看一本書如何讀懂育兒之道

SOUTH PORTLAND, Me. — LIKE many parents, I have a particular book I like to give to friends when they announce they’re pregnant for the first time. It is the book I read early in my wife’s pregnancy, blurting out passages about everything from birth, baby minding and child rearing to education, work and discipline. But you probably won’t find it in the baby section of your local bookstore. “The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings,” by David F. Lancy, is an academic title — but it’s possibly the only book that new parents will ever need.

緬因州南波特蘭——和很多父母一樣，在有朋友宣佈第一次懷孕的時候，我也有一本專門的書想送給他們。這本書是我在妻子懷孕初期看過的，將從出生、保育、撫養，到教育、工作和管教的一切議題，都和盤托出。但也許你在本地書店的育兒區找不到這本書。戴維·F·蘭西(David F. Lancy)的《童年人類學：小天使、私產、調換兒》(The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings)是一本學術書——但它可能是初爲父母的人唯一需要看的一本書。

The book, which first appeared in 2008 and is about to be published in a second edition, is a far cry from “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.” Professor Lancy, who teaches at Utah State University, has pored over the anthropology literature to collect insights from a range of culture types, along with primate studies, history and his own fieldwork in seven countries. He’s not explicitly writing for parents. Yet through factoids and analysis, he demonstrates something that American parents desperately need to hear: Children are raised in all sorts of ways, and they all turn out just fine.

這本2008年首版、即將再版的書，和《海蒂懷孕大百科》(What to Expect When You’re Expecting)是很不一樣的東西。在猶他州立大學(Utah State University)任教的蘭西教授查閱了大量的人類學文獻，從各文化類型中尋找灼見，此外還參考了靈長目動物的研究、歷史，以及他自己對七個國家的實地考察。他寫這本書，並不是明確地面向父母，而是通過一些逸聞趣事和分析，驗證了一些美國父母迫切想聽到的話：撫養孩子的方法多種多樣，結果都挺好的。

Children in Fiji, for example, are not allowed to address adults, or even make eye contact with them. In Gapun, an isolated village in Papua New Guinea, children are encouraged to hit dogs and chickens, and to raise knives at siblings. At 8 or 9 years old, boys among the Touareg, a nomadic people in North Africa, get a baby camel to care for. Try sitting on the couch with your partner and keeping these to yourself as you read.

比如斐濟的孩子不能稱呼大人，甚至不能跟他們對視。在巴布亞新幾內亞的偏遠村莊加龐(Gapun)，孩子們被慫恿着去打狗和雞，對着兄弟姐妹揮舞刀子。北非遊牧民族圖瓦雷克(Touareg)人會讓8、9歲的男孩去照料一隻幼年駱駝。當你坐在沙發上看這本書，看看你如何忍得住不把這些說給身邊的另一半聽。

This is not “Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” anthropological trivia into the weird and wonderful ways of mankind. I took a larger point from all this — namely that humans have a tremendous capacity for living inside their culture and accepting those arrangements as natural, and finding other arrangements weird, unnatural, even abhorrent.

它並非“信不信由你”(Ripley’s Believe It or Not)式的人類學趣事，專門收集人類一些古怪而奇妙的做法。它有着更宏大的視角——即人類在自己的文化中生活時，有着極強的適應力，可以自然地接受這些約定，而覺得其他的約定很奇怪、不自然，甚至可惡。

When you’re a first-time parent, something perverse happens that makes you seem like a visitor to your own culture. In the first year of my son’s life, I found myself pondering things like baby rattles. Where do they come from? Why do we give rattles to babies? Are there cultures where babies don’t get rattles? (Indeed, there are.)

初爲父母的人會遇到一些不合常理的事，讓你覺得對自己身處的文化很陌生。在兒子降生後的第一年裏，嬰兒搖鈴之類的東西會引發我的深思。這些東西從哪冒出來的？爲什麼我們要給孩子鈴鐺？是不是有些文化是不給孩子鈴鐺的？（的確有。）

At precisely the moment that I was worrying about my cultural performance of parenthood, I stumbled across mention of “The Anthropology of Childhood” on a blog and got a copy. I was immediately taken. The book does not render judgments, like other parenting books we know. “My goal is to offer a correction to the ethnocentric lens that sees children only as precious, innocent and preternaturally cute cherubs,” Professor Lancy writes. “I hope to uncover something close to the norm for children’s lives and those of their caretakers.”

