide, there are 155active full-time sociocultural anthropologists appointed inthe National Research Council's ten top-ranked departments.Of these, only nine (including the author) declare child- andyouth-related topics among their interests. I do not meantheir primary interest. Among these nine scholars, child- oryouth-related work is on average the third area of interestlisted. Moreover, four of the nine are primarily concernedwith youth or adolescence, an age that by definition is at theborders of childhood.

Publications follow interest. Between 1986 and 2001, ac-cording to the Eureka database of peer-reviewed journals, theAmerican Anthropologist has published three articles on chil-dren (excluding book reviews and studies of nutrition). Asearch for articles from the American Anthropologist in which"child," "children,' "child-care," or 'childhood" figured as asubject or keyword yielded 14 hits since 1904. If introductorycollege texts in anthropology are a harbinger of things tocome, the future hardly seems brighter. In a recent review of30 popular anthropology textbooks, Erika Friedl found a pat-tern that with few exceptions, children not only are under-represented in our texts but also undertheorized and outrightneglected is both strange and disconcerting: "With few ex-ceptions, children not only are underrepresented in our textsbut also undertheorized and outright neglected" (2002:19).

It might be countered that not every interesting phe-nomenon is of interest to everyone. There is no a priori rea-son that mainstream anthropology should find children anirresistible research topic. Then- are, however, a number ofsubstantive reasons. The most obvious Is contemporary an-thropology's commitment to the Idea that culture is learned,not Inherited. Although acquiring cultural skills Is a lite-longproject, It Is patent that children do the bulk of culturallearning. By adolescence, children In every known society

display elaborate and culturally specific ways of making-meaning and modes of behavior that are manifestly well de-veloped. Although often not considered fully expert, by ado-lescence children are adept participants in a culturaltradition.

This is not a latent fact or hidden dynamic that must beadduced through close and systematic analysis. Virtually allfolk traditions recognize, and many explicitly comment on,this state of development. Consider, for example, the age-dependent "costs" of transgression. Young children's errors,from a cultural perspective, are relatively low cost, provokinglimited or no condemnation (Lancy 1996). In contrast, errorsin cultural performance committed by postadolescents aregenerally seen as more serious and are more likely to arousedirect criticism, punishment, or other sanctions. Plausibly,the reason for the difference in cost is the conviction that byor shortly after adolescence a significant degree of culturalcompetency is expected. This observation is not a function ofany particular way of construing culture. Regardless of one'sorientation—regardless of whether culture is identified withconceptual skills, or a specified range of sentiments, or thewherewithal to produce cultural performances, or the capac-ity to transact cultural relations, or the processes by whichunequal cultural capital is extracted—it is during childhoodthat the overwhelming bulk of these achievements arereached. Because so much anthropology is devoted to identi-fying, understanding, and conveying what people do, itseems uncontroversial that exploration of how they come todo it would be a central preoccupation of the field.

This last point might be termed a theoretical imperative.Another compelling reason to study children derives from animperative to "embarrassment managements Imagine thefollowing scenario: An ethnographer works among a popula-tion whose social structure is sharply stratified. One group,whose cultural identity derives from a notion of maturityand attributed competence, wields significant power over asubaltern class, whose identity derives from a notion of im-maturity and attributed incompetence. There are culturallyspecified economic, emotional, and social relationships be-tween these two groups, both of whom are named by termsroughly translatable into familiar English terms. There is ex-tensive ongoing contact, and subjacent conflict, between thesubaltern and elite. Although the former significantly out-number the latter, there remains a closely managed relation-ship of power that systematically disenfranchises the subal-tern population. In this culture, like many others, the elitetalk endlessly about their subaltern clients and seem to de-rive an important dimension of their sense of self and com-petency by the relative successes and failures of their clients.Moreover, the ethnographer spends a great deal of timeamong the subaltern group, informally observing their ac-tivities, their publicly punished transgressions, and theirpublicly praised successes. Remarkably, the ethnographernever. In all her writings, mentions the subaltern population,making scant reference to the economic and emotional rela-tions that dominate the elites' interaction with them.

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My point here is transparent. Such an account would beseen as fundamentally flawed; similar lapses in attention togender issues, once effectively challenged, brought on a sig-nificant reorientation of the field. Ethnography and theorythat ignored women were recognized as impoverished andmisleading.

Our hypothetical ethnographer, however, might seek todeflect criticism by observing that unlike gender and genderrelations, which are constructed and interestingly varyingacross culture and time, the particular elite/subaltern com-plex she omitted involves a relationship of power, authority,economy, and sentiment that is universal—and many an-thropologists do not feel compelled to attend close-ly to in-variant domains of experience. It is not obvious, however,that gender is less a universal and more a construction thanchildhood. Both are universally encountered and both aresystems of inequity, disadvantage, and sustenance. Bear inmind that an adequate treatment of gender in culture in-volves more than simply acknowledging gender relations. Anadequate treatment of childhood and children similarly in-volves more than acknowledging that adults and childrenstand in a particular relation. "Add children and stir" is nomore insightful than 'add women and stir." In both cases, agenuine change in gaze yields a reconfiguration of the field.

There is a final motivation to move children in from themargins that turns on methodological and theoretical com-patibility. Children's lives and experience simply lend them-selves to anthropological inquiry. In its simplest guise, an-thropology is the study of the nature and scope of differencesin the ways different populations act, think, and speak. Chil-dren's behavior, thought, and speech differ systematicallyfrom that of adults. The tools of observation and analysis thatafford insight into the specificities of experience of theAshanti and Nuer, or for that matter gays in San Francisco ortransmigrants moving between northern California andwest-central Mexico, are Just as amenable to studying thespecificities of children's experience. Indeed, recent shifts inanthropological focus render the sorts of relations betweenchildren and adults even more directly relevant to culturetheory. Sub- or embedded cultures and their interactionshave nearly replaced culture as the object of anthropologicalinquiry. Children, as I will discuss below at greater length,constitute themselves into semi-autonomous subcultures,and as such can be as usefully explored by anthropologists asSenegalese street merchants in Marseille, Vietnamese ricefarmers in Louisiana, or high-energy physicists at LawrenceLivermore. As the nature and practice of everyday power be-come increasingly central concerns of cultural studies, thequotidian dimensions of subaltern experience marking chil-dren's lives also become increasingly central.

Several explanations have been offered for children's margi-nalization. "Guilt" by association Is perhaps the most com-mon. Invidious comparisons of Western children's thought to"primitive" thought that animated much early ethnology

(e.g., Levy-Bruhl 1979) and that have continued to be drawn(e.g,, Hallpike 1979), plausibly evoke discomfort among con-temporary anthropologists. Even if they themselves do notenvisage doing it, the image of these embarrassing com-pari-sons—like the image of stage theories of social evolution—may have turned some away from the study of children alto-gether. Second, children are closely associated with womenand their traditional spheres of influence—the home andhearth. As a result, some have suggested that children suf-fered the same systematic exclusion from the anthropologi-cal gaze as their mothers (Caputo 1995; James and Prout1990). Intrinsic dullness is another explanation (although itis seldom, of course, framed in such pejorative terms). Formost anthropologists, the commonly evoked image of chil-dren is that of adults-in-the-making. Liminality, somewhatironically given the considerable anthropological interest inother forms of age-related status, in this instance generallytranslates into the notion of children as culturally incompe-tent creatures, who are, at their most interesting, simply "ap-pendages to adult society'' (Bloch 1991; Caputo 1995; Jamesand Prout 1990; Schwartz 1981; Toren 1993).

These are not entirely satisfying explanations. Like Sar-tre's (1948) anti-Semite, who, as a result of a disagreeable en-counter with a Jewish tailor, despised Jews but not tailors,anthropologists uncomfortable with their predecessor's awk-ward comparisons of children's and primitive thought didnot end up abandoning the study of native populations,only children. Nor are children the only population who suf-fered invidious comparisons under the ancien regime. Nine-teenth- and early 20th-century anthropology had muchworse things to say about blacks and women, yet this did notcause anthropologists to exclude race or gender from subse-quent study. "Gender, race, and class" as categories havegreat currency in contemporary scholarship and the atten-tion paid to how they are constructed and sustained are notexceptions but the rule. The feminist turn in anthropology isnow several decades old. Women and their lives are closelydocumented in the bulk of contemporary anthropologicalwork. In contrast, mainstream interest in children remains(figuratively) in its infancy, to cite Sharon Stephens's (1998)bon mot. It does not seem plausible that children are off theradar because their mothers urre.3

Nor does intrinsic dullness necessarily translate into lackof attention. Even the most adult-centric perspective doesnot in principle preclude interest in children. Arguably, itmakes children all the more interesting. Children, after all,are appendages to adult society often being the central (if fre-quently silent) figures in both the commonplace and pri\i-leged activities. Rites de passage, the very logic of age-grades,and notions of descent and alliance all turn on the fact andpresence of children and youth. Even if children were siniplvadults-ln-the-making, this should invite rather than repelmainstream interest. Children are meaningful creatures invirtually all societies. Practices peculiar to their care and sus-tenance are indigenously recognized and frequently topicsfor conversation. Indeed, virtually even- cultural system takes"the child" to be a natural t,u t, even if the particulars of what

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constitutes a child vary (Aries 1962). Notions of "child,""adult,'' "parent," and "offspring" are all cultural confec-tions. It is hard to imagine more preternaturally 'natural"everyday concepts. People everywhere and at all times havesome beliefs about what children are and what should be"done" with them. Issues surrounding cultural and social im-maturity are of vital interest to those whose beliefs and prac-tices anthropologists closely attend. In conceiving of chil-dren as mere appendages to adult society, anthropology hasconceived of them as lacking inherent interest. This conveysthe situation, it does not explain it. Being an appendage doesnot mean being of marginal interest: An arm is an appendagebut it is not of marginal interest to those who study limbs.

