Comprehensive Study Notes on Modes of Reproduction, Culture, and the Life Cycle

Modes of Reproduction

  • Definition: Dominant pattern of population change through fertility and mortality.
  • Cultural anthropologists have identified three modes corresponding to livelihood strategies.

The Foraging Mode of Reproduction

  • Source of Evidence: Study of the Ju/wasi people.
  • Birth Intervals: Ju/wasi women have birth intervals of several years due to:
    • Prolonged breastfeeding: Inhibits progesterone production, suppressing ovulation.
    • Low body fat: Required for ovulation; Ju/wasi diet is low in fat, and foraging keeps body fat low.
  • Typical Births: Ju/wasi women typically have two to three live births, with two surviving to adulthood.
  • Adaptation: This mode is adaptive and sustainable in their environment.
  • Changes with Lifestyle: When Ju/wasi become farmers or laborers, their diet changes (more grains and dairy), and physical activity decreases, leading to an increase in birth rates.

The Agricultural Mode of Reproduction

  • Association: Associated with the highest birth rates of the three modes.
  • Pronatalism: An attitude or policy encouraging childbearing is common.
  • Reasons for Pronatalism:
    • Need for a large labor force for farming, animal care, food processing, and marketing.
    • Many children are seen as a rational reproductive strategy.
  • High Birth Rates Examples: Several low-income agricultural countries in Africa:
    • Niger: 7.47.4 births per woman.
    • Somalia: 6.76.7 births per woman.
    • Uganda: 6.76.7 births per woman.
    • Angola: 6.56.5 births per woman.
  • Cross-Country Variation: Birth rates vary due to reduced demands for family labor.
    • South America: Lower rates of two to three children per woman in countries like Venezuela, Chile, and Argentina.
  • Cultural Groups with High Birth Rates: Mennonites and Hutterites (Christians of European descent in the United States and Canada) typically have eight to ten children.
  • Pronatalism in Rural North India:
    • Having many sons is important for farm labor and protecting family land.
    • Large families are seen as a sign of wealth and success.

The Industrial/Digital Mode of Reproduction

  • Fertility Levels: Replacement-level fertility (births equals deaths) or below-replacement-level fertility (births less than deaths).
  • Economic Factors: Children are less useful in production due to reduced labor demands and mandatory schooling.
  • Demographic Transition:
    • Shift from high fertility and high mortality (agricultural) to low fertility and low mortality (industrial).
    • Phase 1: Mortality declines due to improved nutrition and health, increasing population growth rates.
    • Phase 2: Fertility declines, leading to low population growth rates; many countries have below-replacement fertility.
  • Concerns about Low Growth Rates: Labor shortages and a declining tax base.
  • Distinguishing Features:
    • Stratified Reproduction: Social inequality reflected in population patterns.
      • Middle and upper classes: Few children with high survival rates.
      • Poor: High fertility and mortality rates.
      • Surrogate motherhood: "Outsourcing" of pregnancy, spreading globally, including India.
    • Population Aging: Proportion of older people increases relative to younger people.
      • Example: Japan's declining population growth and rapid aging.
    • Scientific/Medical Technology Involvement: High involvement in all aspects of pregnancy (artificial insemination, preventing pregnancy, terminating pregnancy).
      • Increasing specialization in providing new services.

Culture and Fertility

  • Culture's Role: Culture shapes human fertility from conception through birth.

Sexual Intercourse

  • Challenges in Research: Sexual practices involve private beliefs and behaviors.
    • Ethics of participant observation prohibit intimate observation or participation.
    • Biases in verbal reports.
    • Confidentiality concerns.
  • Early Anthropological Study: Bronislaw Malinowski's study in the Trobriand Islands (1929).
  • Importance of Studying Sexuality: Due to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including HIV/AIDS.
When to Begin Having Intercourse?
  • Biological Factors:
    • Fertility span: From menarche (onset of menstruation) to menopause (end of menstruation).
    • Menarche: Varies globally from 12 to 14 years of age; earlier in high-income countries.
      • Example: Japan (12.5 years), Haiti (15.5 years).
    • Trend: Earlier age at menarche worldwide, possibly due to diet and activity patterns.
  • Cultural Factors:
    • Cultural rules vary by gender, class, race, and ethnicity.
    • Many cultures: Sexual activity should begin only with marriage, especially for females.
    • Zawiya, Morocco: Bride's virginity is highly valued; unmarried women may use deception to meet the requirement of blood-stained wedding sheets.
Intercourse Frequency and Fertility
  • Assumption: High fertility rates are associated with frequent sexual intercourse.
  • Classic Study: Comparison of Euro-Americans in the United States and Hindus in India.
    • Hindus had intercourse less frequently but had higher fertility rates.
  • Factors Limiting Intercourse Frequency in India:
    • Hindu religion: Teaches the value of sexual abstinence.
    • Sacred days: Abstinence on many sacred days, potentially up to 100 days each year.
    • Lost semen complex: Belief that men's health and strength are linked to the retention of semen.
      • "Everyone knew that semen was not easily formed; it takes forty days and forty drops of blood to make one drop of semen… Celibacy was the first requirement of true fitness, because every sexual orgasm meant the loss of a quantity of semen, laboriously formed." (Carstairs 1967)
  • Conclusion: Sheer frequency of intercourse is not the sole explanation for fertility rates; cultural dynamics restrain sexual activities.

