Artifacts of Everyday Life: Cross-Cultural Patterns in Children’s Object Handling

Artifacts of Everyday Life: Cross-Cultural Patterns in Children’s Object Handling

Mara Duquette, 3rd-Year, Anthropology, Global Studies

2023 URS

Marisa Casillas , Comparative Human Development, Chatter Lab; Kennedy Casey, Chatter Lab

The objects that are available for children to interact with vary widely across locations and cultures. Children’s own object handling creates frequent opportunities for them to learn about objects’ physical properties, functions, and relationships to other things in their environment. These interactions, especially when paired with relevant linguistic or social feedback from caregivers and others, shape children’s language and sociocultural development. While prior research has made a strong case for the utility of object-centric interactions in supporting children’s early learning, object-centered activities have primarily been studied in very short, and somewhat artificial circumstances, like bringing a child into a research lab or having an experimenter follow the child with a handheld camera. Very little prior research has examined child object-centered interactions outside of North American populations. To expand this research, we analyzed 78 daylong photo streams from child-worn cameras of children, up to age four, from two unrelated non-Western communities: one Tseltal Mayan (“Tseltal”; Chiapas, Mexico) and one Rossel Papuan (“Rossel”; Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea). Object handling accounted for approximately ⅓ of children’s time, and >17k photos with child object handling were manually annotated to determine what objects were typically handled in each community. Children handled an average of 27 unique, identifiable objects per day in both communities. The distribution of object categories handled (e.g., consumables, toys, natural objects, etc.) was largely consistent across age and cultures, to our surprise. However, there was variation in the particular objects handled by children within and across cultures. This research motivates further investigation of cross-cultural similarities and differences in the typology of handled objects, paired with information about co-occurring activities and/or surrounding language.

Digital Abstract