Technical Flexibility and Rigidity Webinar (private)
Week 11 – Context and process in the cultural learning of techniques: the example of blade tool use among BaYaka forager children in the Republic of the Congo
Flexible transmission for versatile tools? Thank you, Adam, for this paper that links so well precise ethnographic observations with general theoretical concerns. Here is a question it suggest. Some tools are very task-specific and typically have to be used in a precise and non-obvious way (e.g., from the Western toolbox, a plumber’s snake or a snail clamp). How to use them is typically taught through demonstration or instructions. Other tools (e.g. a piece of rope or a pocketknife) are used for an open range of goals. No teaching could demonstrate all these uses; a mix of observation and exploration might be an optimal way, or at least a necessary component of becoming a competent user. This seems to be the case with the blades made available to Aka children. Are there, among the Aka, more specialised tools, or very specialized uses of broad purpose tools such as blades, and, if so how are these more specialised skills transmitted?
This question in a genral form is relevant both within and across cultures. The first answer that comes to mind – that the transmission of more narrowly specialized skills relies on more rigid transmission practices, whereas the more versatile skills can be, or even must be transmitted in a more flexible manner – may well be too simple.
What is the relationship between adult interactions and transmission? Thank you, Adam, for this very interesting chapter. It was very thought-provoking, and raises some points that are certainly relevant to our draft (Week 1) that I and my co-authors will want to consider.
Learning through collaborative play with peers has already been brought up earlier in the webinar by Giulio, so it was nice to see it expanded on here with a different population and cultural practice. I was particularly struck by how the way you describe 'adult' (for want of a better word) BaYaka interactions seems to correspond to the type of social learning opportunities that children are provided. In particular, the fact that adult-adult BaYaka interactions appear to be very public (you say that most non-sleeping activities take place in view of other community members) and involve sharing and distributing resources such as material goods and time, seems like it lends itself to the kind of opportunity scaffolding that you describe with children. At the very least, a kind of distributed childcare where a parent trusts that any adult who finds a lost or hurt child will care for them does help to partly offset the risk of giving them knives to play with (at least, relative to a situation where supervision is the sole purview of the child's caregivers).
Of course, these adult-adult interactions are also part of the cultural niche construction. Children are born into a cultural context that is defined by the behaviour of adults within that society, but that adult behaviour is as much a product of this cultural context as it is the bricks and mortar. Indeed, it seems that the way that this cultural construct or context is framed with regards to facilitating the adults' interactions will have a direct impact on the opportunities provided for social learning (i.e. if the context is constructed to facilitate adults’ behaviour by providing a public social context because of the benefits yielded by discussion, feedback, social validation, etc., the opportunities for novices to observe will be very different from a situation where adults toil alone in solitary workshops and zealously guard their individual techniques to protect against plagiarism or scooping).
I wonder if you could comment on the correspondence between these levels (the adult-adult interaction and the adult-child transmission). While I doubt that there is a straightforward one-to-one correspondence, such that e.g. open, social, and public adult interactions when expertly producing the behaviour naturally lead to more pedagogical, scaffolded transmission, I do wonder if you or any of the other anthropologists on the project might have some insights on the underlying dimensionality of this relationship.
cultural values and scaffolding limit rigidity in technique learning: a response to Dan and James Thank you, Dan and James, very much for your comments. I actually think I can answer both of your very helpful questions in one integrated response here, because I think the important issues raised by Dan (specialized tool use needing more rigid transmission) and James (the adult-adult, adult-child dimensions) are related and did indeed need more attention in my draft.
Dan, you are very right to raise this issue, and I struggled on how to address specialized tools and tool use in the paper. For this draft I wanted to keep to making the point that the culturally constructed environment can make learning such broad purpose tools easier and less costly (or harder and costlier, for that matter). However, your comment makes me think a few examples of both specialized uses and of specialized tools may help further the argument in a couple of ways. Additionally, I do not think I emphasized the role of cultural values enough in the culture-specific ways that BaYaka children learn. Another factor I did not emphasize enough is the importance of scaffolding across the human extended childhood and adolescence periods – something that applies to learning patterns across cultures. I’ll try to address your question and make my points about values and development here, and will bring these together in responding to James’ question.
