Cultural Geography of East Asia

Topic: Cultural Geography of East Asia
How do the articles link together?
Why aspect of cultural geography do the articles address? (Language, ethnicity, spatial distribution, human impact on the environment, etc.)
Outline the methodology in each article (3 paragraphs)
What was the main finding (the abstract usually outlines this)?
List a term or concept that you did not previously know.
What practical applications do the research in each article have in the “real” world?
What would you have done differently?
What potential for further research is there (this is often summarized at the end of the article)
What particular question does this research raise in your mind? Please be provocative, but appropriate. This question will provide a prompt for your peers in their discussion posts.

https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474019886832

cultural geographies
2020, Vol. 27(1) 3 –21

sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1474474019886832

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Underground imaginations,
environmental crisis and
subterranean cultural
geographies

Harriet Hawkins
Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Abstract
It is claimed that our current environmental crisis is one of the imaginations: we are in desperate
need of new means to understand relations between humans and their environment. The
underground was once central to the evolution of Western environmental imaginations. Yet,
this has waned throughout the 20th century as eyes and minds turned up and out. After outlining
some of the history of the underground as a site from which to evolve environmental imaginations,
the article will explore how the underground might propagate environmental imaginations fit
for pressing contemporary environmental concerns. It will do so using examples of three caves
evolved through an ongoing arts practice-based research collaboration with artist Flora Parrott.
Exploring these three caves, I will explore how the underground offers a powerful site for doing
the imaginative work that our current environmental crisis requires, focusing in particular on
the challenges of engaging lively earths and deep times (pasts and futures) that have become
commonplace in the Anthropocene. To close, the article begins to reflect on the possibilities
of collaborative creative geographies as a means to rethink the idea of the imagination within
geography, as not just something that might be studied but that these creative practices might
enable the creation of much-needed new imaginations.

Keywords
art, caves, imagination, subterranean, underground, Anthropocene, environment

Going underground?

Our current environmental crisis is, for many across the humanities, ‘a crisis of the imagination’.
In other words, Western societies have failed to get to grips with the changing nature of our envi-
ronmental relations and we urgently need new ways of understanding nature and human relations
with it.1 Claire Colebrook goes so far as to argue that not since Darwin’s Theory of Evolution has
Western environmental thinking faced such a wholesale reckoning.2 Bron Szeresynski captures the

Corresponding author:
Harriet Hawkins, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham TW20 0EX, UK.
Email: Harriet.hawkins@rhul.ac.uk

886832 CGJ0010.1177/1474474019886832cultural geographiesHawkins
research-article2019

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4 cultural geographies 27(1)

common sentiment when he suggests we need to ‘reimagine relations across the planet between
humans, and between humans and non-humans, and recompose the lived time of human history
and the deep time of our home planet’.3 Indeed, the Anthropocene, that contentious identification
of a new geologic epoch premised on scientific claims that human-environmental impacts are
reaching geophysical levels, poses a series of imaginative challenges. As Szeresynski asks, ‘how
can its seemingly incompatible scales of action and consequence, event and outcome, and the deep
enfolding of human and inhuman agencies it pronounces be given form or even imagined?’4 And
further, ‘how do we explore the thresholds where the social meets the geologic, the inorganic, the
inhuman?’5 Furthermore, the very imagination of the Anthropocene itself is one that has been up
for considerable debate, exploring the geographies and time–spaces of this human centric concept.6
This article is concerned to advance the argument that the underground (or subterranean) might
offer a valuable site at which to tackle some of this contemporary imagination work. It does so by
way of a discussion of three underground sites encountered in the course of an ongoing
collaboration with artist Flora Parrott. As it comes to a close, the article reflects on the possibilities
of such creative collaborative geographies, both to study the geographical imaginations of others
(as cultural geography has long done) and, perhaps, to attempt through this practice-based work to
create much-needed new imaginations.

Histories of the subterranean in European Modernity demonstrate how ‘although always pre-
sent, waves of underground imagery have tended to peak during periods of especially rapid and
difficult change’.7 If the 20th century is largely agreed to have witnessed a decentring of the under-
ground from our imaginations – as Western Eyes and minds were turned up and out, by flight,
adventures in outer space and of late, by climate change and other atmospheric preoccupations –
there is ample evidence within and beyond geography that a new wave of going underground is
beginning to swell.8 Indeed, the recent underground ventures of geographers and others have coun-
tered the upwards gaze of much of geography’s vertical turn – focusing on skyscrapers, air-space,
mountains, the atmosphere and so on.9 Enhanced attention downwards has included explorations
of the underground as a site of memory, the subterranean infrastructure of our cities (past and
present), the vertical resource geographies of both expansionist colonial pasts and the extractive
presents of a dematerialising economy, and the cultures and histories of caving.10 Such accounts
explore how seeing, sensing and representing bring diverse undergrounds into being. Yet, in the
midst of this direction of energies towards the subterranean and its associated materialities such as
stone, soil and fuel, we have overlooked an important aspect: the underground’s imaginative
force.11

Literary, cultural and visual histories have long identified diverse imaginations of the under-
ground and have even explored the role they played in constituting Western and non-Western
environmental imaginations.12 Key here has been Rosalind Williams’ work on 19th- and early
20th-century European literature as forwarding a very modern separation of nature and culture,
wherein ‘underground worlds have provided a prophetic view into our environmental future . . .
furnish[ing] a model of an artificial environment from which nature has been effectively ban-
ished’.13 Today, however, there appears to be space for a rather different set of environmental
imaginations to emerge from underground spaces. The rise of the Anthropocene has turned atten-
tion across arts and humanities and social sciences to the geologic, inevitably associated with the
subterranean.14 Here, we find the material vitality of the Earth itself is foregrounded in a reconcep-
tualisation of the agency of the inorganic, mineral and geologic alongside the biological. Such that,
attending to the geologic has become synonymous with an ‘ungrounding’ of the Earth and a think-
ing (by way of ideas of deep time) about the human and beyond human experience, with profound
implications. For those interested in political and economic geographies acknowledging a ‘terra’
that was never firm has had far-reaching consequences for ideas like territory, and the practices of

Hawkins 5

nation-states and corporations which often assume Earthly backdrops that hold still for ownership
and exploitation,15 while for cultural geographers and environmental humanities scholars, ques-
tions of life and the space–times of geologic life have come into focus.16 Elizabeth Povinelli, for
example, proposes the concept of geontologies to attend to what the ‘geos’ might offer in place of
long-held understandings of life and politics premised on ‘bios’,17 while others observe the need to
embrace ‘a newly poignant sense that our present is in fact accompanied by deep pasts and deep
futures’.18

The following section of this article will parse these discussions of the underground and the envi-
ronmental imagination in more detail, before turning to its empirical core. This is constituted through
visits to three caves. These visits occurred in the context of an ongoing collaboration developed with
artist Flora Parrott.19 The first cave, visited in summer 2015, is in the Mendips in Somerset, England,
encounterd on a group caving trip organised by Flora. The second is an artificial cave, created during
an artist’s workshop in a London gallery with the same group that had been on that earlier subter-
rnean field-trip. The third cave the paper visits is Mother Shipton’s cave, near Knaresborough in
North Yorkshire, England, to which Flora and I journeyed in 2019.20 Our collaboration has ranged
across a number of sites around the world and resulted in a series of solo and collaborative outputs,
from installations and performances to seminars, book chapters and now this article.21 What emerges
through the creative encounters with the underground discussed here is an environmental imagina-
tion that, as I will explore, is fit for some of the current imaginative challenges we face. It considers
the material and deep time intimacies and sensualities of human bodies with/in millennia-old rocky
bodies, recent plastic ones and mineralogical deposits that are merely months old. In doing so, it
explores how the underground, far from offering a site of separation of nature/culture, as it did in the
19th century, is in fact a renewed site for their engagement and intersection.

Underground imaginations

Many cultures and histories of the underground have mapped the material and social dimensions
of subterranean natural forms, from caves and caverns to infrastructural forms, including subways,
sewers, mines, tunnels and more recently bunkers, and of course their materialities; stone, mud,
earth, rock and so on.22 Others have sought to sift through, as Pike puts it, ‘the discarded fragments
of these past cultures of the underground’, for the subterranean’s wider cultural valences.23 Along
with Pike’s work, it is perhaps Rosalind Williams’ modestly titled but ambitious ‘Notes on the
Underground’ that offers the most extended and explicit excavation of the historical place of the
underground in evolving environmental imaginations.24 Intersecting the literary undergrounds of
European Modernity with science and technology studies, Williams’ volume locates the under-
ground as a visionary site for technological futures. The defining aspect of these futures however,
is the underground’s ‘exclusion of nature – of biological diversity, of seasons, of plants, of the sun
and the stars’.25 The subterranean laboratory, she writes, ‘takes to an extreme, the ecological sim-
plification of modern cities where it sometimes seems that humans, rats, insects and microbes are
the only remaining forms of wildlife’.26 This underground, perhaps not unsurprisingly, given the
sources used, appears the apotheosis of that very modern separation of nature and culture. More
recent engagements with the underground, however, especially by way of conceptions of Earthly
liveliness and the Anthropocene’s Geologic Turn, demand the embrace of environmental imagina-
tions diametrically opposed to this separation of nature and culture. In contrast to Williams’ artifi-
cial undergrounds, the underground that emerges through discussions of the geologic is animated
by a politics of life that is thoroughly entangled within the geologic.

As Yusoff and Clarke make clear, we have inherited stories of a ‘planet so slow moving it could
just about be ignored – give or take an occasional, inopportune shudder’, how they ask, do we

6 cultural geographies 27(1)

counter this ‘decisive stilling of the Earth in social and philosophical thought’.27 For, the
Anthropocene demands an ‘expansion and tourquing’, of ‘conceptions of agency, intimacy and
politics’ that have been forwarded by thinking mostly about the ‘bios’.28 To take seriously humans
as a geologic force, as the Anthropocene requires we do, suggests the need to guard against any
asymmetric rendering that fails to reflect on how geologic forces might also ‘compose and dif-
ferentiate corporeal and collective biopolitical formations’.29 Elizabeth Povinelli’s geontologies
offer one means through which to begin this work, replacing a logics of life premised on bios and
a biopolitics, with geos and their complex intersections of life and non-life.30

Yet imagining Earthly inhuman excess, so different to and excessive of the human and other
forms of biotic life as to unground our understandings of life itself, is not an insignificant challenge
for Western environmental imaginations. Oftentimes it is in non-Western world we have found
elaborations on these imaginations – whether that be in clashes between the dreamings of Australian
Indigenous communities and the mining companies who see them as mineral resources, or the
earth-beings recognised by Andean Farmers and Bolivian tin miners, whose metabolisms are being
exhausted by open-cast mining practices.31 Others have turned to art and aesthetics more widely.
Elizabeth Grosz has long arguing for the potential of art as offering ‘new kinds of material practice’
for ‘an era of intensifying geophysical turbulence . . . new genres and practices that tap into and
work with the shifting forces of contemporary earth’.32 If questions of Earthly liveliness have
posed one set of imaginative challenges, a second set concerns the space-times and temporalities
that such liveliness poses. We need, David Farrier argues, to find the means to embrace, ‘a newly
poignant sense that our present is in fact accompanied by deep pasts and deep futures’.33 How, he
and others ask, can we make sense of the complex times we are now enfolded within, finding ways
to explore the ‘sensuality of deep time’, and a sense of the ‘depth and richness of our enfolding in
geologic intimacy?’34

It is perhaps of no real surprise that the underground offers a rich site for encountering lively
matters and deep times. This emerges clearly even in historical accounts of sublime caves and
caverns, as well as more recent ‘aesthetic geologies’ such as MacFarlane’s journeying into the deep
time of multiple ‘underlands’ – from ice caves to vast undersea mines – and a range of studies of
contemporary artistic practices.35 Such encounters are also offered by accounts of the ‘sacrifice
zones’ of vast open-cast mining complexes, debates about geological golden spikes, mantle strikes
and explorations of the foundational shakings of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake and the ancient
painted caves of Lascaux.36 Attending to these iconic and important sites often has a political
imperative, yet to only explore such ‘wonder-full’ underground risks foreclosing the potential of
other kinds of subterranean spaces. Indeed, such charismatic, iconic sites and events risk intensify-
ing the tendency cultural anthropologists Gisli Pálsson and Heather Anne Swanson observe for the
geological to be ‘rendered as synonymous with the planetary’ and distant from embodied, intimate
and everyday experiences.37 This article counters this with a focus on two of the more banal and
even kitschy caves encountered during my collaboration with Flora. Rather than foreground these
‘wonder-less wonders’ (to borrow Daniel Defoe’s description of these kinds of English scenery38)
over and against the more sublime experiences of the underground, the article explores how the
ordinary and extraordinary become combined, creating everyday, intimate undergrounds that offer
experiences of the sensuality of deep time.39 The intention is less, following Pálsson and Swanson
to try to evolve a ‘grand theory of geosociology,’ than it is to attend ‘to how geologic relations
matter differently to particular entities in particular locals’. In this case attending to ‘the intertwin-
ing of bodies and biographies with earth systems and deep time histories’ is to create deep time
intimacies that rethink nature–society relations and play with questions of time, space, bodies and
underground processes and landscapes.40 We begin in a cave system under the chalky Mendip Hills
in Somerset, Southern England.

