An Introduction to Childhood E-Book

Heather Montgomery

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 558

Beschreibung

In An Introduction to Childhood, Heather Montgomery examines the role children have played within anthropology, how they have been studied by anthropologists and how they have been portrayed and analyzed in ethnographic monographs over the last one hundred and fifty years. * Offers a comprehensive overview of childhood from an anthropological perspective * Draws upon a wide range of examples and evidence from different geographical areas and belief systems * Synthesizes existing literature on the anthropology of childhood, while providing a fresh perspective * Engages students with illustrative ethnographies to illuminate key topics and themes

Leseprobe

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 CHILDHOOD WITHIN ANTHROPOLOGY

Introduction

Children: The First Primitives

Culture and Personality

Cross-Cultural Studies of Child-Rearing

Children in British Anthropology

The Gendered Child

Child-Centered Anthropology

Conclusion

2 WHAT IS A CHILD?

Introduction

Childhood as a Modern Idea: The Influence of Philippe Ariès

Conceptualizations of Childhood

Children as Incompetent or Subordinate

Children as Equals

Children as a Means of Forming Families and Giving Status

Children as an Economic Investment

Unwanted and Nonhuman Children

Conclusion

3 THE BEGINNING OF CHILDHOOD

Introduction

Fetuses

Spirit Children

Reincarnation

Anomalies

Conclusion

4 FAMILY, FRIENDS, AND PEERS

Introduction

The Role of Parents

Adoption and Fosterage

Children outside the Family

Siblings

Friends and Peer Groups

Conclusion

5 TALKING, PLAYING, AND WORKING

Introduction

Learning Language

Children and Play

Work or Play?

Conclusion

6 DISCIPLINE, PUNISHMENT, AND ABUSE

Introduction

Discipline and Punishment in the Western Tradition

Physical Punishment

Alternatives to Physical Punishment

Who Can Punish Children?

Child Abuse

Conclusion

7 CHILDREN AND SEXUALITY

Introduction

Anthropology, Sexuality, and Childhood

Children and Sex: The Influence of Freud

Incest and Abuse

Ethnographies of Children and Sexuality

Child Prostitution

Conclusion

8 ADOLESCENCE AND INITIATION

Introduction

What is Adolescence?

Adolescence and Globalization

Initiation

Initiation: A Psychological Approach

Initiation and Education

Initiation and Gender

Initiation: The End of Childhood?

Conclusion

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

For my sister, Claire

This edition first published 2009 © 2009 Heather Montgomery

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Montgomery, Heather (Heather Kate)

An introduction to childhood: an anthropological perspective of children’s lives/Heather Montgomery.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-2590-1 (pbk.: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4051-2591-8

(hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Children—Cross-cultural studies. 2. Children—

Social conditions—Cross-cultural studies. 3. Child development—Cross-

cultural studies. 4. Child rearing—Cross-cultural studies. 5. Children—

History. I. Title.

HQ767.87.M66 2009

305.231089—dc22

2008013080

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been several years in the planning and writing and I am extremely grateful to the many people who have listened so patiently to me talking about it for so long. In particular I would like to thank Amanda Berlan, Laurence Brockliss, Phil Burrows, Helen Carr, Marina de Alarcon, Ollie Douglas, Maria Francis-Pitfield, Clare Harris, Mary-Jane Kehily, Mary Kellett, Mercia Mathew, David Messer, Ian, Tessa, and Claire Montgomery, John Oates, Fiona Raje, Gary Slapper, Catherine Sutton, and Martin Woodhead.

My editors at Blackwell have been consistently helpful and encouraging from the very beginning and I would like to thank Jane Huber, Deirdre Ilkson, and Rosalie Robertson very sincerely. I am also most appreciative of Justin Dyer, who copy-edited the manuscript. My very grateful thanks also go to the three anonymous reviewers who saved me from some glaring errors, suggested work I didn’t know, and gave of their time and expertise so generously. The mistakes and omissions remain mine.

The staff at the Open University library also deserve great thanks for uncomplainingly ordering obscure volumes with dubious-sounding names every week for the last five years. Without their prompt and efficient help, this book would have been much harder to write.

Finally Peter Rivière, despite his reservations, has shaped much of my thinking and deepened my understanding of both childhood and anthropology. His intellectual rigor and way of seeing the world have been a huge influence and I remain deeply indebted to him.

INTRODUCTION

In 1909 the Swedish reformer Ellen Key claimed that the 20th century would be the “century of the child.” She believed that there would be radical changes in the ways that children were conceptualized and treated, and that during the century children’s welfare would become a social and political priority. Looking back a hundred years, she has in many ways been proved right: children’s welfare and children’s rights have become increasingly politically important and, within academia, children and childhood have become significant areas of study. From the late 19th century onward, research on children has moved steadily from the margins to the center of academic interest and it now makes sense to talk of a distinctive field of childhood studies which has been characterized by its interdisciplinarity, bringing together insights from psychology, law, sociology, children’s rights, social policy, sociology, and anthropology. (For one of the best collections of articles in childhood studies see Jenkins 1998, which encompasses all these disciplines as well as history and literary studies.) Childhood studies has coalesced into a wide-ranging and significant subject area, which acknowledges that children undergo recognizable patterns of physical and psychological development and growth, but argues that the meanings given to these vary enormously within and between cultures. Furthermore, it has called for categories such as “the child,” “childhood,” or “children” to be critically examined and rethought (Pufall and Unsworth 2004; Kehily 2004; see also James 2004 for an overview of the origins and history of childhood studies). Anthropologists have made a significant contribution to this debate, especially in their insistence on the importance of cultural difference and cultural relativism. They have shown consistently that the idea of a universal child is an impossible fiction and that children’s lives are influenced as strongly by their culture as by their biology. There are now enough ethnographic studies of children, and enough theorizations of childhood, for there to be a distinctive subdiscipline of anthropology which focuses on children, their role in society, and their place in the life-cycle, and it is time for this contribution to be documented and celebrated.