We need to seek anthropological resistance elsewhere.Anthropology's faint image of children reflects a more gen-eral tendency in American social science to view childhoodas a way-station on the path to the "complete, recognizable,and . . . most significantly, desirable" state of adulthood(Jenks 1996:9). On this view, children are engaged primarilyin becoming "with perhaps some minor variations . . . whattheir elders already are" (Toren 1993:461). Studying the me-chanics of how this happens is the purview of specialists. Theunderlying image is that children, especially the very young,are radically distinct from and unequal to the adults aroundthem. Importantly for this discussion, they are located intransition to cultural competence rather than as havinggenuine mastery of it. As a consequence, discussion of chil-dren is typically transformed into talk about adults and theways they organize the environment in which children de-velop so as to facilitate the acquisition of the cultural compe-tence appropriate to the society in which they live. Toren as-tutely observes that for the field generally discovering howchildren become "what their elders already are . . . [has] littleor no bearing on an analysis of the relations between adults'"(1993:461). Knowing about the relationship between adultsand their children accordingly provides little insight into re-lations between adults, the principal phenomenon of anthro-pological interest.

The body of research exploring the lives of childrenmost familiar to anthropologists is the literature on socializa-tion that reflects this refraction of childhood through anadult lens. By focusing on the adult end-state and adult influ-ence on "achieving" it, children's activities are cast as ancil-lary or subordinate. As a consequence, the contributions thatchildren make to their own development are often obscuredif not effaced.4 The rich literature on children's play andgames illustrates this well (e.g., Goldman 1998; Lancy 1996;Sutton-Smith 1976). Clearly these studies focus on childrenand, particularly, on routines and cultural forms that oftenhave neither clear parallel in adult activities nor Involve thedirect participation of adults. Play provides a wealth of Infor-mation about the scope of children's cognitive, cultural, andsocial skills. Notwithstanding these Insights, these studiestypically stress the relevance of play to adult activities andgoals, especially the ways In which routlnized play, Includinggames, servo to enculturate children to adult norms andstandards, Lancy (1996) describes games and play as

enduring artifacts, a permanent part of a society's reper-toire, reused with each generation . . . sheltered... learn-ing opportunities. [In play] children could risk "getting itwrong" without serious consequences. At the same time,from society's vantage point, games are clever de-vices—they are fun to play . . . and, thereby seduce thechild into learning things society thinks are important.[1996:94]

Sutton-Smith's (1976) history of toys, for example, is a fasci-nating study of the way industrially produced toys serve totrain children to expect and enjoy the sort of solitary exist-ence that produces a specific kind of bourgeois citizen.

I am not criticizing this work; as I said considerable in-sight is afforded by it. Indeed, I relied on it in the earlier dis-cussion of the low cost of children's transgressions. The pointhere is that this particular focus on play and games dovetailswith a perspective that conceives of children and their activi-ties as functional correlates to adult society and adult goals.In so doing, children's activities are explored to the extentthat they contribute to adult outcomes; and importantly"ownership" of the means of cultural reproduction rest withadults. Socialization theory—the idea that adult dispositionsare achieved largely through adult interventions in children'slives—thus obstructs the appreciation of the contributionchildren make to the acquisition of cultural sensibilities.

Perhaps, most regrettably, socialization theory oftenoverestimates the influence adults actually wield. Severalstudies have shown that adults frequently do a rather poorerjob of shaping their children's cognitions, personalities, andattitudes than is often presumed (Harris 1998; for examplesfrom anthropology see Toren 1993 for an excellent review;see also Hirschfeld 1989a; Mead 1932). Grasping how re-markably good children are at acquiring culture and how diffi-cult ''cultural transmission" actually is are difficult whenadults are overly generously credited with teaching it Chil-dren do generally become much like their elders in criticalways. However, they do so in virtue of more than being "'so-cialized" into adulthood.s

For cultural reproduction, overly generous appraisal ofsocialization is not only a function of what researchers lookfor but also where they look. On a widely accepted view, theappropriate environment in which to study cultural trans-mission/acquisition is the one inhabited and controlled byadults, a strategy that makes sense if adults are the principlesocializing agents. Accordingly, if it is assumed that adultscreate the cultural worlds into which children are inductedand that adults largely control the processes by which thishappens, then attention to the adult world seems fitting.However, if the goal Is to understand how children contrib-ute to making culture, a more appropriate focus would be thearena in which children do most of their culture making:namely, In their lives with other children, what is sometimescalled "children's culture.

The Idea that children have their own cultures may seemfar-fetched to some readers. Children may be uncomfortablein adult culture and even, as they often seem to be in NorthAmerican and Northern European societies, resistant to it, theframe of descriptive reference is still the dominant cultural

Hirschfeld Why Don't Anthropologists Like Children? 615

tradition. And there is the rub. It is now a commonplace thatcultural environments are manifold. At any given momentthe cultural environment which an individual inhabits isfragmented, fluid, noisy, and negotiable—from the perspec-tives of both information and power. All cultural environ-ments are themselves comprised of multiple, contesting,competing subcultural environments. Recognizing that chil-dren's culture is one of these should pose no a priori diffi-culty. In fact, it has not for many scholars (Corsaro 1997;Goodwin 1990; the contributors to James and Prout 1990;Maltz and Borker 1986; Opie and Opie 1960; see also Eckert1989; Willis 1981). Children not only live in the culturalspheres of the adults with whom they share a life space—alargely trivial observation—but they create and maintain cul-tural environments of their own. The cultural environmentin which cultural reproduction takes place is accordingly notnecessarily, nor even principally, the cultural environment(s)relevant to adults:

A child's goal is not to become a successful adult, anymore than a prisoner's goal is to become a successfulguard. A child's goal is to be a successful child.... Chil-dren are not incompetent members of adults' society;they are competent members of their own society, whichhas its own standards and its own culture. Like prisoner'sculture and the Deaf culture, a children's culture is looselybased on the majority adult culture within which it exists.But it adapts the majority adult culture to its own pur-poses and it includes elements that are lacking in theadult culture. [Harris 1998:198-199]

These observations are more than the recognition thatnot all children's activities are fully matched in adult society.It is uncontroversial that children participate in special-pur-pose cultural activities from which adults are largely exclud-ed. Nor is it disputed that children develop and maintain so-cial practices, networks of relationships, and systems ofmeaning that are distinct to their own social and physicalspaces. The notion of a culture of childhood, however, cap-tures more than special-purpose child-focused activities.Children's cultures encompass substantial and elaborated en-vironments that are not only distinct from, but independentof the adult environments in which they are embedded.Children maintain a rich repertoire of games and songs—cul-tural forms—that do not appear to be linked to adult culture,forms "circulate from child to child, beyond the influence of. . . adults [who] know nothing of them. . From generationto generation, this thriving unselfconscious culture remainsunnoticed by the sophisticated [sic] world and quite as littleaffected by it" (Opie and Opie 1960:1). Critically, in con-structing their cultural environments children engage in thesame kind of activities, deploy the same kinds of relations ofpower, authority, and status, and draw on the same mo-ments of meaning as adults do as they create and inhabittheir own cultural worlds.

Lack of appreciation for children's rich cultural competencesand ignorance of the wealth of cultural forms that children

create and sustain on their own have obscured how centralan anthropology of childhood—to put a name on the projectI am promoting—would be to any understanding of culturalreproduction. Theories of cultural reproduction—or, for thatmatter, theories of the disruption of cultural reproduction—are adequate only to the extent that they are based on a real-istic account of the lives and forces that shape the lives ofprecisely the individuals who bear that reproduction. I havesuggested, however, that the broad mainstream(s) of anthro-pology are more than uninformed about children. Anthro-pology has displayed an enduring aversion to children, a re-sistance to an anthropology of childhood. It is not simplythat children do more than many acknowledge. That they doit so exceptionally well is a point of tension for many anthro-pologists.

