Anthropology of Childhood

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/

L’iconographie égyptienne est avant tout l’expression d’une propagande. Elle utilise l’image et un grand nombre de codes et de conventions pour transmettre des messages de natures diverses, principalement dominés par la politique, la religion et les préoccupations funéraires des anciens Égyptiens. C’est dans cet état d’esprit qu’il faut replacer l’image des enfants dans l’iconographie.

Μαργαρώνη, Μ. (2008). «Ζητήματα εκπαίδευσης και ταυτότητας παιδιών διανοούμενων Αλβανών μεταναστών στη Μαγνησία. Μία μελέτη περίπτωσης», στο: ΥΠ.Ε.Π.Θ. (επιμ.), Πρακτικά Επιστημονικού Συνεδρίου «Ο ρόλος της Τυπικής, της Μη Τυπικής και της Άτυπης Εκπαίδευσης στην διαμόρφωση της προσωπικότητας των παιδιών και των εφήβων». [Αθήνα, 8-9 Νοεμβρίου 2008], σσ. 141-146 [Margaroni, M. (2008). «Questions of Education and Identity of Children of intellectual Albanian Immigrants in the Prefecture of Magnesia. A Case Study». Presentation at the Scientific Conference, entitled «The Role of Formal, Not Formal and Informal Education in the Configuration of Personality of Children and Adolescents». Organizing Institution: Ministry of Education and Religion. Athens, 8-9 November 2008. Publication in the conference proceedings (pp. 141-146)].
Το θέμα της παρούσας εισήγησης εγγράφεται στο επιστημονικό πεδίο της Ανθρωπολογίας της Παιδικής Ηλικίας, της Μετανάστευσης και της Σύγχρονης Εκπαίδευσης και έχει ως στόχο τη διερεύνηση του ρόλου της τυπικής εκπαίδευσης στη διαμόρφωση της προσωπικότητας (όσον αφορά σε ζητήματα εθνοπολιτισμικής ταυτότητας) παιδιών διανοούμενων Αλβανών που διαμένουν στο νομό Μαγνησίας. Χρησιμοποιώντας ως μεθοδολογικά εργαλεία την επιτόπια έρευνα και τη (συμμετοχική) παρατήρηση, τις αφηγήσεις ζωής και τις ημικατευθυνόμενες συνεντεύξεις/συζητήσεις με πληροφορητές-κλειδιά, θίγονται τρόποι με τους οποίους η σχολική εκπαίδευση των νεαρών Αλβανών μαθητών συμβάλλει στη διαχείριση καίριων καθημερινών θεμάτων, όπως η διγλωσσία και η διπολιτισμικότητα, η πολιτισμική διαφοροποίηση (και συχνά αντιπαράθεση) ανάμεσα στην οικογενειακή και τη δημόσια (λ.χ. σχολική) ζωή, οι ενδοοικογενειακές και διαγενεακές σχέσεις των αλλοδαπών μαθητών, οι σχέσεις τους με τους συνομίληκους αλλοδαπούς ομοεθνείς και αλλοεθνείς συμμαθητές, όπως επίσης και με τους Έλληνες, έτσι όπως αυτές αναπτύσσονται και καλλιεργούνται μέσα στη σχολική κοινότητα, η εσωτερίκευση ή μη από τους Αλβανούς μαθητές της στερεοτυπικής αναπαράστασης των “ντόπιων” για αυτούς, ο εθνοπολιτισμικός στιγματισμός και οι στρατηγικές αντιμετώπισής τους, η ενσωμάτωση στη χώρα υποδοχής και οι εννοιολογικές κατηγορίες που κατασκευάζουν για αυτήν ως ετερότητα.