This book has arisen after ten years’ work as a researcher and lecturer on anthropology and childhood. Over the years I have regularly been asked to recommend a book aimed at a mid-range undergraduate audience which wanted an overview of the specific ways that anthropologists have studied children’s lives and their ideas about childhood, and I have been unable to do so. I found that many other books on childhood studies were either for more theoretically advanced students or on more specialized topics. There have certainly been influential books and articles which have discussed ideas about children and childhood, as well as seminal monographs on particular aspects of children’s lives, but when I started to write this one there had not been a book that placed these within the history of anthropology, which linked up previous studies and descriptions of children, or one which looked at the thematic issues that have increased our theoretical understandings of childhood. Given the contemporary interest in children, it is hardly surprising that I have not been alone in this idea and that others, too, have brought out introductory guides to children and anthropology. David Lancy’s The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings (2008), which is based on a review of material from anthropology, history, and primatology, is a very welcome addition to the field, dealing with childhood in its broadest, and most interdisciplinary, sense. Similarly Robert LeVine and Rebecca New’s edited volume Anthropology and Child Development (2008), which brings together some of the key anthropological texts on child development into one reader, also makes a valuable contribution. In this book, however, I wanted to go back to original ethnographies, and look at them in context, finding out what anthropologists in the past had written about children and how this could inform future work. I was less interested in cross-cultural theories or worldwide surveys and more in detailed ethnographic descriptions which illuminated children’s lives and which could open up areas of inquiry for students to pursue, enabling them to fashion their own papers and areas of potential research.

One of the very first questions such a book needs to deal with is the definition of a child. International law defines childhood as the period between the ages of 0 and 18, but, like others who have written on the subject, I have found this far too limiting. Biology is not particularly helpful either, although there are obvious markers such as conception, birth, or first menstruation. As an anthropologist, however, I am less interested in chronological or biological markers than in the social significance given to them, and, as I will go on to discuss throughout the book, children may be recognized as children long before birth, or sometime afterward. They may still be considered a child until after initiation, marriage, or indeed until their own parents die. One of the most important conclusions for any anthropologist studying childhood is that there is no universal child and that the concept of the child is one that must be defined internally and in its own context. I quite deliberately offer no definition of childhood, in order to show, through the use of different ethnographic evidence, quite how diverse and elastic a concept childhood can be.

I had originally intended to limit this book very specifically to anthropological understandings of childhood. I felt that psychologists, and more recently sociologists, had dominated the field, and I wanted to redress the balance, looking at anthropology’s unique and substantial contribution. Immediately I realized that this was an impossible task. Trying to uncover a “pure” anthropology of childhood is impractical, especially in relation to North American anthropology, which was constructed as interdisciplinary from the start. Restricting the scope of this book only to social and cultural anthropology would mean ignoring the fields of psychological, biological, and linguistic anthropology, which have made such important contributions to the study of childhood, as well as downplaying the fact that most of the social anthropologists in North America who have studied and published on childhood since 1950 have also been involved in the field of child development. Nevertheless, I have tried to concentrate as far as possible on anthropological work on children, and where I have used the work of authors from other disciplines, I have mentioned their disciplinary background.

An issue that quickly became problematic in the research for this book was the large, and sometimes irreconcilable, differences between British and American anthropologists who have been interested in childhood; it would be possible to write two completely distinct histories of ideas about the ways that anthropologists in each country have thought, and written, about children. The emphasis on psychology, for instance, which has been such an important part of American anthropology, has been treated with suspicion, and even hostility, in the UK. The Human Relations Area Files, such a rich source of data for many American anthropologists, were received with distrust and derision in certain anthropology departments in the UK and are used only very rarely by British anthropologists (see the following chapter for more detail on this). At many British universities it is possible to gain an undergraduate degree purely in social and cultural anthropology, and many British students who take doctorates in social anthropology have not gained a first degree in the subject, making social anthropology in the UK a highly specialized area. In contrast, most North American universities operate a “four fields” approach to anthropology, where equal emphasis is given to archaeology, linguistics, socio-cultural anthropology, and biological anthropology. This, as I will go on to argue in the next chapter, has led to very different traditions in studying childhood in the two countries.

Another important area of difference is the relationship of folklore to anthropology. While folklore is a thriving and respected discipline in North America, in the UK it remains marginalized and very much separated from anthropology. The most important center for the study of English folklore, Sheffield University’s National Centre for English Cultural Tradition, operates under the auspices of the English faculty, and in Edinburgh, folklore comes under Celtic and Scottish studies. Although there was a close relationship between folklore and anthropology in the 1880s and 1890s in the UK, by the 1930s they were two very distinct fields of inquiry, and many anthropologists today treat folklore with a degree of embarrassment. Despite the influence of the work of folklorists Iona and Peter Opie and their studies of children’s games, rhymes, and many other aspects of children’s culture, few British anthropologists, including those specializing in childhood, wish to call themselves folklorists or view studies of folklore as worthy or relevant.

