Socialization describes the process through which people and especially children are made to take on the ideas and behaviour appropriate to life in a particular society. As such it describes an essentially passive process and takes for granted a theory of the person as ‘an individual in society’. Here ‘society’ and ‘the individual’ are conceived of as phenomena of different orders; society as a phenomenon of collective life is understood to precede and to encompass the individual.
Anthropologists’ traditional concern was to analyse and compare the ideas and practices that informed daily life among the different peoples of the world. For the purposes of analysis, they identified relatively discrete domains of collective phenomena such as kinship, political economy and religion. And because ‘the individual’ was understood to be a product of ‘society’, socialization could properly be studied only when these collective phenomena were understood. This perspective meant that studies of socialization were accorded a marginal position with respect to mainstream anthropology.
Learning culture
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.
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 self-regulating 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 ‘internalized’ 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.
Socialization and subjectivity
Rabain’s study was the result of close participant observation of twenty-five children in two Wolof (Senegal) villages over a period of eighteen months; it focused on children aged twenty-two months to five years. Rabain’s recognition that subjectivity is constituted in social relations made her analysis a particularly sensitive one. Her account showed how the child comes to understand itself in relation to others, to realize its place in its natal lineage according to its birth position, age and sex. She analysed exchanges of food, talk, physical contact and objects to show how, in the course of such interactions, the child could constitute an understanding of self and others. She showed too how all these interactions between children and their seniors, and between children and their peers, related to an implicit Wolof theory concerning the nature of heredity, i.e. that the child incarnated a specific ancestor.
Rabain paid special attention to the way that social relations are embodied in action, by contrast to explicit concepts. In so doing she described and analysed the kind of behaviour that was to prove so important for "Bourdieu’s (1977) theory of "practice. Bourdieu argued cogently against the notion that cultural knowledge could be described as a ‘code’ or a set of ‘rules’ that one learned in the course of growing up. The "habitus, described as systems of durable, trans-posable dispositions, inculcated in children by virtue of their observation and imitation of others, was Bourdieu’s answer to the problem of how to fill the theoretical gap between analytical models of behaviour and the actual practice of cultural actors. He wanted to understand how people come to be coerced or, as he would have it, ‘enchanted’, by their own cultural practice. His account of how the habitus is formed is a theory of socialization that implicitly combines the behaviourism of the American sociologist "G.H. Mead with an idea of embodied cognitive structures that recalls the work of Piaget.
However, Bourdieu’s work with the Kabyle of Algeria has more to do with continuity and change in the concepts and behaviour of adults than it does with how the habitus is formed in the process of socialization from child to adult. It is perhaps because of his lack of attention to the details of cognitive developmental processes in particular children that Bourdieu characterized the habitus as virtually impervious to change that is, to any change except that generated by forces external to the group within which the habitus is formed.
During the 1970s and 1980s the distinctions between cultural and social anthropology became increasingly blurred, as did the research problems denoted by terms such as ‘socialization’, ‘enculturation’, ‘acquisition’, etc. In recognition of the fact that these terms always implicated historically specific ideas of person and mind, and could only denote inherently dynamic processes which were still far from understood, ethnographic researches became more complex and theoretical formulations at once more sophisticated and more tentative. So Jahoda and Lewis (1987: 28) identified a need for: more sensitive and subtle cross-cultural research on the means by which cultures are reproduced … we may thus hope to gain additional and often novel insight into the meaning of childhood, parenthood and gender in particular societies. Through examining the earliest contexts in which they are produced and reproduced in a person’s life, we are also provided with a new point of entry . to understanding dominant cultural symbols.
Agency and the history of social relations
Bourdieu’s theory of practice has proved influential in research broadly concerned with ‘socialization’. His work, and that of the sociologist Giddens, informs various studies that have reformulated the ‘socialization’ problem into one concerned with how the history of social relations enters into people’s understandings of themselves and of the world they live in. Cognitive developmental theories of how meaning is constituted by children over time (especially those of Piaget and Vygotsky) have been crucial to these ethnographic studies, as have findings from experimental cognitive psychology.
In the domain of ‘language socialization’ the work of Ochs with Samoan children and Schieffelin with Kaluli children has shown how, in learning to speak its native language, a child is also learning how to be in relation to others. In other words, the child’s cognitive constitution of the categories of its native language is mediated by a complex array of social relations (see Ochs 1988; Schieffelin 1990). Lave’s (1988) study of arithmetic as a cognitive practice in everyday contexts develops a theory of how ‘the person acting’ and the social world are mutually constituted; this perspective has important implications for theories of how people become who they are and in so doing constitute the social relations of which they appear to be the product. Toren (1990) analyses how everyday ritual activities inform the process whereby Fijian children cognitively construct over time the concepts that adults use to denote the hierarchical relations which implicate chiefship as a particular form of political economy; this work shows how cognition may be understood as a microhistorical process, one that inevitably transforms concepts and practices by virtue of constituting them.
Contemporary anthropologists recognize that ‘the individual in society’ is an historically specific idea of the person; it implicates a particular form of rationality, one that informs and is informed by the politico-economic processes denoted by ‘capitalism’. This understanding poses a considerable problem to those theories in the social sciences that depend upon ‘the individual in society’ formulation. People have to constitute the ideas and practices of which they appear to be the product. This new perspective means that ‘socialization’ is beginning to give way to a more complex understanding of persons as historical agents, actively engaged in constituting their relations with others and, in so doing, subtly transforming the concepts that denote these relations. Nevertheless, the idea of socialization is still prevalent in anthropology.