It is uncontroversial that children are great learners gen-erally and talented students of culture in particular. Theyrapidly and readily acquire the abilities to slip seamlessly intothe cultural life around them. This seamless elision into aspecific cultural existence is a function of some "deep" abili-ties. Few would be satisfied with an account of cultural acqui-sition based on simply mimicry. Children do not ape culture,they learn or acquire it. They come to represent cultural infor-mation, manipulate these representations, and use them asthe basis for making sense of the world and organizing actionin it. Representations, manipulations, and computations areinternal to individuals and thus psychological phenomena.Anthropology—including the bulk of psychological anthro-pology—has long resisted acknowledging let alone system-atically exploring internal mental states. It hardly seems anoverstatement to say that anthropology since Durkheim hasdemonstrated a sustained aversion to things psychological(see Strauss and Quinn 1997, chapter 2, for a comprehensivetreatment; see also Bloch 1998; Hirschfeld, 2000a; Sperber1996).

Casting children's experience and development in termsof psychological phenomena is not the equivalent to claim-ing that culture is ideation, that it can be reduced to ideation,or even that there is some subset of our knowledge that isspecifically cultural. It is to suggest that participating in a cul-tural environment means participating in a particular set ofcausal cognitive relationships through whose agency a cor-pus of knowledge is distributed (Sperber 1996). It is a funda-mental tenet of anthropology that cultural forms pass fromone generation to the next through the agency of teachingand modeling, both direct and indirect. As observed above,this argument is implicitly causal—certain parental routinescreate the conditions for certain childhood experiences thatshape individual and collective identities and it identifies thepredominance of cultural practices with their own reproduc-tion.

There is no doubt that cultural learning is empirically in-evitable. Humans are, from birth, cultural creatures shapedby the cultural environments they inhabit. Culture so thor-oughly saturates the environment that not acquiring it seemsalmost unthinkable. The usually tacit assumption is that byexposing an individual to a range of cultural knowledge, the


individual acquires a more or less faithful version. Implicithere is the further assumption that most cultural knowledgeis expressed in patterns of behavior, speech, and artifact thatthe learner eventually comes to recognize. Reflecting on howeasy college teaching would be if this were the case shouldsignal that this view is at the very least an incomplete ac-count. Even if this theory of learning were enhanced withsome constraints (e.g., that knowledge is acquired only if thepresentation of the knowledge is clear, informative, and rele-vant to the learner and that the learner is well motivated),the theory remains insufficient as anyone who has tried toteach an adolescent common courtesies can attest. Theresimply is no psychologically plausible account of how knowl-edge, particularly the sort of abstract knowledge encompassedin cultural schema, models, key symbols, or regimes of truth,could be acquired from exposure in the absence of consider-able mediation on the part of the learner (Hirschfeld 2001).

This may strike many as a curious claim. After all, cul-tural information, cultural knowledge, is conspicuous to thepoint of extravagance. It virtually saturates the environment.It is both promiscuous and redundant in that every act, everypublic representation, has a cultural character, a cultural di-mension that indelibly marks it. That children would learnto be cultural actors, that they could readily induce culturalknowledge solely in virtue of living in a culturally rich envi-ronment, seems more than plausible. All the more so ontheories that cast cultures as bounded, relatively stable, andhomogeneous environments, populated with actors whoconsistently share interests and knowledge. If cultures— cul-tural environments—are spatially discontinuous, frag-mented, fluid, contested, and ever transforming worlds, asincreasingly has been argued (Brightman 1995; Dirks et al.1994; Gupta and Ferguson 1997), then no matter how con-spicuous or culturally saturated these environments mightbe, learning about them is no trivial task. Learning "that X"when everyone around you says X, behaves as if X were true,and places a common moral value on X would presumablybe a good deal easier than learning "that X" when X is de-bated, highly contested, and under moral and political chal-lenge and exception. Learning "that X" under these condi-tions requires organisms that have significant talent foridentifying what is relevant information in the environmentand ignoring what is not.

Anthropologists have never credited children with thesort of talent—the sort of agency—that it would take to ac-complish this task. As Hardman (1973) notes, even anthro-pologists concerned with children

view them to a greater or lesser extent, as passive objects,as helpless spectators In a pressing environment which af-fects and produces their every behaviour. They see thechild as continually assimilating, learning and respondingto the adult, having little autonomy, contributing nothingto stKidl values or behaviour except the latent outpour-Ings of earlier acquired experiences. 1197J.87)

This is a/i impoverished and potentially pernicious accountof cultural learning (or learning in general, for that matter).Ignoring the major acconiplishnieiit that acquiring cultural

knowledge actually is, encourages anthropologists to over-look the crucial contribution that children make to the crea-tion, sustenance, and distribution of cultural forms (Sperberand Hirschfeld 1999). It emboldens the field to see the acqui-sition of knowledge as a straightforward process, or more ac-curately, as a straightforwardly simply process. As several an-thropologists have recently observed, it is not (Bloch 1998;Strauss and Quinn 1997; Wertsch 1998).

Acquiring cultural knowledge is an asymmetrical achieve-ment, not because the expert is an expert and the novice anovice, but because the child brings to bear specialized cog-nitive skills and domain-specific programs that make devel-opment possible (Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994). In a sense,the novice is the expert: an expert at learning. Without thesingular architecture of children's minds culture would beimpossible. This claim is more than the throw-away acknow-ledgment that humans have individual minds and thereforesomething interesting—but largely irrelevant to anthropol-ogy—could be said of the mind. I intend a much strongerclaim, namely, that culture cannot be understood except interms of the cognitive architecture of children and the spe-cialized learning mechanisms that the architecture affords(Hirschfeld 1996; 1997).

1 turn now to two specific cases with which I illustrate theprocesses that I have described: namely, a distinct children'scultural tradition, a similar adult tradition, and the cognitivesusceptibilities and competences that shape the relationshipbetween the two. Both traditions are cultural confections ofAmerican society (although both have counterparts in a widerange of cultures). The two forms—preadolescent cootie loreand "adult" construal of race—at first blush surely seem in-commensurate. I will try to establish that they are not Inparticular, I seek to show how the operation of a specializedlearning program, deployed in the context of a specific cul-tural environment, creates the conditions by which childrencreate and sustain a "simple" game and by which adults or-ganize and sustain fundamental access to power, authority,and resources. Because I have written about racial thinking atlength elsewhere (Hirschfeld 1989a, 1996, 1997, 2000), mydiscussion of it here will be brief. The material on cooties hasnot been reported, and I will present it here in more detail.

Over the past several years, my collaborators—SusanGelman, Rachel Heiman, Gail Heyman, Katie Hinds, BarbaraHofer, Oren Kosansky, Ivelisse Martinez, and Heidi Schwein-gruber—and I have investigated a constellation of practicesand beliefs of North American children about "cooties"(Martinez et al. 1999). We observed children in 2nd and 4thgrades during free play, Interviewed children in small groupsand Individually at school, and eventually asked anothergroup of kindergarten, 2nd and 4th grade children to partici-pate In several experimental tasks. Children were drawnfrom two different areas. The first consisted of schools In andnear a Midwestern college town whose catchment is largelywhite and middle class. The second consisted of schools


about 50 miles away, whose catchment was rural and smalltown and largely working class. About half the students inthese schools are white.

In the most general terms, cooties are a social contami-nant that pass from one child to another, a form of interper-sonal pollution. According to one source, the term cootie is atransformation of a British colonial word for lice that waspopularized by returning World War I veterans (Samuelson1980). Consistent with this interpretation, The Oxford EnglishDictionary defines cootie as body louse and suggests that itmay be derived from the Malay word kutu meaning "a para-sitic biting insect.'" Contemporary North American chil-dren's usage sometimes follows this gloss. More frequently,however, children describe cooties as something that cannotbe seen but that is disagreeable (a fair number of childrenused one of three tropes in describing cooties: the invisibleparticulates associated with germs, farts, or "boogers").Adults, presumably "recalibrating" memories of their ownchildhoods, sometimes use cooties and lice interchangeably.One author entitled an article "Cootie Control" that advisedparents on how best to treat head lice infections despite thefact there was no mention of cooties in the body of the text(Nathanson 1997).

The overwhelming association with "cooties," however,for both adults and children in North America, is attributionsby children of an invisible contamination that passes fromone child (often a member of a stigmatized group) to anotherand the prophylactic routines used against cootie contami-nation. There are a number of these prophylactic routines,including "cootie catchers" fashioned out of paper, pretendinjections, and special ways of crossing fingers or hands: "ifyou cross your hands you won't get them. If you get on apole you won't get them"; "if you don't like person and youtouch them, you can get cooties unless you cross your fin-gers"; or "if cooties are in your house, you lock up all of thedoors and turn off all the lights."

There has been little scholarly work on cooties. The twonoteworthy studies are by Samuelson (1980) and an ex-tended discussion in Thome's (1993) Gender Play. There aremany more fictional treatments. Several adult-authored nov-els, some targeting adolescents but some meant for adultaudiences, have used cootie lore and its practices to convey asense of deep and inextricable social taint, dread, and exclu-sion (Hayter 1997; Holub 1998). On the whole, however,cooties are a domain of younger grade-school children's ac-tivities, enacted by children, regulated by children, and expe-rienced by children. If the culture of childhood consists ofsemiautonomous cultural forms maintained through chil-dren's practices, cootie lore is exemplary.

