Commentary: Good Ethnographies Make

Good Theories

Naomi Quinn

Abstract The extremely high quality of the ethnography in this collection of articles is attested by the various

challenges the authors pose to my own previously published ideas about universals of child rearing. In a 2005

article, I posited that child rearers everywhere (1) engineer the environment to insure that the child’s experience of

the lessons to be learned is constant, so as not to dilute their impact; (2) use emotionally arousing techniques such

as beating, frightening, shaming, teasing, and praising to make these lessons motivating and memorable; (3)

enlist the further motivational force of approval for good behavior and disapproval for bad; and (4) predispose or

prime the young child with foundational components or simpler versions of the lessons to be learned, readying the

child for these later, more complex lessons. I find it necessary and helpful to qualify each of the four claims in light

of the case studies presented in this issue. [mothering, child rearing; universals; ethnography and theory; case

studies]

To appropriate the syntax, minus the content, of Frost’s New Hampshire farmer’s laconic

maxim: Good ethnographies make good theories. Field anthropologists know this in their

bones. I, for example, have never theorized about anything without working it out with

ethnographic material, my own or other researchers’. Other social scientists do not under-

stand this use of ethnography, and may be dismissive of or simply mystified by our manner

of working with it. How does good ethnography make good theory? For one thing, all the

detail and nuance and context that are stripped away in experiments, or squeezed out in data

reduction to numbers, are there to work with.

But it is not just a matter of ‘‘thick’’ description; it matters where the description is thick.

And that the thickening is guided explicitly or implicitly by theoretical hunches and leads.

So anthropological theorizing can be said to be two-staged. In the first stage the ethno-

grapher him- or (in all the articles in this special issue) herself decides what to notice and

collect and record. And those decisions are theory laden, although the theory with which

they are laden may be as yet undeveloped and vaguely formed. The second stage begins with

the ethnographer’s own interpretations of the ethnography, reliant on the more explicit

theories with which she is currently thinking, on other ethnographic cases with which she is

familiar, and, of course, on all her background knowledge of the group in which she has been

living and working. This process of interpretation does not end there, however. The

ethnographer herself, and other anthropologists thinking along similar lines, can dip back

into that ethnographic case for further theoretical inspiration. Other anthropologists can

even, and often do, consult the original field researcher for ethnographic details and insights

Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology

GOOD ETHNOGRAPHIES MAKE GOOD THEORIES 441

ETHOS, Vol. 38, Issue 4, pp. 441–448, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. & 2010 by the American AnthropologicalAssociation. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1352.2010.01160.x.

that they want for their own theoretical purposes, but that may have been missing from

published descriptions.

This theme issue is premised on the intimate relation between ethnography and theory,

clearly intending to promote the latter through the former. Its editors will be gratified to

know, then, that these ethnographic contributions have already worked their theoretical

effect on this commentator. Let me try to give at least one example from each of the con-

tributions to the issue, of how my thinking about child rearing has been challenged by the

material herein. The quality of these case studies is such that I am sure they will have similar

effects on others’ ideas and work, on mothering and child rearing and child development

more generally.

In my most recent work, I have been thinking about how culture gets internalizedFmainly

in children, and starting at the most obvious place, child rearing (in my 2005 article, ‘‘Uni-

versals of Child Rearing’’). Most of the authors in this issue have been kind enough to cite

this piece of mine, but none have explicitly challenged my argument. However, their

ethnographies do contain implicit challenges that need to be answered.

To recap the original article, I argued (based on a close reading of a handful of other superb

recent ethnographies on this topic) that underneath the considerable variation in child

rearing cross-culturally could be discerned four universals. First, the environment is every-

where engineered in such a way as to try to insure that the child’s experience of the lessons to

be learned is constantFmeaning that this experience is insofar as possible unadulterated by

contradictory messages; is begun early and, thereafter, sustained; and is diligently reinforced

by the community of child rearers. Second, by various widespread techniques such as beat-

ing, frightening, shaming, teasing, and praising, important lessons are taught in an

emotionally arousing manner to make them motivating and memorable. Third, approval

and disapproval are universally enlisted to teach the child to behave well and, conversely, not

behave badly. Fourth and finally, I argued, child rearing everywhere also predisposes or

primes the young child, with foundational components or simpler versions that make it

easier to learn lessons later to be assembled from or built on these earlier ones.

