Anthropology of childhood syllabus (2010) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Promoting an Anthropology of Infants: Some Personal Reflections
Abstract: As is the case with the vast majority of cultural anthropologists, I began my field research working with adults. Becoming a mother changed my life – not just my family life (of course), but also my career. Being pregnant, undergoing childbirth, and embarking on the awesome project of raising a child also raised for me countless questions – practical and emotional to be sure, but also intellectual. Along with the gift of a child came a second gift, the gift of becoming an anthropologist of motherhood – and, more generally, of parenthood, of caretaking, and of the object of all that affection and work, children themselves. In this essay, I look back on the difference that parenthood made in reshaping my scholarly perspective on social life, and in reshaping my teaching career in the academy as a mentor and a professor. I conclude by reflecting on the pleasures and challenges of forging an anthropological study of that tiniest and most sociologically invisible of human groups, infants. Résumé : Comme pour la majorité des anthropologues culturels, devenir mère a changé ma vie – pas seulement ma vie de famille (bien sûr) –, mais aussi ma carrière. Être enceinte, donner la vie et se lancer dans le projet fou d‘élever un enfant a fait surgir en moi d‘innombrables questions – d‘ordre pratique et émotionnel bien sûr, mais également d‘ordre intellectuel. Le cadeau que représente un enfant s‘est accompagné d‘un autre, celui de devenir une anthropologue de la maternité – et, plus globalement, de la parentalité, de la prise en charge, et de l‘objet de toute cette affection et ce travail, les enfants eux-mêmes. Dans cet article, je me penche sur ce que la parentalité a changé dans ma perspective de recherche sur la vie sociale et dans ma carrière d‘enseignante à l‘Université en tant que mentor/maître de stage et professeur. Je conclus avec quelques réflexions sur les plaisirs et les défis que représente la construction d‘une étude anthropologique des êtres les plus petits et sociologiquement presque invisibles, les enfants.Mots-clefs : Anthropologie de la petite e
Chapter 21: Childhood and culture in society
Routledge eBooks, 2023
The Early Years Handbook for Students and Practitioners is a comprehensive and accessible course text for all degree level students undertaking programmes related to early years and childhood studies. Designed and written by the SEFDEY Professional Association and a team of new expert contributors, this text provides a balanced approach to the subjects discussed and encourages you to consider and challenge perceptions of early years and to promote good professional practice. This edition has been extended to cover the learning and development of children from birth to 8 years and features new chapters on research, risk, neuroscience, the environment and more. Divided into four parts-The Student-Practitioner-Professional; The Learning and Development of Children 0-8; The Child, Family and Society; and The Senior Practitioner-Professionalthe book covers all aspects of working with young children and engages you with theory that is explicitly linked to your practice. In each chapter, the book seeks to help you develop your professional identity and includes the following: • Activities to help you to reflect on your own practice. • Debates and dilemmas to promote discussion between students and colleagues. • Real-life case studies and photographs to illustrate key points. • Extended "reflective thinking" boxes outlining key research in the field and implications for practice. • Suggestions for key projects to help those looking for research topics. The book is supported by a companion website featuring, for students, links to useful websites and video material and an interactive flashcard glossary. Online support for lecturers includes ideas for tasks and activities to use in class and the diagrams and images in the book available to download.