Cooties are invisible; cootie practices are not. The para-digmatic scenario involves a child or several children whobroadcast with gestures and other manifestations of disgustand horror that they have come Into contact with someoneelse's cooties. The polluting child may be identified as an in-dividual or, more typically, as a token of a social category: "Ifa girl touches me then 1 say Rhhhhhl"; "If you touch some-body, well If [you] touch a boy, girls don't like boy cooties,

and the boys don't want girl cooties . . . the boys run fromthe girls.'

These activities may sound, as they sometimes actuallyare, like the hyperbolic, physicalized, and playful rehearsalsof routines of gender avoidance common among preadoles-cents. Cooties attributions, however, are often more seriousand the sometimes playful quality of the "game" not very ef-fectively masks much deeper emotion.

An interaction that occurred during an earlier phase ofour collaborative ethnography of children's culture illustratesthis vividly. One of the lead researchers on the project,Ivelisse Martinez, witnessed the force of cootie fear firsthand. Martinez was chatting with a group of nine-year-oldchildren in a classroom (not about cooties) when a girl ap-proached the group and sat in an available chair. Almost im-mediately and quite suddenly she became demonstrably up-set. Martinez asked her what was wrong. The girl breathlesslyreplied that she just realized that the last child to use thechair had cooties. The remark was not a function of the dis-cussion nor provoked by anything else Martinez observed.She was convinced that the girl's reaction was neither pre-tense nor fanciful. It was an expression of actual fear of pollu-tion.

In one respect the event was exceptional. Characteristi-cally, cooties involve attributions of pollution or the dangerof pollution that occur when both the cooties contaminatorand potential contaminatees are actually in the midst of in-teracting. Attributions tend not to be delayed. Despite this"real-time" quality of cootie attribution, there is also a char-acteristic uncertainty about cooties. A child not only neverknows when he or she will "get" them, but also never knowswhen he or she might be accused of "giving" them. Unlike,for instance, other cultural forms in which social contamina-tion occurs—caste pollution in South Asia seems an appro-priate point of comparison—cooties contamination is not aconstant threat for which regular, routinized protections areavailable. Nor are there specific circumstances in which coo-ties threat is always present or even specific to a particularperson or a particular group—as there is for menstruatingwomen in some societies. In short, there are neither specificcontexts nor a class of persons for whom or from whom therisk of cooties contamination is invariably present. The sameperson can be the source of cooties at one moment but be-nign the next. Indeed, some of the "excitement" of the coo-tie phenomenon seems to be derived from this lack of pre-dictability.

Given the association with disgust and pollution, notsurprisingly, cooties also serve as an offensive "weapon, aswhen one child tries to contaminate another in "cootie tag"(Samuelson 1980; Thome 1993). Opie and Opie (1969:75-76)classify a British variant ("the Dreaded lnrgi") under the ru-bric "the Touch having Noxious Effects." in their section on"Chasing Games." Although attribution ot cootie contami-nation Is often gamellke and playful, they can, as observedabove, be both strategic and serious. They are frequently usedin a familiar and cruel scheme for excluding unpopular, new.or otherwise stigmatized children. The novels 1 mentioned


earlier convey this aspect dramatically. In one, entitled IvyGreen, Cootie Queen, and meant for early grade school-agedchildren, Holub (1998) tells the story of a young girl stigma-tized by a rumor circulated by the "popular" girls that shehas cooties. More dramatic—at least for adults—is a novel in-tended for an adult audience called Revenge of the Cootie Girls,in which Hayter (1997) vividly describes the lasting traumasocial exclusion in grade school by having been labeled a"cootie girl.' The force of this is underscored when she ex-plains to an uncomprehending Japanese friend that a cootiegirl is a social pariah.

The sense of genuine emotion evoked by cooties—andthe enduring memory of that emotion—was intriguinglyconveyed in a piece in the New York Times during the 2000presidential primary season. The article, published in theSunday Week in Review section, illustrated the growing at-mosphere of tension between the two leading Democraticcandidates with the following description: "The vice presi-dent has gone on referring to Mr. Bradley as his friend—atleast until their chat on 'Meet the Press,' when Mr. Gore putout his hand . . and Mr. Bradley stared at it with a look thatsaid, 'Ewww, cooties' " (Henneberger 2000).

Simply mentioning cooties to undergraduates in mycourses triggers a flood of memories and invariably provokesa collective spasm of squirms and nervous laughter. Like im-migrants, whose memories of childhood often have a specialclarity because they evoke not only a particular moment intheir lives but also particular cultural and often sensory expe-riences (Hoffman 1994), North American adults have littledifficulty instantaneously retrieving memories of cootiespractices and re-experiencing the affect inscribed in them.

We found, paradoxically, that despite cooties' instru-mental force and lasting salience, children give surprisinglyvague answers when we asked what cooties actually are, apattern that Samuelson (1980) also reports. Cootie lore is notconceptually orderly. In response to our questions, one childwould use language appropriate to describing familiar but in-visible particulates like germs ("cooties is like germs, it hasgerms on it."; "cooties can give you germs.' "They give youbad germs that can kill you.") or those associated with viola-tions of personal hygiene ("usually if one of my friends usesthe bathroom on themselves they have cooties''; "whensomeone digs up their nose or eats their boogers"; "cootiesare where somebody licks the bottom of the chair or eats pa-per"; "when you are by somebody and they fart maybe thatcan give you cooties"). At other times, children use languagemore typical to descriptions of ephemera like bad associa-tions or misbehavior ("if you don't like a person and youtouch them, you can get cooties"; "people who have cootiessteal stuff from people and they talk too much and they fightpeople, and they beat up girls. They are bad"; "usuallyyou get cooties when somebody does something nasty"). NotInfrequently, children use mixed descriptions, particularlyby prefacing descriptions that simultaneously Imply en-dorsement with disavowals of belief In cooties: "1 don't be-llevc they are real. If they were real, they are probably prettysmall so that you couldn't see them"; "1 don't like them.

'Cause it's (ust a game that I don't play. I used to, but don'tanymore. I really, really don't like it's gross. . . All differentkinds of people get it."

These vague and varying statements do not mean thatcootie lore is inconstant, rather, as I said earlier, that it is un-tidy. One measure of this is that degree to which the same"untidiness" is distributed over time and space. Thome(1993) observes that the same pattern of practices and beliefsis found in communities in California (mixed Chicano/Lat-ino/Anglo), in Michigan, and on the East Coast. Similarly,our interviews, like those conducted by Samuelson (1980),reveal considerable consistency between adult reminiscencesand contemporary children's routines. Perhaps most strik-ingly is a recurrent pattern in children's "games" across cul-tures. Samuelson (1980) reports versions of cooties in Eng-land, Spain, Madagascar, and New Zealand. Opie and Opie(1969:75-78) recount a British game called "The DreadedLurgi," whose name derived either from a then-contempo-rary radio show or, and intriguingly, from a supposed ail-ment "found" in East Anglia from which "the idle" suffer.They note, however, that basic form has existed "generationafter generation." Lurgy tag (East Anglian spelling) involves akind of tag in which the chaser through skin-to-skin contracttransmits "something evil or sickening." like cootie attribu-tions, Lurgi tag is not always playful. One headmistress toldof discovering the game when a student came crying because"everybody said she had 'it'," a troubling complaint, theOpies report, which had been reported in "a number ofschools, large and small."

As with cooties, lurgy picks out and highlights negativesentiments toward stigmatized children: "In Norwich wefound the word 'lurgy' in everyday use amongst children—'You're lurgy'—but with the restricted inference that the per-son was 'stupid, goofy, looney, nuts, [or] a nit'." Similar rou-tines are found throughout Great Britain and "such gamesseem to be played around the world. In Auckland, New Zea-land, when a boy is tagged by a girl, the others deride himshouting 'You've got girl fleas' " (Opie and Opie 1969:77).The Opies describe similar forms outside the United King-dom:

In Valencia the ordinary game of chase is Tu portes lapusa' (You carry the flea). At Massa in the Bay of Naples,the game is 'Peste'. And In Madagascar... the child whodid the chasing was boka, a leper, and when he touchedsomeone his leprosy was conveyed to the one he touched,who in turn rid himself of the disease on someone else.[1969:77]

A comparable children's cultural form exists in Japan.Engacho are prophylactic routines that Japanese children useagainst a form of social contagion that shares a number offeatures with the forms discussed above. A typical situationIn which an engacho routine would be enacted would startwhen a child Is polluted by being soiled, say through contactwith dog feces (or who might otherwise be stigmatized, pos-sibly In virtue of being an ethnic minority). Successive con-tamination to other children, however, is not through contactwith the Initial polluting substance, but in virtue of it. Thus,


as with cooties and several of the other forms just discussed,social contamination results from contact with an invisible,essentially abstract, substance that transfers from one childto another. To prevent contamination or remove it, engachoroutines are enacted, which typically involve finger gesturesalso reminiscent of cootie lore. As in the United States, con-temporary authors have used engacho to evoke nostalgicmemories of childhood in adults. The material presentedhere was provided by Yu Niiya,6 who in addition to drawingon her own childhood memories, discovered an internetchat room devoted specifically to engacho. In it there was adiscussion, which she reported in an email to me, of a recentanimated film entitled:

Sen to Chihiro no Kami Kakushi (Sen and Chihiro SpiritedAway) by Hayao Miyazaki, [which] depicted a scene of En-gacho. Sen (the heroine, a 10-year old girl) goes to a won-derland and kills a little evil monster by stepping on it.Then she makes two crossed rings with her thumb and in-dex and says "Engacho!" The old man sees it and cuts thering with his palm, saying "Engacho kitta." And Sen fi-nally feels relieved, [personal communication]

The debate apparently began during a discussion of regionalvariation in engacho routines and the possibility that someviewers might not be familiar with it.