In most modern anthropological writings it has become traditional for the author to situate herself in the text, discussing how her own gender, ethnicity, and age have an impact on her work. I have mentioned my own fieldwork briefly in chapter 7 without commenting on my background, but for this section of the book, I should state it. After a first degree in English literature, I took a master’s and Ph.D. in social anthropology. In many ways I am a very typical product of the way in which anthropology is taught in the UK. I do not have a first degree in it and I have never formally studied biological anthropology, archaeology, or folklore. Classes in cognitive or linguistic anthropology were optional and rather marginal to my studies, and while the following ten years researching children have meant that I have had to engage with ideas outside British social anthropology, I am very aware that certain prejudices remain. I have tried, throughout this book, to set out as fairly and impartially as possible the major schools of thought in anthropology, as well as the work which has been done on particular issues related to childhood, but I am aware that readers may disagree with my interpretations, accuse me of omission, or feel I am too dismissive of particular ways of understanding childhood. It is not my intention to be so; one of the reasons I have long been fascinated by childhood studies is the enormous depth and breadth of the subject and the exciting possibilities that analyzing childhood from different perspectives can offer.

When I first started my doctorate in 1992, the number of people working specifically on childhood was still very small. Conferences on the role of children in anthropology were few and far between and there was a limited amount of theoretical literature on the subject. At the time there was also a sense that children were not a completely legitimate topic of study; Elizabeth Chin has claimed that “despite anthropology’s strong – although uneven – tradition of studying children (or, more commonly, childhood), children are a topic that is both overtly and covertly regarded as less than serious” (Chin 2001:134). There is certainly some fairness to this complaint; indeed on my first day in a new job, in the late 1990s, a senior colleague told me that he regarded my work, on children in Thailand, as “comparative social work” rather than “proper” anthropology. Since then, however, the field has blossomed: specific master’s courses on anthropology and childhood have sprung up, international conferences, or specific panels within conferences, devoted to childhood are regularly organized, ethnographic monographs which take children as their central focus have increased exponentially, and almost all university departments can claim at least one or two students working on projects directly related to children’s lives. Children and childhood are now generally recognized as being worthy subjects of study, and it is no longer possible to agree with those who make the claim that children are not taken seriously in anthropology or that those who study children are not taken seriously as anthropologists.

Although many anthropologists have studied children’s lives and deconstructed ideas about childhood, and have done so for a long time, there has been a growth in the numbers of academics focusing primarily on children in the last thirty years. Those who have recently specialized in the study of childhood have argued that, in the past, children have been under-represented in both anthropological theory and ethnographic description. They have attempted to rectify this by looking at the ways that children themselves create meanings and form their own belief systems, as well as examining the ways that they negotiate and shape social attitudes about childhood. This analytical approach to children’s lives might best be described as “child-centered” or “child-focused” anthropology and it demands the use of children as primary informants and focuses on children’s voices and children’s agency. This new theorization has been given impetus by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which was opened for signature in 1979, came into force in 1989, and is the most widely signed rights treaty in the history of international law, with only Somalia and the USA not ratifying it. It is made up of 54 legally binding articles which aim to protect and promote children’s rights in the fields of health, education, nationality, and the family. It is no coincidence that the rise of child-focused anthropology is contemporaneous with the Convention and that anthropologists who work in this field critically engage with the UNCRC and its provisions, and take a rights-based approach to childhood which insists that children’s importance as agents and informants be recognized.

The vision of childhood enshrined in the UNCRC is one where childhood is a separate space, protected from adulthood, in which children are entitled to special protection, provision, and rights of participation. The UNCRC emphasizes that the proper place for children is at school or at home with their families. Indeed while there is an article stating that all children have an inalienable right to go to school, there is no corresponding right not to attend. The idea of childhood reflected in the Convention privileges education over work, family over street life, and consumerism over productivity. The child envisaged by the Convention is an individual, autonomous being, an inheritor of the liberal, humanist ideals of the Enlightenment, a view which has caused problems for universal interpretation and implementation (see Burman 1996; Cowan et al. 2001; Montgomery 2001b). Against this backdrop, it is perhaps not surprising that many anthropologists interested in studying children in non-Western contexts have been drawn toward those children who exist as anomalies in the new globalized notion of childhood (Hall and Montgomery 2000). They have often studied children who are out of place physically in that they are neither at home or at school, such as street children (Baker 1998; Hecht 1998; Panter-Brick 2000, 2001, 2002; Burr 2006). Alternatively they have turned their attention to children who act in ways contrary to accepted ideals of childhood, such as child prostitutes (Montgomery 2001a), child refugees (Hinton 2000), and child soldiers (de Berry 1999; Rosen 2007). Examinations of these groups of children have challenged universal notions of the child implicit in the UNCRC and profoundly complicated understandings of concepts and categorizations such as childhood or youth.

The political aspects of childhood are never far from such discussions, and the ways in which the notion of the child is discussed, invoked, and contested by politicians, the media, and within families has produced rich ethnographic and theoretical work. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent (1998) and Sharon Stephens (1995a) have contributed important edited collections to the debate over the cultural politics of childhood in which they insist on both the importance of childhood as a political and social construct and the necessity of emphasizing the lived reality of children’s experiences (Ennew and Morrow 2002). They make the case that studying children is fundamental in understanding any society or culture and for any meaningful analysis of social change. In Sharon Stephens’ words:

As representatives of the contested future and subjects of cultural policies, children stand at the crossroads of divergent cultural projects. Their minds and bodies are at stake in debates about the transmission of fundamental cultural values in the schools. The very nature of their senses, language, social networks, worldviews, and material futures are at stake in debates about ethnic purity, national identity, minority self-expression and self-rule. (1995a:23)

Such authors have argued powerfully that an understanding and examination of children’s experiences should be seen as central to anthropology and, furthermore, must be viewed in the context of conflicting and contested ideas about children and the sort of childhood they should have. In Scheper-Hughes and Sargent’s words: “Childhood also involves cultural notions of personhood, morality, and social order and disorder. In all, childhood represents a cluster of discourses and practices surrounding sexuality and reproduction, love and protection, power and authority and their potential abuses” (1998:1–2). As more anthropologists begin to question ideas about modernity and the contemporary world order, childhood is one of the central issues with which they must come to terms.

