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.
缅因州南波特兰——和很多父母一样，在有朋友宣布第一次怀孕的时候，我也有一本专门的书想送给他们。这本书是我在妻子怀孕初期看过的，将从出生、保育、抚养，到教育、工作和管教的一切议题，都和盘托出。但也许你在本地书店的育儿区找不到这本书。戴维·F·兰西(David F. Lancy)的《童年人类学：小天使、私产、调换儿》(The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings)是一本学术书——但它可能是初为父母的人唯一需要看的一本书。

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.
这本2008年首版、即将再版的书，和《海蒂怀孕大百科》(What to Expect When You’re Expecting)是很不一样的东西。在犹他州立大学(Utah State University)任教的兰西教授查阅了大量的人类学文献，从各文化类型中寻找灼见，此外还参考了灵长目动物的研究、历史，以及他自己对七个国家的实地考察。他写这本书，并不是明确地面向父母，而是通过一些逸闻趣事和分析，验证了一些美国父母迫切想听到的话：抚养孩子的方法多种多样，结果都挺好的。
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.
比如斐济的孩子不能称呼大人，甚至不能跟他们对视。在巴布亚新几内亚的偏远村庄加庞(Gapun)，孩子们被怂恿着去打狗和鸡，对着兄弟姐妹挥舞刀子。北非游牧民族图瓦雷克(Touareg)人会让8、9岁的男孩去照料一只幼年骆驼。当你坐在沙发上看这本书，看看你如何忍得住不把这些说给身边的另一半听。
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.
它并非“信不信由你”(Ripley’s Believe It or Not)式的人类学趣事，专门收集人类一些古怪而奇妙的做法。它有着更宏大的视角——即人类在自己的文化中生活时，有着极强的适应力，可以自然地接受这些约定，而觉得其他的约定很奇怪、不自然，甚至可恶。
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.)
初为父母的人会遇到一些不合常理的事，让你觉得对自己身处的文化很陌生。在儿子降生后的第一年里，婴儿摇铃之类的东西会引发我的深思。这些东西从哪冒出来的？为什么我们要给孩子铃铛？是不是有些文化是不给孩子铃铛的？（的确有。）
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.”
正当我忧心于我作为父母的文化表现如何时，我在一篇博文上偶然看到《童年人类学》这本书，于是就买了一本。我立刻被吸引住了。这本书不像我们知道的其他育儿书，它没有发表论断。“我们把孩子视为宝贵、无邪、非比寻常的可爱小天使，我的目标就是对这种以自身文化为中心的看法做出纠正，”兰西教授写道。“我希望能为儿童的生活以及他们的监护者，找到一种接近常态的东西。”
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.
这种常态就是，儿童应该在非常小的时候开始自食其力（否则他们就会被当成一种有些超自然力量来纵容，也就是书名中所说的“调换儿”）。放眼世界，正规的学校教育所占比重微不足道，多数知识都是通过玩耍和模仿习得的。孩子更多时候是他们的兄姊在照看，而不是大人。父亲几乎不管孩子。绝大多数文化中，成年人不像我们这样花大量时间跟孩子玩，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.
初为父母的人要面临扑面而来的各种商业产品和育儿哲学流派：亲密育儿法、婴幼儿资源中心(Resources for Infant Educarers)、《从零岁开始》(Baby Wise)等等。然而《童年人类学》让我们看到，无论是超市里琳琅满目的婴儿用品，还是我们的育儿思想，都谈不上真的有什么不同。真正的差别是有的人和孩子一起睡，有的人不是；有的用尿布，有的用纸尿裤。兰西教授在讲座中说，两者就是“成熟后再采摘”和“未成熟就采摘”的文化区别。
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“成熟后再采摘”的文化里，大人基本上对婴幼儿不理不睬，断奶前可能连个名字都没有。他们要经历一种他称为“乡村课程”的过程：跑跑腿、带个信，做一些小规模的成人事务。而后才会被“采摘”，也就是被完全被当作一个独立的个人。“未成熟就采摘”的文化则完全不同，包括我们也是这样，我们总是迫切地尽早让婴儿社会化，或承认他们作为人的身份。
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.
兰西教授将美国的未成熟采摘方式称为“幼者至上”(neontocracy)的文化，成年人为相对较少的儿童提供服务，他们被视为无价之宝，尽管他们什么用也没有。有人感觉兰西是在藐视当代的美国家长，他们被迫坐在地上，跟孩子们玩乐高积木(Lego)。但他承认，每种文化都逐步形成了保持自我发展所需的育儿策略，他认为，“未成熟就采摘”在像我们这么复杂的社会中是必要的。而是否应该输出这种文化则是另一个问题。
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.
我们将我们的文化习惯当作一种与生俱来的东西，但我看到了当代“幼者至上”文化的历史渊源：17世纪的荷兰，这让我着迷。富裕、城市化的荷兰中产阶级开始把他们的孩子当作天生的瑰宝，而不是未来的劳工。由于越来越多的婴儿成功存活，出生率有所降低；娇生惯养的孩子可以在早期获得培养。我们可以说，导致我们现在如此专注于育儿的，是政治哲学家约翰·洛克(John Locke)。他认为荷兰人的想法源于17世纪80年代的英国，英国的清教徒和贵格会(Quaker)信徒等新教激进分子提出了这些想法。我们，以及兰西教授所说的“神一般的小天使”是他们的继承人。
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.
有人从民族学的角度对无处不在的发育心理学家——他们的建议往往缺乏重要的文化视角——进行了修正，我对此感到高兴。案例分析：当极度缺觉的妻子和我已经无计可施时，我们通读了关于婴儿睡眠的各种建议书籍，其中没有哪一本曾提到，在单独的房间的床上连续不断地睡8小时是一种明显的文化特例。在大多数文化当中，睡眠都带有社会性。从世界范围来看，有人成群结队地睡觉，有人和动物一起睡，有人睡得时间比较短，还有的人睡觉不盖东西。
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.
一旦我们认识到自己的做法并非常态，我们就放松了。我们一岁的儿子不像我们期望的那样一直熟睡，并不意味着他存在缺陷；这意味着他还没有发育到能适应我们文化中的睡眠模式的程度，而这并不能一蹴而就。
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.
对于《童年人类学》，最令人惊讶的事就是它教会我要从跨文化的视角出发，重视那些乍看可能有些随意的事情，例如我们如何对待卫生习惯或传授礼仪。我意识到，作为家长，我的工作就是传输我的文化。把孩子想象成来自异乡的陌生人，比如长期住在你家的留学生，而且你必须不断地耐心针对他们到来的这个地方，向这个学生做出解释，这样做能带来一定帮助。
“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.”
“在我们的文化中，我们不把脚搁在桌子上，”我听见自己说。“我想在有些文化当中，你可以这样做，但我们的文化不行。”
Then we get on the floor and play Legos, which is what we do in our culture.
然后，我们开始到地板上玩乐高(Lego)积木，我们的文化就是这么做的。