First, there are absolutely examples of specialized tools or, more commonly, techniques using broad-use tools that seem to require some degree of teaching and demonstration. For one, hunting nets and snares and other tools that require specific types of knots (e.g. bundle of leaves and basket to fetch honey, see below) seem to require some degree of careful demonstration. For instance, I watched a BaYaka friend put his two kids down in front of him as he laid his porcupine hunting nets on the mat and said, “Watch me, you’re going to learn how to hunt.” I should emphasize that this is all the teaching that occurred. The children were then given the opportunity to watch him finish weaving and tying. While I have not seen it, I predict that as a child begins to try to tie the cords together to weave the net, the method of teaching may change to some degree to include some correction. Such teaching has been documented in the technique of weaving mats as described by Bonnie Hewlett in her ethnography Listen, Here is a Story (Hewlett, 2013). There, she describes being a novice learning to weave a basket, and how her teacher (another adult woman) would tell her “no, not like that” and correct her actions. Another example of teaching is documented in a study I participated in on nut cracking (Boesch et al., 2017). Here, we watched as BaYaka women and older girls laid a machete or the traditional ax blade-side-up on the soft forest floor, hold it with their feet, then hold a nut carefully on the edge of the blade with its seam oriented vertically, and hit the nut hard onto the blade to crack it open. Obviously, this could severely injure the individual if she miscalculates her hit at all and gets a finger in between the hammer and the blade. However, even in this situation (where we did see adolescents cut themselves multiple times), the extent of teaching that we observed was a woman pointing to the nut’s seam where it should be placed on the blade’s edge. The teaching moment lasted only a few seconds, and the girl stopped trying after a few attempts.
This brings me to my point about values. Specifically, respect for individual autonomy is a core value among the BaYaka. My colleague Sheina Lew-Levy and I have a paper in press where we describe the role of task assignments in BaYaka children’s learning and the conflicts that can arise when children simply don’t want to do what is asked of them. Without going into depth here, among the BaYaka, children learn on their own terms, but adults give them opportunities to learn. More generally, given repeated opportunities to learn throughout development, even the most complex techniques are acquired with seemingly little intensive teaching.
We present the following quote in the paper which I think makes these points well. In it, one of our informants explained this process of subtle task assignments in his own learning to collect honey,
“When I woke up in the morning, my father told me to come with him to find honey. I saw how to collect honey by being close to him. He told me to cut and tie the rope [for the pendi basket (used to collect honey)]. I was still small so I couldn’t tie it. My father tied the knot and showed me. My father told me how to look for honey in the tree. I found honey in the tree, but didn’t know how to cut [the comb], so my father sent me down to make a fire. My father climbed the tree to show me how to collect honey.”
Over repeated attempts, most men learn to collect honey from the tops of some of the tallest tree species in the Congo Basin– most often with the help of others, including younger men and women.
Importantly, and back to James’ question, while adults provide opportunities for children’s learning, much of BaYaka children’s time and daily learning occurs among other children. Lew-Levy et al. (Lew-Levy et al., 2019) demonstrates that BaYaka children teach each other subsistence skills more often than adults teach children, though there is a developmental shift where adolescents learn more from adults. So, as James points out, the social environment is just as much part of the culturally constructed niche. In this case, I wish to point out that adults take a very hands-off approach, and children learn on their own terms, and much of their learning is with other children. For highly specialized skills, the extended human childhood can allow for multiple learning opportunities for even the most challenging techniques, still with little rigid teaching.
Now, I should be careful to say that I do not think that this is always the case across all cultures, nor even across all domains of BaYaka culture. Interestingly, where the most direct teaching seems to be required among the BaYaka is not in techniques at all, but in some ecological knowledge (Boyette & Hewlett, 2017) and in ritual knowledge (which does require some artistic techniques, actually)(see this fascinating paper: (Lewis, 2015)). I’m not sure how to integrate this into the paper, however, and would welcome any ideas as we continue to discuss our contributions.
Boesch, C., Bombjaková, D., Boyette, A. H., & Meier, A. (2017). Technical intelligence and culture: Nut cracking in humans and chimpanzees. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 163(2), 339–355. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23211
Boyette, A. H., & Hewlett, B. S. (2017). Autonomy, Equality, and Teaching among Aka Foragers and Ngandu Farmers of the Congo Basin. Human Nature, 28(3), 289–322. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-017-9294-y
Hewlett, B. L. (2013). Listen, here is a story: Ethnographic life narratives from Aka
and Ngandu women of the Congo basin. Oxford University Press.
Lewis, J. (2015). Where goods are free but knowledge costs: Hunter-gatherer ritual economics in Western Central Africa. Hunter Gatherer Research, 1(1), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.3828/hgr.2015.2
Lew-Levy, S., Kissler, S., Boyette, A. H., Crittenden, A. N., Mabullaj, I., & Hewlett, B. S. (2019). Who teaches children to forage? Exploring the primacy of child-to-child teaching among Hadza and BaYaka hunter-gatherers of Tanzania and Congo. Evolution and Human Behavior.