Despite the UNCRC’s pivotal role in shaping recent understandings of childhood, I am not suggesting a radical or insurmountable split between child-focused anthropology and a more general anthropology, especially as the conclusions from each can usefully inform the other in a number of ways. Anthropologists who have carried out ethnographic work on children’s lives have pointed out many problems inherent in the philosophies and goals of the UNCRC. By setting universal standards for all children, and defining childhood so definitively as the period of life between birth and the age of 18, the UNCRC takes little account of cultural relativity, and anthropologists have regularly pointed out the discrepancies between the realities of children’s lives and the universal ideals enshrined in the UNCRC. Even while acknowledging that the UNCRC may be an idealized vision, rather than a blueprint of practical policy, many have shown that it does not work on a local level. They have also critiqued the very nature of the UNCRC, arguing that it is fundamentally flawed and based on a Western ideal of an autonomous rightsbearing citizen that has limited applicability outside the industrialized West (Montgomery 2001b). In many cases they have found that neither the children themselves, nor their families, see them as the bearers of rights, and that looking at indigenous concepts of childhood means analyzing children as incomplete or subordinate in many cases (this point will be expanded in chapter 2). In critiquing notions of universalism, childfocused anthropologists have reinforced many of the points made so explicitly in older work, and there is a large overlap between these two sets of studies. The heterogeneous nature of childhood, the impact of gender, age, birth order, and ethnicity, as well as the problems defining childhood, have, as this book will show, been long-time concerns of anthropology, as have ideas about where life begins, what makes personhood, and how social competency is defined.

Another reason not to view child-centered anthropology as a radical break from the past is that the role and importance of children in fieldwork have been previously recognized, even if not always explicitly acknowledged (there are of course exceptions to this such as Bohannon 1954). When discussing this book with various colleagues, I was struck by how often they recounted anecdotes of how they had been befriended by children who acted as willing research assistants, who answered questions, showed patience with a socially inept foreigner, and acted as important sources of information. Unfortunately, on reading their monographs, this acknowledgment was not always there, even though children were discussed, analyzed, and sometimes even quoted (Rasmussen 1994). Inez Hilger, for example, in her exhaustive description of Araucanian children’s lives in Chile and Argentina, gives frustratingly fleeting glances of children’s own voices, even though she clearly canvassed children’s opinions and was given a great deal of help by them. Her published work, however, relied almost entirely on what adults told her, and it is adults rather than children whose views are quoted and analyzed (Hilger 1957). Looking back now on older ethnographies, it is true that references to children’s lives are often incomplete, but nevertheless children and ideas about childhood are there. Discussions of social roles, gender, and the making of persons all touch very directly on fundamental issues of childhood, what makes children children, and what separates them from adults. Indeed the ways in which adults become social persons cannot be understood without an analysis of what they were before.

I found that drawing a distinction between child-centered and older ethnographies was an unhelpful and limiting one, which seemed to create a dichotomy between understanding children as human beings and as human becomings. Anthropologists specializing in children have tended to reject the notion that they are human becomings, arguing that they should be seen in their own terms and not as incomplete or incompetent adults. They have emphasized the importance of children’s experiences here and now, rather than seeing children as being of interest for what they will become. As such they have rejected other studies which have looked at socialization or seen children as anything other than possessors of a valuable, complete culture. Ideally, however, an anthropology of childhood should see children as both beings and becomings. Children can be of interest for what they are now, and the many new ethnographies that appear each year on children’s everyday lives have shown this, yet children are also becoming something else, they change and transform from the socially immature to the mature. Childhood is a time of transition and change, and despite the enormous variations in the ways in which childhood is understood, there is no society that does not acknowledge that children (however they are defined) are very different from adults, have different needs, and have different roles and expectations placed on them.

When I first imagined this book, I envisaged it as having a dual purpose. The first was as a summary of previous anthropological work, looking at the multiple ways that childhood has been conceptualized and what insights into children’s lives such work could reveal. I had become used to hearing students who wished to focus on children dismiss any previous work that did not deal directly with children as irrelevant, and I wanted to challenge this idea. I hope this book will help such students negotiate earlier monographs, showing them where the ethnographic record can guide them, suggesting further reading, and warning them against dismissing too carelessly older works that would have value to them. The second purpose is to place the study of children more firmly in a tradition, to show that there need not be a great separation between child-centered anthropology and the work that has preceded it. I want to show that childhood had a history in anthropology, that children have not simply been ignored or neglected, and, for British readers, that American anthropology, with its long interest in child-rearing, had to be included in any history of anthropological ideas about children. I wished to challenge the notion that only those who talked to children themselves, used them as informants, or discussed their lives in great detail could contribute to the debate about childhood as an area of study. I wanted to show that those who are interested in a variety of other topics, such as birth practices, marriage, gender, education, or economics, have much to say about children, and that their insights are crucial for a full understanding of children’s lives. I believe that it is not possible to study, for example, child labor in Africa without a thorough knowledge of social life described in earlier ethnographies. Despite the enormous social, political, and economic changes seen in African societies over the last fifty years, the insights from work into social structures and familial organization are as relevant and useful to an anthropologist looking at child labor from a child’s perspective as are the ideals laid down by the UNCRC, which is now more commonly used as a starting point. Similarly I would argue that anyone wishing to study children’s lives or ideas about childhood in Melanesia would find as much that is of interest in the work done on gender, initiation, or personhood, but which refers only indirectly to children, as they would in the work of Margaret Mead, despite her direct interest in children and their lives.

