Commentary: Opening Up Perspectives on Autonomy and Relatedness in Parent—Children Dynamics: Anthropological Insights

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Many studies have shown widely varying human child-rearing practices; no child is ever a tabula rasa in the eyes of the culture. The article by McShane et al. (2009) on parenting themes of autonomy and relatedness among Inuit migrants from the northern countryside to Ottawa, a medium-sized city and the capital of Canada, offers important findings on previously less-studied child-rearing among Inuit in that southern urban setting. More broadly, the article contributes insights into how child-rearing practices and beliefs reflect local conceptions of the person and the world, and how the child should be prepared to live in it. Issues raised here include the challenges of distinguishing among cultural, psychological, and political economic influences of migration, urbanization, and globalization, and delineating the ways in which intimate personal concepts interweave with wider forces in child-rearing. Also at issue are definitions of relatedness and autonomy, concepts which are widely deployed in cross-cultural studies of child-rearing, but which are based upon Western philosophical formulations, and which McShane et al. analyze in the Inuit urban case. These concepts are difficult to formulate in culture-’neutral’ or ‘etic’ terms. The article shows both the uses and the limitations of retaining analytical ‘odd-job’ concepts for heuristic purposes. The present commentary argues that it is necessary to deconstruct critically such concepts as relatedness and autonomy, and to approach them as tendencies contingent upon context, rather than as universal polarized basic needs.