Hawkins 7

The Artificial cave

The question of time in the Anthropocene is a testy one, for it has become known as an ‘epically
controversial geologic epoch’ that causes ‘fatal confusions’ in Western understandings of time and
temporality. It poses imaginative challenges, demanding, as Ferrier writes, ‘a kind of deep time
negative capability, inducting us into the strangeness of a temporality that vastly exceeds intergen-
erational memory’.41 Yet, as these discussions evolve, the challenge of imagining distant pasts is
rendered even more complicated by the need to appreciate how these vast spans also erupt into the
everyday: ‘the thickening of the present as a confluence of deep time and deep futures’.42 What
follows explores these ideas firstly in the context of our Mendips (Somerset, UK) caving experi-
ences, and secondly, through our reflections on these experiences during a small event in a London
gallery. During this event, some 10 of the group that went caving created an artificial cave that
became a site prompting reflections on the earlier caving experience (Figure 1). Discussion probes
the tensions between caving bodies ‘in the flow,’ caught in the immediacy of the experience, and
bodies that are caught within millennia-old rocky bodies, as well as more recent plastic ones. In
doing so, it reflects on the imaginative work of addressing an ‘in-human agency that is not and
cannot be fully extensive with the human domain, however inclusively this is imagined’.43

Deep time intimacies?

Damp, chilly and boiler-suited up we squeezed, crawled and scrambled our way through tunnels
and water filled channels for hours. After twisting ourselves through a tight passage, corkscrewing
bodies pulling with arms and pushing with legs, we lay on a smooth rocky surface, its shallow
incline mirroring the pitch of the roof. We turn our head-lamps off, and prone on our backs listen
in the dark to our guide telling us that these rocks would send compasses haywire, that some of the
sediments have a reverse polarity, they are remnant magnetisms from paleomagnetic events.

Caves and human bodies are ontologically connected. A cave is defined as a cave if it is open to
the surface and large enough to admit a human body, vugs, hollows and holes into which humans
cannot enter, are not caves. If caves are shaped, as Sarah Cant puts it, ‘through sensing caving

Figure 1. The artificial cave.
Source: Photo (author’s own).

8 cultural geographies 27(1)

bodies’, then oftentimes accounts observe how, as a practice, caving often brings us to our bodies
in particular ways.44 Stories of caving have become synonymous with a post-phenomenological
accounting of landscapes, bodies and worlds. These are stories of the becoming of bodies, matter,
textures and light (or rather no natural light), stories of spaces, surfaces and sensations narrated
through patterns of contact and non-contact, and our own explorations where no exception.45
Geographical accounts of caving map intimate spatialities of, in Cant’s words, ‘flux between
human geographies of exploration and encounter, and physical geographies of space within rock:
lime, water and calcite’.46 Senses are heightened by the darkness, physical challenges and different
environments of the cave, destabilising bodily presence and boundaries as bodies evolve into
heightened sensory devices, sensitised to changing surfaces, shifting light scales and to the move-
ment and temperature of air.47

Oftentimes, the temporalities of our intimacies of bodies of flesh and rock, of skin and sediment,
were those of being caught in the present, as we scrabbled around, inelegantly, amateurishly, absorbed
in working out where to put our feet and hands in the here and now. At other moments, waiting our
turns poised at the top of a slippery waterfall whose base we could not see, or queuing up nervously at
the entrance to a narrow corkscrewing tunnel only navigable one way, time seemed to stretch out end-
lessly, defying my desire to get it over with. The shifting time frames of our sensing-caving bodies as
they negotiate intimacies with rock, water and various forms of technology (harnesses, hats, carabi-
ners, Wellington Boots) are enfolded with what we might call after Farrier the ‘sensuality of deep
time’.48 For alongside these embodied experiences of lived time is the infusion of caving with what
Cant observes as the ‘immense geological presence’, while for Rob MacFarlane, to journey into under-
lands is to journey into deep time.49 Edwards finds caving time to be a time of thresholds:

when a breakthrough comes, ordinary time stops, as they [cavers] face the enormity of an encounter with
deep, geologic time in a space, which may, on some rare occasions, never have been encountered before.
This threshold represents the persistence of the sublime in caving culture, framed and set off by the
ordinary of what proceeds and indeed follows it.50

Our Mendip caving was by contrast very ordinary, beginners caving. We made no breakthroughs,
we found no new passages, yet we did pause often to reflect on the press of geology, on the feeling
of being amidst millennia, smoothing with hands rocks shaped by thousands of years of running
water, seeing compasses dragging off north by remnant magnetisms. Our perhaps quite predictable
caving experiences kept in play together the experiences of being in our bodies and being within
rocky bodies; the immediate presentness of scrabbling climbing and negotiating always entangled
with the temporalities of deep time.

Futures-excesses

We stand around in a slightly dusty gallery space in East London and ponder the plastic sections,
occasionally consulting the line map of the caves we had explored a month or so earlier. We trade
memories trying to recreate our journeys and experiences underground. Hexagonal in section and
joined together with a series of wing nuts the tubular sections of the artificial cave are made of
fibre glass, matt black on the outside and oddly dirty beige within (Figure 2). We try to recall the
subterranean spaces, playing out bends and cork-screws with our bodies, fixing long sections and
tight turns together to mimic these remembered geologies.

As we create new artificial caves on the gallery floor, a geological god-trick of sorts, we reflect
on the limitations of this training cave. The plastic sections we are playing with have been fash-
ioned not for us but rather to train want-to-be-cavers and cave-rescue teams to master small spaces.

Hawkins 9

We muse on the limits of this plastic training ground; you can see the end before you go in; you are
never really below the surface; nothing is going to fall and trap you; the enclosure is within milli-
metres of plastic not millennia of rock; you can always be saved, rescued by aid of a screw-driver
and some blocks of wood.

The artificial cave was not dark. Its surfaces have been worn slick in some places, in others the
chicken wire that forms its structure has been revealed, making sharp edges that catch skin, clothes
and hair. It is not the earthly damp smell of the caves, but an antiseptic, sterile smell, kitchen
cleaner, mixed with sweat and nerves, these tight places might be in a safely known suburb of
London rather than within volumes of rock, but they still made us feel a little panicked at times, as
well as rather silly (Figure 3).

As we explored and continually remade our artificial caves, we tended to frame our reflections
through what was lacking. As we slithered and grubbed our way through the beige plastic of our
geologic forms, we observed how while sometimes tight, and even a little panic inducing, it felt
safe, it felt known. It was nothing, we agreed, like caving. Yet, in the imaginative space opened up
between our caving in the Mendips and this artificial cave what emerged was less a paucity of
sensory experiences and rather a more attuned awareness of the geologies we had been exploring
then and now, their differences and also their similarities.

Fibre glass – a composite of glass-reinforced plastic – is an interesting material from which to
make a fake cave. Our artificial chthonic experiments led us to tell lithic and strata stories that
further complicated the enfolding of deep time pasts, and here futures, in a thickening of the pre-
sent.51 If being amid the rock was to be in a space that felt dense, full and textured with time, then
it might have been thought that plastic – that modern material, convenient, disposable – might
create the exact opposite sense.52 Yet if plastic was long a utopic material of timeless smoothness,
enabling easy passage through life detached from the flux of time, its imaginaries have shifted of
late. The artificial cave was born of strata in a very material sense. Fibre glass, like all plastics, has
petrochemical origins. The oil from which it is formed shares a fossil history with the rocks of
karstic caving landscapes, often found together, one is formed from fossilised plants, the other

Figure 2. The artificial cave.
Source: Photo (author’s own).

10 cultural geographies 27(1)

from dead sea creatures. But entwined with these material pasts is a sense that the geologic force
of plastics really lies in their futures. Some of the same earth scientists responsible for early
Anthropocene debates have proposed plastics as technofossils, a datable stratigraphic marker –
formed not only from fossils but destined to become one.53 Plastics, Michelle Bastion and Thom
Van Buren suggest, are the new immortals, presenting novel forms of persistence.54

If the Karst landscapes most popular for caving lend themselves to fluid and porous post-phe-
nomenologies of bodies, water and rock, then crawling through the artificial cave became an expe-
rience of recognising, to quote Deborah Dixon, ‘differential renderings of corporeal vulnerability
and obduracy’.55 Kai Bosworth’s geo-feminist account of Uranium mining in South Dakota
explores the ‘shared inhuman geological matrix’ in which the permeability of geological materials
is entangled with those of human bodies affected by toxins, forming new, dangerous and unstable
consistencies and inconsistencies.56 Standing in the midst of a London gallery, the artificial cave
lacks the political imperative and force of Bosworth’s exploration, but the experience does encour-
age us towards particular comprehensions of bodies, senses and substances and their temporalities
and materialities. Plastic has long been thought of as smooth, as uncontaminated, as contained. Yet,
for Heather Davies, this is the lie that sits at the heart of the promise of plastics: the ‘sealed, clean,
smooth surfaces belie a more volatile, unstable materiality’.57 The more we crawled, the more we
became attuned to the cave’s worn patches, to the smoothing of its faux rugged appearance.
Thinking about the volatility of these materials, we mused through different scales, slightly horri-
fied to note the lingering plastic smell as that of substances evaporating off the form. We thought
about time, about what would happen when our cave became too worn out to use, about what might
become of this particular plastic geology?

Figure 3. The artificial cave (interior).
Source: Photo (author’s own).

Hawkins 11

The imaginative spaces opened up by the artificial cave play with time, bodies and matter. To
be in the artificial cave was to consider plastic as a geological material, intersecting rock and poly-
mer to understand deep time as a story not only of stratigraphic pasts but also of deep futures, of
the materials we create that will outlast us and also of materials that entwine with us in ways we
cannot afford to overlook.58 In the artificial cave, we might not experience the intensity of sensa-
tions associated with encounters with the sublime underground, but we do become aware of new
and unlikely stabilities and consistencies, as well as instabilities. Going underground becomes a
site for thinking both presentness and deep time through bodies of geology, plastic and flesh, and
for acknowledging limits. The boundedness of the artificial cave installs within the gallery space a
sense of the unknowability of the underground and its excessive geologies. This is important, for
one of the challenges of the Anthropocene’s geologic turn is not only to imagine non-human geos
but also to recognise that the logics of ‘human-non-human relations based on interconnectedness,
reciprocity and mutual affectivity’ might not offer an adequate address to the ‘before, beneath and
beyond the human of the geologic’59 For Bosworth, this is not about a lack of understanding or of
thought but due to ‘a surplus of potentiality exhibited by the Earth’.60

Mother Shipton’s Cave

Charles Lyell, farmer-geologist, writing in his Principles of Geology (1830), observed of the ero-
sion he was experiencing in his fields: ‘the imagination was first fatigued and then overpowered by
endeavouring to conceive of the immensity of time required for the annihilation of whole conti-
nents by so insensible a process’.61 Almost two centuries later and, in the Western world at least,
the imagination of Earthly forces (even given what we now know about plate tectonics) continues
to pose challenges, the urgency and dimensions of which have been sharpened by the Anthropocene’s
geologic turn. As Yusoff and Clarke have put it, ‘if some form of bios have been enrolled into
efforts to reimagine collective life, the basal depths and lumpen masses of the inorganic, the min-
eral, the geologic, have proved rather more recalcitrant’.62 How, in short, we imagine the geologic
– ‘composed of seemingly inert minerals, as lively’ – has proven somewhat of a challenge.63 The
third cave on this itinerary, Mother Shipton’s Cave, offers a site of lively geologies, not only pres-
enced through the ‘putting on display’ of a geological process but by reflecting on how such lively
geologies are entwined with biography and bios- life. Claiming to be England’s oldest tourist
attraction, Mother Shipton’s Cave and its petrifying well have been attracting visitors for centuries,
with written records dating back to 1538 (Figure 4).

Displaying lively earths

We share the ‘Beech Avenue’, a relic of this landscape’s history as a Royal Park, with Dog Walkers
and Joggers, and, as a sign informs us, some of the oldest trees in England, their three-hundred-
year-old trunks carving unnatural looking straight lines upwards through the gorge. Passing
through a wooden door complete with faux gargoyle, we go down to a walk-way by the river that
leads to the cave (Figure 5).

From an overhang draped with moss, sheets of water run into fern-fringed pool. A plastic sign
politely requests, ‘please don’t drink the water’. The rocky curtain is fringed with a series of maca-
bre objects, an array of hats, an old fashioned ice skate, a Grecian urn, a teapot, a lobster, and
strings and strings of small teddy bears, each sporting increasingly stony fur.

