Anthropology of Children and Childhood

In the good old days of descriptive ethnography children's games and pastimes were treated as a serious matter. The now-defunct handbook Notes and Queries on Anthropology declared games of all kinds to be "worthy of special study", and advised fieldworkers to join in and learn to play them, as well as recording them as fully as possible (1929: 321; 1951: 334). When I began fieldwork in Usangu in 1980, Alison Redmayne encouraged me to collect children's riddles for the linguistic and cultural information they contained, much as she and other Oxford-trained anthropologists of her generation had done. But after a tentative start I switched my attention to the verbal 'games' that adults played, making no more than occasional notes on children's pastimes whenever I came across them. Sometimes they were difficult to ignore, like the boys who playfully parodied the ethnographer-as-photographer with their own clay models of my camera.

The article examines the psycho-historical model of the evolution of childhood in the context of other historical – anthropological concepts to consider the still little known history of paedophilia. It presents the oldest documented cases of paedophilia in the context of libertinism and formation of the public in the second half of the 18th century. On the basis of surviving sources, the author mentions several scandals involving child abuse in the territory of Slovakia in the 18th and 19th centuries. She has sought discussion of paedophilia in contemporary educational literature and anti-clerical pamphlets, and emphasizes that there is a deep tradition behind the “culture of silence” associated with recent paedophile scandals in the Catholic Church.

This edited volume studies the complex interrelation of poverty, work, and different stages in the life course, and how it contributes to the permanent existence of poverty and inequality in vulnerable groups in society. Mechanisms of productions and reproduction of these relationships are identified through empirical research carried out in four Latin American countries: Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba. This book centers on the experiences of individuals in those less favored social groups who may have suffered structural poverty for decades, or who may have been simply deprived of a basic income to cover their most essential needs.

This chapter examines the evidence for the daily lives of children in Viking and Hiberno-Scandinavian Dublin. Research relating to Hiberno-Scandinavian children in the Irish archaeological record is still in its infancy, but the material from Dublin offers considerable potential (McAlister 2003; 2009). The themes of environment, socialisation and play are discussed in order to explore how children could create their own cultural worlds, which intersected with-but were also distinct from-the adult world (Lillehammer 1989; 2000). The material and cultural world of children can be traced through the study of the nature and distribution of objects that belonged to children, such as toys (Sofaer-Derevenski 1994; Baxter 2005). Toys are given both significance and meaning by the children who play with them, and, as Sally Crawford (2009, 57) has recently argued, 'given that children engaged with material culture in object play, it is imperative to identify their toys in the past if children's culture, and its relationship with adult culture, is to be understood'. Interaction between children and the adult world can also be examined through analysis of artefacts that represent labour production and socialisation. Finally, analysis of the range of artefacts buried with children allows for exploration of the ways in which childhood identity and experience were interrelated with other identities, such as class and gender. 'Finding' children in the archaeological record There is little doubt that traces of the lives of children can be found in the archaeological record, even if our capacity to identify them is, as yet, still somewhat limited. As Mizoguchi (2000, 141) has argued, 'talking about children in the milieu of archaeological discourse is currently as contentious as talking about gender used to be. This is predominantly because children are often deemed to be invisible, or difficult to recognize archaeologically … however it is simply not accurate to state that children cannot be seen in archaeological material'. Nevertheless, childhood is not widely studied by archaeologists (Park 2005, 53). There are a number of reasons why this has come about, but Hirschfeld (2002, 612) has argued that the lack of child-focused scholarship has been the result of a cultural mindset that overestimates the role of adults in cultural learning, and underestimates the contribution of children in cultural reproduction. He also states that there has traditionally been a lack of appreciation of 'the scope and force of children's culture, particularly in shaping adult culture'. Another reason why childhood studies have been sidelined in archaeology is the persistent belief that 'we already understand what childhood is all about' (Park 2005, 54). Park argues that this belief is unfounded: Ethnographic research demonstrates that childhood can be defined differently from culture to culture, and therefore the experience of being a child undoubtedly varies as well. And if synchronic variation is possible, then so of course is variation over time. Hence there is the need for an archaeology of childhood, in which at least one goal should be to explore how and why childhood varied (2005, 54).

Artykuł przedstawia propozycję interpretacyjną czwartego tomu autobiograficznego cyklu powieściowego Karla Ove Knausgårda Moja walka. Powieść dostarcza interesującego materiału badawczego pod względem zobrazowanego w utworze problemu tożsamościowego i nienormatywnego pożądania związanego z erotyczną transgresją, która nie powinna zaistnieć z powodów etycznych (pożądanie względem nieletniej uczennicy). Metodologia wykorzystana w artykule sytuuje się na granicy dociekań psychoanalitycznych, teorii gender i poetyki queer.

RESUMEN El propósito en este artículo es analizar los sentidos de pertenencia desplegados mediante prácticas rituales de iniciación mapuches dirigidas a los niños y niñas, revitalizadas en la provincia del Neuquén a partir de 2000; a la vez que indagar cómo tales instancias han sido experimentadas por las niñas y los niños participantes, a partir del relevamiento etnográfico de sus prácticas y representaciones. Asimismo, se abordan las implicancias de estos rituales en los procesos etnogenéticos en curso en una "joven" comunidad rural y en un barrio periférico de la ciudad de Neuquén Capital, Argentina. Para terminar, se plantean reflexiones sobre lo que el caso analizado aporta a los estudios antropológicos sobre los procesos de etnogénesis y sobre la niñez. ABSTRACT This article explores the senses of belonging promoted by mapuche ritual practices of initiation addressed to children, which have been revitalized in the province of Neuquén since 2000, examining how children themselves have experienced them, through an ethnographic approach to their practices and representations. At the same time, this paper analyses the impact such rituals have had on the ongoing ethnogenetic processes in a "young" rural community and in a peripheral neighborhood of Neuquén city, Argentina. To conclude, I suggest how the analysis of this case can contribute to anthropological research on processes of ethnogenesis and on childhood.