正當我憂心於我作爲父母的文化表現如何時，我在一篇博文上偶然看到《童年人類學》這本書，於是就買了一本。我立刻被吸引住了。這本書不像我們知道的其他育兒書，它沒有發表論斷。“我們把孩子視爲寶貴、無邪、非比尋常的可愛小天使，我的目標就是對這種以自身文化爲中心的看法做出糾正，”蘭西教授寫道。“我希望能爲兒童的生活以及他們的監護者，找到一種接近常態的東西。”

That norm is that children are expected to earn their keep, starting at a very early age (or they are tolerated as semi-supernatural forces, the “changelings” of the book’s title). Worldwide, there is little formal schooling; most knowledge is learned through play and imitation. Kids may spend more time overseen by older siblings than adults. Fathers have very little to do with their children. And adults in most cultures rarely, if ever, play with their children as extensively as we do with ours.

這種常態就是，兒童應該在非常小的時候開始自食其力（否則他們就會被當成一種有些超自然力量來縱容，也就是書名中所說的“調換兒”）。放眼世界，正規的學校教育所佔比重微不足道，多數知識都是通過玩耍和模仿習得的。孩子更多時候是他們的兄姊在照看，而不是大人。父親幾乎不管孩子。絕大多數文化中，成年人不像我們這樣花大量時間跟孩子玩，甚至根本不玩。

The first-time parent faces a bewildering array of commercial products and schools of parenting philosophies: attachment parenting, “Resources for Infant Educarers,” “Baby Wise,” the list rolls on. But “The Anthropology of Childhood” shows that neither the supermarket baby aisle nor our parenting ideologies are truly diverse. The real divide isn’t between people who co-sleep and those who don’t, or between those who use cloth diapers and those who use disposables. It is between what Professor Lancy, in lectures, has deemed “pick when ripe” cultures versus “pick when green” cultures.

初爲父母的人要面臨撲面而來的各種商業產品和育兒哲學流派：親密育兒法、嬰幼兒資源中心(Resources for Infant Educarers)、《從零歲開始》(Baby Wise)等等。然而《童年人類學》讓我們看到，無論是超市裏琳琅滿目的嬰兒用品，還是我們的育兒思想，都談不上真的有什麼不同。真正的差別是有的人和孩子一起睡，有的人不是；有的用尿布，有的用紙尿褲。蘭西教授在講座中說，兩者就是“成熟後再採摘”和“未成熟就採摘”的文化區別。

In the “pick when ripe” culture, babies and toddlers are largely ignored by adults, and may not be named until they’re weaned. They undergo what he calls a “village curriculum”: running errands, delivering messages and doing small-scale versions of adult tasks. Only later are they “picked,” or fully recognized as individuals. In contrast, in “pick when green” cultures, including our own, it’s never too early to socialize babies or recognize their personhood.

在“成熟後再採摘”的文化裏，大人基本上對嬰幼兒不理不睬，斷奶前可能連個名字都沒有。他們要經歷一種他稱爲“鄉村課程”的過程：跑跑腿、帶個信，做一些小規模的成人事務。而後纔會被“採摘”，也就是被完全被當作一個獨立的個人。“未成熟就採摘”的文化則完全不同，包括我們也是這樣，我們總是迫切地儘早讓嬰兒社會化，或承認他們作爲人的身份。

Professor Lancy calls the American way of doing pick when green a “neontocracy,” in which adults provide services to relatively few children who are considered priceless, even though they’re useless. One senses him rolling his eyes at modern American parents, impelled to get down on the floor to play Legos with their kids. But he admits that each culture evolves the child-rearing strategies it needs to reproduce itself, and he posits that pick when green is necessary in a complex society like ours. Whether it should be exported is another question.