The point of these various and varied examples is notthat cootie lore, engacho, the Dreaded Lurgi, etc. are versionsof each other; nor are they expressions of some universal de-velopmental moment that children everywhere pass through.Later I will suggest that to understand these cultural forms isto understand specific aspects of children's conceptual archi-tecture. These cultural forms, nevertheless, are massively un-derdetermined by that architecture. They are literally themind-making contact with public representations.

For the present discussion, however, what is relevant isthat all these "games," routines, and other cultural forms arewhat Opie and Opie (1960) call children's unselfconsciousculture, reproduced without adult intervention. For example,to return to cooties in particular, while adults raised in theappropriate culture readily recognize and remember cootielore, children learn cootie lore only from other children andenact it only with other children. Children give cooties onlyto each other and get them only from each other.

The tethering of cooties to the conceptual, physical, andrelational space of children creates possibilities that often re-main obscured. Although cooties are extremely evocative foradults, paradoxically adults typically also think of cooties asone of many trivial childhood activities. However, withinchildren's culture cootie practices represent, regulate, and en-act relations of power among children. Cooties mark and po-lice social and personal distance and rehearse relations of so-cial status and power through threats of contaminations andclaims on Impurity. In these respects there are manifest par-allels between cootie lore and the various children's culturalforms discussed just above. There are also blatant parallelswith adult cultural forms of social contamination that regu-late relations of power and authority. Caste In South Asia Is aconspicuous example. Race In American society Is another.

Although cooties lack the systematicity and apparent inde-pendence of context that are characteristics of systems of ra-cial and caste thinking, there are crucial similarities bothwith respect to beliefs and the use of those beliefs in the serv-ice of systems of power and authority. To repeat this impor-tant point: Cooties are about power and authority within chil-dren's culture. Cooties are used to establish and maintainunequal social relations between children. At the very leastthey are a means of signaling and ultimately enforcing suchrelations. As Thome notes "recoiling from physical proxim-ity with another person and their belongings because theyare perceived as [having cooties] is a powerful statement ofsocial distance and claimed superiority" (1993:75).

This power derives from at least two aspects of cootielore; the untidiness or lack of systematicity in cootie attribu-tions and the putative nature of cooties themselves. Attribu-tions of cootie contamination are typically unpredictable,one never knows when, in what context, or by and aboutwhom they will be made. "[Cooties] come from differentpeople. Any kind of person can have it, but I don't knowwhat makes you have it.'' In one sense, then, a cooties attri-bution at any given moment calls attention to existing socialdistance rather than creates it.7

In this respect, cooties functions much like race andcaste, and does so presumably in virtue of being attributedwith a singular "natural" nature. A central element of racialand caste thinking is naturalized difference and the use madeof it to police social difference. Part of the reason that cross-racial and cross-caste contact is thought to be polluting isthat such contact supposedly violates or disrupts a natural or-der. Children share these beliefs. Even preschool-age chil-dren apply essentialist reasoning to racial and caste differ-ences and they expect both racial and caste groups toreproduce in much the same way that other natural thingsdo, particularly nonhuman living species (Hirschfeld 1996;Mahalingam 1999; Springer 1996). One possible explanationfor the frequent association of cooties with germs and lice isthat cooties too represents a naturalized (as distinct from anatural) image of the world. That is to say, cooties evokegerms and lice not because of empirical parallels between coo-ties and small vermin but because of a conceptual parallel.Germs and lice are biological or natural phenomena. Theconceptual parallel suggests that juvenile modes of estab-lishing and signaling social distance are naturalized, just asare adult forms tend to invest important value-laden aspectsof sociality with a natural basis.

Finally, a particular kind of social relation is policed andsignaled through cooties attributions. Cootie routines reflectbeliefs about group contamination, especially gender (Powlishta1995; Thome 1993). Gender, however, is not the only inter-group relation expressed (or publicly commented on)through cooties. As already observed, cootie attributions fre-quently pick out individuals stigmatized because of theircharacter or appearance (e.g., children who misbehave orwho are overweight). Cooties are also linked to stigmatizedgroups, as one boy made unst'ltconsdously clear: •They|cooties| are grovs, people run I mm people when someone farts.


or licks their toes, or dig up and eat their boogers. Africanpeople, Panama people. Girls have them more than boys.*'(The intersection of cooties, intergroup relations, and preju-dice was not missed by at least one (adult) playwright. InMarch 2001, the San Francisco Bay Area Discovery Museumpresented an interactive play meant "to promote toleranceand diversity" entitled Cootie Shots: Theatrical Inoculationsagainst Bigotry.)

One explanation for the parallels between cootie loreand race, caste, and gender on the one hand, and germs orlice on the other, is that cootie lore is a version of these otherbelief systems. Cooties could simply be an analogue by trans-fer of properties whose "base'' resides in another domain,one largely structured (supposedly) in and by adult culture.Cooties, on this view, would be a transfer, perhaps even a de-graded transfer, of relations and justifications for the waypower and authority are distributed and regulated in thedominant, adult cultural tradition. Cooties might, thus, be ajuvenile version of dominant culture, much in the way so-cialization theory anticipates that children's cultural formsare way-stations on the pathways to adulthood.

To explore this possibility—and to ultimately rejectit—we need to look at how closely cootie lore and theseother systems of relations are structured. Before doing this,however, we need to rule out an even more straightforwardpossibility: cooties may simply be a way of signaling friend-ship (and lack thereof).

Friendship and Enmity: In order to consider this possi-bility, we asked a group of children to imagine the followingscenario (adapted from a task used by Rozin et al. 1994):

You are going to another school to sing with your classand your teacher tells you to get a class shirt, you know,one that says the name of your school and your grade.You need to get it from a pile of shirts in a corner of yourclassroom. Your teacher wants you to get ready. You hurryup and grab a shirt, you put it on, and go join the groupfrom your class.

Half the children participated in a positive scenario:

Think of a person, a kid you know, that would make youhappy and make you feel good if you found out that he orshe had worn the same shirt that you picked and put onbefore you wore it.

Half the children participated in a negative scenario:

Think of a person, a kid you know, that would make youunhappy and make you feel bad and upset if you foundout that he or she had worn the same shirt that youpicked and put on before you wore it.

We then asked the child to rate how likely was each of a listof explanations for their discomfort (at discovering that theyhad worn a piece of clothing last used by a desirable or anundesirable child). We told the child that the list of explana-tions was collected from the remarks that children had givenus when we coniiucted the same experiment at another school(the list was In fact drawn from remarks children had madeduring unstructured play that we had observed during the ear-lier, ethnographic phase of the research). Each explanationreflected one of several modes of contamination: contamina-

tion by association ("made me think about how much Ididn't like that person"), social contamination ("other kidsmight know who wore it before"), contamination because ofcharacteristics of shirt ("it wouldn't fit right after the personwore it"), or contamination because of particulate transfer("it would have germs or tiny little things that would makeme like that person"). Children rated contamination by asso-ciation, social contamination, and contamination because ofcharacteristics of shirt as plausible explanations. There wereno reliable differences across ratings of the three explana-tions. Contamination involving particulate transfer/trans-mission, however, was rated less plausible, essentially no bet-ter than chance.

Following the first set of questions, we told each childthat children at another school sometimes brought up coo-ties in their explanations of their discomfort in wearing thesweat shirt of the undesirable child. We told them that wewanted to take the opportunity of these one-on-one situ-ations to tell us what they knew about cooties ("What canyou tell me about cooties?"). Their responses were coded intoseveral broad categories.

In marked contrast to the explanations they gave fortheir discomfort at wearing the undesirable child's sweatshirt, children were significantly more like-ly to bring up par-ticulate transfer/contamination when talking about cooties.The greatest portion, 31 percent, of their descriptions men-tioned the transfer of some substance (body excretions,germs, disease, etc.), 17 percent pretense (cooties is just agame), and 11 percent social (social categories or relation-ships). Thus, unlike their explanations of "simple* socialcontamination—that emphasized associative thinking andsocial relationships—cooties evoke a sense of particulate pol-lution that conformed to a naturalized model.