Dan Sperber 28 November 2020 (00:09)
Flexible transmission for versatile tools?
Thank you, Adam, for this paper that links so well precise ethnographic observations with general theoretical concerns. Here is a question it suggest. Some tools are very task-specific and typically have to be used in a precise and non-obvious way (e.g., from the Western toolbox, a plumber’s snake or a snail clamp). How to use them is typically taught through demonstration or instructions. Other tools (e.g. a piece of rope or a pocketknife) are used for an open range of goals. No teaching could demonstrate all these uses; a mix of observation and exploration might be an optimal way, or at least a necessary component of becoming a competent user. This seems to be the case with the blades made available to Aka children. Are there, among the Aka, more specialised tools, or very specialized uses of broad purpose tools such as blades, and, if so how are these more specialised skills transmitted?
This question in a genral form is relevant both within and across cultures. The first answer that comes to mind – that the transmission of more narrowly specialized skills relies on more rigid transmission practices, whereas the more versatile skills can be, or even must be transmitted in a more flexible manner – may well be too simple.
James Strachan 1 December 2020 (12:40)
What is the relationship between adult interactions and transmission?
Thank you, Adam, for this very interesting chapter. It was very thought-provoking, and raises some points that are certainly relevant to our draft (Week 1) that I and my co-authors will want to consider.
Learning through collaborative play with peers has already been brought up earlier in the webinar by Giulio, so it was nice to see it expanded on here with a different population and cultural practice. I was particularly struck by how the way you describe 'adult' (for want of a better word) BaYaka interactions seems to correspond to the type of social learning opportunities that children are provided. In particular, the fact that adult-adult BaYaka interactions appear to be very public (you say that most non-sleeping activities take place in view of other community members) and involve sharing and distributing resources such as material goods and time, seems like it lends itself to the kind of opportunity scaffolding that you describe with children. At the very least, a kind of distributed childcare where a parent trusts that any adult who finds a lost or hurt child will care for them does help to partly offset the risk of giving them knives to play with (at least, relative to a situation where supervision is the sole purview of the child's caregivers).
Of course, these adult-adult interactions are also part of the cultural niche construction. Children are born into a cultural context that is defined by the behaviour of adults within that society, but that adult behaviour is as much a product of this cultural context as it is the bricks and mortar. Indeed, it seems that the way that this cultural construct or context is framed with regards to facilitating the adults' interactions will have a direct impact on the opportunities provided for social learning (i.e. if the context is constructed to facilitate adults’ behaviour by providing a public social context because of the benefits yielded by discussion, feedback, social validation, etc., the opportunities for novices to observe will be very different from a situation where adults toil alone in solitary workshops and zealously guard their individual techniques to protect against plagiarism or scooping).
I wonder if you could comment on the correspondence between these levels (the adult-adult interaction and the adult-child transmission). While I doubt that there is a straightforward one-to-one correspondence, such that e.g. open, social, and public adult interactions when expertly producing the behaviour naturally lead to more pedagogical, scaffolded transmission, I do wonder if you or any of the other anthropologists on the project might have some insights on the underlying dimensionality of this relationship.
Adam Boyette 9 December 2020 (14:41)
cultural values and scaffolding limit rigidity in technique learning: a response to Dan and James
Thank you, Dan and James, very much for your comments. I actually think I can answer both of your very helpful questions in one integrated response here, because I think the important issues raised by Dan (specialized tool use needing more rigid transmission) and James (the adult-adult, adult-child dimensions) are related and did indeed need more attention in my draft.
Dan, you are very right to raise this issue, and I struggled on how to address specialized tools and tool use in the paper. For this draft I wanted to keep to making the point that the culturally constructed environment can make learning such broad purpose tools easier and less costly (or harder and costlier, for that matter). However, your comment makes me think a few examples of both specialized uses and of specialized tools may help further the argument in a couple of ways. Additionally, I do not think I emphasized the role of cultural values enough in the culture-specific ways that BaYaka children learn. Another factor I did not emphasize enough is the importance of scaffolding across the human extended childhood and adolescence periods – something that applies to learning patterns across cultures. I’ll try to address your question and make my points about values and development here, and will bring these together in responding to James’ question.