Fertility Decision Making

  • Levels of Decision Making:
    • Family level: Parents consider the value and costs of children.
    • State level: Governments plan population targets.
    • Global level: Economic and political interests influence reproductive policies.
At the Family Level
  • Factors Affecting the Desire for Children:
    • Children’s labor value: Positive effect.
    • Children’s value as old-age support for parents: Positive effect.
    • Infant and child mortality rates: Positive effect.
    • Economic costs of children: Negative effect.
  • Differences Between Husbands and Wives:
    • Example: Highland village in Oaxaca, Mexico; men want more children than women do.
    • “My husband sleeps peacefully through the night, but I have to get up when the children need something. I’m the one the baby urinates on; sometimes I have to get out of bed in the cold and change both our clothes” (Browner 1986).
  • Preference for Sons or Daughters:
    • Sons: Widespread in South Asia (India, Pakistan) and East Asia (China, Korea).
    • Balanced number: Southeast Asia.
    • Daughters: Some parts of Africa south of the Sahara and some Caribbean populations.
At the State Level
  • Government Policies: Affect population growth rates.
    • Factors include: Economic factors, public services, military needs, ethnic and regional proportions, and population aging.
At the Global Level
  • International Influence: Global power structures (pharmaceutical companies, religious leaders) influence decision making.
    • 1950s: Western nations promoted family planning programs in developing countries.
    • 1990s: United States adopted a more restrictive policy and promoted abstinence.

Fertility Control

  • Methods: People in all cultures have influenced fertility, including ways to increase, reduce, and regulate birth spacing.
    • Direct: Herbs or medicines that induce abortion.
    • Indirect: Long periods of breastfeeding.

Indigenous Methods

  • Cross-Cultural Availability: Hundreds of direct methods are available.
  • Afghanistan Research: Over 500 fertility-regulating techniques were found in one region.
    • 72% for increasing fertility, 22% contraceptives, 6% for inducing abortion.
    • Methods involve plant and animal substances taken orally, as pills, inhaled, vaginally inserted, or rubbed on the stomach.

Induced Abortion

  • Prevalence: Practiced in virtually all societies.
  • Attitudes: Range from absolute acceptability to conditional approval, tolerance, and opposition and punishment.
  • Methods: Hitting the abdomen, starving oneself, taking drugs, jumping from high places, lifting heavy objects, and doing hard work.
  • Reasons: Related to economic and social factors.
    • Pastoralist women: Heavy loads do not allow for care of many small children.
    • Poverty: Preferable to bearing a child who cannot be fed.
    • “Legitimacy”: Social penalties for bearing an illegitimate child.
  • Government Regulation: Some governments promote or forbid access to abortion.
    • China: One-Child-per-Couple Policy (1978) involved strict surveillance, group disapproval, and forced abortions/sterilizations (loosened in 2014).

Religion and Abortion

  • Catholicism: Forbids abortion, but many Catholic women seek abortions.
    • Brazil: Illegal abortions lead to detrimental health effects and maternal deaths (up to one-fourth in the poorest regions).
  • Islam: Forbids abortion, but abortion of female fetuses is practiced covertly in Pakistan and by Muslims in India.
  • Hinduism: Teaches ahimsa (nonviolence), but thousands of Hindus seek abortions.
  • Buddhism: Provides no overt rulings against abortion.
    • Japanese Buddhism: Aborted fetus is “returned” to a watery world and may come back.

The New Reproductive Technologies

  • Emergence: Since the early 1980s, methods to bypass biology and offer options for childbearing to infertile couples have become available.
  • In Vitro Fertilization (IVF): Eggs are fertilized outside the womb.
    • Spreads globally, interpreted within cultural frameworks.
    • Study of male infertility in Cairo (Egypt) and Beirut (Lebanon) showed the connection between masculine identity and fertility, with social stigma for infertile men.
    • Third-party sperm donation is not acceptable in Islam.