« Quelques-uns deffendent exactement aux nourrisses de leurs enfans, d'aprocher de leurs maris, craignans qu'elles ne troublent le laict, et qu'elles n'en deviennent trop échauffées. Ce que toutefois il ne faut entendre à toute rigueur : car la nourrisse qui sera d'une bonne nature, joviale et gaillarde, ayant désir du couple avec son mari, si elle sent que cela luy soit totalement dénié, elle s'eschauffe tellement en son harnois, que le laict se gaste, brusle et sent le bouquin, dont il est rendu beaucoup plus mauvais et pernitieux : mais quand elle a esté délectée de quelques médiocres embrassements, elle est rendue plus modeste, tranquille et tempérée. Le laict en est meilleur, plus doux, gratieux et convenable pour la santé de l'enfant. »
Jacques Duval dans son ouvrage "Traité des Hermaphrodits, parties génitales, accouchements des femmes, etc." (1612)

Abstract; This work supports the idea of moral ascendancy to solve conflicts that may arise in cases of maternity subrogated in countries where there is no regulation of the institute. Moral ascendancy would be derived solely from the fact of taking the desire to have a child through surrogacy and make it viable. This consideration allows, for all cases, the same rules are applied to the natural biological ancestry, by analogy, with only the variation of the concept of motherhood and fatherhood for the field simply moral, forgetting the classic qualifications of family members. This design is the one that protects, on all sides, the embryo and their equality with all conceived naturally.

This book is the result of a long movement of ideas and practices between Brazil and Germany. It brings together different research methodologies (discourse analysis, case studies, cross-cultural comparison, and action and practice-research) and studies innovative theoretical approaches and childhood-related practices that question present power relations and open up new ways of dealing with emerging phenomena in the fields of school and educational policy as well as in home-rearing, therapeutic, and community practices. A series of critical case-studies and examples of radically innovative educational, media and therapeutic practices and community-based interventions are presented, all of which demonstrate the transformative powers of collective subjectivities in the making of the history of childhood and youth and of society in general. The studies presented in this volume also illustrate the role cultural-historical and qualitative childhood research may play in this “making of history”. With an introduction by M. Kontopodis and chapters by: I. Behnken, M. Benites, F. Camerini, M. Damiani, B. Fichtner, F. Liberali, A. Lopes, M. Mascia, I. S. Soares, H. Winkler, and W. Wörster

What does it mean to grow up as an evangelical Christian today? What meanings does ‘childhood’ have for evangelical adults? How does this shape their engagements with children and with schools? And what does this mean for the everyday realities of children’s lives? Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork carried out in three contrasting evangelical churches in the UK, Anna Strhan reveals how attending to the significance of children within evangelicalism deepens understanding of evangelicals’ hopes, fears and concerns, not only for children, but for wider British society. Developing a new, relational approach to the study of children and religion, the book invites us to consider both the complexities of children’s agency and how the figure of the child shapes the hopes, fears, and imaginations of adults, within and beyond evangelicalism.

The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism explores the lived realities of how evangelical Christians engage with children across the spaces of church, school, home, and other informal educational spaces in a dechristianizing cultural context, how children experience these forms of engagement, and the meanings and significance of childhood. Providing insight into different churches’ contemporary cultural and moral orientations, the book reveals how conservative evangelicals experience their understanding of childhood as increasingly countercultural, while charismatic and open evangelicals locate their work with children as a significant means of engaging with wider secular society. Setting out an approach that explores the relations between the figure of the child, children’s experiences, and how adult religious subjectivities are formed in both imagined and practical relationships with children, the book situates childhood as an important area of study within the sociology of religion and examines how we should approach childhood within this field, both theoretically and methodologically.

The aim of this article is to analyse why more than ten years after transnational adoption began in Spain, the “silences” that impede to talk about the adoption triad ‒biological and adoptive families and adopted children‒, which is in fact about multimothering, infringe the rights of adoptees. A way to this analysis is looking at certain forms of symbolic and euphemistic violence towards women who delay motherhood and have to go for assisted reproduction and/or international adoption. A violence that is also exercised on women who give or who are asked to give their children because their “inadequacy” for motherhood, through a hegemonic discourse of silence.

Socialisation theories have traditionally focused on how children are socialised in a rather unidirectional manner, according to a transmission model. However, more recent research and theories show that children are not just passive recipients, but active agents in their socialisation process. At the same time, children are subordinated to adult control. In school, they are regimented and involuntarily subjected to mass routines, discipline and control. The aim of this study was to explore and give a voice to pupils’ critical thinking about school rules and their teachers’ behaviour in relation to these rules. Ethnographic fieldwork and group interviews with students were conducted in two Swedish primary schools. The findings show that pupils criticise some school rules, distrust teachers’ explanations of particular school rules, perceive some school rules and teachers’ interventions as unfair and inconsistent, perceive no power over the construction of school rules, and express false acceptance and hidden criticism. The findings are discussed in terms of hidden curriculum, power, mentality resistance, democracy, participation and democratic citizenship education.

