As a theory of ‘the learning of culture’, socialization has to be differentiated from the theory of cultural conditioning that was assumed by *‘culture and personality’ studies in early cultural anthropology. These studies were informed by *psychoanalytic theory on the one hand and, on the other, by †behaviourist explanations of learning; they focused on emotional rather than *cognitive development. Socialization as informal *education was more prominent in early studies in social anthropology. It figures in the work of *Malinowski’s followers; so, for example, in We, the Tikopia, †Raymond Firth included data on interaction between children and their senior kin, and on the care of young children and their education especially with respect to learning the ideas and behaviour proper to kinship. Firth’s account is sensitive to the quality of relationships, and his brief but evocative descriptions of interactions between particular persons allow the reader to gain a sense of what it is to become a Tikopian (1957 [1936]:125–96).
†Meyer Fortes’s (1970 [1938]) account of education in Taleland (Ghana) is perhaps the most systematic early study of socialization. Tale children, he said, are:
actively and responsibly part of the social structure, of the economic system, the ritual and ideological system…the child is from the beginning oriented towards the same reality as its parents and has the same physical and social material upon which to direct its cognitive and instinctual endowment.
(1970 [1938]:18–19)
He described the attitudes of Tale adults and children to the learning process and showed how the child learns the ‘categories of social behaviour …as patterns in which interests, elements of skill, and observances are combined’. Fortes described learning as a process of increasing differentiation of patterns of behaviour that ‘are present as schemas from the beginning’. A child’s kinship †schema, for example, was said to ‘evolve’ out of an initial discrimination (at the age of 3–4) of kin from non-kin, followed by continuing discriminations of appropriate distinctions and differential behaviour within the category of kin until (at the age of 10–12) a mature grasp of the kinship schema was attained (1970 [1938]:53–4). (Note that Fortes’s schema should not be confused with the psychologist †Piaget’s idea of the schema as a selfregulating cognitive structure.)
This view of socialization as learning assumed that what was learned were the categories and behaviours given in adult behaviour; in other words, ‘learning’ was not understood to entail any transformation of the ideas encountered; rather the ideas and practices of the senior generation were by implication transmitted unchanged to the junior generation and informal education was analysed in terms of ‘modes of transmission’.
Ethnographies published during the 1950s and 1960s often included information on ‘the life cycle’ *conception, birth, child-rearing practices and informal education but only rarely did they make socialization the focus of study. However, social anthropologists analysing *rituals especially those surrounding †circumcision, *menstruation and other early initiations often emphasized their didactic function. In 1970, edited collections of papers by Middleton and Mayer were published, concerning, respectively, ‘education’ and ‘socialization’ in a wide range of culture areas, including New Guinea, China, Africa and the Pacific. Both collections include excellent descriptions of children’s behaviour, but the emphasis is on child-training by adults rather than on the child’s perspective.
During the 1970s an explicitly cognitive orientation began to appear in socialization studies. However, by and large, cultural anthropologists continued to focus on the socialization of emotion, the child’s understanding being taken for granted. An excellent example is Jean Briggs’s fascinating study of how Inuit children ‘internalised’ Inuit values; she analysed specific playful and joking interactions between particular children and adults to show how ‘play expresses and controls disapproved feelings and…negative values. It also expresses…maintains and…creates positive values…[so] playfulness is highly valued in itself (1979:10). Social anthropologists remained concerned with kinship and the socializing force of ritual, both of which figure largely in Jacqueline Rabain’s (1979) L’Enfant du Lignage: du sevrage a la classe d’age. This is perhaps the most detailed anthropological work of this period to be concerned explicitly with socialization.
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