Child Space: An Anthropological Exploration of Young People's Use of Space by Karen Malone, ed.

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 19 No. 1 (Spring 2009) ISSN: 1546-2250 Child Space: An Anthropological Exploration of Young People's Use of Space Malone, Karen (2007). New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company; 271 pages. $Rs.750. ISBN 818069433X. Child Space is an edited volume of ten essays that explore the meaning and use of space through the lives of children and youth. The collection of papers takes the reader to war torn Sri Lanka (Margaret Trawick); the streets of Rio de Janeiro (Lucia Rabello De Castro); neighborhoods in English towns (Virginia Morrow) and Portland (Matthew Atencio); a squatter camp in Johannesburg (Jill Kruger); the holy Indian town of Benaras (Nita Kumar); residential school environments for tribal children in the Indian state of Orissa (Deepak Kumar Behera); villages in the Indian state of Rajasthan (Ann Grodzins Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar); islands of Papua New Guinea and Cook Islands (Karen Malone) and the ultimate postmodern destination of chatrooms in cyberspace (Chris Pawson, Eike Adams and Ralph Tanner). This is an impressive range and the authors and editor must be congratulated for sharing these stories of children’s lives from such diverse corners of the world, real and virtual. I know I will use this volume, more specifically certain papers of this collection, in future references. Having said that, the book has not been able to overcome the curse of most edited volumes: it too suffers from uneven quality of its chapters. Malone rightly points out in the introduction to this volume that the richness, diversity and contrasts of these stories will not lead to “any grandiose generalizations” (10). However, the volume could have attempted to compile a more integrated set of anthropological contributions that share a common conceptualization of space and a common analytic thread. 359 The book’s emergent discourses of place frame space as an opportunity and place as the understood reality (Harrison and Dourish 1996), and accept a more or less baseline definition of place being a setting within which people live or act (Childress 1994). A strong position paper that elaborated on the notion of space and its relationship with the construct of place, perhaps from the perspective of children’s environments literature, would have really helped set the tone for this volume and provided a strong theoretical grounding for the papers. Its lack is felt throughout. The conflict of space versus place plays out in the volume. For example, the editor’s introduction elaborates on the concept of place, derived primarily from environment-behavior literature, as shared spaces, lived spaces. However, the chapter “Contested Space” (Kruger), following De Certeau, sees space as “practiced place” or place being transformed into space through human presence and activities. Most chapters adopt one of two broad methodological approaches. Some chapter authors (e.g., Trawick, Atencio, Pawson et al., Gold and Gujar) show us the world of children through a narrative mode. Others (e.g., Castro, Kumar and Behera) tell us about children, privileging a conceptual mode that is more theoretically driven. Trawick, for example, brings Menan in Sri Lanka alive for her readers by taking us along on her bike trip with Menan through the Sri Lankan countryside. We saw and heard what she saw and heard. Places, people, events that were meaningful to Menan’s life were effortlessly introduced to us through a lucid, narrative format. We were invited to interpret for ourselves the life, hopes and struggles of a child growing up in the shadow of war. In contrast, Kumar tells us in detail about Zeenat, the weaver’s daughter in Benaras. Kumar’s strong scholarship connects socialization processes to disciplining the body and soul. She discusses the location of the child in the nation, the neighborhood as a site for common experiences, and the gendered nature of child space. However, in this telling, we never see Zeenat or the other children for ourselves. We are not placed in their existential space. 360 There is also a third position taken by some papers. Kruger and Malone were both contributors to the Growing Up in Cities (GUIC) study from South Africa and Australiarespectively in the 1990s. Both these authors, in keeping with GUIC strategies, adopt a rich environmental...