Szanto’s study examines a collection of Twelver Shi’i children’s books from the Syrian shrine-town of Sayyida Zaynab. As there are few Twelver Shi’is and Shi’i publishers in Syria, the Shi’i children’s books are imported from Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. As a result, they reflect both local and regional conceptions and concerns. By drawing on the theoretical models offered by Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood, this article analyzes the processes of pious subject cultivation as well as the construction of religious authority through illustrated children’s books. It demonstrates how the nurturing of Shi’i subjects occurs in stages that emphasize affect, openness to authoritative others, and the acquisition and habituation of virtues. Within this general framework, there also exist differences in opinion with respect to precisely what kind of authorities pious Shi’is should relate to, emulate, and follow.

Deleuze dizia que se os prisioneiros são tratados como crianças, estas são tratadas como prisioneiros e sofrem uma infantilização que não é a delas.
Durante muito tempo, a antropologia contribuiu para esse teatro de sombras no qual a sociedade desempenha o papel de prisão disciplinadora e as crianças o de seres associais ou antissociais esperando passivamente por sua  “socialização”. Resultado da surpreendente e inovadora utilização das técnicas de trabalho de campo e observação participante da melhor tradição antropológica, o livro de Guilherme Fians nos livra dessa armadilha. Convivendo, escutando e, sobretudo, levando a sério as crianças, o autor elabora uma antropologia que não é simplesmente “sobre a infância”, mas “da infância”, no sentido em que é escrita “do ponto de vista das crianças”. Neste livro, descobrimos um mundo absolutamente relacional, onde a variação contínua, o humor, as linhas de fuga, os movimentos de desterritorialização e reterritorialização criativa recuperam seus direitos. Mundo que é o de todos e que, mesmo situado no passado irrecuperável de cada um de nós, abre linhas de possíveis para o presente e o futuro. Leitura obrigatória para antropólogos, sociólogos, psicólogos, educadores e todos aqueles que, mais do que com a “educação” das crianças, sabem que com elas temos um bocado a aprender.
(Marcio Goldman)

Attachment theory has its roots in an ethnocentric complex of ideas, longstanding in the United States, under the rubric of “intensive mothering.” Among these various approaches and programs, attachment theory has had an inordinate and wide-ranging influence on a wide range of professions concerned with children (family therapy, education, the legal system, and public policy, the medical profession, etc.) inside and outside the United States. This chapter looks critically at how attachment theory has been applied in a variety of contexts and discusses its influence on parenting. It examines the tension distortion that often results when research findings are translated into actual applications or programs, ignoring any particularities of cultural context. It describes how attachment theory has been used as the basis for child-rearing manuals and has influenced programs and policies more directly, to form legal decisions that affect families, as well as to develop public policy and p...

The paper analyses ethnographic studies of childhood in Slovenian agrarian society in the first half of the 20th century. It shows how children were organically integrated into the daily life, work and interactions, allowing them to directly learn through observation and gradual participation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 2011/2012 in southern Slovenia, it presents a case study on children's learning through observation and participation in domestic chores and thus questions the dichotomy between 'traditional' societies where children could learn through observation and the 'information society' where it is said that childhoods are becoming institutionalised and more formal learning strategies are needed in order to socialise them into current society. Theoretically, the paper draws on current anthropological theories on children's learning and socialisation

Introdução ao Dossiê "A antropologia e as crianças" publicado na Horizontes Antropológicos, em que fazemos um estado da arte do campo e apresentamos as colaborações e contribuições dos artigos que compõem o dossiê, apontando ao fim para continuidades, novas abordagens e inovações possíveis ao campo.

Children are equipped by nature to 'learn' the real WORLD, but education trains them to learn the WORD - the description of the world! The 'real' world is alive, present, experiential, and dynamic. Through playful imitation, children learn life.
Modernity has fragmented the integral nature of life into several types of categories and packed them into neat compartments.  Learning, working, and playing is one such compartment and so are play and toy.  Children are born holistic and the world around them is integrated. But our artificial categories fragment their integral experience.
Childhood is the time when simultaneously several abilities, qualities, and knowledge is developed. The knowledge of where they belong, what is to be done there, how etc is learned, along with developing the tools, qualities, and abilities for learning?  The language also is learned during this time. They learn to name the world, understand the connections, and also learn to communicate their understandings of the world.