In writing this book, I have chosen particular aspects of children’s lives that had previously been studied by anthropologists. Some of these were obvious: initiation, for instance, seemed the most appropriate way to end the book, and there was an enormous amount of material to examine. Similarly discussions of unborn and newly born children, although hampered by problems of definition and distinctions between embryos, fetuses, and children, have attracted much anthropological attention and made an obvious body of literature to review. It also seemed useful to give an overview of the place of children within the anthropological tradition, looking at the various ways they have been understood. Other chapters were more problematic. Some, such as chapter 7 on sexuality, reflect my own interests, but, more broadly, the idea of the sexually innocent child is so central to Western beliefs about appropriate childhood experiences that the idea of writing a book about children’s lives which failed to engage with discussions about their sexuality and sexual experiences would seem incomplete. Yet, devoting a whole chapter to the study of children’s sexuality when there has been such silence on the subject within anthropology was difficult, and the chapter ended up focusing as much on sexual abuse as it did on sexual experience or sexual enjoyment. Given the cultural baggage of so many anthropologists, this may not be surprising, but it does suggest that studying childhood often reflects the prejudices of the ethnographer as much as it illuminates the lives of children themselves.

Patterns of child-rearing and the ways in which children learn to play and work have been important sources of theory and data, and it would be impossible to look at traditions of studying children without commenting on these. Other themes were less obvious. I had not planned to focus an entire chapter on discipline and abuse, and had assumed that it could be included in more general discussions of child-rearing, but in many ethnographies punishment was the sole occasion when children were visible. Children who had been unmentioned before in monographs suddenly came into focus in descriptions of the punishments inflicted on them, especially when these were seen as cruel or in any way unusual.

There are, inevitably, problems in my approach. The vast numbers of ethnographies published means that writing an all-inclusive account of everything ever written about children would be impossible, especially given that anthropology as a discipline is now over a hundred years old and the number of monographs alone published in this period runs into several thousands. I am not attempting to write a comprehensive or definitive volume about children therefore, but trying to pick out certain key topics and use them to illustrate important issues in the anthropological study of children and childhood. There are certain ways of understanding aspects of children’s lives that I have not discussed, including archaeological approaches to childhood, or studies from biological anthropology, including those of primates. I have also mentioned medical anthropology only briefly and the anthropology of education in passing. These other, substantial subdisciplines of anthropology do, of course, influence studies of childhood, but in order to keep the book manageable, I have been forced to be selective. Within each chapter I have identified several themes relevant to the study of childhood and discussed particular ethnographies in the context of those themes. Some of these ethnographies are extremely famous, others are less well known, or chosen because they illustrate a point particularly well. Some are included as a result of my own partisanship and favoritism, and it will not be hard for any reader to note my obvious affection for the warmth and humanity I have always found in reading Meyer Fortes and Raymond Firth. Obviously readers of this book may well have other favorite ethnographies and will be surprised and disappointed not to see them included. My aim is that a student who knows little about the relationship between anthropology and childhood, or does not know where to begin to find out how anthropologists have studied childhood in the past, can pick up this book and come away, not with a complete knowledge of all previous ethnographic work on children, but with an understanding of where analyses of childhood and children’s lives might be found in this literature, as well as suggestions for further reading. I hope that people interested in the social and cultural worlds of children will recognize that other bodies of literature can broaden and deepen their understandings of childhood. I would also hope that those anthropologists who do not profess an interest in childhood might see how their work could contribute to ways of studying childhood. I do not want to claim that the majority of anthropologists, past and present, have been secret anthropologists of childhood without knowing it, or to coerce them into a specialty with which they have no affinity, but by emphasizing the continuities and areas of overlap between childhood and other subjects of interest, it should be possible to open up a conversation between the various subdisciplines of anthropology.

A pitfall of which I was very aware while writing this book was the difficulty of making comparisons across time and place without ending up producing a modern-day version of The Golden Bough where cases and themes are picked up out of context and compared with other examples without any regard for the circumstances in which they occurred, or the time at which they were written. It is very easy to cherry-pick from the literature, drawing false comparisons by selective use of ethnographies. The claim that children were conceptualized one way among the Tikopia of Polynesia in the 1920s and very differently among the Nuer of southern Sudan ten years later, or that Margaret Mead found very different understandings of adolescence among people in the USA and in the south Pacific island of Samoa is liable to be extremely trite unless a deeper analysis can be uncovered. This difficulty is not helped by the convention of using the ethnographic present in monographs, which means that they appear to be written about the way the Tikopia or the Nuer live today, rather than how Raymond Firth or Edward Evans-Pritchard, with all the baggage of their age, gender, class, and background, described them seventy or eighty years ago. Despite these potential problems, it is possible, I believe, to draw useful comparisons between descriptions of children, wherever they live, whatever the background of the people writing about them, and whenever they were described.

Childhood remains an emotive subject and, especially when faced with childcare practices that seem outlandish or even dangerous to outsiders, it is easy to condemn parents as unenlightened or ignorant. Looking at how children are conceptualized within their own cultural contexts, and the consequent implications this has for the ways that they are treated, avoids value judgments and the demonization of parents elsewhere. It allows the anthropologist to recognize when behavior is occurring toward children that is not acceptable and does deserve condemnation. Looking at different forms of punishment, for example, does not simply set up a comparison between hitting children and reasoning with them, but allows an examination of wider questions about how children are dealt with, what is unacceptable in their treatment, and the point at which harsh discipline becomes improper abuse.