These data help situate cootie lore relative to simple so-cial likes and dislikes. Clearly cooties can be used as a way tocall attention to desirable and undesirable children and to re-hearse notions of social distance and hierarchy. We knowfrom other studies that stigmatized groups are likely to be as-sociated with cooties (Thome 1993). In addition to askingchildren to explain their comfort/discomfort with wearingthe sweat shirt, we also asked children to tell us about the de-sirable/undesirable child (what they looked like, how thechild's family was similar to and different from their family,whether their parents would be upset if the child played atthe desirable/undesirable child's house, etc.). Children reli-ably associated desirability/undesirability to social status,gender, and race. Children enjoy contact with children whoare socially like them but are uncomfortable with even indi-rect contact with children who differ from them in race, so-cial class, and gender. There is, however, an important differ-ence between simple deslrability/undesirability and cootieattributions, a difference that indicates that cooties is a sin-gular cultural form. Cootie contamination is linked to thetransfer of particulate but invisible material, whereas simplelikes and dislikes are not.

Germs: This then raises the possibility discussed earlierPerhaps cootie lore Is just a version of children's beliefs about


another naturalized particulate transfer, germs. There areobvious parallels between children's beliefs about cootiesand children's and adults' beliefs about material contami-nants. The wealth of children's routines with medical-likenames, such as "cootie inoculation,' "cootie vaccination,""cootie spray," and "cootie immunization" (Samuelson1980; Thorne 1993) suggest that children conceptually linkcooties and germs and infection and hence that cooties mayrehearse children's understanding of these phenomena, asseveral of the quotes above suggest. We should, nonetheless,resist drawing too close a connection between cootie lore andthese adult cultural and medical forms. Cooties may evokenotions of germs and lice but there are significant differencesbetween cootie lore and children's naive beliefs about dis-ease. For one thing, as the quotes above also show, cootiesare thought to be like germs, or to increase susceptibility togerms. They are generally not claimed to be germs.

There is another difference between children's theoriesof cooties and germs; namely, their respective causal rela-tions to other events in the world. While questions remainabout how best to interpret children's beliefs about germs,there is a broad consensus that from preschool age on chil-dren understand that exposure to germs is causally linked tosubsequent symptoms and illness (Kalish 1996; Kister andPatterson 1980; Siegal 1988; Sigelman et al. 1993; Solomonand Cassimatis 1999; Springer and Ruckel 1992). The basicmental model is cause and effect: germs cause illnesses, likecolds; lice cause skin discomfort, like itching and rashes. Pre-school children also understand that invisible particles (e.g.,sugar dissolved in water) have causal properties (e.g., theyproduce a sweet taste) (Au et al. 1993).

Unlike germs, however, children do not believe thatcooties cause anything. Getting, passing on, and getting rid ofcooties is central to cootie lore; what happens materially afterthis is not, as the following remark shows: "Or someonemight do something really disgusting. It's when you dig upyour nose and you touch somebody, and you have to crossyour fingers.' Even preschool children understand thatcrossing fingers is not an effective way of avoiding germ-bominfections. Rather a cootie routine is about bracketing andcontrolling social interaction ("They are not nice. . If theyget you, they'll tease you if you don't cross your hands"). Bythe same token, recall the version from Madagascar describedby Opie and Opie in which a child with "leprosy" rids him-self of the disease by simply tagging another child. If chil-dren's beliefs about cooties were simple reflections of theirown beliefs about germs and other contaminants, we wouldexpect a fairly faithful correspondence between the mentalmodels of each phenomenon. Nothing in the literature onchildren's notion of germs suggests that children actually be-lieve that diseases are cured by passing the noxious particlesto someone else.

Race: Race is a social force—and hence a cultural form-In both children's and adult culture. Developmental psy-chologists (Aboud 1988; Katz 1983) and more qualitativeresearchers (Goodman 1970), however, have long contendedthat there are fundamental differences between the way chil-

dren understand race and the way adults do. To explore therelationship between cootie lore and children's conceptionsof race, we need to understand the relationship between chil-dren and adult conceptions of race. A bare-bones descriptionof "adult" racial thinking in North America would includethe following three interrelated folk propositions. First, hu-man beings can be exhaustively partitioned into distincttypes based on their concrete, observable constitution. "Ob-servable constitution" means that racial types are embodied,natural, and enduring. Second, membership in a particulartype carries with it nonobvious and inner qualities as well asoutward ones. Third, the first and second propositions arelinked by a causal theory that posits that individuals haveboth the observable and nonobvious qualities of a particularracial type in virtue of having a particular racial essence. Thatthis conceptual edifice reflects the contingencies of the regu-lation of power and authority, which the system of racialthought serves. On this argument, race is about relations ofpower, power is about aggregate structural (political, eco-nomic, or cultural) relations not mental ones, hence the con-cept of race is a function of existing structural relations (seeHirschfeld 1996).

This account is not a theory about the ontogenesis of ra-cial cognitions but a theory about its social construction. Thewidely accepted developmental account is even simpler (seeAboud 1988; Katz 1983). Children form racial categories byopening their eyes and looking. A slightly more subtle ver-sion might hold that in virtue of the contingencies of powerand authority, adults draw children's attention to race. Thenchildren would open their eyes and discover it. The idea thatrace's perceptual prominence contributes to its precociouslearning is consistent with a long-held view that children areconcrete thinkers, tethered to surface appearances. Youngchildren readily learn to distinguish race in much the sameway that they learn about other perceptually salient humanproperty—say, being tail or blond. The reason that childrenlearn about being tall, blond, or black before they learn aboutbeing Republican or French is because blacks and tall andblond people are more visually prominent than RepubUcansor French folk (Aboud 1988). The claim about perceptual sal-iency is in turn linked to a second claim about conceptualproperties. According to this argument, children not only at-tend to surface differences, they interpret these differences tobe superficial. For the young child, being black is initially nomore important than being tall, blond, thin, or brown eyed.Thus, while adept at forming racial categories, children aresupposed to rely on superficial appearance and when reasoningabout race they ascribe superficial and modifiable properties.8

Given how widely held these claims are, it is somewhatsurprising that so little research has actually tested them. Theidea that perception drives children's racial cognitions is anassumption not an empirical discovery inference. For a vari-ety of reasons—not surprising to anthropologists—1 haddoubts about a realist interpretation of race. 1 conducted aseries of studies to see if children really were as superficial intheir thinking.* Against received wisdom, 1 found that northernKuropean children's initial concept of race contains almost


no perceptual information. What little visual informationthere was typically was inaccurate and idiosyncratic (Hirschfeld1993).

I also undertook several studies that explored youngchildren's reasoning about race. Previous research concludedthat young children expect that a person's race will change iftheir surface appearance changes. The work was based onasking children to reason about abrupt and unfamiliarchanges in appearance. To see whether the abruptness or un-familiarity of the tasks affected their judgments, I askedAmerican preschoolers about changes in appearance withwhich they were familiar; those involved in growth and fam-ily resemblance. Children know that as things grow their ap-pearances change. They also know that children resembletheir parents in some ways but not others. Using this knowl-edge as a base, I asked preschoolers whether certain changeswere possible. Even three year olds demonstrated that theyunderstand that a person's race will not change as she growsolder. In contrast to their beliefs about racial constancy, how-ever, three year olds anticipate that other aspects of physicalappearance, like a person's body type (hefty versus wiry), canchange during a person's lifetime. Similarly, young childrenbelieve that a child and his parents are necessarily of thesame race, although they did not believe that a child and hisparents would necessarily have the same body build.10

These findings demonstrate that children, in construct-ing and interpreting racial categories, pace the received view,go well beyond the information given. Even young childrenhave a sophisticated and adult-like cultural understanding ofrace, favoring a biological, abstract, and essentialist interpre-tation according to which race is conceptualized as immuta-ble, linked to family background, and diagnostic of groupidentity. In short, even very young children's conceptual rep-resentation of race is very much like the one of the adultswith whom she lives. In contrast to previous research thatclaimed the young children have only a superficial grasp ofrace, these (and other) studies evince a deep, theorylike,adult concept of race.

Both race and cooties share a singular conceptual fea-ture, a naturalized interpretation of group differences, and asingular social feature, the use of supposed naturalized differ-ences to signal and regulate differences in power. This latterfeature is uncontroverslal with respect to race. A naturalizedvision of race has frequently been linked to the contingen-cies of power and authority (Guillaumin 1980). Cooties, wesaw earlier, functions in a similar way—although the powerstakes may seem modest to adults, they are not to the chil-dren who experience them (the jacket cover for Ivy Green,Cootie Queen asks "Is Ivy's Life Ruined?"). Cooties of coursedo not create group-based social distinctions. Neither do coo-ties create the exclusionary practices that cause social rela-tions to be regulated through them. What cooties do Is natu-ralize the distinctions; and In this respect, cooties aredeployed In children's culture the way ran- Is deployed In theregulation of relations (>t power and authority In adult stxiety.

The c(xitie-is-to-chlldn/n as race-ls-to-adnlts analogyaside, the social and mental representations of race and coo-

ties change in the course of childhood. Consider the waythat preschoolers conceptualize the two social groupings.Susan Gelman, Oren Kosansky, and I found that kindergart-ners are familiar with cooties and use them to mark and regu-late social relations. Unlike school-age children, however,they do not expect cootie contaminations to involve thenaturalized transfer of particulate substance. With race, theinverse pattern obtains. Preschool-age children naturalizerace, see it as involving the transfer of a nonobvious essencefrom parents to children. However, race does not regulate so-cial relations or create social distance for preschoolers, as itdoes for slightly older children. The race of a child does notpredict with whom preschoolers will be friends. Thus, al-though cooties and race resonate, they do not follow thesame developmental course. Nor do they appear to be ver-sions of each other.