Mother Shipton’s Cave, and the associated ‘dripping well’, near Knaresborough Northern
England, long a site for local healing, was first officially recorded in the notes of Henry VIII’s
antiquary John Leland in 1538. Hired to inventory England’s ‘wonders’ Leland notes,

12 cultural geographies 27(1)

Figure 4. Mother Shipton’s cave.
Source: Photo (author’s own).

Figure 5. Close up: Petrification well.
Source: Photo (author’s own).

Hawkins 13

a well of a wonderful nature called the dripping well . . . for out of great rocks it emits water continually,
the water is of such a nature that whatever is cast in and is touched by this water turneth into stone.64

The well found its way into the itineraries of aristocratic and gentlemanly travellers, and was fea-
tured in popular gazetteers, read as much in drawing rooms as used on the road.65 In almost all
accounts, the natural wonder of petrification is interwoven with the biography of Mother Shipton,
a witch and oracle described as England’s most famous prophetess and as the Yorkshire Sibyl
(Figure 6).66

Down the centuries, local people and tourists have placed things beneath the water’s flow, a
practice continued today, delighting visitors with a range of stony hats, shoes, teddy bears and
plastic toys in various states of ‘stonifying’. To witness the objects in the flow of the water, their
various crusty mineral layers in active formation, is to experience a liveliness of the lithic that is
scaled to the human here and now. Rather than a temporally distant, large-scale process occurring
over millennia, or a sudden specular volcanic or earthquake event, geological processes here ‘erupt
continually in the midst of the everyday’.67

The small museum (Figure 7), a few minutes walk from the cave, reinforces the everyday liveli-
ness of these geologies by accompanying its displays of teddy bears in various states of petrifica-
tion with an account of the 3-month long duration of process (the bears can be bought for £27.50).
Also on display is a rather odd assortment of petrified artefacts – often personal things like clothes
– left in the well over the centuries; including Queen Mary’s Parasol, deposited in the 1920s, some
very eerie Victorian Dolls, the hand-bag of crime writer Agatha Christie and a top hat from televi-
sion presenter Terry Wogan. As well as a ‘whose-who’ of English vernacular culture, this display
curates a geology scaled to generations and human life spans rather than to the epochal. This put-
ting of geology on display proffers a repost of sorts to the conundrum Kai Bosworth observes: ‘the
rhythms and spaces of life and the radical non-life of the geologic are not necessarily easily syn-
chronized into the everyday or mundane’.68 Yet the challenge is to hold both perspectives together,
for reflecting on our struggles to think about Earth processes, Grosz observes,

Figure 6. Historical image of Mother Shipton’s cave and the dripping well.

14 cultural geographies 27(1)

it is a question of scale, on the level of vast geologic periods – eras lasting billions of years – there may be
intermittent or punctuating catastrophes . . . but at the level of, say, the lived time of a geologic element –
the time it takes for example, for a stalagmite to form – there is continuous unpunctuated (even if interrupted
and transformed) change.69

If the ‘lived’ time of the petrification at Mother Shipton’s cave is one measured in months rather
than years, the site does not simply substitute lived time for deep time and, as Pálsson and Swanson,
observe risk reproducing formulations that juxtapose ‘global’ earth systems with ‘local’ differ-
ences’.70 On a wonderfully odd sign, Mother Shipton gives us a discordant geology lesson. With a
wave of her wizened finger, she instructs,

It has taken the spring water approximately 6,000 years to create this unique geological phenomenon
known as the petrifying well. It is a huge mineral deposit formed the same way as a stalactite . . . This
ordinary looking stream is in fact very special. It feeds the petrifying well and wishing well with its famous
waters. They bubble out of the ground from a spring just out of view, at the end of a mile-long journey from
an underground lake.

They travel up from the lake, she continues,

along a porous layer of rock called an aquifer. The band of rock breaks the surface and the water pours out
forming the spring. It is from this rock that the water dissolves massive amounts of minerals on its journey,
mainly Calcium carbonate (calcite). Just right for turning things to stone!

Here, local petrification processes are situated as one of multiple temporalities and many pro-
cesses: the 3-month fossilisation of the teddies, the human life spans implied by curation of the
artefacts, together with the 6,000+ years of the creation of the well from an already existent older

Figure 7. Geology on Display.
Source: Photo (author’s own).

Hawkins 15

geology. This creates a complex story of the lived time of geology and its local instantiations as set
against wider and longer time frames and processes. If Mother Shipton’s voicing of geological sci-
ence enables these enfolded temporalities, then it also complicates these stories through the impli-
cation of myth and magic: ‘just right for turning things to stone!’ This destabilising note inserts into
what was previously a site of science, the complex intersections of human liveliness and petrifica-
tion practices.

Composing bios and geos

Mother Shipton’s cave offers a site where we might argue, following Povinelli, ‘the biographic,
biological, geography and geologic obligations are seen as co-constituted and inseparable’.71 A
kitschy tourist site is perhaps not an obvious local for the playing out of Povinelli’s geontological
attempts to decentre a focus on bios with an assertion of geos. Yet, looking more closely at the
processes of petrification, the site curates assert mineralogical life.72

If the forms of petrified bears, toys and talismanic human objects present a liveliness of geologi-
cal processes, they also evoke fossils.73 After all, the turning to stone of once organic material is the
very definition of a fossil. Yet, the plastic dinosaurs, lobsters and teddies are all petrified in a very
strange process that intensifies even the normal negotiation of living and non-living that fossilisa-
tion implies. Indeed, as Yusoff notes of fossils, they ‘unlock this life-death, time-untimely, corpo-
real-incorporeal equation, suggesting the need for a theory of the geologic and a recounting with
the forces of mute matter in lively bodies: a corporeality that is driven by inhuman forces’.74
Alongside the artificial forms of once-living objects (e.g. a plastic lobster) which have then been
petrified through a series of geological processes which implicate another kind of life, the complex
imaginations of living and non-living the site explores are further complicated through the figure
of Mother Shipton.

A 1881 edition of the Spiritualist observed that it was ‘tolerably certain that Mother Shipton had
an actual existence, living from around the 1470s until 1540’.75 It was rumoured her mother was
banished, after being raped by the Devil, to give birth in a cave by the well. Mother Shipton’s
demonic parentage combined with her prophetic powers ensured her own banishment as a witch.
She most famously enraged King Henry VIII when, far from being chastised on being told she was
to be tried as a witch, she responded by predicting the death of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. She was
later proven correct. As recorded in a series of prophesy books (first published in 1641 and still
available today), Ursula – Mother – Shipton (hence the stone bears) made predictions that echoed
down the centuries, predicting future wars, political upheavals, the Great Fire of London (accord-
ing to Samuel Pepys) and even air travel and the Internet (Figure 8). Her life and prophesies were
the subject of many engravings by the likes of William Hogarth, as well as plays and puppet shows
and is rumoured she was the original inspiration for the pantomime dame.76

Mother Shipton’s is a discordant biography; her uncertain existence combined with the endur-
ing power of her prophesies to challenge not only societal order but also linear histories scaled to
human lifetimes. In the oracle voice that speaks to visitors from the cave, Mother Shipton’s history
is narrated as a geo-biography, entwining processes of petrification and centuries of feminine
myths which negotiate the boundaries of the human and non-human, of animate and inanimate.77
Her powers are mapped against both classical myths of Medusa, the defiled goddess-turned-gor-
gon whose gaze turned enemies to stone and the 7th-century Saxon Abyss St. Hilda. St. Hilda, who
lived on sea cliffs not 70 miles north of Mother Shipton’s cave, is famed for benevolent petrifica-
tion practices: namely, for turning a plague of snakes to stone, their lithic forms said to be found in
the ammonites that plentifully dot that coast. Yet if these histories and myths of petrification hinge
on a stilling of liveliness, then Mother Shipton’s enduring value is perhaps the opposite. Here,

16 cultural geographies 27(1)

rather than the living rendered dead, what was once considered non-living is given agency and
animism. If turning of things to stone has long been associated with a criss-crossing of human
liveliness, feminine excessiveness and mineralogical animism, these intersect here with everyday,
ongoingness of geological processes to offer up stories of mineralisation that reorder ideas of life
and non-life – reminding us as Povinelli suggests, ‘we were also rocks and sediment before we
settled into this mode of existence’.78

Conclusion

The underground has long been a site to which humanity turns – intellectually, imaginatively and
literally – when its ways of life are under threat. Until recently, the 21st century, especially in the
Western world, had been marked by so-called ‘atmospheric’ and ‘surface’ chauvinisms,79 with the
underground quite literally overlooked. This article has attempted to intervene within the current
interest geographers and others have in going underground, to explore the value of the imagina-
tions that the underground propagates. While sometimes the imaginations created by the explora-
tions of this article – from cave excursions, to gallery installations and field visits – focused on the
underground, at other points the underground offered a jumping off point for wider and much-
needed environmental imaginations. The three caves here have offered a means to address the
aesthetic and imaginary problems posed by the disruptive temporalities of deep time that require
an embrace of deep pasts, deep futures as well as the present, together with geological liveliness
and the ‘mineralogical dimension of human composition that remains currently under thought’.80

In beginning from a creative collaboration (rather than already existing artwork), this article
moves towards a set of reflections on how such an embrace of creative practices within geographi-
cal research might expand the possibilities of geographical engagements with underground imagi-
nations. In other words, through these kinds of creative practice-based ways of working, we move

Figure 8. Historical images of Mother Shipton.
Source: Photo (author’s own).

Hawkins 17

beyond studying the imaginations as they emerge from past or present artwork, novels and so on,
towards querying how it is that such collaborations might enable the evolution of new imaginations
fit for the environmental challenges we currently face. Here, the imagination takes up a place
alongside various evocations of aesthetics, of transdisciplinary actions and collectives and of
experimental practices as a means to come to terms with the demands of our contemporary envi-
ronmental crisis. Framing this crisis as, in part, a crisis of the imagination is not without its risks.
For some, it is too easy and indeed too dangerous to suggest that in new imaginations lies the route
to salvation. To exaggerate the importance of the imaginary is, it has been suggested, to run the risk
of consolidating a diversionary side-show, blind to its own relative insignificance. It is also to risk
being suspiciously super-structural in understanding cultural behaviour, summoning a monolithic,
often largely contemporary Western ‘we’ who are in need of such reimaginations.81 Yet, we should
not overlook the force that has long been attributed to the imagination. Indeed, humanistic geogra-
phers were very clear from the outset that the combination of the ideas inside our heads and the
world beyond was a co-constitutive one, an observation that has shaped cultural geography for
decades, both identifying the darker side of the constitutive force of the imagination (mapping and
colonialism) and its potentiality (climate change).82 If past studies of the underground have deter-
mined the co-constitutive relations between worlds and underground imaginations, as Pike sug-
gests, then future possibilities might lie in not only studying contemporary examples of the
underground and our imaginations, as this article has done, but also to push the possibilities of arts
practice–based collaborations to not just intervene but to produce new imaginations. This clearly
needs considered thought, not least because of the disastrous histories of the imagination as a tool
of power. Careful questioning needs to happen of whose imaginations hold sway, and appreciation
held of their unpredictable force as they circulate and shift. There are, as scholarship is already
noting, significant challenges to be faced when competing imaginations of the underground are
brought into contact.83 Furthermore, as geographers, it might be timely to revisit the idea of the
imagination, just as we have in recent years come to critique and evolve ideas of creativity and
aesthetics. In doing so, we might reflect, as we have on these ideas, on what emerges when we
challenge the imagination as primarily a human capacity. If creativity and aesthetics can be under-
stood as non-human practices and experiences, then what might be in store for not only our envi-
ronmental imaginations but also our thinking on the imagination, if we begin to think the
imagination as a non-human capacity.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article: The author(s) received financial support for the research from the UK Arts and Humanities
Research Council grant number: AH/N004132/1. and the Leverhulme Trust:PLP-2016-186.

ORCID iD

Harriet Hawkins https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7056-4982

Notes

1. L.Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature writing and the Formation of American
Culture (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1996); D.Ferrier, Anthropocene Poetics: Deep time, Sacrifice
Zones and Extinction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

2. C.Colebrook, Death of the Post-Human: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities
Press, 2014).

3. B.Szerszynski, ‘The Anthropocene Monument: On Relating Geological and Human Time’, European
Journal of Social Theory, 20(1), 2017, pp. 111–31.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7056-4982

18 cultural geographies 27(1)

4. N.Clark and K.Yusoff, ‘Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’, Theory, Culture and Society,
34(2–3), 2017, pp. 3–23, 20.

5. Clark and Yusoff, ‘Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’.
6. J.Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM

Press, 2015); D.Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2016); D.Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene:
Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities, 6, 2015, 159–65.