Chapter 1 of this book begins with a history of childhood studies within anthropology. Taking the late 19th century as its starting point, it looks at how children have been used by anthropologists in a variety of ways to better their understandings of society in general. It examines various modes of thought within anthropology, all of which explicitly use ideas about childhood to discuss other topics, such as the relationship between primitive and childish thought, the evolution of humankind, the connections between culture and personality, the importance of examining childrearing practices, the role of women and other “lost tribes” of anthropology, and finally the move toward child-centered anthropology and the recognition of children as active informants and meaning-makers. Chapter 2 discusses the question, “what is a child?” and examines the multiple and various ways that children have been conceptualized, including the claim that childhood is a recent invention in the West. It starts with the premise that while children are usually acknowledged as being different to adults, there is no such thing as a common childhood, characterized by universally recognized developmental markers or similar attitudes. The singular category of childhood, especially when it is used to refer to a large age range, may not be meaningful elsewhere, where the period of social immaturity is characterized by different stages, each having different social responsibilities and each being classified by different terms which may, or may not, correspond to Western ideas of childhood. Children reach adulthood in a number of ways and by a variety of paths, and the divide between childhood and adulthood is complex and permeable. The Western notion that children are weak, dependent, and vulnerable is culturally specific and several other ways of understanding childhood and analyzing children’s lives are presented.

Chapter 3 looks at the very beginning of childhood. Contemporary anthropologists have shown convincingly that the idea that childhood ends at 18 is a bureaucratic fiction with limited applicability outside the West. The idea that childhood may also have a beginning has been much less well explored, even though it relates to long-standing anthropological concerns about birth, conception, and personhood. This chapter draws on literature that is not usually considered when discussing childhood and looks at how, and when, children at the very beginning of their lives are socially recognized as humans.

Chapter 4 turns to children’s daily lives, their immediate carers, and the kinship connections between children and their families. Kinship has been of central importance in anthropology, and it is in the context of family relations that much information on children’s daily lives is to be found. Who children acknowledge as their kin, and by whom they are acknowledged, and the subsequent responsibilities that children and adults have to each other as a result of this recognition have been central to the development of theories about marriage, lineage, and gender. In this process of recognition and claiming kin, children are rarely passive, and several ethnographies have noted the active role that children play in forming and shaping their families.

The study of how children learn language, and the ways they are socialized though language, has formed a distinct sub-field in anthropology, and the importance of this in understanding children is discussed in chapter 5. The role of play, what it teaches children, and how they learn through it have also attracted a great deal of anthropological attention and notions of work and play are examined in detail. While play is sometimes seen as the epitome of childhood and childish behavior, anthropologists have shown that there is not always a clear-cut distinction between play and work, and in the lives of children outside the modern West, where the former ends and the latter begins can be hard to tell.

Another aspect of child-rearing which has received much anthropological attention is the disciplining of children. Chapter 6 examines this issue alongside recent understandings and concerns about child welfare. The spectrum of punishments meted out to children is great, ranging from very harsh beatings that have shocked observers, to the complete absence of physical punishment. This chapter relates these discussions of punishment back to ideas about the nature of childhood and how much children are perceived as knowing or understanding. The issue of abuse has been the focus for much contemporary child-centered anthropology, but the differences between what is truly abusive and what might appear unkind or cruel to outsiders is a difficult one, and so this chapter finishes with a discussion of how to differentiate between acceptable discipline and unacceptable abuse.

The ideal of a sexually innocent childhood is one of the primary sites of contestation in contemporary Western constructions of childhood. Freudian claims of a sexualized infancy come into direct conflict with the ideal of a child as innocent and unknowing about sexuality. Chapter 7 examines this issue using ethnographic accounts of children’s sexual experiences and knowledge about sex to argue that this ideal is a product of a culturally specific matrix of social, economic, and cultural ideas about childhood, the body, and sexuality. Sexuality is a relatively recent topic for anthropologists, but work on this subject has shown that sexual acts do not carry the same meanings cross-culturally and that certain acts which may be sexual in one context may not be so in another. In terms of children’s sexuality, these understandings are vital, even though this has been much less discussed and there are still almost no analyses of children’s own views of their sexual experiences. A horror of child sexual abuse in the West has meant that it is an extremely problematic area to explore, especially for an adult, foreign anthropologist, and much of the work that has been done on children’s sexual experiences has focused on abuse rather than enjoyment.

The final chapter, chapter 8, looks at the end of childhood and at initiation. Adolescence is often seen as a concept invented only in the 20th century, yet many societies have intermediate states between adulthood and childhood. Furthermore, globalization has led to the export of the idea of the teenager and increasingly a Westernized notion of adolescence has become a worldwide phenomenon. If birth has sometimes been understood as the beginning of childhood, then initiation has been seen as its end, marking the transformation from socially immature child to fully mature adult. This chapter will concentrate on what initiation rituals can tell us about the end of childhood; whether they really do mark its conclusion, or whether they are simply one process among many that continually change people and which occur throughout the life-cycle.

1

CHILDHOOD WITHIN ANTHROPOLOGY

Introduction

Looking back on the ways that children and childhood have been analyzed in anthropology inevitably reveals gaps, but it also shows that anthropologists have a long history of studying children. This chapter will give an overview of several schools of anthropological thinking that have considered children and used ideas about childhood to contribute to holistic understandings of culture. It will examine how anthropologists have studied children in the past and what insights these studies can bring to more recent analyses. Although not always explicit, ideas about children, childhood, and the processes by which a child becomes a fully socialized human being are embedded in much anthropological work and are central to understanding the nature of childhood in any given society. Work on child-rearing has also illuminated many aspects of children’s lives and is vital to understanding children themselves and their wider social relationships. Having discussed these, this chapter will then turn to newer studies of childhood, based around child-centered, or child-focused, anthropology with the assumption that children themselves are the best informants about their own lives. This has been presented as a radical break with the ways that anthropologists have studied children previously, when, as Helen Schwartzman has argued, anthropologists “used children as a population of ‘others’ to facilitate the investigation of a range of topics, from developing racial typologies to investigat[ing] acculturation, but they have rarely been perceived as a legitimate topic of research in their own right” (2001:15, emphasis in original). This chapter will examine the history of studies of children and childhood within anthropology, evaluating the extent to which Schwartzman’s view is correct.