It is not that these four universals are disproven by the case studies in this issue. How well

they survive will have to be measured against a greater future ethnographic array. But they

are certainly tested by the ethnographies presented here, and some are forced to undergo

modification or at least, to bear caveat. The four principles do, however, provide a useful

framework for conducting this reappraisal.

Experiential Constancy Further Specified

I start with perhaps the most straightforward universal, the one about experiential con-

stancy. Although my original definition of experiential constancy was qualified to say that it

was applied to ‘‘those most important child-rearing lessons, about the person they were to

442 ETHOS

become’’ (Quinn 2005:484), I failed to follow up on the implications of this qualification.

Two of the articles in this issue illustrate how child rearer’s efforts to maintain constancy are

strategically and narrowly focused on experiences that are regarded as providing the most

centrally important childhood lessons.

Thus, in Kathleen Barlow’s ethnography, what seems to be absolutely constant is that Murik

mothers, including those who are not a child’s actual biological mother but who stand in for

her, never themselves punish a misbehaving child. Rather, others punish the child while the

mother stands by to support and comfort the child who has been punished. In the most

dramatic of Barlow’s observations, a distant female relative dumped a bucket of water over a

little boy who was having a tantrum. His mother then wiped him off and held him in her lap.

This division of labor between mothers and others may help explain, and certainly reflects,

the paramount importance, indeed the idealization, of mothering, both substantively in

food giving and other expectations of maternal generosity, and more broadly and symboli-

cally in rituals and other cultural practices, among the Murik.

The Murik pattern is all the more striking in contrast with practice in the many societies in

which parents themselves are the primary disciplinarians of their own children. In these

other cases, parents do not seem to worry that children may become emotionally ambivalent

toward these alternatively punishing and nurturant figures. Indeed, as reflected in the case

Suzanne Pelka describes in this issue, of surprisingly traditional lesbian child rearing in New

York City, U.S. middle-class child rearers are loath to permit anyone else to discipline their

children. In this New York City family, even the live-in grandfather does not discipline his

grandchildren; and, as a live-in grandmother myself, I can attest to the patternFI know

better than to insert myself into the disciplining of my granddaughters.

The two mothers in this New York family put their efforts into keeping another aspect

of their children’s experience constant: the consistency of discipline itself. Discipline in this,

as in many other U.S. middle-class households, means time-outs. These parents feel it is

crucial, not just to threaten time-outs for misbehavior, but to also follow through without

exception. This emphasis on consistent discipline appears to reflect the exceptionally high

value these parents place on their children’s unerringly good behavior in the small, confined

New York apartment where the family lives. And it is also a policy to which the parents may

well have been exposed through popular culture, being a routine recommendation, although

certainly not a central theme, in the pediatric advice literature published in the United

States (e.g., Dobson 2003:119–120; Leach 2007:535–536; Shelov 2004:150, 260, 292; Spock

2004:426).

Given the narrow application of mothers’ and other child rearers’ efforts to keep certain of

children’s experiences constant, exactly what these experiences are is an excellent clue to the

cultural values they are trying to instill in their children, whether these values are wide-

spread and deeply resonant societal ones, or more selective ones that particular parents

under particular circumstances choose to put into practice.

GOOD ETHNOGRAPHIES MAKE GOOD THEORIES 443

A Community of Child Rearers? Not Always

Another contribution to this issue, by Jianfeng Zhu, is not about child rearing, yet it holds a

further and equally important cautionary message regarding the experiential constancy

surrounding rearing. Zhu describes the debate about proper prenatal nutrition for pregnant

women ongoing in a central Chinese city between her sample of ‘‘modern’’ post-Maoist

mothers and their ‘‘old’’ mothers who joined the workforce and bore their own children

during Maoist days. The older women come to their daughters’ homes to cook for them

and, later, presumably, to help with their children, while the new mothers continue to work

outside the home at their professional occupations. The debate is over the value of home-

cooked foods obtained at old-fashioned markets that the younger women consider dirty and

unhygienic, versus the value of nutritional supplements that the older women consider less

efficacious and much too expensive. Put another way, it is a standoff between a production

society and a consumption society. And mother and daughter argue, quarrel, squabble, and