Attachment theory has its roots in an ethnocentric complex of ideas, longstanding in the United States, under the rubric of “intensive mothering.” Among these various approaches and programs, attachment theory has had an inordinate and wide-ranging influence on a wide range of professions concerned with children (family therapy, education, the legal system, and public policy, the medical profession, etc.) inside and outside the United States. This chapter looks critically at how attachment theory has been applied in a variety of contexts and discusses its influence on parenting. It examines the tension distortion that often results when research findings are translated into actual applications or programs, ignoring any particularities of cultural context. It describes how attachment theory has been used as the basis for child-rearing manuals and has influenced programs and policies more directly, to form legal decisions that affect families, as well as to develop public policy and p...

Attachment theory has its roots in an ethnocentric complex of ideas, longstanding in the United States, under the rubric of “intensive mothering.” Among these various approaches and programs, attachment theory has had an inordinate and wide-ranging influence on a wide range of professions concerned with children (family therapy, education, the legal system, and public policy, the medical profession, etc.) inside and outside the United States. This chapter looks critically at how attachment theory has been applied in a variety of contexts and discusses its influence on parenting. It examines the tension distortion that often results when research findings are translated into actual applications or programs, ignoring any particularities of cultural context. It describes how attachment theory has been used as the basis for child-rearing manuals and has influenced programs and policies more directly, to form legal decisions that affect families, as well as to develop public policy and p...

Neste texto, proponho o encontro da antropologia da criança, um campo bastante consolidado na antropologia, com a etnologia indígena. Partindo da percepção de que, de um lado, os estudos sobre crianças indígenas estão igualmente consolidados no Brasil, mas, de outro, a etnologia indígena não os tem levado em consideração, e que os
modelos analíticos recentes têm falhado em incorporar as crianças, proponho meios para essa incorporação. Para isso, discuto a revisão de conceitos que têm balizado a antropologia, mas por vezes persistido na etnologia indígena, e trago exemplos de etnografias com crianças indígenas, de modo a propor uma etnologia indígena que possa levar a sério o que as crianças têm a revelar.

Oneiric Home and Its Hidden Spaces. The Image of the Attic and the Basement in Childhood Memories.

The article addresses the issue of uninhabited home spaces such as attics and basements. Refering to ethnographic research, the author aims at reconstructing the image of those spaces recorded in childhood memories as well as at explaining their symbolic meaning.
Simultaneously, the text attempts at answering the question concerning the role that those spaces play in the process of the individual's development and the place that their images may have in the mythical order.

School rules are usually associated with classroom management and school discipline. However, rules also define ways of thinking about oneself and the world. Rules are guidelines for actions and for the evaluation of actions in terms of good and bad, or right and wrong, and therefore a part of moral or values education in school. This study is a part of a larger ethnographic study on values education in the everyday life of school. Here the focus is on school rules and students’ reasoning about these rules. Five categories of school rules have been constructed during the analysis: (a) relational rules; (b) structuring rules; (c) protecting rules; (d) personal rules; and (e) etiquette rules. The findings show that the students’ reasoning about rules varies across the rule categories. The perception of reasonable meaning behind a rule seems to be – not surprisingly – significant to students’ acceptance of the rule. According to the students, relational rules are the most important in school. Students also value protecting and structuring rules as important because of the meaning giving to them. Etiquette rules are valued as the least important or even unnecessary by the students.

Abstract The aim of this article is to establish whether there is anything intrinsically immoral about surrogacy arrangements from the perspective of the surrogate mother herself. Specific attention is paid to the claim that surrogacy is similar to prostitution in that it reduces women's reproductive labour to a form of alienated and/or dehumanized labour.

Intercountry adoption has declined significantly in the last five years. It is not as feasible an option anymore for building a family with a very young child or infant from Guatemala. However, global surrogacy appears to be meeting the need for some individuals and couples. Contracting surrogacy with a woman in another nation is explored, focusing on vulnerable women. Specifically, surrogacy in India and Guatemala is discussed with concerns about informed consent in the context of poverty and, in the case of Guatemala, violence against women and human trafficking. Technological advances and globalization are also considered as the authors pose critical questions about the practice of global surrogacy. Implications for social workers and human rights defenders are also posed, underscoring the importance of awareness to this emergent global practice.

