CHILD CULTURE

On Native Identity, 'Home-ness'

and the Primary Acquisition of 'World View'

by Hugh M. Lewis

The 'World View Problem' concerns the nexus of interconnections between language, culture and cognition and has been the central concern of relativist and structuralist arguments regarding the 'deep structural' and 'surface functional' uniformity or variability of the phenomenal patterning of language, culture and cognition. The relativity/structure of Weltangschauung should be most readily apparent in the pattering of primary socialization of children involving differential of acquisition of language, culture and cognition.

Without the pretense of science, I attempt in my forthcoming paper to merely offer the suggestion of one possible solution to this 'problem' based upon a brief study of my own daughter's little world which is mostly encompassed within the walls of our two bedroom apartment. She has developed a vocabulary which is divided into basic sets--names of her human friends, for her toys and books, for food, for daily routines. She has become, by and large, a creature of habit with her daily routines which nevertheless always seem to make muddles of our models. She has sets of 'things' and 'relations' kept in different containers and different 'temporal' frames and sequences of events--her dolls piled in one corner, her jewelry in a small plastic basket, her toys in another, her larger carts, rocking horse and plastic shopping cart along one wall, her books piled willy-nilly upon one of the shelves of our bookcase, her bathtub toys, her plastic container with dinosaurs, her building blocks and all her drawing things. She knows where our clothes are, and where to find all the photographs.

In short, within the bounded spaces of her small world, my daughter has become something of a resident expert not only in relation to her own things and activities, but in the involvement with her parents who are an integral part of that world. We constrain her, mediate the world for her, feed her, dress her, play with her, protect her, manipulate her, pick up after her, and she in her turn constrains us, controls us, manipulates us, imitates us and learns from us. She grows in her expertise at an astonishing daily rate, continuously incorporating new components and activities into it.

Child Culture, and a child's growing competence and improving performance within that culture, represents what can be considered from a social constructivist point of view a critical 'moment' in the reproduction of human reality. As an American child, my daughter has already learned to identify with her many personal possessions in an intense way which makes these seem to be an extension of her own ego identity in the world. How this might be different from the basic upbringing of an Okinawan, a French, an Indian, a Canadian or an English child is of considerable relevance to the world view problem. What the long term consequences may be if we suddenly decided to place her full time into a day care center so both her parents could pursue careers in the world to make ends meet is another relevant and related question. Or if we suddenly took to hitting her or to constantly argue between ourselves.

It is my wish to study, within the scope permitted by a single paper, the problematics of world view vis-à-vis my own child's culture, and of child culture in general. I will attempt such a study from several directions--a review of some of the relevant literature, a biographical accounting of her development, a brief period of 'participant observation' of her daily activity 'in situ', a possible cross cultural comparison with data drawn from other studies, an ethno-semantic analysis of her growing, but limited vocabulary and an analysis of some of her discourse. It seems possible to even attempt to construct a computer based model of her culture as if this were an 'expert system' of sorts, one which knows little but learns a lot, and one that may have a basic 'cultural logos' in spite of its sometimes disorder. The goal of such a model would not be to predict her behavior or to anticipate the direction in which she is sure to change, but to simply and subtly capture a small place of her 'moment' and in so doing to perhaps reveal a little of the way that she makes sense of her world.