Infanticide

  • Definition: Killing of an infant or child.
  • Forms:
    • Direct infanticide: Actions such as beating, smothering, poisoning, and drowning.
    • Indirect infanticide: Prolonged practices such as food deprivation and failure to provide medical care.
  • Motives:
    • “Deformed” or very ill infant.
    • Infant's sex.
    • Adulterous conception.
    • Unwed mother.
    • Birth of twins.
    • Too many children in the family.
  • Study in Canada: Mothers convicted of infanticide were young and lacked resources.
  • Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ Study in Northeastern Brazil:
    • Indirect infanticide was related to extreme poverty.
    • Modernization of mortality: Infant and child mortality is class-based.
    • Mothers selectively neglect sickly or weak babies.
    • Religious beliefs provided psychological support by believing babies went safely to heaven.
    • Update: Women now give birth to fewer babies, and most survive due to government-provided health services; however, adolescents face drug-related gang violence.

Personality and the Life Cycle

  • Definition of Personality: An individual’s patterned way of behaving, thinking, and feeling.
  • Formation: Largely through enculturation (socialization).
  • Cultural Anthropologists Study:
    • How cultures enculturate members into having different personalities and identities.
    • How personalities vary according to cultural context.
    • How changing cultural contexts affect personality, identity, and well-being over the life cycle.

Birth, Infancy, and Childhood

The Birth Context
  • Effect on Psychological Development: Cultural context affects an infant’s psychological development.
  • Brigitte Jordan’s Comparative Research: Studied birth practices in Mexico, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United States.
    • Maya women in Mexico: Midwife provides massage and psychological support; husband and female kin are present.
    • United States: Hospital births are technocratic and managed, alienating the mother and family.
  • Cultural Competence: Awareness of and respect for beliefs and practices that differ from Western medical practice.
Bonding
  • Western Theory: Parent–infant contact and bonding at birth is crucial for parental attachment.
  • Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ Critique: Bonding does not necessarily have to occur at birth to be successful.
    • Low-income mothers in northeastern Brazil: Bonding occurred later if the child survived infancy.
    • Related to the high rate of infant mortality.
    • Western bonding is adaptive in low-mortality, low-fertility societies.
Gender in Infancy
  • Sex vs. Gender:
    • Sex: Biological markers (genitals, hormones, chromosomes).
    • Gender: Cultural construction, highly variable across cultures.
  • Human Plasticity: A high degree of human “plasticity” allows for variation in personality and behavior.
  • Challenges in Studying Innate Gender Characteristics:
    • Impossible to collect data on infants before cultural treatment.
    • Difficult to study and interpret behavior of infants without introducing biases.
  • Studies on Euro-American Personality Stereotypes:
    • Infant males are more aggressive than infant females.
    • Infant females are more social than infant males.
    • Infant males are more independent than infant females.
  • Evidence and Interpretation:
    • Boy babies cry more: May be due to difficult delivery, not aggressiveness.
    • Girl babies smile more: Culture, not nature, may be the explanation because caretakers smile more at them.
    • Independence/dependence: No clear differences.
  • Constructionist View:
    • Cultures go to much trouble to enculturate offspring into a particular gender.
    • If gender differences are innate, they should be the same throughout history and across cultures, which they are not.

Socialization During Childhood

  • The Six Cultures Study: Comparative research project designed to provide data on how children’s activities and tasks shape their personalities.
    • Observed children between the ages of 3 and 11 years.
  • Personality Types:
    • Nurturant-responsible: Caring and sharing acts toward other children.
    • Dependent-dominant: Fewer acts of caregiving and more acts that assert dominance.
  • Findings:
    • Gusii children (Kenya): Highest frequency of a nurturant-responsible personality type due to a wide range of tasks at earlier ages.
    • Orchard Town children (United States): Highest frequency of the dependent-dominant personality type.
  • Influence of Mode of Livelihood:
    • Horticultural societies: Children are more nurturant-responsible.
    • Intensive agriculture or industry: Children are more dependent-dominant.
  • Women’s Work Roles: Key underlying factor.
    • Horticultural societies: Women work outside the home, and children take on family-supportive tasks.
    • Other cultures: Women are mainly occupied in the home, and children have fewer tasks.
  • Implications for Western Child-Development Experts:
    • What happens when the dependent-dominant personality develops into a narcissistic personality?
    • Consumerism supports the development of narcissism.
    • Involving children more in household responsibilities might promote a more nurturant-responsible personality.

