Americans' use of discipline examined
Dentan's study of Semai informs thinking about dynamics between children and adults

By JENNIFER LEWANDOWSKI
Reporter Contributor

Perhaps the most telling manifestation of Robert K. Dentan's philosophy about young people is the bumper sticker on his automobile: "Children behave as well as they are treated."

Dentan, professor of anthropology and American studies, has devoted a great deal of his professional career to studying the Semai, an indigenous people of Malaysia. The time he has spent, and continues to spend, learning about the culture-both in Malaysia, researching and writing about the Semai, and teaching-has contributed to his thinking on the dynamics between children and adults in both the United States and Malaysia.

"In general, I'm interested in the ways in which people's ideological systems reflect, justify, rationalize and mystify social realities, particularly inequality," he says in a faculty biography on the American studies Web site http://wings.buffalo.edu/academic/department/AandL/ams.

More specifically, however, Dentan seems committed to shedding light on some of the aspects of American behavior that contribute to an unhealthy culture-in particular, discipline.

"Almost the only reason Americans beat kids is for 'discipline' or 'respect for authority,' by which we mean obedience," he says. "Semai don't care about obedience. Obedience is for slaves.

"If you can't persuade-or con-a kid into agreeing that they should or shouldn't do something, maybe you just don't have a very good case."

Dentan explains the perceived rationale for hurtful behavior.

"Usually, before you do violence, you simplify the situation in your mind, so that violence seems plausible as a solution. You say to yourself something like, 'kids need structure' or 'children are grateful for limits,'" he says.

What often results from an act of violence, he notes, is a feeling of relief or pleasure stemming from what he says is a faulty notion that aggression is borne of frustration. The result of violent feelings or behavior, however, is the need to rationalize.

"To make violence palatable to decent, concerned, humane people like ourselves, there has to be a kind of simplifying formula-social, religious, political or moralizing-that muffles the sound of weeping, screaming children and other innocents," he says.

Dentan, who earned his doctorate at Yale, says that where physical discipline is concerned, Semai refrain from using corporal punishment to subdue a child. While the Semai fear that hitting a child could cause death, he says, adults in the U.S. seem more preoccupied with keeping children in line.

"I think people know there's something wrong with privileging oneself to hurt a weaker person in ways you would never hurt someone your own size," says Dentan, who teaches courses such as "American Norms and Deviations," "Cultural Ecology," "Southeast Asian Ethnology" and "(Non)Violence." "But at the same time, (people) have this discipline-and-punish paradigm so embedded in their mind that they can't conceive of kids behaving as well as they are treated."

A common misconception of adults is assuming that because children are considered socially inferior, it's OK to humiliate or hurt them, he points out.

"You should always ask yourself, when you get angry at a kid, just what you're angry about," he says. "Has the kid done something evil, or is it just that the kid is being disobedient? If the latter, what have you done lately to earn-not coerce-the obedience?

"We need to respect children as we'd respect any other human being."

Dentan's interest in the Semai was piqued by a college roommate who was Indonesian and-the short of a long story-"being young, stupid and macho," Dentan jokes, he was driven to seek a remote people in what was then Malaya.

Dentan, whose work on the Semai continues in a book he's working on that focuses on "the intertwining of violence and nonviolence in Semai life and history," notes that Semai don't set out to raise non-violent children.

"They just want children to know that they're safe with their close kin and neighbors," he writes.

Unlike in the U.S., where hierarchy looms in nearly every institution, Dentan says the Semai-who today number roughly 30,000-have no hierarchy.

"You don't have to break down control barriers if there aren't any," he says. "But the parents tell the kids that the outside world is horribly dangerous, so that the kids will stay near the adults, where they are relatively safe.

"To the degree there's a hierarchy," he says, "it consists of parents (and other adults) being refuges for the kids."

Semai say they don't beat their children, Dentan says, unlike the Malays, another population of indigenous peoples who do beat their children. The Semai, he says, conclude "that's why our children are strong and healthy, and Malay children are like baby rats."

"Semai just hang out with their kids," he says. "I don't think they love their kids more or better: less, if anything. But it's never interrupting for a kid to sit on the lap of an adult."

In an excerpt from his latest work in progress, Dentan explains that in hierarchical institutions, "do what your boss says" and "do what your mom says" are matching imperatives.

"But that's not how Semai adults traditionally lived, and the parents' relative lack of concern about 'obedience' as a value in itself matches their own lives, in which obedience isn't very important."