Building on recent efforts to reconceptualize development and socialization as contextually grounded processes, several aspects of Yucatec Mayan children's daily lives are observed, including maintenance activities, social orientation, work, and play. For each category of activity, the behavior of children ranging in age from 0 to 17 is described. Three principles of engagement generated to explain the Mayan cultural context (primacy of adult work, parental beliefs, and independence of child motivation) are used to interpret the descriptive data, illustrating how cultural understanding enables a meaningful interpretation of Mayan children's behavior and how lack of knowledge of these principles could lead to a misinterpretation through a Western cultural lens.There has been a growing interest among Western researchers in conceptualizing development and socialization not as static phenomena to be found in individual children or in cultural belief systems or institutional structures, but rather as dynamic processes that can be observed and analyzed through the study of the behav-375 Author's Note: Both the method and the spirit of this research were inspired by the work of Ruth H. Munroe, who introduced me to the complexities and joys of studying children in other cultures. The research was carried out with the partnership and support of John A. Lucy. I am indebted to

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Interpretive modes of inquiry have had a long and distinguished history in the social sciences (Rabinow and Sullivan, 1979). In some disciplines, such as history and cultural anthropology, interpretive approaches have been privileged, whereas in others, such as sociology and linguistics, interpretive traditions have coexisted alongside positivist approaches to understanding human action. EGen in psychology, where the prevailing orientation has been positivist, proposals for a "second psychology" have recurred throughout its history, dating back to its very origins as a scientific discipline (Cahan and White, 1992; Jahoda, 1989) and continuing vigorously in the present (Bruner, 1990;Gergen, 1985; Lave and Wenger, 1992;Shweder, 1990). Many of these proposals have recognized the need to include interpretive modes of inquiry in order to understand human psychology as an outgrowth of cultural life.At present, there is renewed interest in and lively debate about interpretive inquiry in the social sciences, and researchers who study children have contributed significantly to these discussions (for example,

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Children learn their culture’s moral system by participating and observing everyday life. Yucatec Maya children’s cultural environment is organized on three intertwined principles: autonomy, belonging, and work. As they develop, they must integrate them into a single system that motivates their moral behavior. From infancy, children assert and caregivers respect their autonomy to organize their own activities, learning, and social engagement. Belonging entails reciprocal caring within an age hierarchy of responsibility and respect. Work is not only exercising competence but also “pitching in.” Understanding these more complex meanings lead Yucatec Maya children to see that their actions matter to their family, and they recalibrate their idea of autonomy to include the opportunity to make a difference. A model for studying the development of children’s moral understanding is demonstrated by ethnographic data: study the child-in-context and interpret everyday behavior as evidence of moral action as defined by the culture.

In several previous studies, 18-month-old infants who were directly addressed demonstrated more robust imitative behaviors than infants who simply observed another's actions, leading theorists to suggest that child-directed interactions carried unique informational value. However, these data came exclusively from cultural communities where direct teaching is commonplace, raising the possibility that the findings reflect regularities in infants' social experiences rather than responses to innate or a priori learning mechanisms. The current studies consider infants' imitative learning from child-directed teaching and observed interaction in two cultural communities, a Yucatec Mayan village where infants have been described as experiencing relatively limited direct instruction (Study 1) and a US city where infants are regularly directly engaged (Study 2). Eighteen-month-old infants from each community participated in a within-subjects study design where they were directly taught to use novel objects on one day and observed actors using different objects on another day. Mayan infants showed relative increases in imitative behaviors on their second visit to the lab as compared to their first visit, but there was no effect of condition. US infants showed no difference in imitative behavior in the child-directed vs. observed conditions; however, infants who were directly addressed on their first visit showed significantly higher overall imitation rates than infants who observed on their first visit. Together, these findings call into question the idea that child-directed teaching holds automatic or universal informational value.

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