7. D.Pike, Subterranean Cities: The Worlds beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005); D.Pike, Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture
1800-2001 (New York: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 46.

8. W.Lesser, The Life Below the Ground: A Study of the Subterranean in Literature and History (London:
Faber and Faber, 1987); D.W.Wolfe, Tales from the Underground: A Natural History of Subterranean
Life (London: Basic Books, 2002); J.Hunt, Underground: A Human History of the World beneath Our
Feet. (London: Penguin Books, 2019).

9. D.Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University, 2001); S.Graham, Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers (London: Verso
Books, 2018); A.Harris, ‘Vertical Urbanisms: Opening Up Geographies of the Three-Dimensional City’,
Progress in Human Geography, 39, 2014, pp. 601–20; D.E.Cosgrove and V.Della Dora, High Places:
Cultural Geographies of Mountains and Ice (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008); D.McCormack, Atmospheric
Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).

10. See for example, S.Merrill, Networked Remembrance: Excavating Buried Memories in the Railways
beneath London and Berlin (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017); C.L.Galviz and S.Merrill (eds), Going
Underground: New Perspectives (London: LTM, 2013); R.Dennis, C.L.Galviz and S.Merrill (eds),
‘Special Issue: 150 years of the London Underground’, The London Journal, 38(3), 2013, 175–6;
M.Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002);
B.L.Garrett, ‘Picturing Urban Subterranea: Embodied Aesthetics of London’s Sewers. Environment and
Planning A: Economy and Space, 48, 2016, pp. 1948–66; P.Dobraszczyk, B.Garret and C.L.Galviz (eds),
Undergrounds: Exploring our Cities Within (London: Reaktion Books; New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2016); B.Braun, ‘Producing Vertical Territory: Geology and Governmentality in Late Victorian
Canada’, Ecumene, 7, 2000, pp. 7–46; H.V.Scott, ‘Colonialism, Landscape and the Subterranean’,
Geography Compass 2, 2008, pp. 1852–69; G.Bridge, ‘The Hole World: Scales and Spaces of Extraction’,
Scenario Journal, 5, 2015, unpaginated; S.Cant, ‘“The Tug of Danger with the Magnetism of Mystery”:
Descents into “The Comprehensive Poetic-Sensuous Appeal of Caves”’, Tourist Studies 3(1), 2003, pp.
67–81, 69; S.C.Aitken, ‘A Phenomenology of Caving’, The Canadian Caver, 18(2), 1986, pp. 26–9;
S.Cant, ‘British Speleologies: Geographies of Science, Personality and Practice, 1935-1953’, Journal
of Historical Geography, 32(4), 2006, pp. 775–95; M.A.Pérez, ‘Lines Underground: Exploring and
Mapping Venezuela’s Cave Environment’, Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic
Information and Geovisualization, 48, 2013, pp. 293–308.

11. J.J.Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015);
H.Scott, Fuel: An Ecocritical History (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

12. For example R.Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); Braun, ‘Producing Vertical Territory’; H.Hawkins, ‘(W)
holes – Volume, Horizon, Surface – Three Intimate Geologies’, Emotion, Space and Society, 32, 2019,
p. 100583.

13. R.Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society and the Imagination (Boston:
MIT Press, 2008), p. 4.

14. N.Clark, Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (London: SAGE, 2011); Clark and Yusoff,
‘Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’.

15. G.Bridge, ‘Territory, Now in 3D’, Political Geography 34, 2013, pp. 55–7; D.Depledge, ‘Geopolitical
Material: Assemblages of Geopower and the Constitution of the Geopolitical Stage’, Political Geography,
45, 2015, pp. 91–2; K.Peters, P.Steinberg and E.Stratford, Territory beyond Terra (London: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2018); R.Squire, ‘Rock, Water, Air and Fire: Foregrounding the Elements in the Gibraltar-Spain

Hawkins 19

Dispute’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34, 2016, pp. 545–63; H.Hawkins, ‘“A Volcanic
Incident”: Towards a Geopolitical Aesthetics of the Subterranean’, Geopolitics. Epub ahead of print 25
September 2018. DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2017.1399877; see also the papers collected in the special issue
of Geopolitics on Subterranean Geopolitics, edited by Rachael Square and Klauss Dodds, 2019.

16. D.Chakrabarty, ‘Anthropocene Time’, History and Theory 57(1), 2018, 5–32; F.Ginn, M.Bastian,
D.Farrier and J.Kidwell, ‘Introduction: Unexpected Encounters with Deep Time’, Environmental
Humanities 10(1), 2018, 213–25.

17. E.Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016);
K.Yusoff, ‘Geologic Life: Prehistory, Climate, Futures in the Anthropocene’, Environment and Planning
D: Society and Space, 31, 2013, pp. 779–95; B.Woodward, On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New
Geophilosophy (New York: Punctum Books, 2013).

18. Ferrier, Anthropocene Poetics, p. 6.
19. Our collaboration started with an Arts Council England Award, a Leverhulme Artist in Residence Grant

and further Arts and Humanities Research Council funding.
20. The Somerset fieldwork was conducted in May 2015, Mother Shipton’s cave in March 2019.
21. F.Parrott and H.Hawkins, Fieldwork: A Conversation (Leonardo, in press); F.Parrott and H.Hawkins,

‘Six Voids’, in A.Secor and P.Kingsbury (eds), A Place More Void (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, in press); Expand and Contract Seminar; Caving: A Workshop – Tate Modern, 14 February 2016.

22. P.Dobraszczyjk, C.L.Galviz and B.L.Garrett. Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within (London:
Reaktion Books, 2016); I.Klinke, A Subterranean Journey into Cold War Germany (London: Blackwell,
2018); Cohen, Stone.

23. Pike, Metropolis on the Styx.
24. Williams, Notes on the Underground.
25. Williams, Notes on the Underground.
26. Williams, Notes on the Underground, p. 20.
27. Williams, Notes on the Underground, p. 4.
28. G.Pálsson and H.Swanson, ‘Down to Earth: Geosocialities and Geopolitics’, Environmental Humanities,

8, 2016, pp. 149–71.
29. Clark and Yusoff, ‘Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’.
30. Povinelli, Geontologies.
31. M.T.Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Charlotte: University of North

Carolina Press, 2010); G.S.Carreno, Mining and the Living Materiality of Mountains in Andean
Societies, Journal of Material Culture, 22, 2017, pp. 133–50.

32. E.Grosz, K.Yusoff and N.Clark, ‘An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz: Geopower, Inhumanism and the
Biopolitical’, Theory Culture and Society, 34(2–3), 2017, pp. 129–46, 137.

33. Ferrier, Anthropocene Poetics, p. 6.
34. Ferrier, Anthropocene Poetics, pp. 9, 48.
35. S.Carroll, An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Spaces in the British Imagination (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); N.Hermingman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (New
York: Cornell University Press, 2004); R.MacFarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey (London:
Penguin Books, 2019); M.Sommer, ‘The Romantic Cave?’, History of Earth Sciences Society, 22(2),
2003, pp. 172–208.

36. N.Clark, A.Gormally and H.Tuffen, ‘Speculative Volcanology: Time, Becoming and Violence in
Encounters with Magma’, Environmental Humanities, 10, 2018, pp. 273–94, 274; Clark, Inhuman
Nature; K.Yusoff, ‘Geologic Subjects: Nonhuman Origins, Geomorphic Aesthetics and the Art of
Becoming Inhuman’, cultural geographies, 22(3), 2015, pp. 283–407.

37. Pálsson and Swanson, ‘Down to Earth’, p. 154.
38. Pálsson and Swanson, ‘Down to Earth’.
39. See Pérez, Lines for the dangers of an unhelpful dichotomy between ordinary and extraordinary with

respect to the underground; Pálsson and Swanson, ‘Down to Earth’.
40. Pálsson and Swanson, ‘Down to Earth’, p. 155.
41. Ferrier, Anthropocene Poetics.

20 cultural geographies 27(1)

42. Ferrier, Anthropocene Poetics.
43. Clark and Yusoff, ‘Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’, p. 160.
44. Aitken, ‘A Phenomenology of Caving’; Cant, ‘British Speleologies’; Pérez, ‘Lines Underground’.
45. See Note 8.
46. Cant, ‘British Speleologies’.
47. Pérez, Lines.
48. Ferrier, Anthropocene Poetics.
49. Cant, ‘The Tug of Danger with the Magnetism of Mystery’; MacFarlane, Underlands.
50. J.Edwards, ‘‘The Land to Forget Time’: Tourism, Caving and Writing in the Derbyshire White Peak‘,

Landscape 42, 2017, pp. 634–49, 642.
51. Ferrier, Anthropocene Poetics.
52. J.Gabrys, G.Hawkins and M.Michael, Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic (London:

Routledge, 2013).
53. S.Taffel, ‘Technofossils of the Anthropocene: Media, Geology and Plastics’, Cultural Politics 12(3),

2016, pp. 355–75.
54. M.Bastian and T.van Dooren, ‘The New Immortals: Immortality and Infinitude in the Anthropocene’,

Journal of Environmental Philosophy, 14(1), 2017, pp. 1–9.
55. D.Dixon, Feminist Geopolitics: Material States (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 63.
56. K.Bosworth, ‘Thinking Permeable Matter through Feminist Geophilosophy: Environmental Knowledge

Controversy and the Materiality of Hydrogeologic Processes’, Environment and Planning D: Society &
Space, 35(1), 2017, pp. 21–37.

57. H.Davies, ‘Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures’, philoSOPHIA, 5(2), 2015, pp.
231–50.

58. S.Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2016).

59. Clark and Yusoff, ‘Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’.
60. Bosworth, ‘Thinking Permeable Matter through Feminist Geophilosophy’.
61. C.Lyell, Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface,

by Reference to Causes Now in Operation (London: John Murray, 1830),

62. Clark and Yusoff, ‘Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’.
63. Clark and Yusoff, ‘Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’.
64. Quoted on the sign at the site; J.Leland, ‘The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535-1543’,

Edited by Lucy Toulmin Smith,

65. For example, F.T.Buckland, Curiosities of Natural History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan,
2005[1865]); B.A.Burrell, ‘A History of the Dropping Well at Knaresborough with the Analysis of the
Water’, Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological and Polytechnic Society, 13, 1896, pp. 135–43.

66. Accounts of Mother Shipton include, D.A.Wilson, ‘The Myth of Mother Shipton: Prophet-Making and
Profit Taking’, in M.Crane and R.Raiswell (eds), Shell Games: Studies in Scams, Frauds, and Deceits
(1300-1650) (Toronto: Victorian University Press, 2004), pp. 309–24.

67. Ferrier, Anthropocene Poetics, p. 8.
68. Bosworth, ‘Thinking Permeable Matter through Feminist Geophilosophy’.
69. Grosz, Yusoff, Clark, ‘An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz’, p. 144.
70. Pálsson and Swanson, ‘Down to Earth’.
71. E.Povinelli, ‘On Biopolitics and the Anthropocene: Elizabeth Povinelli, Interviewed by Mat Coleman and

Katheryn Yusoff’, 2014,

72. K.Yusoff, E.Grosz, N.Clark, A.Saldanha and C.Nash. ‘Geopower: A Panel on Elizabeth Grosz’s Chaos,
Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,
30, 2012, pp. 971–88.

http://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/Ancillary/BeagleLibrary/18303_Lyell_A505/1830_Lyell_A505.1.html?ref=driverlayer.com/imageVolume1

http://www.archive.org/stream/itineraryofjohnl05lelauoft/itineraryofjohnl05lelauoft_djvu.txt

http://societyandspace.org/2014/03/06/on-biopolitics-the-anthropocene-and-neoliberalism/

Hawkins 21

73. I am grateful to a reviewer comment that noted other kinds of imaginaries this site evoked in for them,
from time capsules to pagen rites. Space does not allow me to take up these other possibilities, although
it was highly useful to be reminded of the importance of making space for the multiple interpretative
possibilities these sites evoke.

74. Yusoff, ‘Geologic Life’.
75. W.Harrison, Mother Shipton Investigated (London: W.H. Harrison, 1881), Pamplet: The Prophesies of

Mother Shipton in the Raigne of King Henry the Eighth (London, 1641).
76. See Note 68.
77. G.M.E.Alban, The Medusa Gaze in contemporary Women’s Fiction: Petrifying, Maternal and Redemptive

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
78. Povinelli, Geontologies, p. 23.
79. Wolfe, Tales from the Underground; Hunt, Underground; Lesser, The Life below the Ground; Williams,

Notes on the Underground; Pike, Metropolis on the Styx.
80. Clark and Yusoff, ‘Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’.
81. T.Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury,

2015); T.J.Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Berlin: Sternberg
Press, 2017); M.Miles, Eco-aesthetics Art, Literature and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change
(London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

82. H.C.Prince, ‘The Geographical Imagination’, Landscape 11, 1962, pp. 22–5; G.Derek. Geographical
Imaginations (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 1994); S.Daniels, ‘Geographical Imagination’, Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers, 36(2), 2011, pp. 182–87.

83. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism; Carreno, ‘Mining and the Living Materiality of Mountains
in Andean Societies’; Povinelli, Geontologies.

Author biography

Harriet Hawkins explores the geography of art works and art worlds. Often working collaborative with artists,
she explores ideas of creativty, aesthetics and the imagination in the context of enviornmental change, and
most recently with respect to subterranean spaces.

Social & cultural GeoGraphy, 2016
Vol. 17, No. 6, 803–807
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1165859

Engaging climate change: cultural geography and worldly
theory

George Revill

Faculty of arts and Social Sciences, Department of Geography, the open university, Milton Keynes, uK

ARTICLE HISTORY received 3 May 2015; accepted 25 February 2016

Introduction

This provocation proposes that cultural geographers should pay more attention to theory
itself as geographically and historically located cultural material. The paper argues this opens
up the possibilities for theorizing within the context of interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary
research. It has particular relevance for cultural geography’s engagement with arts and cre-
ative practice. The paper adopts the example of climate change to highlight some of the
ways theories and concepts both connect and divide in interdisciplinary contexts. It argues
for an historical and cultural approach to theory and theorizing able to both contextualize
different approaches and open up theoretical spaces to informed creative thinking which
might help us bridge disciplinary divides.

In this context, theoretical ‘worldliness’ means recognizing the situated nature of knowl-
edge and developing sensitivity to the various ways in which theories circulate and act
beyond the familiar territory of our own discipline. As used here, this notion foregrounds
the way theories operate across a range of scales, from the global and universal to the
local and particular. The climatologist Mike Hulme (e.g. Hulme, 2009) has done much to
argue for the importance of culture in understanding climate change issues, engaging
publics at a wide variety of levels from the personal to the global. Cultural geographers
have certainly taken up this challenge, developing specific concerns with cultures of sci-
ence and scientific understanding, collaborations with artist practitioners around issues
of place making, environmental understandings and public engagement (e.g. Brace &
Geoghegan, 2010; Daniels & Endfield, 2009; Endfield & Morris, 2012; Gabrys & Yusoff, 2012;
Miles, 2010). If as Hulme argues, sensitivity to cultural specificity is central to effective
environmental engagement, then theorizing relevant to issues such as climate change
must also be recognized as having spatio-temporal cultural specificity. One might ask,
how can we develop theory within such environmental debates which is modest enough
to engage specific experience yet imaginative enough to speak creatively and construc-
tively beyond its home territory?

CONTACT George revill george.revill@open.ac.uk

mailto:george.revill@open.ac.uk

804 G. REvIll

Climate change and cultural geographies of theory

With a few very notable and high profile exceptions, it can be argued that human geography
is a net importer of theory. Considering geography is such a vibrant and well-established
discipline, it has been strongly argued that the discipline does not develop its own theory
nearly often enough (Philo & Söderström, 2004, p. 106). Rather, geography tends to be a net
importer of theory from elsewhere. As Massey (2005) argues in the context of theory drawn
from both the human and physical sciences, geographers must disentangle their own par-
ticular theoretical interests from the agendas and interests ‘provoked by their moments’ and
‘the debates of which they were a part’ (Massey, 2005, p. 19). Massey argues that geographers
need to recognize that theories are worldly in the sense that they are the products of geo-
graphically and historically specific sets of social, cultural and political relations. In order to
use theory creatively, it needs to be critically situated rather than taken at face value.

Attention to situating and historicizing theory has a particular relevance to debates about
climate change. Academic debate concerning climate change has distinctive ways of prob-
lematizing the local and the global, in terms of general processes and particularly understand-
ings of process and change. Fleming, Jankovic, and Coen (2006) show how issues of local and
global, the specific and the universal have been a constant point of tension in the history and
science of weather. Recognizing this, Hulme (2008) borrows the concept of cosmopolitanism
from latour in order to provide a theoretical context for the plurality of climate change under-
standings and discourses operating across a variety of spatial scales. However, the term cos-
mopolitan is not without its critics, or its historical, cultural and geographical baggage. The
term has been roundly critiqued within post-colonial theory as valorizing the privileged posi-
tion of highly mobile, educated, urban westerners. Outside the metropolitan heartlands of the
developed North, the concept does not necessarily have much purchase on the world, its
effects may be both oppressive and reactionary (Jazeel & McFarlane, 2010).

Hulme’s use of the term cosmopolitanism highlights important issues raised by, for exam-
ple, Edward Said and James Clifford, concerning how theories and concepts move, travel
and translate from location to location and time to time. This sense of situated theory still
does not seem to work often enough within the north as a driver for theorizing. The south,
it seems, needs its situationally specific theory in order to gain purchase on the world, but
northern theory remains all too often ‘universal’ and universalizing in its cultural and geo-
graphical claims (Mignolo, 2002). It is all too easy for even relatively enlightened theorizing
specific to issues such as climate change to fall into the trap of devising local solutions to a
global problem defined around the theoretical framings of the global north.

Interdisciplinarity and engagement

Within present day cultural geography, issues of engagement and interdisciplinarity are very
much on the agenda and it is very likely that these issues will be an increasing focus of
attention in the future. Engagement and interdisciplinarity are particularly pressing issues
for work concerning climate change. It is easy to pick out several reasons for this:

Firstly: the need to bring together a wide variety of disciplinary knowledges in order to study
climate change in its physical and human complexity.

Secondly: the need to engage, consult, inform and converse with publics in terms of both under-
standing the nature, trajectory and implications of the changes that might take place and pro-
ducing viable and publicly agreeable futures in the knowledge of change.

SOCIAl & CulTuRAl GEOGRAPHY 805

For cultural geographers, the concept of landscape is both a key interdisciplinary term and
one which has considerable potential with regard to the study of climate change in terms of
developing more modest and culturally specific theorizing (Brace & Geoghegan, 2010). But
landscape itself is not an unproblematic or uncontested term even within cultural geography
where it is variously a set of aesthetic codes and/or practices of living and dwelling. One then
needs to add to this usage the very different ways in which the term is used as a group of
techniques for planning and design in, for example, landscape architecture, planning and
ecology. Terms such as ‘landscape’ can prove problematic when cultural geographers work in
interdisciplinary contexts. The many different uses and applications of the term landscape,
make it all too easy to talk past colleagues from other disciplines even where we appear to be
using a shared vocabulary and conceptual framework. Given Hulme’s appeal for geographers
to understand experiences of climate change as culturally and geographically specific. It seems
evident that long-standing concepts such as ‘landscape’ like more recent ones such as ‘cosmo-
politanism’ might offer universalizing false friends unless considered carefully in historically
specific ways. Finding ways of understanding these and other concepts as themselves cultural
materials with specific histories and usages is imperative if cultural geography’s expertise is to
play a constructive part in debates around climate change.

Art engagement and worldly theory

Increasingly cultural geographers concerned with issues such as climate change are working
with practicing artists. In turn, artists engaging with social scientists draw on theories, con-
cepts and metaphors from social science and social and cultural theory. varieties of perfor-
mance-based, socially engaged and publicly collaborative creativity have become important
ways in which cultural geographers work with artists and others to engage publics with
climate science and its consequences, see for example, the work of organizations such as
Cape Farewell, Tipping Point or the well-known london-based arts collective Platform
(Hawkins, 2013; Miles, 2010). This interaction is productive and encouraging; however, it also
provides multiple opportunities for conceptual mismatch. In this context, I found a rather
refreshing approach in a recent book by the composer, improviser and champion of dem-
ocratic forms of music making, Sam Richards. Richards discusses how musicians can engage
with issues of potentially cataclysmic change posed by the present including that of anthro-
pogenically induced climate change. He says:

Zizek’s version of the present as ‘end times’ has inevitably caused controversy. Some critics
have responded cautiously to his Slavic gloom, seeing it as apocalypse rather than analytic,
and his method of argument – non sequential, irrational, uneven – has also attracted criticism.
But these qualities are also those that can make him interesting to artists for whom metaphor,
fragile connections can be prima material. As fact, and definitely as prediction, it is possible to
question his idea of ‘end times’. As both image and text it has tone and texture to recommend
it. (Richards, 2014, p. 37)

What I admire here is how Richards recognizes Zizek’s work as flawed, problematic and a
contested way of understanding the world, yet at the same time is able to celebrate its sit-
uatedness. Most telling of all, Richards is suggesting that the ‘flaws’ in Zizek’s theory, its
worldliness, open up the potential of this theory conditionally and contingently in a creative
and productive way. Rather than deploying theory in spite of its ‘faults’ and constrained by
its limitations, Richards suggests we might actively cultivate its worldliness and invite its

806 G. REvIll

rough, ambiguous open edges to create spaces which encourage creative possibility. To this
extent, his thinking has echoes of what Mignolo (2013) might call ‘thinking pluritopically’.
This might be understood as a dwelling within the worldliness of theoretical entanglement,
rather than observing theory from a fixed point outside its relationality. In this context,
worldliness is at least partly a product of the borders which situate knowledge. Richards’
thoughts are both modest and expansive. An ethos of sympathetic elaboration can take
Zizek’s ideas elsewhere and in the process interest, engage, constitute and potentially enrol
new audiences and new publics.

To work constructively with concepts such as ‘end times’ or indeed, the cosmopolitan or
landscape involves taking the cultural geography of theories and concepts seriously in order
to work creatively with their limitations and possibilities. In this context, the alternative
usages and definitions of terms and concepts, with their potential for mismatch and con-
tradiction, become themselves poetic resources which engage and animate imaginations.
This requires a cultural geography of theory which examines how theory is made, remade
and operates in specific circumstances. It would be a cultural geography that explores the
capacity of theories and concepts to animate, organize and engage particular constituencies,
audiences and publics, whilst recognizing that such theories and concepts actualize and
operate differently in various contexts. This would not so much be a strategy for gaining
tighter control over the effects of theory operating on and in the world, but a tactic which
might enable and encourage theory to flourish and elaborate freely within the contexts in
which it is found and deployed. From this position, it might be possible to produce collab-
orations between geographers, art practitioners and publics which, for example, maximize
the opportunities for creative imaginings of climate change futures by recognizing theoret-
ical situatedness whilst not defining or foreclosing possibility.

Conclusion

My wish is to see a greater sensitivity to the historical location of theory, concepts and met-
aphors within cultural geography as rather more than critique in the sense of defining,
regularizing and regulating meaning. Rather, I would like to see us critically evaluate the
cultural-historical geographies of theory, its ‘worldliness’, as a means of creative and con-
structive conceptual engagement. This might actually encourage geographers – particularly
cultural geographers – to do more theorizing and perhaps produce more geographically
sensitive theory for the discipline, particularly in relation to such pressing issues as anthro-
pogenically induced climate change. In this context, theorizations, concepts and metaphors
have to be cast upon the world as points of departure rather than as attempts to control,
define and capture. This does not mean a relativistic free for all but a very careful thinking
through of the ways in which the spatio-temporal specificity of particular theories, concepts
and metaphors open up possibility, allowing them to resonate and elaborate in and through
the world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

SOCIAl & CulTuRAl GEOGRAPHY 807

References

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and lay knowledges. Progress in Human Geography, 35, 284–302.

Daniels, S., & Endfield, G. H. (2009). Narratives of climate change: Introduction. Journal of Historical
Geography, 35, 215–222.

Endfield, G., & Morris, C. (2012). Cultural spaces of climate. Climatic Change, 113, 1–4.
Fleming, J. R., Jankovic, v., & Coen, D. R. (2006). Intimate universality: Local and global themes in the history

of weather and climate. Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications.
Gabrys, J., & Yusoff, K. (2012). Arts, sciences and climate change: Practices and policies at the threshold.

Science as Culture, 21(1), 1–24.
Hawkins, H. (2013). For creative geographies: Geography, visual arts and the making of worlds. london:

Routledge.
Hulme, M. (2008). Cosmopolitan climates: Hybridity. Foresight and Meaning, Theory, Culture and Society,

27, 267–276.
Hulme, M. (2009). Why we disagree about climate change. New York, NY: Cambridge university Press.
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knowledge production. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35, 109–124.
Massey, D. (2005). For space. london: Sage.
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101, 57–96.
Mignolo, W. D. (2013). On pluriversality. Retrieved from http://waltermignolo.com/on-pluriversality/
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individual use.

Who’s in Charge?: Coparenting in South
and Southeast Asian Families

Rahael Kurrien1,2 and Easter Dawn Vo1

In light of the evolving roles of parents and the involvement of extended family within Asian
cultures, the traditionally Western dyadic coparenting construct must be reconceptualized to
include not only the coparenting relationship, but also other caregivers within the coparenting
network. Theoretical and empirical evidence on coparental systems are discussed and two
studies from South and Southeast Asian cultures are presented to highlight subcultural
variations in cocaregiving networks. Results indicated that mothers were the primary care-
givers across both cultural contexts. Extended family members assumed important coparental
responsibilities in both cultural contexts. These findings highlight the need to reconceptualize
and expand the dyadic coparental unit to include extended family members. We also discuss
the relevance of the broader coparental network in examining the Asian child”s education as
well as cognitive and socioemotional development.

