ABSTRACT
Definitions of good fatherhood and expectations of men’s involvement with their children differ from one culture to another. I draw on intensive fieldwork among two groups of men, one in the San Francisco Bay region of northern California, the other in a village in the southern African country of Botswana, to illustrate this variation. Most of this chapter is devoted to a descriptive analysis of two systems of cultural expectations about the appropriate behavior of men and about what fathers are supposed to do for their children. In order to contextualize these cultural analyses, I first discuss four elements of an anthropological approach: (a) the meaning of cultural interpretation, (b) the particularism of anthropological method, (c) the nature of comparison, and (d) the concept of dominant cultural values. Then I consider the cultural specificity of parenthood and the theoretical development of the idea that children develop within a cultural context.
