From: Barbara, Burns
Email: javacup@cats.ucsc.edu
Course: Psych 100G, Diversity in Developmental Psychology
College: U of CA, Santa Cruz
Instructor: Eugene Matusov
ClassWeb: http://www.ematusov.com
ChildrenObservations: No
Date: 12 Jun 1997
Time: 18:43:08
Remote Name: re-entry-1.ucsc.edu
In this essay I will support the Social Constructionist perspective on the development of emotions. I will present the viewpoint that love is not universally defined or experienced. I will center on the critical role of the care-giver, the attachment theory, and how the cultural needs define their values and perpetuate the community. As supportive evidence I will largely cite from Colin Turnbull's book, The Mountain People, which concentrates on the Ik (a displaced and starving community in Uganda, Africa in the 1970's).
Love, stated as a universal cross-cultural emotion, requires sensitive consideration and close examination. Love, the mere existence of it, may depend on the needs of the culture. I will present a culture in severe survival status. A culture so fundamentally deprived that the idea of love is laughable; seen as a ludicrous and luxuriant, a death sentence. R. Harre', a Social Constructionist, proposes that emotions are entirely constructed from the culture, "They are intentional, entailing a moral order of rights, obligations, duties, and convention of education," (Oatley, 1994, p. 118). K. Oatley, theorist for the communicative/appraisal theory of emotions, agrees mildly with Harre' in that emotions are partially socially constructed, but that the foundation is of a biological basis, "a basis of mental states concerned with the cognitive management of priorities in our everyday plans and actions," (Oatley, 1994, p. 119).
Given Oatley's theory, couldn't it be proposed that a society may decide love is not a priority. Therefore, obliterate love from the culture and with the passage of generations become something not experienced at all; a process of evolution where only the fittest survive. This is what I purpose is possible and what I contend happened with the Ik. If we are willing to accept, "It is worthwhile to recognize how many diverse meanings can be found for the idea of love, and what it says about the importance of love in our society, or perhaps to people in general," (Lazarus and Lazarus, 1994, p. 106), then mustn't we also consider love's unimportance to certain communities? I will use Colin Turnbull's anthropological field study on the Ik (a community in Uganda, Africa) to demonstrate this other possible existence, a culture without love.
Colin Turnbull, an anthropologist with many interesting field-studies behind him, finds himself in the midst of the Ik, (a tribe in Uganda, ousted by the local government from their natural settings and lifestyle) and constantly struggles with his own ethnocentrism. "One of the objectives of anthropology is to discover basic principals of social organization, and small-scale societies are ideal...the more isolated the better," (Turnbull, 1972, p. 17). Turnbull's golden opportunity arrives, he observes, studies and lives with the Ik; which is almost absolutely essential to grapple with any understanding of the Ik's social processes. His work, published as The Mountain People, in 1972, was committed to getting beyond the, "how inhuman...how primitive...how disgusting," himself (the trappings for all), and in finding just what is not inherent in humanity.
Discovering that to be human may not hold essential qualities of goodness and love. That to be most basically human can mean going against what seams to be good for the entire culture and love. You see, outside of their shared language, the Ik really only share one other thing; and that is just what is good. Good is food. Food is good, and one who has food is good. Even more precise, a good man is not a man who helps you get food but he is a man with a full stomach. Turnbull's findings reveal the Ik, shove ethnocentrism in our faces, and outlines how their culture continues to survive, without love, within their assumed social processes.
A basic introduction to the Ik is need. In Uganda, Africa, the Ik were a community of nomads; hunters and gatherers that sustained life constantly on the move, moving to capture their food, working only three to five hours a day, and conserving their energy the remainder of their time. They give little thought to tomorrow, knowing if the hunt escaped them today, they would eat tomorrow, these are the terms they lived with. Turnbull emphasizes the differences of the hunter-gathers and the farmers, "He lives in sympathy with it (the land, nature) rather than trying to dominate it...For the farmer the results of a year's work may be destroyed overnight, where as the most the hunter can lose is what he can replace tomorrow," (Turnbull, 1972, p. 21). For the benefit of the Uganda government, for a Kideop National Park, the Ik were, "virtually (abolished) overnight when they (the Ugandan government) loaded the entire population of Ik into trucks and drove them out of their homeland," (Bodley, 1975, p. 108). They were now forced into resettlement to be farmers. Not only was farming not congruent with their cultural history, but severe droughts place them in a constant starvation status.
I believe these severe survival conditions adversely effect the culture and define the critical role of the care-giver and the attachment period. This is where cultural-emotional molding takes place. It is the failure of this initial bonding that reinforces survival of a community without love. I find support for this in the works of John Bowlby's and in Mary Ainsworth's attachment theories. I will explain these theories angling in on how they support the development of a culture without love and I will reveal the Ik's behaviors that foster this social development. "(The) attachment theory asserts that social development involves a continuing need for secure attachments and the continual construction, revision, integration, and abstraction of mental models," (Sternberg & Barnes, 1988, p.85). If there is no secure attachment what is the result? John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist, purposes a process of how affectional bonds are made and broken. Bowlby's attachment theory asserts that, "infants and children construct mental models of themselves and their major social-interaction partners, and that these models regulate a person's behaviors and feelings throughout life," (Sternberg & Barnes, 1988, p. 72).