KEY WORDS: coparenting; extended families; sub-cultural differences; family roles.

Adults all over the world hold many differ-
ent roles, from friend to coworker to spouse, that
affect their own development as well as that of
their children. One of the most widely researched
adult roles is that of “parent.” For instance, Lamb
(1995) has examined the evolution of the father role
within the United States, and Mirande (1991) has
described the traditional parenting roles in Asian
families. However, over the past 10 years social-
ization researchers (e.g., Belsky, Crnic, & Gable,
1995; McHale, 1995) have given more widespread
attention to the processes of coparenting and co-
caregiving. McHale (1995) defined coparenting as the
amount of support parents provide for one another
in raising their children. As the traditional parenting
roles have begun to evolve because of urbanization,
so too has the process of coparenting.

In the United States, coparenting researchers
have focused both on interadult dynamics within

1Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts.
2To whom correspondence should be addressed at Department
of Psychology, Clark University, 950 Main Street, Worcester,
MassachusettsMA 01601; e-mail: rkurrien@clarku.edu.

families along dimensions such as support and an-
tagonism (Frosch & Mangelsdorf, 2000; Katz &
Gottman, 1996; McHale, 1995), and on delineation
of household duties and childcare responsibilities
between mothers and fathers in nuclear families
(Cowan & Cowan, 1992; Deutsch, Lussier, & Servis,
1993). However, at the same time, there has been
a growing appreciation among developmental psy-
chologists for the fact that millions of the world’s
children are growing up with multiple caregiving
figures (McHale, Khazan, et al., 2002), and that psy-
chology’s stereotypical model of the family in its
nuclear two-parent form has little applicability cross-
nationally (McHale, Lauretti, Talbot, & Pouquette,
2002). Therefore, this paper will (a) discuss the evo-
lution of parenting roles in Asian families and how
those changes have necessitated a reconceptualiza-
tion of coparenting in South and Southeast Asian
families; (b) examine the process by which copar-
enting is navigated in two different cultures by pre-
senting studies of Indian and Vietnamese families’
parenting beliefs and practices; and (c) present an
argument for why coparenting should be studied in
other cultures.

207

208 Kurrien and Dawn Vo

Parental Roles

Differences between ideal, perceived, and actual
parental roles are significant because such discrepan-
cies can affect both the adult’s satisfaction and well-
being in the parenting relationship and the child’s
adjustment and development in life. For instance,
DeVos (1978, cited in Sue & Morishima, 1982) theo-
rizes that “the role and structure within the Japanese
American family are responsible for the individual’s
ability to adapt and adjust” (p. 79). By this he means
that each member within a Japanese family has spe-
cific, well-defined obligations and functions which
they must perform, thereby protecting individuals
from juvenile delinquency, mental disorders, and al-
coholism, while promoting high rates of academic
achievement and income (Sue & Morishima, 1982).
Empirical work has supported DeVos’ theory and
shown that the way parents view their role is im-
portant to their personal mental health (Brody, Flor,
& Neubaum, 1998; Sonuga-Barke & Mistry, 2000)
and to their child’s development and adjustment
(Hackett & Hackett, 1993; Ishii-Kuntz, 1995; Lamb,
1995) across a number of different cultures.

Caregivers do not exist within a vacuum but
are part of a broader environmental surround that
influences their own and their children’s develop-
ment. As will be discussed in further detail shortly,
there are prototypical mother and father roles that
often vary little across cultures. However, the diver-
gent cross-cultural functions of mothers and fathers
evolve based on factors such as industrialization,
residential living patterns, and roles of other family
members. Although traditional and evolved mother–
father roles may be relatively similar across cultures,
it is other caregiver roles (e.g., grandparent, aunt)
and the environment (e.g., the extended family liv-
ing) in which a child is raised that may contribute to
the diverging pathways toward mental health (Brody
et al., 1998; Sonuga-Barke & Mistry, 2000) and child
adjustment (Hackett & Hackett, 1993; Ishii-Kuntz,
1995; Lamb, 1995). For instance, parents in many
cultures may have the goal of caring and providing
for their children, but the context in which they raise
their children may be vastly different, thus contribut-
ing to different developmental outcomes.

Traditional Roles

Cross-culturally, traditional parental roles often
dictate that the mother be doting, emotional provider

with the father as a teacher and main provider of
material support (Ho, 1987; Ishii-Kuntz, 1995). In
both Asia (Mirande, 1991) and America (Lamb,
1995), the most traditional basic role for mothers
has indeed been that of nurturer with fathers as the
primary breadwinner. Although times have changed,
this basic role division is still at work in both Asian
and European American cultures. The contention
here is not that parental roles are perceived in the
same way across all cultures, but that often the ideal,
primary roles of parents are construed in the same
manner across cultures and that the ideals evolve as
the society develops and grows.

Just as American fathers were once primarily
viewed as breadwinners or moral and gender role
guides with mothers’ primary functions viewed as
emotional and physical nurturers (Lamb, 1995),
roles of Asian parents were construed in this fashion.
In a conceptual paper describing traditional Asian
parents, Shon and Ja (1992) characterize the father
as the unquestioned authority and leader of the
family while the mother is the nurturer. Most often,
Confucian principles provide the historical basis for
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian
parenting roles (Mirande, 1991). This typically
implies that the father made most of the decisions,
had the responsibility to provide for the family by
ensuring its economic welfare, and was the primary
disciplinarian. In contrast, the mother’s role was to
be emotionally available by listening when the child
had difficulties and to be emotionally expressive.
Furthermore, the mother’s role was to feed, clothe,
and take care of the child. Fathers also had this
function, but fulfilled it more instrumentally by
providing the economic means to feed, clothe, and
take care of the child, whereas mothers were the
ones who carried out actual caretaking activities
(Ishii-Kuntz, 2000; Shon & Ja, 1992). Kibria’s (1993)
findings also support this distinction of parental roles
in Vietnamese families. The fathers in Kibria’s (1993)
interviews were the primary breadwinners, more
physically and emotionally distant than mothers,
and the main authority figures who meted out the
punishment. Thus, at the most basic level, mothers
were the main sources of physical and emotional
support while fathers were the primary breadwinners
and disciplinarians. Both Asian and Euro-American
fathers were less involved than mothers in the daily
caretaking activities (i.e., bathing, feeding) of their
children, while mothers maintained the primary
caregiver role by providing emotional and physical
nurturance. However, as times have changed,

Coparenting in South and Southeast Asian Families 209

fathers in both cultures have expanded their primary
functions such that they become more involved even
at earlier stages of the child’s development.

The Evolving Roles

With urbanization, migration, and acculturation
the father’s role has appeared to change more than
the mother’s role for both European and Asian
Americans. Within the last few decades in America, a
“new fatherhood” movement surfaced (Lamb, 1995)
in which the fathers’ primary role moved toward
being more involved and nurturant toward the chil-
dren, although still less so than mothers. The Euro-
American fathers moved from an exclusive role as
breadwinner and teacher to emphasizing the devel-
opment of close affective relationships with their
children (Harkness & Super, 1992). Despite urban-
ization, the Euro-American mother has remained in
the role of primary nurturer and emotional provider
although her time spent with the child may be less
than before (Lamb, 1995). Similarly, Jankowiak’s
(1992) review of Asian societies showed that urban-
ization led to a change from fathers’ discouraging
emotional display toward a more intimate father–
child bond such that fathers can now, within their
expected role, display affection. This new role of
fathers owes largely to mothers’ employment outside
of the home, different sizes of the domestic space
(smaller living space forces fathers to be in closer
proximity to their children), and the new folk concept
of increasing father involvement (Jankowiak, 1992;
Lamb, 1995).

Besides engaging in more frequent and active
emotional displays, fathers are also beginning to
spend more time with their children and participating
in child rearing activities. Lamb (1995) would argue
that while fathers are still expected to fulfill the
primary breadwinner role, they are also becoming a
greater indirect source of influence on mothers and
are more directly involved with childcare. Fathers
in or from Asian countries have likewise become
nurturant in the sense that they spend more time
interacting with their children. For instance, there is
some evidence that Japanese men are making the
transition from being absent, workaholic fathers to
more nurturant fathers due to karoshi (death by
fatigue) and children’s toko kyohi (refusal to at-
tend school; Ishii-Kuntz, 1995). These families, then,
are becoming less “fatherless” in the physical sense.
Correspondingly, in a survey-based qualitative study

that asked about aspects of children’s educational,
psychological, and cultural problems and assets,
Korean parents indicated that fathers in America are
more likely to participate in childcare activities such
as changing diapers (Yu & Kim, 1983). They also
recognized the need for egalitarian roles between
husband and wife. Therefore, in both Asian and
Euro-American families, fathers are becoming more
nurturant in the sense that they spend more time with
their children and are slowly progressing to share
more childcare duties.

Because roles have changed and there is more
involvement between parents across all domains of
parenting, the importance of studying the coordina-
tion of these roles on the children’s mental health is
extremely important. As Asian families also become
more westernized, it becomes important, too, to
study how they transition to coordinating roles rather
than maintaining strict parenting role boundaries.
This sharing of roles requires greater coordination
and cooperation between parents. However, beyond
the mother–father-coparenting unit, given the in-
volvement of extended family in Asian cultures, it is
important also to examine the entire coparenting net-
work that may include grandparents, aunts, and older
siblings. Relatives in Asian cultures may be placed by
mothers and fathers in the role of surrogate parent
and thus, are afforded the right or has the obligation
to provide discipline or moral instruction to the child.
Also, many Asian families engage in extended family
living such that the influence of nuclear and extended
family remains stable and consequential. Thus, how
do all the “parents” within the Asian family organize
and manage their parental roles and beliefs?

Extended Family Involvement

The functioning cocaregiving unit in many non-
Western family units extends beyond mothers and fa-
thers to other relatives (e.g., Bharat, 1996; Mirande,
1991) as well as close family friends in some circum-
stances (Kibria, 1993). In Asian cultures (Mirande,
1991; Staples & Mirande, 1980; Woods, 1996), as
opposed to American society, the extended fam-
ily network is an obligation rather than an option.
Generally, extended family living is more prevalent
among Asian Americans than Euro-Americans. Fur-
thermore, Vietnamese families report greater ex-
tended family living than any other Asian American
groups (U.S. census data, 1990, cited in Ishii-Kuntz,
2000).

210 Kurrien and Dawn Vo

In comparison to the United States, societies in
which the extended family plays a more prominent
function also have designated family member roles.
Although the mother–child dyad has been consid-
ered of primary influence on the child’s development
and survival, in the extended family living environ-
ment the mother’s role becomes less central (Rogoff,
Mistry, Goncu, & Mosier, 1991). This is especially
true in families who have more than one child,
live near or even with relatives, and are involved
in a relationship of long-term support and obliga-
tion with other community members (Rogoff et al.,
1991).

Brody et al. (1998) speculate that the ex-
tended kin network provides strength to the African
American family so that children, despite chronic
problems such as poverty, can often develop into
“emotionally, healthy competent people” (p. 232).
Also, Hackett and Hackett (1993) attributed greater
well-being of Asian children to structural features of
the traditional Asian family. Particularly, they found
that extended family involvement promotes psycho-
logical well-being in children. On the other hand,
when the extended family does not provide tangible
and emotional assistance, there is also risk for ten-
sion to arise. Disagreements and conflicts between
different caregivers (not just parents) often send the
child the message of instability and may adversely
affect the child’s outcome (Brody et al., 1998). Thus,
it can be speculated that when one person infringes
on the perceived role boundaries or does not meet
the actual role, conflict may ensue and create disad-
vantages in a child’s development.

In other related work, Roopnarine, Lu, and
Ahmeduzzaman (1989) have shown that in the
Kuching (a Chinese Malyasian society) and in Asian
Indian societies, the extended family network is actu-
ally preferred over the nuclear family unit. In modern
society, it is difficult to maintain the extended family
structure because of the more common dual-earner
unit and other means of childcare (i.e., nonrelated
caregivers). However, the father–son ties help to
maintain the extended family network. Also, in these
societies, adults may drop in to visit friends and
relatives without first giving notification or having
an invitation—an act that is usually construed as
intrusive in American society. If the families are
able to visit anytime, are they also allowed to give
their opinions and participate in child rearing? In-
deed, Roopnarine et al. (1989) suggest that in Indian
families, extended family members contribute to the
socialization of infants and young children because

most of the early childhood is spent in an extended
family environment.

