Enriched with anecdotes from ethnography and the daily media, this revised edition examines family structure, reproduction, profiles of children's caretakers, their treatment at different ages, their play, work, schooling, and transition to adulthood. The result is a nuanced and credible picture of childhood in different cultures, past and present.
The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood offers a portrait of childhood across time, culture, species, and environment. Anthropological research on learning in childhood has been scarce, but this book will change that. It demonstrates that anthropologists studying childhood can offer a description and theoretically sophisticated account of children's learning and its role in their development, socialization, and enculturation. Further, it shows the particular contribution that children's learning makes to the construction of society and culture as well as the role that culture-acquiring children play in human evolution. Book jacket.
This study explores children through the eyes of an eclectic team of researchers from the United States to Viet Nam to Australia. Seen as an important contribution to research on children because it integrates the subfields of anthropology (including archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural and linguistic anthropology, and applied anthropology) to bear on an analysis of the conditions of children and youth in the 21st century.
This unprecedented collection of articles is an introduction to the study of cultural variations in childhood across the world and to the theoretical frameworks for investigating and interpreting them. Presents a history of cross-cultural approaches to child-development Recent articles examine diverse contexts of childhood in ecological, semiotic, and sociolinguistic terms Includes ethnographic studies of childhood in the Pacific, Africa, Latin America, East Asia, Europe and North America Illuminates the process through which people become the bearers of culturally/historically specific identities Serves as an ideal text for anthropology courses focusing on childhood, as well as classes on development psychology
We have all read fairy tales about kings and queens, princes and princesses, dragons and castles. It's all true! They really existed! Well, except for the dragons. Dragons didn't really exist. Somebody just made that part up (Also the talking fish.) But the kings and princesses and castles definitely existed. For much of history, most people lived under monarchies. That meant they took one person and everyone had to do anything he said, until that person died, and then they'd just do the same thing with his son or sometimes daughter. Sort of like a game of Simon Says, except the same person always gets to be Simon, and the game goes on forever. This was referred to as "government." There are two common mistakes people make about kings. One is to think that they were always there: that there's just something odd about humans that makes them want to give one person all the power. No. That's wrong. The other mistake is to think maybe people long ago behaved that way, but that's because people long ago were slightly stupid, and hadn't figured out how to hold elections or online surveys, but we certainly don't have anything like kings now. That turns out not to be true either. It might seem to be, because we no longer have anyone dressed in elaborate costumes who can order somebody's head chopped off - at least, in most places, we don't - but as we'll see, things haven't changed nearly as much as we like to think. One thing no one can deny: kings are fun to think about. That's why people like to dress up as them, or play games where they get to be kings or queens, or why there are so many books and stories about them. So why write another one? Well, mainly to ask: why do we find kings and queens so interesting? What is it we really like about them, and what is it we'd find annoying or even terrifying if one was actually around? Where did they come from and why do they never seem to go away? Is it possible to keep all the things we like about kings and queens and get rid of all the other ones? This book, then, is an illustrated collection of questions and answers to help us get to the bottom of all this. But it's also meant to be entertaining because, let's face it, kings and queens are pretty entertaining. We'll see what happens when some people get to do absolutely anything they want, and other people try to come up with all sorts of clever strategies to keep them out of trouble. We'll see what happens when servant girls conquer the world, mummies pretend they're still alive, and parents build make-believe towns for their children. But we don't want to give too much away.
Over several generations villagers of Dominica have been shifting from Patwa, an Afro-French creole, to English, the official language. Despite government efforts at Patwa revitalization and cultural heritage tourism, rural caregivers and teachers prohibit children from speaking Patwa in their presence. Drawing on detailed ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of video-recorded social interaction in naturalistic home, school, village and urban settings, the study explores this paradox and examines the role of children and their social worlds. It offers much-needed insights into the study of language socialization, language shift and Caribbean children’s agency and social lives, contributing to the burgeoning interdisciplinary study of children’s cultures. Further, it demonstrates the critical role played by children in the transmission and transformation of linguistic practices, which ultimately may determine the fate of a language.
Children of God uncovers the significant, but largely unnoticed, place of the child as a prototype of human flourishing in the work of four authors spanning the modern period. Shedding new light on the role of the child figure in modernity, and in theological responses to it, the book makes an important contribution to the disciplines of historical theology, theology and literature and ecumenical theology. Through a careful exploration of the continuities and differences in the work of Thomas Traherne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Charles Péguy, it traces the ways in which their distinctive responses to human childhood structured the broader pattern of their theology, showing how they reached beyond the confines of academic theology and exercised a lasting influence on their literary and cultural context.
How Long Have Fathers Carried and Cared for Their Infants? -- Life Cycle -- The Birth of a Child and the "Birth" of a Socially Recognized Father -- Couvade and Hormonal Correlates of Paternity -- Postnatal Infant Development -- Reproductive Careers among Forager Males -- The Duration of Father Care Estimated from Skeletal Maturation and Decline -- Evidence of Father Care in Humans and Animals -- Forager Fathers and Infants Cross-culturally -- Paternal Behavior in Nonhuman Primates and Other Animals -- Evolutionary Perspectives -- The Evolution of Carrying Behavior -- Hyper-encephalization of Neonates -- Becoming Human -- Epilogue: The Role of Father Care: Past, Present, and Future.
Children in the Marshall Islands do many things that adults do not. They walk around half naked. They carry and eat food in public without offering it to others. They talk about things they see rather than hiding uncomfortable truths. They explicitly refuse to give. Why do they do these things? Many think these behaviors are a natural result of children's innate immaturity. But Elise Berman argues that children are actually taught to do things that adults avoid: to be rude, inappropriate, and immature. Before children learn to be adults, they learn to be different from them. Berman's main theoretical claim therefore is also a novel one: age emerges through interaction and is a social production. In Talking Like Children, Berman analyzes a variety of interactions in the Marshall Islands, all broadly based around exchange: adoption negotiations, efforts to ask for or avoid giving away food, contentious debates about supposed child abuse. In these dramas both large and small, age differences emerge through the decisions people make, the emotions they feel, and the power they gain. Berman's research includes a range of methods -- participant observation, video and audio recordings, interviews, children's drawings -- that yield a significant corpus of data including over 80 hours of recorded naturalistic social interaction. Presented as a series of captivating stories, Talking Like Children is an intimate analysis of speech and interaction that shows what age means. Like gender and race, age differences are both culturally produced and socially important. The differences between Marshallese children and adults give both groups the ability to manipulate social life in distinct but often complementary ways. These differences produce culture itself. Talking Like Children establishes age as a foundational social variable and a central concern of anthropological and linguistic research.