Adolescence and Identity

  • Transition from Childhood to Adulthood: Involves biological and cultural events.
Is Adolescence a Universal Lifecycle Stage?
  • Puberty: A universal time in the human life cycle with biological markers.
  • Adolescence: A culturally defined period of maturation from around puberty until adulthood.
  • Schlegel's Argument for Universality: People in diverse cultures have special terms comparable to the American term “adolescent.”
    • Interprets adolescence as adaptive in an evolutionary sense, providing training for parenthood.
  • Other Anthropologists' View: Adolescence is culturally constructed, highly variable, and impossible to explain on biological grounds.
    • People in many cultures recognize no period of adolescence.
    • In some cultures, identification of an adolescent phase is recent.
  • Fatima Mernissi's Statement: Adolescence became a recognized life-cycle phase for females in Morocco only in the late twentieth century: "The idea of an adolescent unmarried woman is a completely new idea in the Muslim world, where previously you had only a female child and a menstruating woman who had to be married off immediately so as to prevent dishonorable engagement in premarital sex."
  • Cultural Constructionist View:
    • Length and elaboration of adolescence vary for males and females in different cultures.
    • Maasai pastoralists: Long period for males devoted to training in warfare; females move directly from being girls to being wives.
    • Sambia of New Guinea: Long initiation period for young males may involve an accepted sexual relationship with an older male.
    • Sub-Saharan Africa and the Amazon: Girls go through lengthy adolescent phases in seclusion.
  • Cultural Materialism: A long and marked period of adolescence is preparation for culturally valued adult roles: worker, warrior, or parent.
    • Extended adolescence for females in nonindustrial societies occurs in cultures where adult females are important as food producers.
Coming of Age and Gender Identity
  • Margaret Mead: Made famous the phrase “coming of age” in her book Coming of Age in Samoa.
  • Psychological Aspects: Ceremonies often have a sacrificial element with symbolic death and rebirth.
    • Most coming-of-age ceremonies are gender-specific, highlighting the importance of adult roles of men and women.
    • Often involve marking the body of the initiate (scarification, tattooing, genital surgery).
  • Male Genital Surgery: Removal of part of the skin around the tip of the penis.
    • Maasai adolescent males: Circumcision ceremony marks the end of adolescence and the beginning of manhood.
    • “As long as I live, I will never forget the day my head was shaved and I emerged a man, a Maasai warrior. I felt a sense of control over my destiny so great that no words can accurately describe it” (Saitoti 1986).
  • Female Genital Cutting (FGC): Range of practices involving partial or total removal of the clitoris and labia.
    • In some contexts, FGC is practiced along with infibulation (stitching together of the vaginal entry).
    • Usually performed when a girl is between 7 and 15 years of age.
    • In the Sahelian countries, Egypt, some groups of the Middle East, and some Muslim groups in South and Southeast Asia.
    • Often associated with people who are Muslim, but also occurs among some Christian groups in Ethiopia.
    • Scholars have no good explanation for the regional and social distribution of FGC.
    • Many young girls say they look forward to the ceremony.
    • Raises questions of cultural relativism.
  • Initiation Rites at Virginia Military Institute (VMI):
    • Freshmen students (“Rats”) are assigned to an upperclassman (“Dyke”).
    • Freshman year involves continuous humiliation and abuse.
    • Culminating initiation ritual involves crawling through mud while being attacked by upperclassmen.
    • Adams interprets this ritual as a birthing event.
    • Breaking Out initiation ritual is no longer practiced at VMI, replaced with a long weekend series of events.
Sexual Identity and Gender Pluralism
  • Biological vs. Cultural: Debate over whether gender identity and sexual preferences are biologically determined or culturally constructed and learned.
  • Melvin Konner's Position: Both factors play a part.
  • Cultural Constructionist Position: Emphasizes socialization and childhood experiences as more powerful than biology.
    • Support found in cases where people change their sexual orientation during their lifetimes.
    • Examples: Sambia of Papua New Guinea and the xanith of Oman.
  • Third Gender: Cultures allow for a third gender, which is neither purely male nor purely female.
    • American Indians: “Two-spirit person” whose work roles and sexual orientation may or may not conform to their genital endowment.
    • India: Hijra who dresses and acts like women but is neither truly male nor truly female.
  • Gender Pluralism: The existence in a culture of multiple categories of femininity, masculinity, and blurred genders that are tolerated and legitimate.
    • Thailand: Three gender categories have long existed: phuuchai (male), phuuying (female), and kathoey (transvestite/transsexual/hermaphrodite).
    • Youth in Tehran: Many young women have their first sexual experience with another woman due to gender segregation but do not self-define as gay.
  • Asexuality: Asexual person is someone who does not experience sexual attraction.
  • Heteronormativity: The belief that all people fit into two distinct genders with corresponding distinct social roles and adhering to heterosexual relations.
  • Homophobia: Hatred of people whose sexual preferences are toward the same sex.
    • Homosexuals are disproportionately victims of hate crimes, housing discrimination, and problems in the workplace.
    • Homosexual youth have substantially higher suicide rates than heterosexual youth.
    • Lesbian Hispanic women have higher rates of several health problems compared to heterosexual Hispanic women.