For refugees such as the Vietnamese, the struc-
ture of extended families is even more multifaceted.
After the Vietnam War, it was far too common
to find young Vietnamese children in the United
States without their parents or Vietnamese hus-
bands without their wives; so as a coping mech-
anism, Vietnamese Americans worked hard to re-
build family ties in the United States by altering and
broadening the inclusion criteria of “family” (Kibria,
1993). Therefore, friends and distant relatives who
had been only marginally involved in the family in
Vietnam became part of the active circle of kin net-
work in the United States (Kibria, 1993). Histori-
cally, Vietnamese families used Confucianism as a set
of ideal standards for kin relations, but they also had
a less strict model that included bilateral and distant
kin (Kibria, 1993). This has perhaps enabled them
more flexibility to include friends and extended fam-
ily members into the immediate family network once
in the United States. Vietnamese Americans endeav-
ored not only to implement the traditional family
system, but also to expand upon it for emotional
and economic gains in the United States (Kibria,
1993).

Given the fact that extended family involvement
and living is an obligation rather than an option
in many Asian cultures (Staples & Mirande, 1980;
Woods, 1996), we present data from two studies
about cocaregiving roles and family structure within
Asian cultures to further McHale’s argument that the
construct of coparenting must be reconceptualized
for these families in order to accurately encapsulate
their family processes. Specifically, we will examine
studies of Indian and Vietnamese families to exem-
plify the need for reconceptualization. Coparenting
has been defined as the degree of support parents
provide for one another in raising their children
(McHale, 1995). In light of our argument above
about the evolution of parenting roles as well as
the obligation of extended family involvement, what
does the process of coparenting in other cultures look
like?

Coparental Systems in Asian Cultures

The complexities of family systems and process
in Asian families makes the study of coparenting in
these cultures particularly relevant because it offers
a comparative view of contemporary child rearing

Coparenting in South and Southeast Asian Families 211

and caregiving arrangements. In addition, in exam-
ining cocaregiving in Asian cultures, it is particularly
important to take into account the growing influence
of westernization and urbanization on Asian families
that have led to both structural and cultural changes
in family networks, child rearing beliefs, and child-
care arrangements.

Although there have been numerous conceptual
and ethnographic reports on family life in Asian
families (Kibria, 1993; Zhou & Bankston, 1998) there
have been relatively few empirical studies on par-
enting and family dynamics. With regards to par-
enting, research in Asia has broadly focused on the
themes of familial interdependence and parenting
styles (Chao & Tseng, 2002). In India, for exam-
ple, the ties between family members and relatives
are characterized by a strong sense of duty, familial
expectations, roles and obligations, irrespective of
the proximity of residence (Sekaran, 1992). Family
researchers in India have examined the associations
between maternal employment and gender role ide-
ologies on paternal and extrafamilial involvement in
childcare with somewhat contradictory results. Al-
though Ramu (1987) reported that in middle-class
Indian families, maternal employment did not have
a significant effect on men’s involvement in child-
care tasks, Suppal, Roopnarine, Buesig, and Bennett
(1996) nearly a decade later asserted that families
in which women were primarily homemakers were
more likely to hold a traditional orientation with
respect to the gendered division of family roles. Sub-
cultural differences in socioeconomic status family
structure and living circumstances (urban/rural) have
also been examined with relation to the division
of childcare responsibilities in Indian families. Al-
though these studies across the board have indicated
that mothers remain the primary caregiver, it is im-
portant to note interesting subgroup differences. In
nuclear families, mothers relied on fathers and do-
mestic servants to share in caregiving tasks whereas
in joint families, mothers sought assistance from ex-
tended family members (e.g., grandmothers, aunts)
who often assumed significant roles in other aspects
of child rearing. In addition, in socioeconomically
disadvantaged families in which mothers worked out-
side the home, caretaking responsibilities were di-
vided among other family members (Seymour, 1993,
1999). In a study of rural caregiving arrangements
in India, rural mothers, irrespective of employment
status, relied on female family members and older
siblings for cocaregiving (Desai & Jain, 1994; Sriram
& Ganapathy, 1997).

A similar pattern of dependence on family mem-
bers for childcare was noted among dual-earner Sin-
gaporean families (Yuen & Lim, 1992). According to
a 1986 National Survey of Working Mothers (cited
in Yuen & Lim, 1992), more than half of all working
mothers sought assistance from relatives, particularly
grandmothers, for caregiving of their pre-school-age
children. About 40% of these women lived in ex-
tended family situations. The employment of domes-
tic servants to help out with both household work and
childcare is common among upper class dual-earner
families. The foster care of children, particularly
infants, is still a common caregiving arrangement
among the more traditional of dual-earner Singa-
porean families. The formal childcare system, which
primarily caters to pre-school-age children, is slowly
gaining popularity among educated working mothers
in Singapore (Yuen & Lim, 1992). Lu, Maume, and
Bellas (2000) in an analysis of the 1991 Household
Survey of the China Health and Nutrition Study re-
ported interesting urban–rural differences in the pre-
dictors of paternal involvement in household labor
and childcare in Chinese families. In urban house-
holds, maternal employment and men’s higher edu-
cation levels were associated with greater paternal
engagement in household work and childcare. Con-
versely, the greater the disparity between spouses’
income levels, the lower urban men’s participation
was in household labor and caregiving. On the other
hand, in rural families, maternal employment status,
men’s higher educational status, and the egalitarian
balance of decision-making powers between spouses
positively influenced the amount of time that men
spent in household labor and caregiving. Although
across both urban and rural settings, mothers were
primarily responsible for housework and childcare,
in rural families in which there was a daughter-in-law,
men’s involvement in household chores and caregiv-
ing decreased.

In summary, in light of the evidence on parent-
ing in Asian cultures which indicate that female fam-
ily members (e.g., grandmothers and aunts), older
siblings, and neighbors are central cocaretaking fig-
ures, there is a need to reconceptualize the tradi-
tional Western dyadic coparenting construct in order
to accurately portray and describe the complexities
of caregiving arrangements in contemporary Asian
families. Although structural aspects such as family
composition are important considerations in the con-
ceptualization of coparenting in Asian families, inter-
familial functional relationships (e.g., the nature and
extent of social interaction, communication) have

212 Kurrien and Dawn Vo

also been recently emphasized in cross-cultural stud-
ies of the family (Georgas et al., 2001). The question
of functional relationships is particularly pertinent to
Asian families wherein gender role ideologies shape
interactions and expectations within the family.

RECONCEPTUALIZING COPARENTING IN
SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIAN CULTURES

The significance of extended family members
and other informal childcare figures (such as neigh-
bors) has been emphasized in many reports of par-
enting and role-sharing (Desai & Jain, 1994; Lu et al.,
2000; Sinha, 1996; Verma, 1995) in South Asian
cultures. We contend that applying the dyadic, pre-
dominantly Western, conceptualization of the copar-
enting construct to studying coparenting dynamics
and family systems in South and Southeast Asian
cultures would be erroneous and would negate the
influence of important multiple caregivers in the
child’s environment. Understanding the variability in
the composition of caregiving networks is also crucial
in accurately describing the functional complexities
of coparenting systems within these cultures. We
will examine the relevance of the Western dyadic
coparenting construct, and highlight the need for a
broader reconceptualization of the construct in cross-
cultural family studies by presenting data from two
studies on cocaregiving arrangements in Vietnamese
American and Indian families. These studies under-
score the importance of developing indigenous the-
oretical frameworks in order to reliably understand
and portray Asian family system.

Study 1: The Indian Family Context

The first study was a quantitative analysis of the
variability in cocaregiving arrangements as a function
of socioeconomic status and family structure in con-
temporary urban and rural Indian families. The sam-
ple comprised of three subgroups of 15 Hindu moth-
ers, each with a pre-school-age child. Fifteen families
lived in an urban socioeconomically disadvantaged
area of Pune, another 15 in upper-middle class neigh-
borhoods in Pune, and the last group of mothers
in a neighboring poor rural area. Each subgroup
had families with nuclear and joint/extended family
structures. We designed a caregiving responsibility
interview schedule in which mothers identified all the
child’s caregivers in the family and then reported on

the weekly distribution of nine caregiving activities
among the identified caretakers. The nine activities
included brushing teeth, toileting, bathing, dressing,
feeding breakfast, taking to preschool center, bring-
ing back home from preschool center, feeding lunch,
feeding dinner, and putting to bed. Mothers reported
on the number of days in the week that different
family members carried out each of the nine caregiv-
ing activities. We initially calculated each caregiver’s
total weekly involvement with the preschooler across
all nine activities and then examined the patterns of
caregiving as a function of family structure and living
circumstance.

Across the patterns of family structure and liv-
ing circumstance, we noted that mothers assumed
the role of primary caregiver of their pre-school-
age children. Of note is the significant interaction
between family structure and living circumstance for
parental involvement in childcare; F (2.45) = 4.27,
p = .02. Follow-up analyses using the Bonferroni
correction for multiple comparisons indicated that
in middle-class urban families, regardless of whether
family structure was nuclear (Fig. 1) or joint (Fig. 2)
fathers were more involved in caregiving than were
fathers in urban and rural disadvantaged families.
Across nuclear families, fathers in upper-middle class
families (M = 14.56, SD = 3.84) were more engaged
in caregiving activities than fathers from urban so-
cioeconomically disadvantaged families (M = 5.00,
SD = 1.41; t = 6.21, df = 14, p = .00) and those from
rural socioeconomically disadvantaged households
(M = 5.20, SD = 0.48; t = 5.16, df = 12, p = .00).
Across joint families, paternal involvement in child-
care in upper-middle class households (M = 8.83,
SD = 2.31) was greater than involvement in both
urban poor (M = 3.75, SD = 1.04; t = 5.57, df = 12,
p = .00) and rural socioeconomically disadvantaged
families (M = 2.80, SD = 0.79; t = 7.68, df = 14, p =
.00). Follow-up analyses indicated no significant dif-
ferences in paternal involvement in caregiving be-
tween the urban and rural socioeconomically disad-
vantaged fathers.

Of note was the compelling degree of variability
in caregiving structures and practices among
contemporary Indian families. Overall, in both urban
and rural residences, fathers in nuclear families were
more engaged in caregiving activities than those in
joint families. In joint families, coparenting respon-
sibilities were shared among other female family
members. In upper-middle class joint families, grand-
mothers were identified as the only nonparental
coparenting source of support, whereas in both

Coparenting in South and Southeast Asian Families 213

Fig. 1. Engagement with child as a function of family structure and living circumstance: Nuclear
Indian families.

Fig. 2. Engagement with child as a function of family structure and living circumstance: Joint
Indian families.

214 Kurrien and Dawn Vo

Table I. Demographic Information for Vietnamese American Families

Number of Number of Children’s age Residence in the
family members children (in years) US (in years)

Family 01 7 1 2.5 20
Family 02 5 3 9, 6, and 1 2
Family 03 7 3 8, 5, 3 months 13
Family 04 6 4 15, 10, 7, 9 months 3
Family 05 3 2 6, 9 months 10

urban and rural socioeconomically disadvantaged
families, caregiving responsibilities were distributed
among other female relatives such as aunts and older
siblings. Part of this may be due to the fact that
our sample of upper-middle class families has fewer
children, and even in families in which there were
older siblings, they were not called upon or expected
to share in caregiving activities. Noteworthy is our
finding that in none of the 24 joint families were
fathers more involved in child care activities than
were grandmothers or other female extended
family members who provided the major source of
caregiving support to the mother. This can be most
prudently explained by the accessibility of other
family members for cocaregiving support and by
the pressure in joint families to subscribe to more
conventional gendered family roles and child rearing
practices than in nuclear families. Findings from this
study support McHale and colleagues’ contention
that narrow conceptualizations of coparenting as a
family process shared by married partners are clearly
irrelevant for many Indian families. Moreover,
they also highlight the important socioeconomic
subcultural differences in Indian families’ functional
cocaregiving arrangements.

Study 2: The Vietnamese American Family Context

The second study was a qualitative analysis of
the Vietnamese American parents’ perception of
parental roles and how they evolved or were main-
tained postimmigration. Participants were five intact
Vietnamese American immigrant families from an
urban New England community of 180,000 people.
The average age for mothers was 33.4 and for fathers
it was 37.6. The average number of children in the
household was three, with the ages ranging from
3 months to 15 years. On average, the families had
been in the United States for 9.4 years (Table I).

Perceptions regarding actual and traditional par-
enting roles as well as expectations of parenting were

obtained through the semistructured Parenting Roles
Interview developed specifically for the study. The
interview consisted of eight questions regarding per-
ceptions of parenting roles, parenting in Vietnam,
and expectations before starting a family. There were
a subset of questions regarding other caregiver roles
(e.g., grandparents) and instances of cooperation or
tension that were only asked if the family indicated
on the demographics questionnaire that other indi-
viduals, aside from mother and father, had parental
or caregiving roles in their children’s lives. Two sce-
narios, one depicting a discipline situation and the
other a feeding scenario, were developed to elicit
reactions from parents regarding a relative and a
close friend participating in unsolicited caretaking
duties of their children.

