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CAROL WORTHMAN |
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Toward A Comparative Developmental Ecology Of Human Sleep
CAROL M. WORTHMAN  significant domain of human behavior that claims a third of daily life but remains largely overlooked by anthropologists is sleep. Sleeping arrangements (who sleeps by whom) have been closely documented and subjected to cross-cultural analysis because of interests in incest taboo, psychoanalytic views of culture and personality, and emphases on family structure and gender, but sleep itself is regarded as the period when informants are unavailable for interview and participant observation method allows the fieldworker an unobservant period of sleep or note-writing. Meanwhile, sleep research has proceeded to characterize the ontogeny and physiology of human sleep and sleep architecture, as well as to extensively document sleep/rest behavior and biology across animal taxa, especially mammals. But the comparative study of sleep has not extended to population variation in humans. Although sleep deprivation and chronobiological experiments have monitored acute and mid-range effects of manipulated sleep ecologies, the developmental and lifetime ecologies of sleep normative among western populations studied so far, appear to the anthropologist as scarcely representative of the extant and expectable range of human sleep ecologies. Specifically, patterns of solitary sleep on heavily cushioned substrates, consolidated in a single daily time block, and housed in roofed and solidly walled space, contrast with the variety of sleep conditions among traditional societies. These conditions include multiple and multi-age sleeping partners, frequent presence of animals, embeddedness of sleep in ongoing social interaction, fluid bed- and waketimes, use of nighttime for ritual, sociality, and information exchange, and relatively exposed sleeping locations that require fire maintenance and sustained vigilance.
This paper will explore the thin extant cross-cultural anthropological literature that pertains to the ecology of human sleep, and proceed to brief descriptions from in-depth interviews of contemporary ethnographers concerning sleep conditions and patterns across a world-wide range of traditional forager, pastoralist, horticulturalist, and agriculturalist communities. Although scarcely definitive, this survey provides sufficient evidence to suggest that the sleep pattern, architecture, and ontogeny of western postindustrial populations may be grounded in a distincitve sleep ecology, from infancy on, and that comparative, cross-cultural investigation will be required for a more complete understanding of sleep, its developmental and regulatory neurobiological substrates, and its chronobiological correlates. The distribution of sleep deprivation for ritual or agonistic purposes, including for adolescent rites of passage, will also be noted.
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