Ethos, 2010
Anthropology and Child Development: A Cross-Cultural Reader contains diverse anthropological and social science studies that examine the impact of cultural practices on child development. The book is organized into four parts ("Discovering Diversity," "Infant Care and Cultural Variation," "Early Childhood," and "Middle and Later Childhood"), each of which examines anthropological writings on infancy and childhood. I touch upon all four sections briefly, but given space limitations I cannot mention every chapter. Part I brings the work of Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Bronislaw Malinowski, Meyers Fortes, and Ruth Benedict together under the rubric of early-twentieth-century cross-cultural studies of childhood. Selections are as diverse as Boas's work on skeletal growth and physical development among European immigrants in New York; Malinowski's recasting of Freud's psychoanalytical theory through his study of Trobriand kinship relations; Fortes's work on the social and psychological aspects of children's knowledge acquisition, social maturity, and inclusion in the adult world among the Tallensi in northern Ghana; and Benedict's supposition that culture mitigates the effect of biology, at least in terms of human behavior. Part II pays homage to infant studies. With the exception of Margaret Mead and a few others, although some anthropologists documented practices of childbirth and child rearing, most did not consider infants and children to be viable research subjects. After 1960, however, the commingling of biology, psychology, and linguistics resulted in new perspectives on infant development. The authors in this section focus on gender, inequality, and relations of power as related to the well-being of women and their vulnerable offspring. Robert A. LeVine's comparative research of the Gusii in rural Kenya and middle-class urban/suburban Americans presents an analysis of parenting in relation to lived experiences across geographic locations and economic and social classes. Melvin Konner's portraits of infancy among foraging peoples in southern Saharan Africa as well as Edward Tronick and colleagues' and Barry Hewlett's work with the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert, the Efe of the Ituri Forest in Zaire, and the Aka of the Central African Republic are examples of research linking human studies with those of other primates. Although early hunter-gatherer studies sought to discover traces of the "ancestral" child rearing practices in terms of universals, this research shows that contemporary hunter-gatherers are not homogeneous but instead demonstrate striking variations in infant care based on cultural practices and ecological factors. The final chapters in this section focus on populations of European origin. For example, LeVine and Norman's research reveals striking cultural variation in how people communicate with their infants and the meanings and roles they assign to their children. A very welcome component of this edited volume is the section on early childhood language acquisition. The main focus is on children's communication, social interaction, and "play," each of which demonstrates human agency in the early stages of biological and cultural development. Such research, particularly since the early 1960s, not only demonstrates how children discover, incorporate, and interact with their various environments, but also how
Culture, infancy and education
European Journal of Psychology of Education, 1989
The English word infant is derived from the Latin infans meaning «without speech». In German (Saugling) and Duch (zuigeIing), an infant is somebody who sucks (at the breast). The French equivalent (nourrisson) reflects that it is an organism which has to be fed. In Czech (kojenec) it is derived from the verb kojit meaning to nurse. Thus, when speech is acquired and feeding can be carried out independently, the period of infancy begins to give way to early childhood. In some non-Western cultures, other sorts of markers may be used to denote this transition which rely more on social phenomena than on maturational or chronological indicators. For example, the Kipsigis of western Kenya define the transition primarily in relation to the birth of the next child (Harkness & Super, 1983). Cultures also differ in terms of defining what are the critical features of development during infancy (leVine, 1977) and thereby what behaviours are preferentially encouraged (or discouraged) by the caretakers (Super, 1981). It is important to appreciate differences in the culturally-constructed meaning of infancy as they provide a better understanding of the variations that manifest themselves in panhuman forms of early educational practice. The crucial, and largely unanswered, question relates to the functional significance of these variations: in what ways do they share common concerns and in what ways do they constitute adaptations to the local environment of the culture? The answers have important consequences for the acceptability and efficacy of any international programs of aid concerned with parental and child health. While there are some notable exceptions, most research concerned with cultural comparisons of infant behaviour and development is simply not up to providing appropriate answers. Understanding the nature of the initial phase of human nurture has suffered from a neglect of the early environment of education in such comparisons. Variousjustifications have been offered for carrying out cross-cultural research on infancy (or what Leiderman, 'Iulkin & Rosenfeld, 1977, prefer to term comparative child development studies). For the present purposes, four reasons or aims can be identified.
