Adolescent Identity

Evolutionary, Cultural and Developmental Perspectives

Bonnie L. Hewlett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136239670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Children's Studies in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

As our world becomes increasingly permeable, and as human populations are rapidly converging and transitioning within a global interconnectedness, it is vital that we look to, and learn from, those most adept at the adaptation, creation, and contesting of culture: adolescents. This text is designed to bridge critical gaps in the understanding of the daily lives, identity development, and experiences of adolescents in diverse cultures around the world. Cultural context is predictive of developmental uniqueness; comparisons provide insights into how social structures and relationships influence the manifestation of individual patterns of development and experience. In quantitative and qualitative detail, the contributors relate the nature of adolescent life to cultural, biological, ecological, demographic, and social variables. The findings of this book will be relevant not only to other social anthropologists, but also to sociologists and developmental/educational psychologists.

1 Introduction

Adolescent Identity, Risk, and Change

Bonnie L. Hewlett

Nearly half of the people inhabiting the world today are under the age of twenty-five—the largest generation of young people in human history. Of those, 85 percent are coming of age in developing countries, experiencing disproportionate economic, social, and political representation in relation to powerful forces operating at global, national, and local levels. In addition to facing inadequate access to healthcare and education, gender inequality, widespread unemployment, political conflict, and the proliferation of HIV/AIDS, over 500 million are surviving on less than two dollars per day (UNFPA 2005, 4, 45). Deprivation, poor health, powerlessness, and poverty are however, not the lived experiences of adolescents everywhere. Our world's adolescents encounter and respond to challenges of physiological development, identity formation, risk, culture change, and globalization in unique and diverse ways. With varying degrees of agency, and opportunity, dependent upon factors such as rural or urban living, economic circumstances, gender, religion, family, and social support, this young generation navigates the complex process of adolescent identity development within a changing and challenging world (ibid.).

This book presents a holistic transdisciplinary view of the thoughts and experiences of adolescents from around the world, including small-scale and complex societies. Developmental psychology has provided important insights into adolescence, but these studies are usually conducted in Western or highly stratified cultures. Adolescent research from a diversity of cultures is needed to evaluate existing characterizations about adolescence and adolescent identity development. The richest and most exciting research often emerges from cross-cultural, transdisciplinary approaches that integrate a range of perspectives on key issues. The chapters in this volume bring together anthropological, evolutionary, and developmental methods and theories that educate, provoke, and help us to think more holistically about the adolescents of our world.

Adolescence became part of human life history when, according to some, a longer period of dependence conferred significant reproductive advantages, allowing young people to “learn and practice” economic, social, and sexual behaviors of adults before they themselves began reproducing (the “brain-growth model” [Bogin 2009; Bogin this volume] and “embodied capital” [Kaplan 1996 in Bock 2005]). Others proposed that the juvenile period was extended so that they could avoid risk by growing more slowly (Janson and van Schaik 1993). As evolutionary life history researchers note, there is a “constant relationship” between the length of the juvenile period and the length of the adult span of life (“adult mortality model” [Charnov 1993 in Blurton Jones 2005, 105]). When adult mortality is high, it “pays” to begin reproduction earlier, whereas conversely when adult mortality is low, it is beneficial to grow larger and delay reproduction (ibid.). However the world's first teenagers came to be, one could speculate that these youth already possessed the social-cognitive abilities that enabled them to understand self and others (Bogin 2009; Meltzoff 2002; Premack and Woodruff 1978). Homo sapiens adolescents, and perhaps other intelligent hominids, such as Neanderthals, had a concept of self and self in relation to others, as identity development would have begun with the appearance of empathy, attachment, and a theory of mind. But within an increasingly complex social world, it is more than likely early Homo sapiens teenagers who first developed complex individual and social identities (Schlegel, personal communication).

Undergoing a surge of biological, cognitive, and evolutionary changes, the brains of the first adolescents would have been capable of abstract and innovative thought, able to use concepts skillfully, successively relating them to each other in more complex ways (Bogin 2009; Gogtay et al. 2004). Gathering information about the “social aspects of reproductive maturity”—cooperation, competition, risk taking, and reputation building—these adolescents would have been capable of learning about economic, social, political, and sexual skills necessary for reproductive success and survival (Ellis, this volume; Schlegel, personal communication; Bogin 2009). Although adapting and adjusting to diverse ecological settings and conditions, adolescents within early hunting-gathering societies would have formed identities within an intimate, supportive, and familiar social world which may have contributed to limited or reduced frequencies of identity conflict, depression, psychological distress, and suicide, often associated with modern adolescent development. But adolescence was no doubt for these first teenagers, as it is for today's young people, an intense and challenging time of risk and change, of learning and growth, of biological and social development.