How do we recognise children’s participation and their relationships with public life? Drawing on evidence from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2016 for the ERC funded Connectors Study on the relationship between childhood and public life, this article explores the ways in which children communicate their encounters with public life. The contemporary phenomenon of listening without hearing is discussed as this relates to the call for listening to children and the simultaneous failure to hear what they say. Idioms are introduced as an ‘instrument’ for thinking through what it means and feels like to encounter and make sense of childhood and children’s practices of relating to public life. The analysis focuses on three emblematic encounters with six- to eight-year-old children living in Athens, Hyderabad, and London. We argue that dominant understandings of listening to children rely heavily on cognitive, conceptual, and rational models of idealised and largely verba...

Children seems to be the most misunderstood beings in the context of modernity. The rise in parenting related theories, websites, etc point to the fact that modern humans have lost their most fundamental instinct required to sustain their species. It looks like the more so-called intellectual knowledge we have the less life sustaining instinctual knowledge we have. I have a different story to tell. It is about children from non-literate communities. I think it may help in understanding children better provided we take care of the usual bias of being 'developed', 'educated' etc It is like this. Suppose we want to study the true nature of dogs would we rather study the dogs in the jungle or the overprotected and conditioned pet dogs? Or at least the street dogs? In the case of children, we are making all conclusions based on studying children from WEIRD societies. Two studies are important to help us out somewhat. (1. The weirdest people in the world? Joseph Henrich (a1), Steven J.Heine (a2) and Ara Norenzayan (a3) The study of childhood in academia has been dominated by a mono-cultural or WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) perspective. Within the field of anthropology, however, a contrasting and more varied view is emerging. In western culture, children are totally controlled and are also trapped in the consumerist culture. I call this product-oriented culture rather than process-oriented. Knowledge itself has been turned into a product to be sold in schools. In order to understand children, in their true form-spontaneous, creative, naturally truthful, trusting life, we have to study children from environments that provide another condition. Let me come to my story. I am from Kerala, India who has been studying indigenous cognition in a most unusual way. I studied design and realized that even my aesthetic sense has been colonized and mechanized in the process and this led me to live with nonliterate communities from 1990. Around 1993 I stopped reading for a couple of years and this was primarily due to the fact that whichever book I read has been written by the western thinkers or within the paradigm of modernity and I am being framed to see the world the way West wants me to see. After I left reading, I began to observe how nonliterate artisan communities create products and how their children learn the craft. This was a fantastic experience as without my knowledge my cognitive system underwent a change. That is from language-based cognition to experience-based cognition. This means I reclaimed the natural cognition in which knowing happens on its own and my job was only to pay attention. Reasoning mind stopped working and due to this understanding began to happen on its own. One thing that became clear is that literates are learning the WORD whereas the illiterates are learning the WORLD and due to this they are being shaped by the characteristics and qualities embedded in their respective cognitive sources. I realized that the linearity, fragmentation and compartmentalization, reasoning, etc are all being developed because the literates are engaging with the written word right from childhood.

Home Visiting always takes place in highly specific contexts. Culture can deeply influence the behaviours, attitudes, and reactions of parents who are enrolled in early intervention programmes. In the past few years, a systematic examination of the participants’ perspectives encouraged scholars to develop new methods of assessing the developmental and health outcomes of these initiatives. Given their highly contextual and culturally specific character, ethnographic methods have become increasingly popular in this endeavour.

Rather than drawing exclusively on external measurements to evaluate and act upon the individual situations of parents and children, an approach based on qualitative methods seemed to yield the kind of insights that can inform a more case-to-case type of intervention. For example, in rural Australia, using culturally competent care workers has been found to “deliver better developmental outcomes for children and improve maternal health and family functioning”. However, since communities in urban contexts seldom share a single culture, and their members are often very numerous, ethnographic methods might be difficult to use and ultimately inefficient.

In this paper, I propose to reflect upon the combination of ethnographic and statistical methods to understand the influence of multiple cultures of motherhood in the context of HV programmes. My aim is to illustrate the potentials and the limits of statistical and ethnographic methods for the purpose of imagining early intervention initiatives that are both more effective and ethical.