What then is the relationship between these various culturalforms and why do they so clearly resonate one to the other? Ioffer the following explanation. Cooties, racial, caste, andgender systems of classification are all expressions of a singlemechanism for conceptualizing human group differences.Cootie lore is not a juvenile, children's culture version ofthese other "more mature" social systems of categorization.All these systems are products of the same conceptual im-pulse to categorize played out in the culture of preadolescentAmerican children. Each is an independent instantiation of asingle dimension of cognition as it comes in contact withdistinct dimensions of the cultural environment. One doesnot cause the other to come into existence nor does it pro-vide a venue for practicing the manipulation of the structuralrelations inherent in the other. Rather, all emerge from acommon willingness or cognitive disposition to imagine theworld in a very specific way.

Elsewhere I have described what this very specific way is.I argue that these systems are products of a cognitive devicethat guides the development and elaboration of humankinds (Hirschfeld 1996). By this I mean that humans are en-dowed with a conceptual device or module specifically dedi-cated to processing information and guiding inference abouthuman collectivities.11 Virtually from birth, humans evincethe operation of this device. Infants discriminate between in-dividuals as members of different genders and language com-munities (Hirschfeld 1989a; Hirschfeld and Gelman 1997).From toddlerhood, and perhaps earlier, they sort humansinto kin-based, occupational, and racial groupings (Hirsch-feld 1989b, 1996). Moreover, they use these groupings to pre-dict nonobvious properties of their members.

The existence of a cognitive device or conceptual modulefor reasoning about human groups would not be surprising.Much human activity is regulated by and mediated throughsocial collectivities. Yet human collectivities are not as easyto detect as, say, the social groupings of other species. Beesswarm, large social mammals move in herds, 8sh coalesce intoschools, birds migrate in flocks. We can set' these collectivities.


Human social groups seldom present themselves in suchdear forms and not surprisingly researchers have found thateven functional groups like coalitions are difficult to detectperceptually (Stanton and Morris 1987). Most of our infor-mation about social groups is narrative not visual, yet, as dis-cussed earlier, the standard view is that children learn aboutthem by looking. The result is that there is a prevalent under-estimation in both anthropology and psychology of how dif-ficult it is to acquire a culturally-appropriate understandingof social groups (Hirschfeld 2001).

Still, it is obviously useful for people, including children,to know what groups there are in the social universe inwhich they operate. One of the ways that we come to knowwhat groups there are is to identify what their members arelike. Like adults, children recognize that some groups aremore important than others. Also like adults, relative impor-tance derives in part from the kinds of people there are, theirputative natures. A recurrent feature of thinking about groupsis that some ways of organizing people are more "natural"than others. This is evidently the case with gender, kingroups, age-grades, race, caste, etc. Conceptually, adults tendto naturalize these groups. Intriguingly these are also the firsthuman groups that young children learn about and thegroups that young children are most likely to naturalize(Hirschfeld 1988, 1989b, 1995). Of course, children mightnaturalize these groups simply because adults do. But, as Ihave tried to show, the developmental evidence does notsupport this conclusion. Rather, children come to naturalizethese groups on their own initiative.

That children do this on their own initiative has impor-tant consequences for understanding adult beliefs as well.Children's representations, I argue, are grounded in a special-ized cognitive device for guiding learning about socialgroups. The specialized device, however, not only organizesthe way children acquire knowledge about the world, it or-ganizes the way adults envision the social world. Adults re-cruit for their own social universes the kinds of things thatchildren find easy to learn and hence easy to sustain overtime. This is not a logical necessity, of course. Adults could,and presumably do, create social confections with no analogin children's social repertoire. The problem comes in tryingto sustain over time that confection. The more learnable arepresentation is, the more likely that it will continue to belearned faithfully (that is, the more likely a faithful version ofit will be acquired by most members of a population). Andlearnability is a function of children's thinking. In short, theepistemic relationship between child and adult, betweenchildren's culture and adult culture, is, in this respect, the in-verse of conventional wisdom. Children do not become whotheir elders are. Rather their elders become what the child— ormore specifically what the architecture of the child's mind-affords (see Sperber 1996 for the theory of communication,the eplstemology of representations, on which this argumentrests).

Gender, kin, age, race, caste, and other naturalizedgroupings are among the most precociously acquired socialentitles. They are also the social groupings most closely

bound with the distribution of power and authority. This isnot a coincidence. According to conventional wisdom, chil-dren come to naturalize these particular groups because of thepolitical economic salience they have in the wider (adult) so-ciety. That is to say, according to conventional wisdom, theyare early emerging categories because they are so sociallyconspicuous. There is a puzzling aspect to this account. Al-though, to my knowledge, no one has acknowledged it, thenotion that these categories are socially conspicuous is curi-ously coincidental with the notion that gender, kin, age,race, and other naturalized groupings are learned early be-cause of their marked perceptual correlates.12 On this argu-ment, as discussed earlier, children learn to recognize thesecategories because they are so physically conspicuous. As I ar-gued earlier, the idea that these categories are early-emergingconcepts because of perceptual salience is mistaken.

Race is important to the organization of power andauthority because of a conceptual proclivity children have tonaturalize categories like race. A specialized learning mecha-nism that renders social naturalization an easy "achievement"by making naturalization easily thinkable is a precondition forthese processes of ideological distortion, explanation, andjustification. In a critical sense, power is racialized becausechildren find naturalizing social groups cognitively easy. Atleast in the case of race, the fact that the concept plays a fun-damental role in organizing power and authority is not thecause of its cognitive properties but derives from them. Racialpolitics sustain themselves not simply because they serveand define relations of power and authority, they are sus-tained because children make them easy to think (seeHirschfeld [1997] for a detailed discussion of this argument).

It is crucial that I make this point dearly. I am not sug-gesting that race is an innate concept or that children wouldacquire it without the support of the cultural emironment.Race is not an innate concept. Indeed, given that it is histori-cally a relatively recent concept, it is difficult to see how itcould be. In the absence of a cultural environment in whichrace is a fundamental dimension of political, economic, andcultural organization, children would not learn it. This maybegin to sound like the view I am challenging, because it ap-pears that I am granting race's precocious acquisition to thecentral role it plays in organizing society. This is not myclaim. There are many ways to organize political, economic,and cultural life and no doubt many have been imple-mented. The question is how many are still with us? Rela-tively few. Race, it seems, is one of those that has managed tostick. Other organizing principles have not stood the test ottime. Others that have, like class or nationality, are arguablybest Interpretable as versions of (or derivations from) racialthinking (Stoler 1995). Indeed, it has been argued, correctly Ibelieve, that race is less a central organizing principle ofAmerican society than a systematic distortion of that organi-zation (Wlnant 1994).

Race, 1 contend, has become so widespread because It isso easy to learn. Of the various dimensions around which po-litical-economic and cultural lite can be and has been organ-ized (or, as the cast may be, appears to be organized), the

624 American Anthropologist Vol. 104, No. 2 • June 2002

idea of race has "succeeded" because it is so easily learned. Itis so easily learned because of the relationship this particularidea has with a special-purpose program for learning aboutsocial entities. Specifically, the cultural idea of race meets theinput conditions—triggers the operation—of a specializedmodule for creating human kinds and, hence, is readily stabi-lized and entrenched in a cultural environment. The humankind module is a developmental device, a mechanism forguiding the acquisition of knowledge.13 The idea of race con-tinues to be part of the cultural environment, and hence a di-mension of the environment which children "sample" intheir early mappings of the social world, because the idea ofrace "fits" well with the conceptual architecture that guideschildren's developing visions of the world. In this importantrespect, the child is the father of man (if you will excuse theovergendered phrase).14

CONCLUSION

It is worth repeating how curious is anthropology's aversionto children. Anthropologists certainly have lots of opportuni-ties to meet, talk to, and observe children. More importantly,children are theoretically crucial: anthropology is premisedon a process that children do better than almost all others,namely, acquire cultural knowledge. Nonetheless, the call tobring an anthropology of children into the mainstream hasbeen repeatedly made by, among others, Hardman (1973),Schwartz (1981), Toren (1993), Caputo (1995), and Stephens(1998). Still, a sustained, coherent, and—most critically—theoretically influential program of child-focused researchhas not emerged. Rather than repeat, yet again, the sameplaint, 1 have tried in this essay to demonstrate the theoreti-cal relevance that a fine-grained understanding of knowledgeacquisition affords. Individuals living within a particular cul-tural environment seem to maintain relatively faithful ver-sions of each others' cultural knowledge.15 To the extent thatanthropologists have tried to explain this, they have as-sumed a fairly simple pattern of elders instructing—either di-rectly through tuition or indirectly through modeling—andnovices learning. The obverse idea that elders may behaveand believe as they do because of the actions of their chil-dren has little currency in anthropology. Yet, as I have triedto show, there is considerable evidence that it occurs. 1 donot mean that as a general rule children shape adult behaviorand belief. One open and interesting question is how oftenthis occurs and in what domains. No matter the answer, itshould be clear that it is more prevalent and important thananthropologists have realized.