disagree about it continuously and vociferouslyFlaced with charming Chinese epithets. (I

love how one young woman refers to her mother as ‘‘the old antique’’; I try to imagine one of

my American daughters calling me that. Maybe, but it would certainly have to be said jok-

ingly.) Intriguing is Zhu’s claim that the debates between mothers and daughters, far from

being symptoms of irresoluble conflict or even verbal abuse, are culturally normative. These

arguments enable communication and foster relationship between the women. So, one of

the older mothers says, ‘‘without arguing, I feel isolated from my daughter’’; and one of the

younger women observes, in turn, ‘‘I could not bear to live even one day without hearing my

mother’s nagging. The upshot of this argumentative collaboration between two generations

of women, Zhu claims, is ‘‘hybrid mothering practices that nourish the future baby.’’

It is easy to imagine these debates running on into the future, over how the children not yet

born should be raised. How will children be raised in these homes? What happens, espe-

cially, to experiential constancy? How do the arguments, and the hybrid model of child

rearing should it emerge (I would like to hear more about this model from Zhu), affect the

kinds and variability of the techniques for emotional arousal, approval and disapproval, and

predispositional priming the child encounters? Will the children have one foot in each of

two cultures of child rearing and how will they themselves resolve the attendant differences?

These questions could be raised about every kind of household affected by cultural change

(whether of the swift state-instigated Chinese variety or more gradual), or by migration of

people from one cultural world into anotherFnot just those with immigrant grandparents

participating in the rearing but also those formed by parenting couples from two different

cultural backgrounds, or those relying on foreign nannies to help raise children, for example.

In other words, how widely and how well does the assumption of a single community-wide

cultural model of how to raise children hold?

In particular, this assumption of a community-wide standard for raising children may be

more appropriate for the kinds of small-scale societies in which solutions to the task of child

rearing originally evolved. Such societies are relatively homogeneous, and largely isolated or

insulated from the outside world; to use Greenfield’s (2009) already once-borrowed term,

444 ETHOS

they foster a Gemeinschaft environment. In such groups, the expectation that the child’s

experience of important lessons be constant can be imposed on the entire larger community

beyond the household. In the more complex and diverse societies that Greenfield (2009)

characterizes in terms of a Gesellschaft environment, however, experiential constancy of

child rearing may rather have to be enforced more narrowly, by scrupulously denying

household outsidersFor even, as seen in the case of live-in grandparents in the United

States, nuclear family interlopersFany jurisdiction over this rearing. Thus, one could not

imagine, in such households, anything like the Murik incident in which a woman other than

the mother, a distant relative, dumped a bucket of water on a child having a tantrum. I did

not draw this distinction between kinds of societies in my earlier article (even though I there

cited a telling German example in which vacationing parents had left emphatic instructions,

which the relatives who were temporarily caring for their young son took pains to follow, as

to how long he should be left alone in bed in the morning).

And, yet, there are forces that push child rearing in the direction of a single shared model,

even in complex, diverse societies. Even in these societies, ideas about how to raise children

may have wide circulation and cultural currencyFas, in the case already noted, being pro-

moted and kept current in bestselling advice books on child rearing. The case of Pelka’s

lesbian mothers illustrates still another force toward homogeneity. The paradox Pelka

encounters is that this couple, so unconventional in their lesbian marriage and their repro-

ductive technology (one mother provided the egg, fertilized by a sperm donor, and the other

mother carried the fetus), are intent on having what they consider to be a traditional family.

One mother works outside the home and the other stays home with the childrenFalthough

they remind us of those rare successfully ‘‘feminist’’ heterosexual marriages in their mutual

participation in child rearing. The ‘‘traditional family values’’ that they teach their children

begin with a Jewish tradition that serves as the foundation for these good values and include

showing respect to and consideration for others, respecting private property, and obeying

rules. Tellingly, and worth repeating, one of the mothers reveals that, had she married a

man, she ‘‘would have got married barefoot on a beach by some justice of the peace’’ rather

than in a church wearing a wedding dress. Because she married a woman, however, ‘‘I’ll be

damned for someone to tell me I can’t get married in a church and wear a big white dress and

take her last name. I’ll even bear her children!’’ And raise them in a ‘‘traditional’’ way. This

might be termed ‘‘protest traditionalism,’’ and it is a force toward an ironic kind of cultural

sharing, including shared ideas about how children should be raised.

