Childhood in a Sri Lankan Village is a beautifully written account of childhood, child rearing and the daily lives of children from infancy through marriage and adulthood in a small community outside Kandy. The book examines how local child rearing practices and ethno-theories of parenting have an impact on the ways in which children are treated and how they subsequently behave, and the author discusses whether certain developmental stages such as ‘the terrible twos’ are universally significant. Chapin examines the everyday practices of these children, looking at how they are fed, where they sleep and how they interact with their mothers, fathers and others in the wider community and captures the daily, often unnoticed, activities that are central to child rearing. Woven into this is a comparison with Western (particularly North American) ideas about child rearing and adult/child relationships and the contrast between the two is both fascinating and revealing. Here, childcare practices are not simply the mechanical processes of keeping the young fed, clothed and warm but are understood in their widest symbolic and cultural sense and used to reveal deeper patterns of meaning. The links between the subtle, intimate emotions of infancy and the more public and sometimes conflicting ideas of shame, envy and desire that children have to contend with as they grow older are superbly developed and, on finishing this book, written after several periods of fieldwork conducted over a decade, the reader is left feeling they too have watched these children grow up and seen them turn from infants for whom nothing is denied to the shy, self-effacing people so prized in this community. How this change occurs and how children are actively shaped and disciplined, even when there appears to be little overt socialisation, are explored and explained in depth. The role of hierarchy is central to the book and the discussion of the problems involved when trying to do research with children as equals, when this is not how they are seen locally, is very well done. I enjoyed her discussion of the difficulties of trying to interview children directly in a culture which emphasises modesty, subordination and shyness in children and where children were reluctant to take part in her research. Chapin comes to understand that there are many other forms of agency and to be junior or subordinate in a relationship is not necessarily to be powerless. Running alongside the account of how children in Sri Lanka become socialised is a discussion of the author's own process of unlearning and of starting to see her own parenting practices through the eyes of others. One of the books’ greatest strengths is Chapin's own presence within it and her frank descriptions of how her perceptions of herself as a mother were called into question and how she came to understand how her performances of motherhood were seen by others. She is frank about her own sometimes laboured path to understanding what was occurring and this book should be read by everyone interested in what really happens during fieldwork. It should also be read as a corrective to almost all childcare manuals which promote the ‘right’ way to parent children, based on profoundly ethnocentric notions of children's role in society and ‘proper’ behaviour in childhood. This is a nuanced and subtle book which places ethnographic description at its heart, but which draws on work from developmental psychology (particularly attachment theory) and from childhood studies. I found it enthralling: while it is theoretically sophisticated it is also completely jargon free. It should be of interest to all anthropologists and psychologists, whatever their areas of specialisation, as well as to anyone interested in the mechanics of fieldwork and the sometimes painful internal transformations that are the mark of the good social scientist. It is also a wonderful read which will inspire any student, practitioner or academic interested in childhood to want to carry out similar research and write it up so engagingly.
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Jun 1, 2016
Laura L Brock + 1
Open Access