Structuring their own adaptations to the harsh and delightful realities of their lives, young people of today increasingly participate in a broad social, economic, and political world. The research presented in this volume positions their lives within this wider social, cultural, and temporal context in order to understand the impact of risk, change, adversity, and globalization on personal and social identity development. The following chapters by international scholars on adolescents from around the world, increase our awareness of, and respect for, their individual biologically and culturally influenced lives and experiences as they develop a sense of self as a certain kind of person, a personal identity, and a sense of self in association with a group, role, or another person, a social identity (Schlegel this volume; Markstrom this volume).

Several chapters in the volume question the cross-cultural applicability of Erikson's (1968) classic acute adolescent identity crisis. Often times upholding and reinforcing cultural practices beneficial to themselves, their families, and the larger society, adolescents in many places in the world navigate their way quite well through childhood, adolescence and into adulthood. While these adolescents possess coping strategies buffering adversities they face as they develop a sense of oneself in the movement from identity immaturity to identity maturity, others find the development of personal and social identities challenging (Marcia 1966; Schlegel this volume). Facing the loss of supportive and changing kinship structures, and/or struggling with the push and pull of an increasingly interconnected world, where “new needs are born of new desires,” these adolescents call into question long held beliefs and practices, unsure how to reconcile a sense of “self as” and a “self with” in a rapidly changing environment (Schlegel this volume; Bauchet and Guillaume 1982, 208; Gebru 2009; Bucholtz 2002).

The contributors to this volume bring together cultural, developmental, and evolutionary approaches, addressing such questions as: When did the period of adolescence emerge in human evolutionary history? When is risky behavior an adaptive feature of adolescence? Why do great variations in the experiences of adolescent identity development exist? Why is identity formation problematic for some adolescents and not for others? How do globalization, adverse environments, and cultural change challenge our world's young people? The international scholars in this volume powerfully make the case for culturally sensitive research, illuminating the diverse experiences of our world's youth and bridging critical gaps in our understanding of adolescent identity formation, risk, and change. Cultural context is predictive of biological, social, and developmental uniqueness; comparisons from the U.S., Central Africa, Kuwait, Dominica, Haiti, Canada, China, Polynesia, and Micronesia provide insights into how evolutionary, historical, social, and cultural structures and relationships influence the manifestation of individual variations during this important time in the human life span.

HOW WE HAVE COME TO UNDERSTAND ADOLESCENCE

For decades the work of Erik Erikson (1963), J. Marcia (1966), and Margaret Mead ([1928] 1961) framed anthropologists' understanding of adolescent identity formation. In the ensuing decades few anthropologists carried on Mead's pioneering work, challenging Western-centric beliefs about adolescent rebellion, mood swings, and conflict—irrespective of Freeman's critique (Bucholtz 2002; Condon 1987; Mead [1928] 1961; Freeman 1983)—and the study of adolescence all but disappeared from scholarly debate. Anthropological studies undertaken since Mead's classic work echoed the traditions of past theorists, focusing upon event specific research (e.g., initiation, courtship, marriage, or rites of passage), portraying the adolescent as an incomplete member of culture, in the process of becoming complete, as an adult, or concentrating upon biologically driven developmental aspects of adolescent life and experience. Anthropology's study of adolescence was limited by a concern with understanding how adolescent behavior could lead to a better understanding of adults; interesting in passing only, a “stage” on the way to the destination of adulthood (Bucholtz 2002). Child-focused research, and, especially, research specific to adolescents, remained marginalized and under-theorized (Hirschfeld 2002; Bird-David 1992). Adolescents' knowledge, behaviors, identity development, and activities were not viewed as theoretically or ethnographically interesting (Hewlett and Lamb 2005, 2). Children, as Ingold (1994, 745) noted, and it could be said adolescents even more so, were “conspicuous by their very absence.”