A Different Technique for Emotional Arousal

In my 2005 article, I gave cross-cultural examples of how discipline for misbehavior is uni-

versally made emotionally arousing and, hence, well learned and memorable. I cited the

neurobiological basis for this effect on learning and memory. I argued that U.S. middle-class

parents use extravagant praise because negative arousing techniques are unavailable to them,

given their conviction that such punishments can harm the child’s all-important self-esteem.

The Ecuadorian case, drawn from ethnography that Heather Rae-Espinoza conducted

GOOD ETHNOGRAPHIES MAKE GOOD THEORIES 445

mainly among middle-class families in the large coastal city of Guayaquil, adds to this

account an unusual disciplinary technique that takes advantage of emotional arousal in a less

straightforward way than the beating, frightening, shaming, teasing, or praising that I

described. It appears that these Ecuadorian parents endeavor to maintain an environment

for the child that, far from being neutral, is positively pleasant for them. Parents maintain an

agreeable, affectionate, companionable home environment, they include children in much-

enjoyed errands and other trips outside the home, and they ‘‘consent’’ to children’s requests

in a way that U.S. middle-class parents would undoubtedly label indulgent. A big part of this

consenting is the stream of candies and other little treats that are continually showered on

childrenFfacilitated by the availability of such individual-sized treats, which are sold in all

kinds of shops and hawked on buses. The upshot is that Ecuadorian parents do not have to

beat, shame, or otherwise punish children severely for misbehavior. They merely withhold

the rewards that are ordinarily expected to get the same arousing effect. Rae-Espinoza

describes the instance of the little girl who, after misbehaving at dinner, runs from the table

into her room. The parents pick that time for the father to leave the house on an errand.

When the daughter comes out of her room and finds that her father has left her behind, she

is distraught.

The U.S. middle-class ‘‘time out’’ that Pelka’s mothers practice can be considered another,

simpler example of this techniqueFremoving the child from whatever fun and interesting

things are going on, and signaling his or her exclusion from the social life of the family.

What is perhaps most unusual about the Ecuadorian case is how assiduously ‘‘consenting’’ is

practiced, to create the positive environment that can then be ‘‘subtracted,’’ and how elab-

orately the outer world is constructed to support this environment.

Another, different, example comes from Karen Sirota’s contribution to this issue. Sirota

describes in beautiful detail, from videotaped examples, how middle-class Los Angeles

mothers obtain their children’s obedience by coupling their requests for cooperation in

otherwise unappealing tasks and activities, such as getting dressed in the morning, or un-

complainingly accompanying their mothers on errands, with imaginative play (in the latter

instance reinforced with praise in the typically American manner, as in, ‘‘You were such a

good girl in the store’’). The introduction of play makes it fun for the children to do what

their mothers want them to do. It also, Sirota argues, allows for the incorporation of im-

portant moral lessons into everyday life, cultivates valued aspects of personhood and

relationality, and mediates competing instrumental and affiliative aims. Perhaps this manner

of employing play could be considered an elaborate case of distracting, a widespread child-

rearing practice about which I, in my 2005 article, had nothing to say.

I do find it suggestive that all these techniques for what may be considered positive or only

moderate negative emotional arousalFpraising, turning obedience into play, using

‘‘time-out,’’ and maintaining positive incentives that can then be ‘‘subtracted’’Fare linked

to middle-class mothering. It is worth considering whether, in general, parents in Green-

field’s (2009) Gesellschaft environmentsFthat (among an array of other associated traits)

446 ETHOS

emphasize the individual and psychologize the selfFare prone to avoid disciplinary tech-

niques in their child rearing that they deem to be psychologically harsh.

Unintended Consequences of Disapproval

In my 2005 contribution, I named approval for good behavior and disapproval for bad

behavior as a third universal. Not only do approval and disapproval arouse emotion and,

hence, like other emotion-arousing techniques, make the lessons of child rearing stick.

Approval and disapproval are linked back to the human infant’s need to feel loved, and hence

are especially powerful incentives. At the same time, approval and disapproval are linked

forward to the developing child’s sense of him- or herself as a good or bad person. So it is

especially easy for the approval or disapproval of mothers and other close adults to become

internalized as part of that sense of being good or bad, so that, effectively, the growing child

develops an ability to monitor his or her own behavior.

