Some years ago I undertook an ethnographic study of childhood in a remote West African village called Gbarngsuakwelle (When you say the name, you must face away from your audience or give them a shower). Ethnography is the approach taken by cultural anthropologists and involves living with the people you're trying to understand, speaking their language, learning and respecting their customs and, above all, observing and listening, recording faithfully what you hear and see and, then, trying to make sense of it as a non-native. One of the prominent themes in my report (published as Playing on the Mother-Ground, and referred to as an ethnography) was the importance of observation in the lives of children. One venue where I hung out was the town chief's court.
With apologies to fans of Court TV, the average court case is just slightly more interesting than watching grass grow. And this was certainly true of the local court presided over by Chief Wolliekollie. Imagine a 40-minute debate about the failure to promptly return a borrowed lantern or an even longer debate over the amount of compensation appropriate in the case of an adulterous liaison (the juicy details discretely glossed over). And yet the court never failed to attract a good crowd of juvenile spectators. While the boys watching the chief's court were quiet and blended in with their surroundings, it was obvious that the chief saw them as "pupils" in an open-air classroom. His rhetorical questions and judicial "opinions" often reflected basic principles of Kpelle morality (1). Most societies are keenly aware of the child as voyeur and fully expect to use public events for their didactic value.
Children as Avid Spectators in Laos
Anthropologists often describe such scenes. Among the Yakutat of British Columbia, "Children learned a great deal by listening to the older people talk, especially when the old men gathered in the sweathouse to bathe and chat." (2) Among the Tale of Ghana, "Children learn who their... ancestors were by listening at sacrifices." (3) Anthropologists note that little is private or off-limits to children in the village and they learn about the birds and the bees quite early. For example, Australian Arunta children play at being husbands and wives making separate windbreaks and fires and pretending to cook food. Sometimes they also play at
adultery with a boy running away with the "wife" of another boy (4).
Years after recording these scenes of children as spectators, I had an epiphany and realized that what I had witnessed in Gbarngasuakwelle was the fertile field in which couch potatoes might grow. It turns out to be a small step from watching interesting things happen in the village to watching TV. In the village, however, the court case ends, eventually, and the juvenile spectators disperse for new, usually more active, adventures. By contrast, in many contemporary homes, the TV is never off.
Boys in Gbarngasuakwelle were also enthralled by their elders' success in hunting and trapping and spent countless hours in chasing games and "play" hunting that evolved into the real thing. In my childhood, I was a cowboy. I grew up without a village; my windows on the world were books and TV. But, I didn't become a couch potato, either. As interesting as those Saturday morning westerns were, I took equal or greater pleasure from replicating the heroic exploits of The Lone Ranger. My
parents could not afford, nor did they approve of, building a toy treasury for me. But they believed that fantasy play stimulated the imagination and, as the picture shows, contracted with Santa one year to provide the basic accoutrements. We do, occasionally, see village parents supplying cast-off or scaled down tools and weapons as toys to encourage children to use play as a learning medium. Even more important in my own development were my mother's convictions (shared with her village counterparts) that play was an outdoor activity and that children should not be underfoot. So I spent hours each day, "roamin' the range." In the process, I remained lean and healthy and hence, according to Nigel Barber, (Blog= The Human Beast), would have more easily evaded predators in an earlier incarnation during the Paleolithic (5).
What can we take away from all this? Children are endowed with several predilections that facilitate their learning the culture with little or no direct instruction. Those predilections can still be useful today in helping a child learn to construct narratives (stories) and to learn many aspects of the culture. But the mechanisms are not necessarily self-correcting. TV and video games, and the comfortable environment in which they are situated, may be so compelling that the child never shifts from observation to replication. Couch potatoes not only miss out on physical exercise but are short-changed in their mental exercise as well. So parents may need to intervene (minimally) to nudge children from passive receptors to active creators and, above all, to get them off the couch and into the back yard.
1. Lancy, D.F. (1996) Playing on the Mother Ground: Cultural Routines for Children's Development. New York: Guilford
2. De Laguna, Frederica (1965) Childhood among the Yakutat Tlingit. In Melford E. Spiro (Ed.), Context and Meaning in Cultural Anthropology. Pp. 3-23. New York: Free Press.
3. Fortes, Meyer (1938/1970) Social and Psychological Aspects of Education in Taleland. In John Middleton (Ed.), From Child to Adult: Studies in the Anthropology of Education. Pp. 14-74. Garden City, NY: The Natural History Press.
4. Spencer, B. and Gillen, F. (1927) The Arunta: A Study of a Stone Age People. London: Macmillan.
5. Barber, N. (1991) Play and regulation in mammals. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 66:129-146.
Child spectators in Laos, Peter Petrosky photo.
