Child Helpers: A Multidisciplinary Perspective

This essay was greatly inspired by a 15 film titled Tiny Katerina, which shows glimpses of Katerina from two- to four-and-a-half years of age. She lives with her parents and older brother in Northwestern Siberia in the taiga. The Khanty-speaking people live by foraging (berries, for example), fishing and herding reindeer; they are semi-nomadic. In their camp and the vicinity, there is no evidence of electricity or any other public service. These people are very much “off the grid.” From the first, as a wobbly toddler, Katerina is shown being helpful. She carries (and drops and picks up) firewood chopped by her mother into their tent. She ladles food (spilling some) from a large pot over the fire into a tin and feeds the dog. She carries pans with bread dough to her mother to place in the baking oven. When her mother goes gathering in the forest, Katerina has her own toddler-size collecting bucket. She is out in all weather, including deep snow, keeping warm in her animal skin anorak and mittens

Unmasking Children\u27s Agency

The goal of this paper is to identify (unmask) and critique the movement to promote children’s agency as a cornerstone of research, care, education and intervention with children. The article makes a case that this movement is harmful to a scientific approach to the study of childhood, distorts or ignores key understandings of the evolution of childhood and culture. The article demonstrates that the agency movement is ethnocentric, classist and hegemonic representing the dominance of contemporary bourgeoisie child-rearing. It imposes a single, privileged ethnotheory of childhood upon the diverse societies of the world with alternative ethnotheories and practices. Lastly, the article argues that the movement is not efficacious either in advancing theory or practice

Accounting for Variability in Mother-Child Play

This paper highlights contrasting perspectives in the study of mother-child play. One contrast emerges as we look at the phenomenon using the lens offered by anthropology as opposed to the more commonly used lens of psychology. A second contrast is apparent from on-the-ground descriptions of childhood in the ethnographic record compared to observations of children in the upper strata of modern society. Psychologists and those public agents who adopt their perspective see mother-child play—from infancy—as both necessary for normal development and an unlimited good. Its self-evident value should be impressed upon those who are as yet, unenlightened. Anthropologists not only frequently note the absence of mother-child play, but, equally important, they provide culturally-nuanced explanations for why this is so. Psychologists see mother-child play as natural, anthropologists as cultural. The paper concludes with a call to cease the wholesale exportation of a culture-specific child-rearing strategy that may be quite incongruent with native belief and practice

The Chore Curriculum

The term “curriculum” in chore curriculum conveys the idea that there is a discernible regularity to the process whereby children attempt to learn, then master and finally, carry out their chores. While the academic or “core” curriculum (of Math, English, Science) found in schools is formal and imposed on students in a top–down process, the chore curriculum is informal and emerges in the interaction of children’s need to fit in and emulate those older, their developing cognitive and sensorimotor capacity, the division of labor within the family and the nature of the tasks (chores) themselves. The primary theme of this chapter is the notion of children as workers—across foraging (hunting and gathering), pastoral and farming societies. A complementary theme is the process by which children learn the trades of their particular society. In fact, children most often learn “on the job.” Nevertheless, there are distinct regularities in this process that I’ve attempted to capture in the expression “chore curriculum

Why Anthropology of Childhood? A short history of an emerging discipline

The paper has four goals: to refute the claim that anthropologists have not studied childhood; to provide a cursory history of the field; to provide an organizational schema for reviewing the literature in the field and; to suggest a strategy for future scholarship in the anthropology of childhood

Homo faber juvenalis: A Multidisciplinary Survey of Children as Tool Makers/Users

The overall goal of this paper is to derive a set of generalizations that might characterize children as tool makers/users in the earliest human societies. These generalizations will be sought from the collective wisdom of four distinct bodies of scholarship: lithic archaeology; juvenile chimps as novice tool users; recent laboratory work in human infant and child cognition, focused on objects becoming tools and; the ethnographic study of children learning their community’s tool-kit. The presumption is that this collective wisdom will yield greater insight into children’s development as tool producers and users than has been available to scholars operating within narrower disciplinary limits

“Babies Aren’t Persons”: A Survey of Delayed Personhood

To better understand attachment from a cross-cultural and historical perspective, I have amassed over 200 cases from the ethnographic and archaeological records that reveal cultural models (D\u27Andrade and Strauss 1992) of infancy. The 200 cases represent all areas of the world, historical epochs from the Mesolithic to the present and all types of subsistence patterns (Appendix 1). The approach is inductive where cases with similar models of infancy are clustered into archetypes. My principal finding from this analysis is that, in the broadest overview, infants are, effectively, placed on probation and not immediately integrated into the society. Attachment failure is not seen as a potential problem but, rather, premature attachment to an infant whose existence may be fleeting is to be guarded against. Most societies view infants and even children as not-yet-persons. Infants are born into a state of liminality or incompleteness. Among the Wari, a baby is compared to unripe fruit as it is still being made ; (Conklin and Morgan 1996: 672) and the Nankani reserve judgment on the infant\u27s humanity until they can be certain it is not a spirit or bush child (Denham et al 2010: 608). My presentation of results will first identify the main factors that give rise to delaying personhood and, second, to the cultural models which justify and guide the transformation of babies into persons. Variability in the way this non-personhood is characterized and in the steps that must occur to complete the process of constructing a person is great but not infinite. Hence, in the second half of the chapter, I will identify and discuss several archetypal cultural models of infancy

Children as a reserve labor force

Human life history is unique in the great length of the juvenile or immature period. The lengthened period is often attributed to the time required for youth to master the culture, particularly subsistence and survival skills. But an increasing number of studies show that children become skilled well before they gain complete independence and the status of adults. It seems, as they learn through play and participation in the domestic economy, children are acquiring a “reserve capacity” of skills and knowledge, which they may not fully employ for many years. The theory offered here to resolve this paradox poses that, individually and collectively, children’s reserve capacity for work can be rapidly activated to offset a shortfall in familial resources brought on by crises such as the loss of older family members. Additionally, social forces engendered by war, disease, famine, and economic change may lead to the wholesale recruitment of children into the labor force—with consequent attenuation of the developmental opportunities of an extended juvenility. In effect, humans display a primary life history strategy and an accelerated strategy with a shortened period of dependency. A wide array of cases from anthropology and history will be offered in support of this proposal

How Do Children Become Workers? Making Sense of Conflicting Accounts of Cultural Transmission in Anthropology and Psychology

This article uses children’s work as a lens to examine methodological concerns in the study of cultural transmission and children’s learning of useful domestic and subsistence skills. We begin by providing a review of the relevant literature concerning cultural transmission in the context of the ethnographic record, as well as more recent studies originating largely from psychology. We then offer an ethnographic case study concerning Asabano (PNG [Papua New Guinea]) childhood to make an important methodological contribution in the interdisciplinary study of cultural transmission. The case study centers on the paradox that Asabano parents, in interviews, claim that their children learn almost exclusively via parental teaching. Field observation and the parent’s and children’s spontaneous remarks suggest that this, in fact, does not happen and that children are expected to learn largely on their own with little parental intervention. To account for this paradox, we illustrate the limits of asking in particular cultural contexts like that of the Asabano, as well as the influence of institutions such as schools and churches, which have provided new and influential models of teaching that interlocutors are able to refer to in the context of interviews without necessarily changing their actual practices