Becoming Part of This World: Anthropology, Infancy, and Childhood
2013
IN 1973, Charlotte Hardman published an article in JASO entitled 'Can there be an Anthropology of Childhood?' Long before childhood became of general interest to anthropologists, she argued that children were a worthy subject of study. They were, she claimed, a further example of a group with 'muted voices' and in fact possessed a culture of their own. She challenged the idea that children were interesting only in so far as they were subject to processes of socialization and enculturation. She argued that anthropologists had left the study of children to psychologists such as Vygotsky (1962) and Piaget (1932) and sociologists such as Aries (1962), and had not taken up the challenge of looking at children as subjects in their own right, with their own forms of language, meanings, and understandings. She concluded that there could legitimately be an anthropology of childhood. Her article remained obscure, however, and it was another ten years before anthropologists, mo...
Anthropology and Child Development: A Cross-Cultural Reader. Robert A. LeVine , Rebecca S. New
Journal of Anthropological Research, 2010
Anthropology and Child Development: A Cross-Cultural Reader contains diverse anthropological and social science studies that examine the impact of cultural practices on child development. The book is organized into four parts ("Discovering Diversity," "Infant Care and Cultural Variation," "Early Childhood," and "Middle and Later Childhood"), each of which examines anthropological writings on infancy and childhood. I touch upon all four sections briefly, but given space limitations I cannot mention every chapter. Part I brings the work of Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Bronislaw Malinowski, Meyers Fortes, and Ruth Benedict together under the rubric of early-twentieth-century cross-cultural studies of childhood. Selections are as diverse as Boas's work on skeletal growth and physical development among European immigrants in New York; Malinowski's recasting of Freud's psychoanalytical theory through his study of Trobriand kinship relations; Fortes's work on the social and psychological aspects of children's knowledge acquisition, social maturity, and inclusion in the adult world among the Tallensi in northern Ghana; and Benedict's supposition that culture mitigates the effect of biology, at least in terms of human behavior. Part II pays homage to infant studies. With the exception of Margaret Mead and a few others, although some anthropologists documented practices of childbirth and child rearing, most did not consider infants and children to be viable research subjects. After 1960, however, the commingling of biology, psychology, and linguistics resulted in new perspectives on infant development. The authors in this section focus on gender, inequality, and relations of power as related to the well-being of women and their vulnerable offspring. Robert A. LeVine's comparative research of the Gusii in rural Kenya and middle-class urban/suburban Americans presents an analysis of parenting in relation to lived experiences across geographic locations and economic and social classes. Melvin Konner's portraits of infancy among foraging peoples in southern Saharan Africa as well as Edward Tronick and colleagues' and Barry Hewlett's work with the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert, the Efe of the Ituri Forest in Zaire, and the Aka of the Central African Republic are examples of research linking human studies with those of other primates. Although early hunter-gatherer studies sought to discover traces of the "ancestral" child rearing practices in terms of universals, this research shows that contemporary hunter-gatherers are not homogeneous but instead demonstrate striking variations in infant care based on cultural practices and ecological factors. The final chapters in this section focus on populations of European origin. For example, LeVine and Norman's research reveals striking cultural variation in how people communicate with their infants and the meanings and roles they assign to their children. A very welcome component of this edited volume is the section on early childhood language acquisition. The main focus is on children's communication, social interaction, and "play," each of which demonstrates human agency in the early stages of biological and cultural development. Such research, particularly since the early 1960s, not only demonstrates how children discover, incorporate, and interact with their various environments, but also how
Childhood: Anthropological Aspects
Abstract Anthropologists believe that the most important influence in human development is the ecological and cultural setting within which a child will grow up. The anthropological study of childhood documents and accounts for the variety of childhoods found around the world, using comparative ethnographic evidence to test hypotheses about human development. It also studies the mechanisms in child, family, and community life for the acquisition, internal transformations, sharing, and intergenerational transmission of culture. Most importantly, it does this with close attention to the everyday contexts and routines of life, experience, meanings, intentions, and beliefs and goals of the communities, parents, families, and children themselves.