Upcoming Seminar: Culture as the Most Important Influence on Human Development

"Culture as the Most Important Influence on Human Development"

Speaker: Thomas S. WEISNER
Professor, Department of Anthropology and Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences (NPI Semel Institute), UCLA
Time: 12:30 p.m., Friday, 9 November 2012
Venue: Room 401 Humanities Building, New Asia College, CUHK

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If we could know just one fact about a young child that would be the single most important influence on that child's life, the cultural place on earth where that child is going to grow up is, even today, arguably the most important single predictor of a child's developmental pathway, though of course not the only one. Multiple and sibling caretaking of children remains widespread and influences responsibility, nurturance, and social intelligence; co-sleeping with infants and young children is a phyletic universal and widely considered normative; early attachment processes are variable, and influenced by both cultural and biosocial mechanisms starting in infancy. Along with resources, family structure differences, and other institutional and religious systems, these practices all challenge assumptions in much of current Western developmental psychology and encourage anthropological studies of children that incorporate the moral direction and cultural meaning of development into studies of the well-being of children and families.


ALL INTERESTED ARE WELCOME

Feel free to bring your box lunch or sandwich to eat during the talk