Children: The First Primitives

Children have been continual motifs since the earliest days of anthropological writing, the savage and the child existing in parallel to explain social and cultural development. It was through understandings of childhood that early British anthropologists such as Edward Tylor, John Lubbock, and C. Staniland Wake examined the nature of human society and the development of humankind. Before the advent of sustained fieldwork, the child, like the savage or the primitive, stood in opposition to the rational, male world of European and North American civilization. Children were of central importance to these theorists because they provided a direct link between savagery and civilization. The child came to prominence in 19th-century anthropology because of contemporary theory that linked ontology and phylogeny: the view that the transformation of an individual was mirrored in the development of the human race, so that the development of the child from infancy to maturity could be seen to parallel the development of the human species from savagery to civilization. Tylor argued that in children, and in particular in the games that they played, there were echoes of the ways in which our human ancestors lived. “As games thus keep up the record of primitive warlike arts, so they reproduce, in what are at once sports and little children’s lessons, early stages in the history of childlike tribes of mankind” (Tylor 1913[1871]:73–74). Children were, he claimed, “representatives of remotely ancient culture” (1913[1871]:73) and analyzing the child alongside the savage was a way to understand the condition of contemporary humanity.

The idea of “the savage as a representative of the childhood of the human race” (Tylor 1913[1871]:284) was elaborated by other anthropologists. John Lubbock, for example, argued that

the close resemblance existing in ideas, language and habits, and character between savages and children, though generally admitted, has usually been disposed of in a passing sentence, and regarded rather as a curious accident than as an important truth.... The opinion is rapidly gaining ground among naturalists, that the development of the individual is an epitome of that of the species, a conclusion which, if fully borne out, will evidently prove most instructive. (1978[1870]:360)

The stance of both Tylor and Lubbock was explicitly evolutionary: the highest stage of evolution was the European adult male while the savage and the child were at the bottom of the hierarchy. This theory was further developed by C. Staniland Wake, who developed a complex theory of the stages of human evolution that corresponded directly to the observable stages of development in children.

It has become a familiar idea that mankind, as a whole, may be likened to an individual man, having, like him, an infancy, a childhood, youth, and manhood. In the early ages of the world mankind was in its infancy, and from that stage it has progressed, by gradual steps, until now it may be said to have attained, in peoples of the European stock, at least, to a vigorous manhood. (1878:4–5)

In The Evolution of Morality Wake attempted to trace these stages in relation to understandings of morality in both children and savages. He identified five stages in moral development, which he characterized as “the selfish, the wilful, the emotional, the empirical and the rational” (1878:6). Each of these stages corresponded both to a stage in a child’s development and to particular groups of people who represented different developmental states of the human race. Wake argued that the first stage of development, shown both in infants and in the Australian Aborigines, was that of “pure selfishness” because it was characterized by “an entire absence of moral principle, and a disposition which seeks its sole satisfaction in the gratification of the passions” (1878:7). The next stage of development could be seen in North American Indians and slightly older children and was characterized by an innate cruelty characteristic of a pre-civilized state of being.

The third stage of moral development was shown after the age of puberty, when the child entered the emotional period. In this his development mirrored that of the Negro, who was represented as “a creature of passion, which leads him to abandon himself to sexual excesses, and an indulgence in intoxication ... he has a disregard for human life, and when his passions are aroused he is utterly careless about inflicting pain” (1878:8). While Wake acknowledged that education had a restraining effect on the European young man, “subjectively, the youthful phase of the civilised mind is exactly similar to that which is observed among the negroes as a race” (1878:8, emphasis in original). The empirical stage was shown by older youths and by the Chinese and the Hindus, who, while imaginative and clearly of a higher order than others, still had, Wake claimed, an incomplete control over their emotions and a limited grasp of morality. It was only when a child finally reached the rational stage, with a fully formed moral character, that he became an adult. Similarly, in Wake’s view, it was only when the races had reached rationality, characterized as being when “imagination comes to be controlled by the reflective or regulative faculty; and when reason has established its influence” (1878:6), that they were fully civilized. This stage was attained, of course, only by members of Northern European and American societies, and only by men.

In 1906 the first monograph specifically on childhood was written by Dudley Kidd, called Savage Childhood: A Study of Kafir Children, which examined aspects of black South African children’s lives. Deeply imbued with racist attitudes, Kidd found in “kafir” children a charm and interest that he claimed had vanished from adults, even though he also saw them as lagging far behind European children in intellectual and moral development. Yet Kidd did acknowledge the importance of studying children’s lives, claiming that “childhood, so far from being beneath our notice, is the most important, instructive, and interesting period in the life of a savage” (1906:viii). It is possible to dismiss such comments, along with the views of Tylor, Lubbock, or Wake, as rather unpleasant anthropological curiosities. Indeed Laurence Hirschfeld has suggested that because of the offensive early parallels drawn between savages and children, anthropologists have been reluctant to look at childhood for fear of resurrecting these embarrassing antecedents.