Adulthood

  • Adulthood Definition: Entering into some form of marriage or long-term domestic relationship and having children.
Becoming a Parent
  • Matrescence: The cultural process of becoming a mother.
    • Varies cross-culturally in terms of duration and meaning.
    • In some cultures, a woman is transformed into a mother as soon as she thinks she is pregnant; in others, when she delivers an infant of the “right” sex.
    • Nonindustrial cultures: Matrescence occurs in the context of supportive family members; some promote prenatal practices.
    • West: Medical experts increasingly define the prenatal period as an important phase of matrescence, with rules for potential parents.
    • Some anthropologists think that such medical control of pregnancy leads to postpartum depression due to a lack of agency.
  • Patrescence: The cultural process of becoming a father, is less marked cross-culturally than matrescence.
    • Couvade: Beliefs and customs applying to a father during his wife’s pregnancy and delivery.
      • Theories: Fathers were identifying with the female role; data indicate that couvade occurs in societies where fathers have prominent roles in child care.
      • Couvade is a phase of patrescence: The father’s proper behavior helps ensure a safe delivery and a healthy baby.
  • Child Care:
    • Widespread pattern: Women are the major caretakers of infants and children.
    • Cultural anthropologists provide a cultural construction explanation rather than a genetic or hormonal one; they point to cross-cultural variation in child-care roles.
    • South Pacific: Child care is shared across families, and women breastfeed other women’s babies.
    • Aka foragers of the Central African Republic: Paternal child care is prominent; gender equality prevails and violence against women is unknown.
Middle Age
  • Turning Point for Men: In many industrial/digital societies, the 40th birthday leads to restlessness, rebelliousness, and unhappiness.
    • Midlife crisis seems strongly embedded in contemporary culture and its fear and denial of death.
  • Menopause: Cessation of menstruation is a significant aspect of middle age for women in many cultures.
    • Maya women of Mexico: Menopause is not a time of stress or crisis; menstruation is considered an illness.
    • Rural Greek women: Menopause (exapi) is a natural phenomenon that all women experience; postmenopausal women experience relief and freedom.
    • Japan: Menopause is minimally stressful and women rarely consider it something that warrants medical attention.
The Senior Years
  • Contemporary Development: The senior life-cycle stage may be a development of contemporary human society.
  • Variable Recognition: Cross-culturally, the category of the aged is variably recognized, defined, and valued.
    • In many cultures, elders are highly revered; in others, aged people become burdens.
  • Status of Elderly People: Higher and more secure in contexts where they continue to live with their families.
    • More likely to be found in nonindustrial societies than in industrialized ones.
    • Elderly living in age-segregated residences: They have to create new social roles and ties to find new ways of gaining self-esteem and personal satisfaction.
    • Research in a retirement home in central New York State shows that having a pet promotes a person’s sense of well-being.
The Final Passage: Death and Dying
  • Resistance to Death: The contemporary United States appears to play a leading role in resistance to death.
  • Attitudes Toward Death and Dying Among Alaskan Inuits: People are active participants in their death rather than passive victims; friends and neighbors are called together.
    • "I do not suggest that everyone waited for the priest to come and then died right away. But the majority who did not die suddenly did some degree of planning, had some kind of formal service or celebration of prayers and hymns and farewells” (Trelease 1975).
  • Choices Faced by Terminally Ill People: About how and where they should die, and whether they should prolong their lives with unusual means or opt for physician-assisted suicide.
  • Urban Japan: Terminally ill people have clear ideas of what is a “good death.”
  • Mozambique Refugees Living in Malawi: Greatest cause of stress was being forced to leave behind deceased family members without providing a proper burial.
    • Such improperly treated deaths mean that the unhappy spirit of the deceased will haunt the living. This belief is related to high rates of mental-health problems among the refugees.
  • People's Grief: Varies from extended, dramatic, public grieving to no visible sign of grief at all.
    • Bali, Indonesia: People’s faces remain impassive at funerals, and no vocal lamenting occurs.
    • Different modes of expression of loss may be related to the healing process for the survivors by providing socially accepted rules of behavior; either highly expressive public mourning or repressed grief may be equally effective, depending on the context.