Culturebybabies: Imagining everyday material culture through babies’ engagements with socks

Abstract

This article takes its point of departure in babies’ engagements with socks and seeks to explore (1) how material culture matters in babies’ everyday lives and (2) how we can understand material culture through attending to babies’ own practices, that is, babies’ culture. The ongoingness, sensoriality and movement of material culture are highlighted, and the article concludes that re-thinking material culture through babies’ engagements with socks means shifting the focus away from objects’ established meaning and towards the materials of those objects.

Ethnographic Imagination as an Interpretative Approach to the World of Infants and Children with Developmental Disabilities

“…In the wake of Alma Gottlieb’s criticism, a growing number of childhood researchers have begun to reflect on the fact that the field, while nominally covering children of all ages, has paid scant attention to infants (e.g., Brownlie & Leith, 2011; Oswell, 2013). Scholars who do study infants freely admit to its difficulties, as their subjects’ lives seem so abstruse that it leads only to unreliable observations (Elwick et al, 2014; Orrmalm, 2020a, 2020b).…”

“…To resolve these problems, the authors suggested several innovative methods drawing from other researchers. Besides that, there are also inspirational ethnographic studies investigating infants' perspectives through their body movements, in which the researcher plays a crucial role in making interpretations of the 'messy' behaviors (Orrmalm, 2020a(Orrmalm, , 2020b). Yet, just as what I will do below, these methods still rely heavily on adults' (researchers or caregivers) experiences with and perspectives of infants, which may not necessarily reflect the children's 'real' thoughts.…”

Doing ethnographic method with babies – Participation and perspective approached from the floor

“…The very youngest of children have attracted much less attention than older children within the field of child and childhood studies (Alderson, 2008;de Campos Tebet, 2019;Gottlieb, 2000Gottlieb, , 2004McNamee & Seymore, 2012;Orrmalm, 2020;Oswell, 2013;Thorne, 2008). There is research concerning babies that engages theoretically with issues like embodiment (Brownlie & Sheach Leith, 2011;Lupton, 2012Lupton, , 2013aLupton, , 2014 and material objects (Landzelius, 2001;Layne, 2000;Nadesan, 2002).…”

“…There is research concerning babies that engages theoretically with issues like embodiment (Brownlie & Sheach Leith, 2011;Lupton, 2012Lupton, , 2013aLupton, , 2014 and material objects (Landzelius, 2001;Layne, 2000;Nadesan, 2002). There are also some examples of research discussing babies' own engagements with material culture (Lupton, 2013b;Orrmalm, 2020) but overall, research focusing on babies' own practices seems relatively rare within the field.…”

Enacting sabotage in siblings’ conflicts: Desired objects and deceptive bodies

“…By adopting an interactional perspective on children’s peer cultures (Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2007, 2011) and taking inspiration from recent childhood studies that focuses on children’s material practices (e.g. Horton, 2010; Kraftl, 2015; Orrmalm, 2019; Rautio, 2016), this study, on the basis of video-recordings from families in Sweden, directs attention to how play with a desired object is sabotaged and destroyed through affective acts of retaliation.…”