Like Sartre’s anti-Semite, who, as a result of a disagreeable encounter with a Jewish tailor, despised Jews but not tailors, anthropologists uncomfortable with their predecessors’ awkward comparisons of children’s and primitive thought did not end up abandoning the study of native populations, only children. (2002:613)

It goes without saying that the ideas of Tylor, Lubbock, and Wake are outdated and discredited, despite C. R. Hallpike’s recent (1979) revival of some of these long-dead debates to draw parallels between the mentality of “primitive” people and children. What is interesting, however, is not so much the prejudices of the time, as the importance placed on children in understanding humanity in general. Without wishing to rehabilitate the conclusions of these authors, ideas about the nature of children were central to the development of early anthropology. Before fieldwork, children were the only observable “others”; they were the savages at home, and as such they could be studied and observed and their development charted and noted. Children enabled anthropologists to write in a way that familiarized the strange and that domesticated ideas about savages.

In the USA such explicit evolutionary frameworks were rejected, and children had a much more prominent role to play in the development of anthropology, as sources of data rather than as providing close-at-hand parallels to exotic primitives. Franz Boas in particular challenged the idea that race was linked, in a hierarchical manner, to language and culture. He criticized the idea of an evolutionist scale with “the savage,” represented by children and primitives, at one end and civilization, evidenced in European culture, at the other. He also rejected any idea of racial descent being linked to perceived biological superiority, claiming that “the old idea of absolute stability of human types must, however, evidently be given up, and with it the belief of the hereditary superiority of certain types over others” (1974[1911]:218). In “The Instability of Human Types” (1974[1911]), he used studies of child development to chart the environmental impact on human physiology among immigrants to America. By comparing parents and children of Eastern and Southern European descent, and the observable differences between their children born in Europe and those born in their new homeland, he demonstrated how phenotypes such as face shape changed. This, Boas (1916) suggested, meant that the most important differences between people were not biological or racial in origin but environmental. Boas argued that the changes and adaptations in immigrants could be best noted in children and their bodies, as it was during childhood that the most important physiological changes took place.

Thus at the time of birth the bulk of the body and stature are very small, and increase with great rapidity until about the fourteenth year in girls, and the sixteenth year in boys. On the other hand, the size of the head increases rapidly only for one or two years; and from this time on the increment is, comparatively speaking, slight. Similar conditions prevail in regard to the growth of the face, which grows rapidly for a few years only, and later on increases, comparatively speaking, slowly....

It is a well-known fact that the central nervous system continues to develop in structure longer perhaps than any other part of the body, and it may therefore be inferred that it will be apt to show the most far-reaching influences of environment.

It follows from this consideration that social and geographical environment must have an influence upon the form of the body of the adult, and upon the development of his central nervous system. (1974[1911]:215)

Children, in this understanding, are not simply primitives by another name and the stages of their development are not analogous to any sort of racial typographies. Instead they are valid sources of data and one of the ways in which the impact of environmental factors can be seen in human populations. Child development was thus an integral part of US anthropology from the beginning, a point emphasized in LeVine and New’s recent (2008) reader on child development and anthropology, in which Boas’s 1911 article is the first in the collection. Boas’s interest in children, and young people, also had a profound influence on one of his most famous students, Margaret Mead, who became such a prominent figure in the anthropological study of childhood, and to whom we now turn.

Culture and Personality

It was with Boas’s encouragement that Margaret Mead began her famous studies of Samoa and the South Pacific. Like Boas, she viewed the differences between various peoples as cultural rather than biological. In particular she focused her attention on children and young people, looking at how they were brought up, and the effects that their upbringing had on their adult personality and behavior. Mead’s thesis was a direct challenge to psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall, who had argued in his influential 1904 book, Adolescence: Its Psychology, and Its Relations to Anthropology,Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, that adolescence was a transitional process in the life-cycle between childhood and adulthood, characterized by particular traits and behaviors brought on by the biological changes at puberty. Most famously Hall described adolescence as a time of storm and stress, when young people were in the grip of powerful biological changes they could not control. He wrote that “every step of the upward way is strewn with wreckage of body, mind, and morals. There is not only arrest, but perversion, at every stage, and hoodlumism, juvenile crime, and secret vice” (Hall 1904:xiv). Although he acknowledged that adolescence could be a time of creativity, and saw it as crucial to the later development of personality, he also saw it as a time of instability and extremes.

Mead set out for Samoa with the explicit aim of disproving this universal, biological determinism. In Coming of Age in Samoa (1971[1928]) she analyzed the daily lives of Samoan girls from infancy through early childhood until adolescence. She rejected the idea that adolescence was necessarily a stressful and disruptive experience for both the child and the society and claimed that behavior in adolescence was caused by cultural conditioning rather than biological changes. Based on close observation and discussion with young women and girls in Samoa, Mead found none of the tensions inherent in the lives of American adolescents. She pointed to two factors that caused adolescence to be so stressful in the USA, and which created tensions between society and its young people: the large variety of choices in religious and moral matters in the USA and the repressive attitudes to sex and bodily functions. In contrast she found that adolescence in Samoa was not characterized by stress and strain because of the different cultural expectations about appropriate behavior for children and the ways that these notions of appropriateness were transferred to children. From an early age, children were taught to be demure, courteous, quiet, hard-working, loyal to their families, and obedient. The expectation that children would conform to these norms was made easier by the lack of choice. The society was homogeneous, believing in one religion and attending one church. There were no alternative belief systems or models that children could follow and rebellion was not an option. Boys and girls avoided each other when very young, playing only with members of their own sex. As they grew older they started to come together again until girls began to take lovers. As long as these lovers were within certain social groups (i.e., not family members), these sexual affairs were tolerated or ignored.

Mead subsequently came in for a great deal of criticism concerning both her methodology and her interpretation, but Coming of Age in Samoa placed children on the anthropological agenda and Mead remains one of the first anthropologists to take children, as children, seriously.