PENULTIMATE PROOFS: please do not quote. To quote or cite, please see to DOI: 10.1037/hop0000105

A common view among ancient historians about Roman attentiveness to children's psychological development needs reconsideration. The view holds that Romans ignored children's cognitive ontogeny, perceiving early childhood as a largely undifferentia-ted life stage. A separate but related issue is the problematic claim that Roman childhood was entirely a matter of social construction. I present evidence from over four hundred years of Roman writing to make three points against Roman neglect of children and radical social construction. First, a consensus (granted our limited number of sources) about "developmental psychology" prevailed from the late republic to late antiquity. Second, this consensus is consistent with modern findings and theories. In particular, the Roman material maps onto a developmental timeline featuring a "2-month revolution," when the infant engages in dyadic protoconversations with adults, and a "9-month revolution," when the infant shares attention triadically with adults toward third objects. In the Roman consensus, both dyadic protoconversations and triadic joint attention were central to cultural learning. Third, when the Roman consensus about children's minds did change, it was because of the Christian doctrine of original sin, according to which even newborns were psychologically corrupt. Nonetheless , I argue, this rupture in the Roman consensus does not entail that we should suppose childhood to have been entirely a social construction or merely a projection of a religious or other ideology. Rather, any construction of childhood-even the late-antique Christian one-will necessarily rest upon a foundation of, and thus be constrained by, certain inescapable biological and psychological "givens."

Tophet narratives have monopolised the study of infants and children in Phoenician communities, overshadowing fresh approaches to this topic that developed during the last decades. Notwithstanding the lack of textual and epigraphic data, Motya provides a wide range of resources for examining this theme: alleged child-specific artefacts, iconographic sources and skeletal remains. This chapter offers an overall review of the published evidence from Motya connected to infancy and childhood and represents a first attempt to introduce a fresh anthropology-based perspective.

Depuis la fin des années 1980, les études sur l’enfance dans l’Antiquité se sont multipliées, renouvelant en profondeur nos connaissances et nos représentations sur cette question. Nous dresserons un bilan historiographique puis nous tenterons de restituer les grands traits qui caractérisaient ce moment de la vie humaine dans le monde grec en nous intéressant en particulier aux pratiques rituelles de l’enfance.

Children are often the subject of photographic practice but rarely are
they thought of as photographers in their own right.

From the catalogue: 'Introducing the Children's Photography Archive' (ISBN: 978-1-912685-54-7).
You may read more about the archive and download the catalogue here:
https://childhoodpublics.org/communications/writing/exhibition-catalogues/

in common: children’s photo-stories of public life was an exhibition of children’s photo-stories about what matters to them, hosted by the Connectors team in London, Hyderabad and Athens between late 2017 and early 2018. The exhibitions were the outcome of three years intensive research with children and showcased the study findings through photographic stories created by the children. These exhibitions explored the ways that younger children encounter, experience and maybe engage with public life. We examined what public life means for younger children, and questioned how thinking about public life from a child’s perspective might help us to re-think the relationships between public-private-personal-political experiences. You can read more here: https://childhoodpublics.org/events/in-common-childrens-photo-stories-of-public-life/

This book explores how humanitarian interventions for children in difficult circumstances engage in affective commodification of disadvantaged childhoods. The chapters consider how transnational charitable industries are created and mobilized around childhood need—highlighting children in situations of war and poverty, and with indeterminate access to health and education—to redirect global resource flows and sentiments in order to address concerns of child suffering. The authors discuss examples from around the world to show how, as much as these processes can help achieve the goals of aid organizations, such practices can also perpetuate the conditions that organizations seek to alleviate and thereby endanger the very children they intend to help.

In this paper, we argue for a view of analysis as an embodied practice
and review others’ testimonies of carrying out multimodal ethnography.
This review suggests that metaphors are key for communicating what
happens to us in the course of the research and our subsequent sensemaking
practices. We identify four metaphors for communicating data
collection and analytic practices: composing, meandering, plundering and
time travel. We then turn to our own multimodal fieldwork with children
in middle childhood, to think about the experiences and emergent
metaphors that shaped our practice on an international study looking
at the relationship between childhood and public life. Children’s play was
instructive in our own formation as multimodal ethnographers. We
provide examples of the ways in which children recruited us into their
play, the ways in which play taught us about what matters to children,
and finally, how we took play into our own analytical practices.
[First page only - Please contact us for full article.]

Presentation on Youth, Adulthood and Social Integration in the DR Congo on the occasion of an expert group meeting of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Inclusive Social Development, organized by the Doha International Family Institute (DIFI) in collaboration with the International Federation for Family Development (IFFD).

This dissertation focuses on the characterization and role of toys in English language children’s literature, with an emphasis on differences and similarities in the cultural contexts where toys play a primary role.
Although regarded as material objects, toys are depositaries of values and deep connotations attributed to them by human society. Through the critical perspectives offered by material culture studies, thing theory, psychology, and cultural memory, the present work highlights the role of toys in the dynamics of identity building, leading to specific responses to the social context, and choices in gender roles.