Childhood Studies

Abstract

Anthropologists writing in the late 19th and early 20th century did not consider children to be a central focus of their research, which is not to say that children did not appear in some of the earliest issues of, for example, the American Anthropologist. However, when children did appear in these publications it was because they were easy and available to use as specimens for the purpose of developing tests, measures, and comparisons of presumed racial differences; or because they were associated with “curious customs” and artifacts (such as cradleboards), which could be described, collected, and “salvaged” since it was assumed that most extant “primitive” groups would soon vanish; or, because many life-cycle ceremonies that involved children or adolescents could be used to illustrate the dramatic and “bizarre” practices of these groups. Early on, Margaret Mead challenged researchers to consider the study of child behavior as a legitimate topic of study in and of itself. Her interest in using field sites as “laboratories” for putting Western theories of child training and personality development to the ethnographic test contributed to the focus on adult personality development that characterized the culture and personality school that gained prominence in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s and continued with the Six Cultures Study of Socialization (SCSS) in the 1950s. This approach portrayed children as cultural “trainees” subject to the interests and focus of their adult “trainers” or adult institutions (such as schools). Only later, inspired by the development of ethnography of communication studies in the 1960s and 1970s, did researchers like Elinor Ochs, Bambi Schieffelin, and Jenny Cook-Gumperz present a new approach for the study of children that focused on language socialization and everyday interactional practices. This research marked an important shift from viewing children as passive trainees to active participants and interpreters of their social worlds. However, it was not until the 1990s that a new field of Childhood Studies began to emerge that turned away from psychological and psychoanalytic models and toward theorists like Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault in sociology and anthropology. This article surveys the field of Childhood Studies in anthropology as it has developed in the discipline since the 1990s. The assumptions that characterize this field, as well as the range of studies that have been conducted across all four fields of anthropology (archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology) are discussed, concluding with a specific focus on research studies of children’s movement (in play and in migration). For further information about the field of Childhood Studies in anthropology, see articles in the Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology “Socialization,” “Language Socialization,” “Culture and Personality,” and the “Anthropology of Childhood.”