Engendering School Children in Bali

Abstract

This article examines the process of gendering children in Bali, focusing particularly on the way children enmesh the experience ofschoolingwith other gendered experiences. I employ a more agentfocused, subject-centred approach than the sex-role socialization theory that has hitherto underpinned studies ofchildren and gender in the anthropology ofBali. Individuals, through their gendered subjectivities, and especially through their experience of relations with others, constitute their own gendered being. Experience ofschool - ranging from explicit textbook instruction to school social life -contributes to this process. Children therebycreate their own gendered personal and social histories. In writing this article I wanted to find out the part schooling plays in the process by which Balinese children are gendered and gender themselves. The article grew out of frustration with sex-role socialization theory as an explanatory frame for the way individuals constitute themselves, and with anthropological tendencies to reify culture. More broadly, social science generally overstates the part played by ideology in shaping the experience of the individual. All of these inadequacies suggest that as yet we know very little about human subjectivity and learning, and about the enmeshing of the individual in society. This becomes painfully obvious in attempts to explain social change: apart from somewhat mechanistic response-tostimulus theories, we lack theories that allow for understanding of open-ended change. The premiss of this article is that humans are social animals and that they constitute their selves by living amongst other, similarly constituted, beings. Cognition, or knowing, occurs mainly as inter-subjective experience because the individual is a locus of social relations. Subjectivity has many aspects, including conscious knowledge, intentions and imagination as well as unconscious desires, emotions and trauma.1 Subjectivity is both the source and product of a historical process: individuals invent themselves as well as contribute to the constitution of the social groupings among which they live: Human cognition is an historical process because it constitutes - and in constituting inevitably