Bowlby also identifies the behavior of infants and children separate from their primary care givers. Bowlby observed that the infants went through predictable stages of protest, despair, and detachment, (Sternberg & Barnes, 1988, p. 71). Detachment was described as "an active, seemingly defensive disregard for and avoidance of the mother if she returns." Researcher, Mary Ainsworth, "suggests that attachment emerges out of a complex, interplay between infant and mother," (Weiten, 1992, p.387). She defines this attachment is formed in one of three variations: secure, anxious-ambivalent, and avoidant attachment styles. These attachments are based on the "mother's sensitivity and responsiveness to her infant's signals and needs during the first year of life (and) are crucial prerequisites for a secure early attachment relationship." Ainsworth also found the later, avoidance attachment to serve a defensive function. She states, ...mothers of avoidance infants were more rejecting than either secure or anxious mothers....One major way in which they rejected their infants was to rebuff infant desire of close bodily contact. They were also more frequently angry or irritated than the mothers of secure and anxious/ambivalent infants, and less expressive of positive emotions (Sternberg & Barnes, 1988, p. 78).
In chapter three of Barbara Rogoff's text, Culture and Human Development, maternal and community attachment is described under severe conditions, including the common place of infant mortality. Rogoff discloses a study that shows maternal detachment and indifference toward their infants, as a way of life for some, especially those in a Brazilian shantytown. "The women see life as a struggle in which it is necessary to allow some babies to die without attention, care, or protection," (p. 3). The severe conditions and avoidant attachment or detachment offer explanations for the feelings of the Ik mother, we should not be surprised with the following account. It is a burden and a sacrifice to care for an infant. The Ik mother has to render her efforts, strength, and nourishment for an obligatory three years, of breast feeding and caring for the baby. When the mother finds a good place for gathering food she sets her infant down in the field, almost hoping that a predator will come along. When this very event happened..."the mother was delighted....in fact, not only was she relieved of her burden, but, tonight there would be a fat, full, and sleeping leopard out there," (Turnbull, 1972, p. 136). The account reads that it was an easy kill. The Ik enjoyed the feast, stomach contents and all. Bowlby also studied the behavior of institutionalized children separated from their mothers' in the 1950's. Bowlby found, "If the separation continues and no new stable relationship is formed, these children seem to become indifferent to other people," (Cole & Cole, 1993, p. 226). Bowlby labeled this state of indifference as disattachment. The Ik live in very severe conditions. I view their attachment to their mothers and community as dissociated. To the Ik, as illustrated, the children are not the sacred key to sustaining a community, they come and go, "...as long as you keep the breeding group alive you can always get more children. So let the old go first, then the children," (Turnbull, 1972, p. 131).
The ideal family is a man and wife, no kids. "Children are useless appendages, like old parents. Anyone who cannot take care of themselves is a burden and a hazard to the survival of others," (Turnbull, 1972, p. 134). But on the other hand, since there is a chance of a surviving crop, a "proper " family might be a mutual advantage, so the Ik continue to produce. The communal avoidance attachment continues in what is described next. This is how I support Bowlby's words regarding the "continual construction, revision, integration, and abstraction of mental model." "This is how change is possible. Similar to the notion of scripts and schemas in cognitive and social psychology, is compatible with the possibility of change based on new information and experiences, although change may become more difficult with repeated, uncorrected use of habitual models or scripts," (Sternberg & Barnes, 1988, p. 85). "The Ik no less than any others had its essentially social attitude toward kinship, and it readily lent itself to the rapid and disastrous changes that took place following the restriction of their movement and hunting activities. The family simply ceased to exist," (Turnbull, 1972, p. 28).
The concept of family reshaped, is broad, who ever has to live with you, and is living with you is your family, and this status is ephemeral. It is the Ik who laugh at pain and invite life threatening behavior, be it experienced by a baby, child, or an adult. "Anyone falling down was good for a laugh too, particularly if he was old or weak, or blind...," (Turnbull, 1972, p. 113). "Where ever the mother finds a spot in which to gather (food); she loosens the sling and lets the baby to the ground none too slowly, and of course laughs if it is hurt," (Turnbull, 1972, p. 135). "Men would watch a child with eager anticipation as it crawled toward the fire, then burst into gay and happy laughter as it plunged a skinny hand into the coals," (Turnbull, 1972, p. 112). Even the children participated, (as a culture does prevail) children tease a starving playmate with bits of food and as she is about to eat they "sat on her with cries of excitement, fun and laughter, beat her savagely over the head and left her," (Turnbull, 1972, p. 132). If an Ik child lives three years, it is then displaced from the parents home and off their responsibility list. To survive beyond that, bands are formed; a junior band (ages 3-7), and a senior band (ages 8-12). These bands are to provide safety in numbers, a hunting team, and they are very important to teaching the rude finalization that there are no friends, no love. Together they work but they will not make sacrifices for each other.
