ABSTRACT
The Freudian and culture-and-personality approaches were still limited, however, by their concern with children primarily as it afforded better understanding of adults; children, their knowledge, and their activities were not viewed as theoretically or ethnographically interesting in their own right. Woodburn described foragers or mobile hunter-gatherers as "immediate-return" cultures, and all others as "delayed-return" cultures. Hunter-gatherers are a very diverse group of peoples living in a wide range of ecological, social, and political conditions. Most theoretical and empirical studies of hunter-gatherer children involve infants and, to a lesser extent, children who have not yet been weaned. Judith Harris appropriately summarized the literature on children in "traditional" societies available to her, but her summary nicely exemplifies the farmer bias in the literature and reflects critical gaps in our understanding of children in hunter-gatherer cultures. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.