Extended family members, from the parents’
perceptions, had supportive, complementary roles,
but did not assume any responsibilities that the
parents did not otherwise perform. In other words,
extended family members did not have a unique
role. For instance, mother 05 presented the maternal
grandparent role as

taking care of feeding, sleeping, clothing, and taking
them to school for me, and watching over them at
home so that I can go to work. . . almost equivalent
to the mother’s role because the maternal grandpar-
ents love their grandchildren so they worry about
them a lot.

Similarly, mother 03 considered herself and the
maternal grandmother as having the same functions:
“to give the grandchild the bottle, sit and play with
each other. [laughs] So, if she can help me with
anything, she does then.”

Family 01 parents viewed the maternal grand-
parents as a support system as well as providing
knowledge about Vietnamese culture to the child.
Mother 01 said that if there is

something I don’t understand I ask my mom. Some-
thing that I’m not familiar with and she’s [the child]
sick and it was different and it doesn’t seem like
something that would harm her, I would ask her

Coparenting in South and Southeast Asian Families 215

how to do this, you know Asian remedies, like
dau. . . that’s her role to support and my father too.

The father viewed the grandparents’ roles more
as educators of the child than as parent supporters.
Specifically, the maternal grandparents

teach her a more religious side of it, which is bringing
up the Catholic/Christian value and uh, and um,
more the cultural education, which we can’t give
her because we’re basically, Americanized. So we’ll
teach her what we’ve experienced but also we can
offset that by what her parents [the maternal grand-
parents] give her [the child] of the old culture, so it’s
a very. . . it’s a very delicate balance.

In the Vietnamese child’s life, extended fam-
ily members are typically present within the same
household and depending on the parents’ beliefs,
these family members may have a role that extends
beyond babysitting. These Vietnamese parents per-
ceive their extended family members as having roles
that include teaching and nurturing. Thus, the Viet-
namese child’s social and emotional development is
influenced by input from both the parents and other
family members.

In accordance with DeVos’ theory, these
Vietnamese parents maintain stability through im-
plementation of strict role guidelines that outline
what others have the right to participate in. Further-
more, in the interest of constancy, extended family
members’ roles are not generally unique from that
of mothers and fathers. Parents, grandparents, aunts,
and uncles all feed, teach, and play with children.
Although what is taught to the child may be different,
the common denominator is being a teacher. The ab-
sence of a unique role provides further support that
other caregivers do influence the child and are enti-
tled to participate in caregiving tasks. If the individ-
ual had only babysitting rights, the influence would
be more limited. In the case of Vietnamese families,
though, evidence to date has indicated that extended
family members can be considered “parents” as well.
Most importantly, everyone must function within and
not traverse across the role boundaries.

Of particular note is that although none of the
families reported having nonfamilial members in-
volved in the parenting tasks, they did endorse a
friend’s involvement in the hypothetical scenarios.
In terms of a close friend’s unsolicited participation,
9 of 16 responses were accepting of a friend’s in-
volvement. The differences here reflected a division
between mothers and fathers. In terms of discipline,
only mothers said that a close friend did not have the

right (01) or that it was only the mother’s job (05).
Mother 04 initially did not understand the question
and, given her mental status, said that when the
friend scolds the child and “I’m sick then I’ll yell
back at my close friend. I’ll yell really loudly. I get
very agitated.” Fathers, however, found a friend’s
discipline of their child acceptable. For instance, fa-
ther 04 said, “I wouldn’t be mad because they love
my child. They would. . . if the child does misbehave
then scolding them a little is a good thing.” Similarly,
father 01 “expected it from them because although I
don’t believe in punishment, I do believe in scolding
her and uh, set an example of what is right and wrong.
So I do expect them to scold her.” Father 02 also did
not believe in scolding, but thought that adults must
“teach them through love and care.” Therefore, if a
friend were to “teach” the child, the father would “be
happy” about that.

In summary, both studies depart from the
traditional two-parent nuclear family research
that has been conducted in European American
cultures. Our data revealed that in both Indian
and Vietnamese American families, others play
active roles in the cocaregiving of children. Apart
from the child’s biological parents, the coparenting
figures in his/her environment are most typically
extended family members. In rarer instances, they
may be close nonfamilial friends, who may or may
not be given “fictive” status as uncles or aunts. This
broader coparenting family system in both Indian
and Vietnamese families stands in contrast to the
narrow conceptualization of the two-parent nuclear
marital/coparenting unit in European American
families. Even though the method in both studies
differed, the similarity in findings across the two
cultural groups provide clear support for McHale’s
call to recast the Western coparenting construct
so that it more accurately captures the realities of
family life in contemporary South Asian families.

WHY STUDY COPARENTING
IN ASIAN CULTURES?

We have seen how studying coparenting in other
cultures will require expanding the definitions of
coparenting, but what relevance does this construct
have in Asian cultures at all? Rather than merely
instilling a Western-defined construct on Asian cul-
tures, we must examine what value it holds for
individuals and family development within those
cultures. Typically, the impetus and importance of

216 Kurrien and Dawn Vo

studying coparenting in the United States has been
to study the mechanisms influencing generally, child
development, and specifically, psychopathology. As
emphasized earlier, there has been a dearth of studies
investigating the influence of this larger coparenting
network on the child’s developmental trajectory in
Asian families. We will review some of the studies
that have underscored the impact of the broader co-
parental system on child outcomes such as academic
performance, cognitive development, social adjust-
ment, and overall mental health in Asian cultures.

First, we propose that the expanded view of
coparenting to include other cocaregiving figures is
important to Asian families because of the impact
cohesive coparenting networks may have on the ed-
ucation of children developing within these systems.
Ethnic differences in cultural values and beliefs may
affect children’s academic performance through such
socialization practices as parental discipline (Blair,
Blair, & Madamba, 1999). In relation to coparenting,
if an Asian child living within a household is disci-
plined by many different cocaregivers, this pattern
of discipline must be cohesive between the copar-
enting network in order for it to be effective and
thus, influencing educational achievement. Availabil-
ity of parents has also been associated with academic
performance with single parent status, divorce, or
employment status having the most impact (Astone
& McLanahan, 1991). For Asian families, there may
be more adult, parental figures around who assume
cocaregiving roles and may be able to buffer the
effects of parents who may have to work outside of
the home. Again, it is important that these cocaregiv-
ing figures share congruent perspectives on parent-
ing rather than exhibiting conflict around parenting
roles. In one study of racial and ethnic differences in
academic performance, Blair et al. (1999) found that
Asian American students’ performance was most
affected by socioeconomic status. Asian families who
have extended family living arrangements and are
able to coordinate finances as well as caregiving du-
ties may be more likely to have children who are pro-
vided adequate resources (e.g., finances, attention) to
perform better in school than their Euro-American
counterparts.

Second, many studies have examined the impor-
tance of coordinated efforts between members of the
coparental network on cognitive and social develop-
ment as well as overall mental health. For example,
Hackett and Hackett (1993) attributed greater well-
being of Asian children to structural features of the
traditional Asian family. Particularly, they found that

extended family involvement promotes psychologi-
cal well-being in children. On the other hand, when
the extended family does not provide tangible and
emotional assistance, there is also risk for tension to
arise. Disagreements and conflicts between different
caregivers (not just parents) often send the child the
message of instability and may adversely affect the
child’s outcome (Brody et al., 1998).

Also, maternal perception of both concrete
and emotional support from extended family
members in urban socioeconomically disadvantaged
Indian families was related to a child’s cognitive
and social development (Naug, 2000). Children
from contemporary Indian joint families that were
cohesive were found to be better socioemotionally
adjusted than those from nuclear families indicating
that apart from family size, the functional aspects
of familial relationships are crucial in determining
the child’s developmental outcomes (Chakrabatri,
Biswas, Chattopadhyay, & Saha, 1998). Studies on
children at risk have highlighted the role of the
extended family system in supporting child rearing,
buffering against adversity, and enhancing the
child’s resiliency in the face of difficult circumstances
(Sharma, 2000). The larger coparental system in
India also has significant positive implications for
children’s mental health outcomes, which suggests
that the child’s experience in families with extended
support systems alleviates sources of stress, and
mitigates the effect of potential mental disorders.

Further, Sonuga-Barke and Mistry (2000) found
that when Hindu and Muslim mothers perceived
grandmother support as intrusive or overbearing
there were sometimes detrimental effects on the
child’s development. In their study of intergenera-
tional living, the children and grandmothers exhib-
ited fewer adjustment problems (assessed through
teachers’ completion of the Rutter Scale) than the
mothers, who often suffered from depression and
anxiety. Others (i.e., Cooley & Unger, 1991) have
reported evidence that grandmothers may influence
children indirectly through their support of teenage
mothers, but Sonuga-Barke and Mistry’s (2000) data
reveal that grandmothers can also have a direct effect
on children through practical care, moral guidance,
and cognitive and emotional instruction.

Beyond any direct benefits to the child, grand-
mothers are also in a position to fulfill the tradi-
tional role of care provider and guide. Unfortunately,
the benefits accrued by grandmothers and children
may come at a cost to the whole family if moth-
ers are saddled with the larger burden of being

Coparenting in South and Southeast Asian Families 217

simultaneously a good mother, wife, and daughter-
in-law (Sonuga-Barke & Mistry, 2000). Of course,
this tension only creates problems when the role
of the grandmother conflicts with the role of the
mother. Indeed, when there were disagreements be-
tween mothers and grandmothers, mothers are at a
heightened risk for depression and anxiety (Sonuga-
Barke & Mistry, 2000). The authors, Sonuga-Barke
and Mistry, speculate that “mothers may lose a sense
of agency and develop feelings of helplessness in the
presence of overbearing and intrusive grandmothers
with whom they disagree over child care” (p. 138).
Therefore, it is important to underscore the influ-
ence of the functional aspects of coparental networks
on children’s cognitive and socioemotional develop-
ment over and above the structural aspects of Asian
families.

CONCLUSION

It is clear that within Asian families, the copar-
enting construct is in fact important and relevant to
the child’s development because mothers and fathers
are both involved in parenting tasks rather than
being divided in their roles in the family as nur-
turer and breadwinner, respectively. The processes
of “coparenting” defined as the degree to which par-
ents support one another, certainly is a part of Asian
family functioning. However, as argued extensively
in this paper, the Western construct of coparenting
in its current form, while relevant to Asian families,
must be reconceptualized to entirely encapsulate the
Asian family system. Specifically, extended family
members as evidenced through the two studies of
Indian and Vietnamese families, are not mere fig-
ureheads or “babysitters,” but they are cocaregivers
in the lives of Indian and Vietnamese children. As
evidenced in the Indian family study, the subcultural
variation between socioeconomic statuses plays a
larger role in the determination of the coparental
network. Also, the subcultural differences between
Vietnamese immigrants also factors into whether rel-
atives and/or nonfamilial friends are included into
coparenting system.

The significance of extended family members
and other informal childcare figures (such as neigh-
bors) has been emphasized in numerous reports of
parenting and role-sharing (Desai & Jain, 1994; Lu
et al., 2000; Verma, 1995) in Asian cultures. These
findings clearly highlight the inadequacy of concep-
tualizing coparenting processes as a subset of mar-

ital relations. Assuming that the biological parents
are the only essential coparenting figures in South
and Southeast Asian families ignores the reality that
there are multiple important caregivers functioning
in the child’s everyday environment. Understanding
subcultural variabilities in the composition of care-
giving networks is crucial in accurately describing
the functional complexities of coparenting systems
within these cultures. It is also relevant in examining
the influence and benefits of the larger coparenting
network on the child’s developmental trajectory and
parents’ mental health in Asian families.

We recommend that future coparenting studies
with similar populations use observational measures
as well as narrative reports to assess the division of
caregiving responsibilities in such families. Further
research is also needed to assess mothers’ and fa-
thers’ ideological beliefs about cocaregiving in Asian
families. This is particularly relevant in urban–middle
class families, which are being increasingly influenced
by westernization (Roopnarine & Hossain, 1992). It
would be instructive to assess whether there looks to
be a shift in such families from conventional cultural
beliefs to more nontraditional views regarding family
practices within the broader coparenting structure.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Work on this paper and the results reported
herein was made possible in part by National Insti-
tutes of Health grant supplement HD37172 awarded
to James P. McHale, supporting the scholarly work
of Easter Dawn Vo. The authors acknowledge the
helpful comments of Dr McHale, Department of Psy-
chology, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg;
Dr Prerna Mohite, Department of Human Devel-
opment and Family Studies, Maharaja Sayaaji Rao
University, India; and Dr Neerja Sharma, Depart-
ment of Child Development, Lady Irwin College,
Delhi, on earlier drafts of this paper. The authors also
thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful
comments.

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