Anthropological Contributions and Challenges to the Study of Children and Childhoods

Abstract

This essay considers the anthropology of childhood's recent growth. It summarizes the sub-field's extensive if often unacknowledged past, reviews its late 20th-century bourgeoning, and then highlights three influential teaching texts, each of which argues for a more considered, culturally informed understanding of children and childhood while performing the vital service of bringing together heretofore scattered ideas and data. To ensure the field's further maturation, scholars must leverage what an integrative, four-fields approach has to offer, attend to the conjoined, coterminous, and coeval facets of adulthood and childhood; leverage what an integrative, four-fields approach has to offer; expand the pediatric lens; and otherwise guard against our own cultural biases.

A (sub)culture of their own? Children of lifestyle migrants in Goa, India

“…In fact, much of the seminal TCK literature largely ignores the agency of children, a theme that is strongly emphasized in current childhood studies (Hardman, 2001: 503–504; see also Cole and Durham, 2008: 21; Jenks, 2005: 30; Nieuwenhuys, 2003: 152). Children can, in fact, create their own cultural practices (Sobo, 2015: 55). Instead of adults making assumptions about TCKs’ lives and identities, careful attention should be paid to the everyday lives of the children themselves, their own experiences and conceptualizations.…”

“…My research was guided by the prevalent paradigm in childhood studies in social sciences, according to which children need to be studied as active agents who are themselves the best source of information about matters that concern them (Kellet and Ding, 2004: 165). Moreover, children should be seen as legitimate social actors instead of being considered as in a state of becoming adults (see, e.g., Caputo, 2001: 179; James, 2007: 263–265; Montgomery, 2009; Sobo, 2015: 55). This approach is very different from that of developmental psychology, but in this article my aim is to look at the phenomenon from an anthropological perspective.…”