An Insight into anthropological understanding of adolescence. Is adolescence biologically based? - My Original Work

Concept of Adolescence as Developmental Psycho-Psychological Category

During the 20th century, a lot of different theories have been created both in natural and social sciences which aimed to explain various aspects of adolescence: psycho-psychological development, creation of adolescence peer groups, frequent conflicts adolescences have with their parents, forming and development of personal identity, emotional instability and irritability of adolescences etc. One of the main characteristic of these theories formulated in the area of natural sciences (first of all in various fields of biology: biochemistry, physiology, genetics, morphology, as well as in certain branches of medicine: anatomy, endocrinology, psychiatry) implies “decomposing” human body and sexuality into several “factual” levels: anatomy and functioning various sex system, physiology of procreation, psycho-psychological development. Adolescence is usually perceived through psycho-psychological development, in other words these essentialist theories psycho-psychological development conceptualize as the process consisted of the following stages: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

Theoretical models that use described essentialist approach, since they reduce adolescence on “biological” facts (work of hormones, body constitution, sex differences etc.) and understand is only as one the phases in personal development and maturation, represent one of the main barriers to full and proper understanding of social and cultural diversity of adolescence.

Anthropologists conceptualize adolescence as variable cultural and social category. They emphasize that adolescence, perceived as an autonomous stage of psycho-psychological development, doesn’t carry universal meaning in all cultures. They don’t deny the fact that all adolescents get some biological characteristics, but maintain that around body (some of its parts, and “happenings” – hormonal changes, first menstruation, first ejaculation, first sexual intercourse) are constructed systems of knowledge, notions and cultural arrangement that depend on political, historical, religious, economic context. Since the adolescence and maturation are understood as processes connected to the body, they’re also being conceptualized on this way. Conceptualized in this way, adolescence represents kind of field that is intersected by cultural notions, values, interpretations and norms (that vary across political, historical, legal context) and also by religious, ethnical and age group. In different cultures, those are confirmed through family and marital relations and praxis, the system of gender roles, kinship system and system of economy. A lot of ethnographic data show it.

Systems of cultural notions, knowledge, values, praxis and social arrangements on body and sexuality (around which adolescence is formed as the cultural and social category) are variable both across different cultures and in various historical periods within a single culture. Anthropology conceptualizes body as a cultural artifact and points out that biological “universalities” aren’t necessarily baseline for constructing cultural notions on the body. Researches show that knowledge itself on hormones, genes, chromosome structures of sex systems etc., are shaped by social arrangements that organize family, gender, kinship and other relations. In that way, anthropology not only problematizes conception of psycho-psychological development as a series of successive phases determined by biology (i.e. age) but do it in a more radicalized way than other social sciences do (sociology, for example). Doing cross-cultural researches, that represents differentia specifica of anthropology compared to natural and all the other social sciences that examine adolescence, contributes to a wholly understanding of various aspects of adolescence, its psychological and socio-cultural manifestations and implications.