First, there are absolutely examples of specialized tools or, more commonly, techniques using broad-use tools that seem to require some degree of teaching and demonstration. For one, hunting nets and snares and other tools that require specific types of knots (e.g. bundle of leaves and basket to fetch honey, see below) seem to require some degree of careful demonstration. For instance, I watched a BaYaka friend put his two kids down in front of him as he laid his porcupine hunting nets on the mat and said, “Watch me, you’re going to learn how to hunt.” I should emphasize that this is all the teaching that occurred. The children were then given the opportunity to watch him finish weaving and tying. While I have not seen it, I predict that as a child begins to try to tie the cords together to weave the net, the method of teaching may change to some degree to include some correction. Such teaching has been documented in the technique of weaving mats as described by Bonnie Hewlett in her ethnography Listen, Here is a Story (Hewlett, 2013). There, she describes being a novice learning to weave a basket, and how her teacher (another adult woman) would tell her “no, not like that” and correct her actions. Another example of teaching is documented in a study I participated in on nut cracking (Boesch et al., 2017). Here, we watched as BaYaka women and older girls laid a machete or the traditional ax blade-side-up on the soft forest floor, hold it with their feet, then hold a nut carefully on the edge of the blade with its seam oriented vertically, and hit the nut hard onto the blade to crack it open. Obviously, this could severely injure the individual if she miscalculates her hit at all and gets a finger in between the hammer and the blade. However, even in this situation (where we did see adolescents cut themselves multiple times), the extent of teaching that we observed was a woman pointing to the nut’s seam where it should be placed on the blade’s edge. The teaching moment lasted only a few seconds, and the girl stopped trying after a few attempts.
This brings me to my point about values. Specifically, respect for individual autonomy is a core value among the BaYaka. My colleague Sheina Lew-Levy and I have a paper in press where we describe the role of task assignments in BaYaka children’s learning and the conflicts that can arise when children simply don’t want to do what is asked of them. Without going into depth here, among the BaYaka, children learn on their own terms, but adults give them opportunities to learn. More generally, given repeated opportunities to learn throughout development, even the most complex techniques are acquired with seemingly little intensive teaching.
We present the following quote in the paper which I think makes these points well. In it, one of our informants explained this process of subtle task assignments in his own learning to collect honey,
“When I woke up in the morning, my father told me to come with him to find honey. I saw how to collect honey by being close to him. He told me to cut and tie the rope [for the pendi basket (used to collect honey)]. I was still small so I couldn’t tie it. My father tied the knot and showed me. My father told me how to look for honey in the tree. I found honey in the tree, but didn’t know how to cut [the comb], so my father sent me down to make a fire. My father climbed the tree to show me how to collect honey.”
Over repeated attempts, most men learn to collect honey from the tops of some of the tallest tree species in the Congo Basin– most often with the help of others, including younger men and women.
Importantly, and back to James’ question, while adults provide opportunities for children’s learning, much of BaYaka children’s time and daily learning occurs among other children. Lew-Levy et al. (Lew-Levy et al., 2019) demonstrates that BaYaka children teach each other subsistence skills more often than adults teach children, though there is a developmental shift where adolescents learn more from adults. So, as James points out, the social environment is just as much part of the culturally constructed niche. In this case, I wish to point out that adults take a very hands-off approach, and children learn on their own terms, and much of their learning is with other children. For highly specialized skills, the extended human childhood can allow for multiple learning opportunities for even the most challenging techniques, still with little rigid teaching.
Now, I should be careful to say that I do not think that this is always the case across all cultures, nor even across all domains of BaYaka culture. Interestingly, where the most direct teaching seems to be required among the BaYaka is not in techniques at all, but in some ecological knowledge (Boyette & Hewlett, 2017) and in ritual knowledge (which does require some artistic techniques, actually)(see this fascinating paper: (Lewis, 2015)). I’m not sure how to integrate this into the paper, however, and would welcome any ideas as we continue to discuss our contributions.
Boesch, C., Bombjaková, D., Boyette, A. H., & Meier, A. (2017). Technical intelligence and culture: Nut cracking in humans and chimpanzees. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 163(2), 339–355. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23211
Boyette, A. H., & Hewlett, B. S. (2017). Autonomy, Equality, and Teaching among Aka Foragers and Ngandu Farmers of the Congo Basin. Human Nature, 28(3), 289–322. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-017-9294-y
Hewlett, B. L. (2013). Listen, here is a story: Ethnographic life narratives from Aka
and Ngandu women of the Congo basin. Oxford University Press.
Lewis, J. (2015). Where goods are free but knowledge costs: Hunter-gatherer ritual economics in Western Central Africa. Hunter Gatherer Research, 1(1), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.3828/hgr.2015.2
Lew-Levy, S., Kissler, S., Boyette, A. H., Crittenden, A. N., Mabullaj, I., & Hewlett, B. S. (2019). Who teaches children to forage? Exploring the primacy of child-to-child teaching among Hadza and BaYaka hunter-gatherers of Tanzania and Congo. Evolution and Human Behavior.