I find how Bowlby states that detached children become indiffent to others key to the Ik's socialization and to their emergence into adulthood. Bowlby also related the attachment theory to emotions, the emotion of love. He states, "...the most intense of all human emotions arise during the formation, the maintenance, the disruption and the renewal of affectional bonds...," (Sternber & Barnes, 1988, p. 71). It is of interest to note that, "According to Hazan and Shaver, romantic love is an attachment process, and people's intimate relationships in adulthood follow the same form as their attachments in infancy....Avoidant adults found it difficult to get close to others and described their love relations as lacking intimacy," (Weiten, 1992, p. 592-3).
Although the word love is used in this definition I wonder if it is just a convenient label of our culture. A way to fit those in who are not complying to our norms. What would romantic love be like with no intimacy? This I can not fathom. Sternberg and Barnes, in The Psychology of Love, write that the second most important difference in romantic love is that it "almost always involves sexual attraction," second to the need for security and care. Is romantic love basic sexual attraction plus cultural additives? To conclude, Turnbull states that the Ik dismiss love as idiotic, and highly dangerous. We, as a culture, with our elaborate and diverse definitions for love, may believe love to be the root of humanity, but that it may be possible for a community to endure, in human form, without it. "Love is also tangled up with cultural values. Not only do cultures vary their outlook toward love, but these outlooks have changed greatly...," (Lazarus & Lazarus, 1994, p. 107).
I believe it is the crisis of basic survival that brought on the Ik to live life without love. Their focus on life, is based on food and their severe starvation status consumes their every thought and behaviors. Consider what Turnbull states, "The Ik, like the rest of us, are kind and generous and light-hearted and jolly when they can afford to be. I saw the last vestiges of that in the first month or two, and I saw those vestiges replaced almost overnight, it seamed, by the basic survival instincts that lie in all of us," (Turnbull, 1992, p. 33). Recall what Sternberg and Barnes write regarding social development, "...possibility of change based on new information and experiences, although change may become more difficult with repeated, uncorrected use of habitual models or scripts,' (Sternberg & Barnes, 1988, p. 85). Acknowledge the process of change, "Every one of the Ik who were old today was thrown out at three, and has survived in consequence, and in consequence has thrown his own children out and knows full well that they will not help him in his old age any more than he helped his parents," (Nanda, 1994, p. 190).
I find I must consider and support the social constructionist perspective on the formation of emotions to fit the needs of the community. I find the Ik to have adapted to the changes in their lifestyle via adapting their cognition's, emotions, and behaviors. It took the practice of generations, but it happened. If it is so in one culture, and is not so in others, using the words innate and universal is not acceptable. I think an interesting continuance of Turnbull's work, angling in on the changes of the culture, would be very interesting. An in-depth comparison of the old forgotten rituals and traditions would provide the link to the values, feelings, and emotions of the Iks gone by.
I found evidence of this in Turnbull's direct statements and indirectly in other observations he made. For example, the Ik used to host a feast for the whole community to cherish and honor the loved ones passing. It was Turnbull himself, who felt the morbid sadness when he realized the Ik now cry at the risk of the community's discovery of a dead family member (as you know the Ik can not feed the whole community now). The tradition is now adapted. Hurry, bury the dead in the dark of the night, quickly, right outside the compound, so no one will see you; or throw the remains to the animals, but not into your neighbor's yard. I believe the Ik adapted to their severe conditions, by severe measures, yes, but they managed survival. Since I believe them to have changed and adapted, and do to the collaborating theories, I do also hold hope of a new construction of living. If the Ik's conditions change and they can "afford" (as Turnbull writes) the adaptation.
References:
Bodley, J., (1975). Victims of Progress. Thousand Oaks, CA: Cummings Publishing Company, Inc.
Cole, M. & Cole, S., (1993). The Development of Children. New York, NY: W.H. Freeman and Company.
Lazarus, R. & Lazarus, B., (1994). Passion and Reason. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Nanda, S., (1994). Cultural Anthropology. New York, NY: Wadsworth, Inc.
Oatley, K., (1994). Best Laid Schemes. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Rogoff, B., (1996). Culture and Human Development. Unpublished manuscript, University of California Santa Cruz.
Sternberg, R. & Barnes, M., (1988). The Psychology of Love. New York, NY: Vail-Ballou Press.
Turnbull, C., (1972). The Mountain People. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
Weiten, W., (1992). Psychology Themes and Variations. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company.