The issues 1 have emphasized here speak to a more generalphenomenon: What makes something cultural? Understandinghow things become cultural requires that we understand howchildren process information. As Sperber (1996: 54) observes,to explain culture "is to explain why some representationsbecome widely distributed to explain why some repre-sentations are more successful—more contagious—than oth-ers.' Whatever else they may be, successful Ideas are gener-ally highly lvaniablc. If children cannot represent Ideas from

available input, chances are the ideas will remain currentonly at significant cost.16 Learning is not as simple—or ignor-able—as much of anthropology would have it, largely be-cause the mind—its architecture, the ways it comes to formand use representations, and its natural history—is not assimple as much of anthropology would have it. Anthropolo-gists may not like children, but they should.

LAWRENCE A. HIRSCHFELO Associate Professor, Anthropologyand Psychology, 1020 LS&A Building, University of Michi-gan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1382

NOTESAcknowledgments. This article was written while I was a fellow ofthe Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stan-ford, CA. I gratefully acknowledge their generous support. Re-search reviewed in this article was supported by NSF award SBR-9319796 and a grant from the Office of Vice President for Research,University of Michigan. I thank Don Brenneis, Bambi Schieffelin,Ann Stoler, Robert Sussman, Kit Woolard, and several anonymousreviewers for their comments on earlier drafts.

1. These claims should be doubly qualified. First, it is mainstreamanthropology that has evinced limited professional interest in chil-dren and shown little concern to amend this absence. Second, thephrase "mainstream anthropology" here is meant to capture a sta-tistical rather than theoretical regularity. I simply mean the bulk ofresearch done by anthropologists. "Mainstream anthropology"makes little sense if the phrase is meant to pick out a convergentand unified body of theory. It might be more accurate to talk aboutmainstreams in anthropology.

2. My goal here is not to review, even briefly, child-focused re-search in anthropology, but simply to mention a few authorswhose works would be included on most anthropologists' list ofanthropologists who have worked with children.

3. One anonymous reviewer suggested that one reason that a seri-ous interest in children has not emerged because, unlike womenand other previously excluded groups, there are no children an-thropologists, hence no constituency to agitate on their behalf.This seems reasonable, up to a point. The overwhelming majorityof anthropologists have children. And within the American mid-dle-class cultural tradition, our children are us. Ask most middle-class Americans how they are doing and they will almost certainlybegin to talk about their children.

4. The rich corpus of work on language socialization is exceptionalin this regard. I cannot comprehensively review this work or evenfairly characterize it here. Suffice it to say for the present discus-sion, the emphasis in language socialization research is largely onlanguage training, in particular the ways in which adults practicesshape the way cultural and language are jointly learned. The focusis on what adults do in their attempts to ensure that children ac-quire appropriate linguistic knowledge and cultural sensibilities.With the exception of Goodwin (1990), few anthropologists havebeen concerned with how children become socialized into child-hood—which, as will be suggested below, is arguably the primarytask facing the young child. Moreover, anthropological linguisticshas remained largely agnostic on the debate surrounding the ques-tion whether children learn language in virtue of the operation ofan innate language acquisition device or in virtue of domain-gen-eral algorithms for acquiring a broad range of knowledge. Argu-ably, this Is a crucial question about the child's own contributionto language learning, which will be discussed briefly later. Anthro-pological data are particularly relevant to settling on .in answer,and the most comprehensive test of the uatiMst hypothesis is amassive cross-linguistic project in which several anthropologicallinguists partklifted (Slobin 1985).

5. V Realization theory rests, Harris (I«J98) argues, on an unhappyattribution (it causality to correlation. Parents who 'give plenty oflove and approval, set limits and entorc* them tirmlv but fairtv.


don't use physical punishment or make belittling remarks" andwhose child Is "cheerful and cooperative, is reasonably obedient,...is neither too reckless nor too timid, does well in school, has lots offriends, and doesn't hit people without good cause" (Harris1998:17) are thought to be "good" parents. That is to say, their par-enting style caused their child to be a "good" child. It is just aslikely that children whose personalities are inherently consistentwith being "good" children cause their parents to engage in child-rearing practices that are consistent with being "good" parents. Wetend to discount this alternative interpretation because we tend todiscount the notion of "inherent" personality. Yet there is a greatdeal of research supporting the claim that siblings are as likely tohave similar personalities as two individuals chosen randomly(Harris 1998; Plomin and Caspi 1999; Sulloway 1996).

6. 1 learned about engacho through personal communicationswith Yu Niiya and Yuri Miyamoto, participants in a seminar in theGraduate Program in Culture and Cognition, the University ofMichigan. Engacho came up during a discussion of cootie lore. Iam grateful to them for their help and particularly to Yu Niija forher efforts in searching for additional information and for prepar-ing a written account.

7. Another interesting difference between attributions of groupcontamination under cootie lore and those that occur with in sys-tems racial and caste pollution is that, with the exception of gen-der, cootie lore lacks the explicit referencing of social groups thatare hallmarks of racial and caste thinking. Cootie lore typicallylinks social groups to pollution through implicit reference.

8. In one study, Aboud (1988) dressed white children in Eskimocostumes and asked them whether they were now Eskimo. Theygenerally said "yes/ In another study, Semaj (1980) lightenedyoung black children's face with makeup and had them put onblond wigs. When these children asked whether they were nowwhite, they too answered "yes." Both findings admit multiple in-terpretations. Young children could easily be confused about theexperimenter's intent. Children call stuffed bears "bears." Theyknow that adults do the same. Rather than averring to a strong be-lief about race, the children in Aboud's and Semaj's studies mayhave simply been endorsing loose talk. Young children may alsohave been confused about how to answer questions about suddenand contrived changes—like a black child suddenly looking white.

9. The discussion here will be limited to the results of studies ofchildren's reasoning about only two racial groups, namely, blacksand whites. However, the research on which this discussion isbased explored a wider range of groups including, depending onthe study, Hispanics, southeast Asians, and North Africans. Resultsindicate that in terms of the reasoning described here, children'sbelief systems are the same across groups of people of color.

10. Body build was used as a comparison dimension for two rea-sons. First, it actually is fairly stable over the lifespan and acrossgenerations. Second, it is a reliable index of population of origin.

11. This argument is detailed in Hirschfeld 1996, Jackendoff 1992,Furth 1996, and Gigerenzer 1997, who also argue for the existenceof a special-purpose faculty that guides social reasoning.

12. Kinfolk are not always and certainly not obviously perceptu-ally similar. However, most accounts of the development of kin-ship categories assume either that the "real" (genealogical) mean-ing of a kinship term is preempted developmentally by arepresentation that focuses on the perceptual correlates of its refer-ent (e.g., that grandmother means "aged woman, with grey hair andbifocal glasses") or that the meaning Is subsumed to some sociallyconspicuousness aspect (e.g., the identification of kinship withcoresidence). See Hirschfeld 1989b for a critique of both theseclaims.

13. Admittedly, the specialized module evolved in an environmentIn which race did not yet exist. Nonetheless, specialized modulesshape contemporary thought despite the fact that contemporaryevents meeting their Input conditions did not exist during the pe-riod In which they evolved. Masks and facial painting an- commoncultural forms because they meet (I.e., trigger) specialized modulesfor face recognition that evolved as techniques for tracking and In-dividuating people (Sperber 1996).

14. Race is not the only example of the child's constitution ofadult belief. Maltz and Borker describe a similar process with gen-dered relations of power:

the process of acquiring gender-specific speech and behaviorpatterns by school-age children is more complex than the sim-ple copying of adult 'genderlects' by preschoolers.... Amongschool-age children, patterns of friendly social interaction arelearned not so much from adults as from members of one'speer group. . . . Our analysis suggests a different way of think-ing about the connection between the gender-related behaviorof children and that of adults. Most discussions of sex-role so-cialization have been based on the premise that gender differ-ences are greatest for adults and that these adult differencesare learned gradually throughout childhood. Our analysis, onthe other hand, would suggest that at least some aspects of be-havior are most strongly gender-differentiated during child-hood and that adult patterns of friendly interaction, for exam-ple, involve learning to overcome at least partially some ofthe gender-specific cultural patterns typical of childhood.[1986:215]

15. This should not be confused with the claim that people believethe same things, a canard about sharing that anthropology is wellrid of. People may have similar representations in their mindswithout having the same attitudes about the representations. Imay be aware that in the U.S. women are thought to be poor driv-ers, but I may not believe it.

16. To be accurate "children" should be replaced by "novice* inthe previous sentence. Children may not find new theories in as-trophysics learnable, but these theories are still a cultural form.However, if novice astrophysicists cannot learn these theories,they will not be cultural in that they will not be sustained orwidely distributed within the culture of astrophysicists.

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Why Don't Anthropologists Like Children?