蘭西教授將美國的未成熟採摘方式稱爲“幼者至上”(neontocracy)的文化，成年人爲相對較少的兒童提供服務，他們被視爲無價之寶，儘管他們什麼用也沒有。有人感覺蘭西是在藐視當代的美國家長，他們被迫坐在地上，跟孩子們玩樂高積木(Lego)。但他承認，每種文化都逐步形成了保持自我發展所需的育兒策略，他認爲，“未成熟就採摘”在像我們這麼複雜的社會中是必要的。而是否應該輸出這種文化則是另一個問題。

We take our cultural practices as a timeless given, but I was fascinated to read the historical origin of our modern neontocracy: 17th-century Netherlands. Wealthy and urbanized, the Dutch middle class began treating their children as inherently valuable, not as future labor. Birthrates dropped because more children survived infancy; the pampered offspring could be trained at an early age. We can blame the political philosopher John Locke for our current child-rearing preoccupations. He carried Dutch ideas back to England in the 1680s, where Protestant radicals like the Puritans and Quakers picked them up. We, and our “godlike cherubs,” as Professor Lancy calls them, are their heirs.

我們將我們的文化習慣當作一種與生俱來的東西，但我看到了當代“幼者至上”文化的歷史淵源：17世紀的荷蘭，這讓我着迷。富裕、城市化的荷蘭中產階級開始把他們的孩子當作天生的瑰寶，而不是未來的勞工。由於越來越多的嬰兒成功存活，出生率有所降低；嬌生慣養的孩子可以在早期獲得培養。我們可以說，導致我們現在如此專注於育兒的，是政治哲學家約翰·洛克(John Locke)。他認爲荷蘭人的想法源於17世紀80年代的英國，英國的清教徒和貴格會(Quaker)信徒等新教激進分子提出了這些想法。我們，以及蘭西教授所說的“神一般的小天使”是他們的繼承人。

And I was glad for an ethnographic antidote to the ubiquity of developmental psychologists, whose advice often lacks a vital cultural perspective. Case in point: When my wife and I were sleeplessly losing our wits, we read through advice books on infant sleep, none of which mentioned that sleeping for eight uninterrupted hours in a bed in separate rooms is a distinct cultural anomaly. For most cultures, sleep is social. Around the world, people sleep in groups; with animals; in briefer chunks of time; without coverings.

有人從民族學的角度對無處不在的發育心理學家——他們的建議往往缺乏重要的文化視角——進行了修正，我對此感到高興。案例分析：當極度缺覺的妻子和我已經無計可施時，我們通讀了關於嬰兒睡眠的各種建議書籍，其中沒有哪一本曾提到，在單獨的房間的牀上連續不斷地睡8小時是一種明顯的文化特例。在大多數文化當中，睡眠都帶有社會性。從世界範圍來看，有人成羣結隊地睡覺，有人和動物一起睡，有人睡得時間比較短，還有的人睡覺不蓋東西。

Once we learned that ours is not the norm, we relaxed. The fact that our year-old son wasn’t sleeping the way we wanted him to didn’t mean he lacked something; it meant that he wasn’t developmentally ready to be acculturated to our cultural model of sleep, not all at once.

一旦我們認識到自己的做法並非常態，我們就放鬆了。我們一歲的兒子不像我們期望的那樣一直熟睡，並不意味着他存在缺陷；這意味着他還沒有發育到能適應我們文化中的睡眠模式的程度，而這並不能一蹴而就。

Perhaps the most surprising thing about “The Anthropology of Childhood” was how it taught me to value things that, in a cross-cultural perspective, might suddenly seem arbitrary: how we approach hygiene, for example, or teach etiquette. As a parent, I realized, my job is to transmit my culture. It helps to think of your child as a stranger in a strange land, like a study-abroad student you are hosting long term and to whom you must, patiently and constantly, explain the land they’re visiting.

對於《童年人類學》，最令人驚訝的事就是它教會我要從跨文化的視角出發，重視那些乍看可能有些隨意的事情，例如我們如何對待衛生習慣或傳授禮儀。我意識到，作爲家長，我的工作就是傳輸我的文化。把孩子想象成來自異鄉的陌生人，比如長期住在你家的留學生，而且你必須不斷地耐心針對他們到來的這個地方，向這個學生做出解釋，這樣做能帶來一定幫助。

“In our culture, we don’t put our feet on the table,” I have heard myself say. “I suppose there are cultures where you can, but this isn’t one of them.”

“在我們的文化中，我們不把腳擱在桌子上，”我聽見自己說。“我想在有些文化當中，你可以這樣做，但我們的文化不行。”

Then we get on the floor and play Legos, which is what we do in our culture.

然後，我們開始到地板上玩樂高(Lego)積木，我們的文化就是這麼做的。