Bambi Chapin’s ethnographic account of Sinhala child rearing in Sri Lanka, in this issue,

seriously complicates the story I told about approval and disapproval. She was puzzled by

what seemed to be an abrupt transition between younger children’s extravagant demand-

ingness and mothers’ unaccountable willingness to give in to these demands, however

unreasonable or selfish, and their school-age siblings, who had inexplicably become polite

and undemanding in the extreme. On the surface, this case seems to contradict my claim

that children everywhere are primed early to be predisposed to later lessons. These Sinhala

children seem, to the contrary, to learn early what they must later unlearn and, indeed,

reverse. The explanation for this seeming paradox came to Chapin when mothers them-

selves consistently offered such justifications for giving in as, ‘‘Well they are crying. They

cannot understand. We suffer when we hear that. We have to give.’’ And when she then

noticed the affect that accompanied mothers’ giving in, as reflected in averted looks, cring-

ing, or disgust faces. At the same time they were getting their way, children were being

warned about the attendant consequences of getting what they wantedFunhealthy cold

food before bedtime, say, or dangerously sharp knives in the kitchenFand they were

actively, if not always verbally, being disapproved of, discomforted, shamed, resented, and

even rejected and disliked.

Chapin argues that this is not a deliberate Sinhala design for raising an ultimately unde-

manding Sinhala person. Rather, it is an unintended consequence of the psychodynamic

process that she posits. The mothers, who had similarly disavowed their own desires in

middle childhood, find themselves torn. Identifying deeply as they do with their children,

they vicariously satisfy their own disavowed desires when they meet their childrens’. At the

same time, having learned the necessity of disavowing desire, they disapprove of their chil-

dren’s expressions of it. Eventually, for their children as it had been for them, getting what

they want is not worth the attendant disapproval, and the children too disavow desire. I am

persuaded by Chapin’s close, psychoanalytically trained reading of these mothers’ faces that

the expressions of negative affect that accompany giving in to their small children’s demands

GOOD ETHNOGRAPHIES MAKE GOOD THEORIES 447

are involuntary, although it may not be possible to fully settle the question of whether or not

this expressed disapproval includes some component of deliberate intention to discourage

these demands.

I never considered, in my earlier work, the unintended effect on child rearing that psycho-

dynamic conflicts of this sort might have. Yet very different such psychodynamics must

inform child rearing in all societies, and we should be alert to these, collecting more of the

kind of ethnography that Chapin provides. Moreover, as the Sinhala case illustrates, such

psychodynamics may provide unexpected ways for children to learn lessons about the per-

sons they are to become. While not intended or even conscious, such cultural ‘‘solutions’’ to

the task of raising children may persist because, ultimately, and in a given cultural context,

they work (whatever their unanticipated side effects might be). These child-rearing prac-

tices work both in the sense that they produce children who are the kind of adults valued in a

given group, and in the sense that they dampen (if not resolve) a recurrent psychodynamic

conflict for these adults. The Sinhala case also suggests that perhaps my fourth posited

universal, predispositional priming is more of a near-universal (Brown 1991:44) or even just

one common device among many for scaffolding the child’s learning. In Sinhala, such

priming is unnecessary because the important lesson about giving up selfish desires is

learned in another, more dramatic way.

As should be clear, I found these ethnographies extraordinarily good for thinking through

theoryFin my case theory about how the lessons of child rearing are learned, and made

optimally learnable. The two other commentaries herein illustrate how these same ethno-

graphies invited those commentators to think other theoretical thoughts. And subsequent

readers will have similar thoughtful experiences bringing these ethnographies to bear on

their own theoretical pursuits.

NAOMI QUINN is Professor Emerita of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.

References Cited

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Developmental Psychology 2(45): 401–418.Leach, Penelope

2007 Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five, 3rd edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Quinn, Naomi

2005 Universals of Child Rearing. Anthropological Theory 5(4): 477–516.Shelov, Steven P.

2004 Caring for Your Baby and Young Child: Birth to Age 5, 4th edition. Shelov, Steven P., and Robert E.Hannemann, eds. New York: Bantam.

Spock, Benjamin2004 Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, 8th edition. Needlman, Robert, ed. New York: Pocket.

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