Not until the Whitings' (1975) Harvard Adolescence Project (Davis and Davis 1989; Condon 1987; Hollos and Leis 1986; Burbank 1988; Marquez 1999) and the now classic cross-cultural work by Schlegel and Barry (1991) did anthropologists respond to the need for systematic research with adolescents and begin to challenge the universality of the life stage, nature, and experience of adolescence (Condon 1987). Thus, in the late 1980s and 1990s a small group of theorists sought to understand the adolescent life experiences, as related by the adolescents themselves (for a more current example, see Jeffrey and Dyson 2008). More recently, an “anthropology of youth” has emerged, as cultural context was demonstrated to be predictive of developmental and biological uniqueness; adolescents are active producers, rejuvenators, contesters, and conservators of culture and, within these contexts, create their own unique “youth culture” (Caudill 1988; James and Prout 1990; Gaskins and Corsaro 1992; Toren 1993; Talai-Amit and Wulff 1995; Caputo 1995; Sharp 1995, 2002; Wulff 1995; Prout and James 1997; Marquez 1999; Hirschfeld 2002; Bucholtz 2002; Arnett 2004). Anthropologists, and others using anthropological methodologies, thus began reaching across many cultures and disciplines, laying the foundation linking interdisciplinary, cross-cultural theoretical and empirical analyses. The contributors to this volume expand and build upon this rich tradition by integrating biology and culture and utilizing diverse theoretical and methodological approaches in their insightful and culturally sensitive research.

Developmental psychologists, educators, and sociologists continue to contribute the majority of adolescent studies, with their research guided by a variety of theoretical orientations: attachment theory (Bowlby 1958, 1969; Ainsworth and Witting 1969; Lamb et al. 1985); socialization theory (Ochs and Schieffelin 1979; Salzmann 1998); social-cognitive theories (Piaget 1954; Vygotsky 1978; Kegan 1982); and identity development theories (Erikson 1963; Marcia 1966; Gardner 1998). Psychological, sociological, and education studies of adolescence were and continue to be an important focus of research because local, national, and international policy makers were concerned with what was perceived as an increase in adjustment problems occurring among Euro-American middle-class adolescents evidenced in delinquent behavior, violence, alcohol and drug abuse, and teenage pregnancy (Condon 1987). Research conducted covered topics including: poor self-image (but see Nichter 2000); obesity (see Spruijt-Metz 2011); identity issues (for an overview, see Meeus 2011); deviant behavior (Loeber and Burke 2011); child-parent conflict; and alienation and displacement of familial relations by those of peer relations (Gardner 1998; but see also Brown and Bakken 2011). The results of these studies often do not reflect the experiences of adolescents everywhere, a point that emerges in chapters by Markstrom (Chapter 6), Hewlett and Hewlett (Chapter 4), Takeuchi (Chapter 7), Quinlan and Hansen (Chapter 11), and Ahmed and Gibbons (Chapter 10). As Henrich et al. (2010, 3) suggest, the foundation of data in the behavioral sciences is “drawn from an extremely narrow slice of human diversity” with the implicit assumption that “findings from this narrow slice generalize to the species”.

Reviews of leading psychology journals found that 96 percent of research subjects come from Western industrialized countries, including North America, Europe, Australia, and Israel (Henrich et al. 2010, 3; Arnett 2008). This means that 96 percent of psychological research subjects come from countries inhabited by 12 percent of the world's population (Henrich et al. 2010, 3). Other research studies based upon Euro-American youths generalize results to include youths across many cultures, while presuming to be “culture free” with a “one experiment fits all” paradigm (ibid.). The large and largely non-representative data sampling is derived mainly from Western undergraduates with the Euro-American teen and young adult (or as Henrich suggests, the “WEIRD”; his acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) taken as the template for adolescents and young adults everywhere. “Acultural” research, experiments, and studies not only raise important methodological questions, but provide results that speak to the bias of the research questions explored, the “culturally bound university based researcher,” and the “culturally framed data analysis” (ibid.). Importantly, the studies that follow in this book raise the awareness of the danger of over-generalizing results to the broader worldwide community of adolescents.

A Western middle-class model, for example, often taken as a template for adolescents everywhere, tends to idealize childhood as a “golden age” and sees adolescence as a period of learning, identity development, “school, friends, and family” or “dances, fads, and peer groups,” largely devoid of the responsibilities of adult life; this is not characteristic of the experiences of the world's children or adolescents, particularly among the world's poor (Korbin 2003, 431; Panter-Brick and Smith 2000, 161). Globally, many adolescents struggle with personal and social identity in the face of risk, poverty, rapid culture change, depression, the push/pull of tradition and modernity, and the threat of physical, political, and social violence, as illustrated by Chandler and Dunlop (Chapter 5), van Meijl (Chapter 9), Kovats-Bernat (Chapter 8), and Jankowiak and Moore (Chapter 12). Whereas the majority of adolescent-centered studies have been based in the U.S. or other industrialized soc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction Adolescent Identity, Risk, and Change
• Part I Evolution history and hunter-gatherers
• Part II Culture and development Ritual, Risk, and Identity
• Part III Globalization Tradition, Modernity, and Identity
• List of Contributors
• Index