The Size and Nature of Children's Peer Groups among Nonliterate Peoples: A Significant Gap in Ethnographic Literature

Abstract

In defining universal categories of culture, anthropologists traditionally have, for the most part, concerned themselves with real or ideal adult behavior, often leaving unrecorded or unreported the behavior of children. Except for the writings of Dennis (1940), Hilger (1951, 1952), Mead (1952, 1953), Opler (1946), and Whiting and Child (1953), the intensive investigation of child behavior in nonliterate cultures largely has been absent, with a resulting hiatus in ethnographic literature. But even in the above works, it is difficult to elicit extended discussions of the size and nature of children's immediate peer groups, thus presenting an ethnographic lacuna of considerable magnitude. It is the purpose of this paper to examine a segment of anthropological literature with a view toward eliciting explicit, or implicit, designations of immediate peer group size among and, if possible, indications of the nature of such groups. Eighty-two works have been examined for relevant data, consisting for the most part of standard ethnographical and ethnological accounts of nonliterate peoples. The sample was selected at random in order to give as much diversity as possible of authorship and geographical location of the various cultures. The procedure taken with the majority of the works was to examine the indices for items such as children, child-rearing, boys, girls, life-cycle, play, games, sports, age-sets, agegrades, amusements, friendship, and similar categories. Those ethnographical and ethnological accounts which lack an index, of which there are quite a few, generally either have an index-type table of contents, or a chapter such as Social Organization, or Life-Cycle, from which data could be drawn.