2005).
The New Social Studies of Childhood and “Child‐Centered” Anthropology
The study of children in European anthropology has followed a different trajectory to much of that in North America and for many years it was possible to talk about two distinct, and sometimes antagonistic, traditions. The dialogue with psychology, so central to American anthropology, never had the same prominence in Europe, nor have cross‐cultural, comparative surveys or studies of childrearing. Indeed, the large‐scale, comparative work that had revealed many aspects of children’s lives in American anthropology was treated with suspicion and some disdain among certain British anthropologists. The HRAF project, such an importance source – and inspiration – for American anthropologists studying socialization, was a source of particular ire, summarily dismissed by Edmund Leach as “tabulated nonsense” (1964, p. 299). E. E. Evans‐Pritchard was no more complimentary, writing of the HRAF that: “it is full of contradictions and of assertions and suppositions without supporting evidence. The statistical survey covering two hundred and fifty societies displays … poor sampling, crude itemization, arbitrary and inadequate criteria of classification – an almost unbelievably uncritical use of sources’ (1965, p. 26).
With such sources dismissed, and studies of child development largely delegated to psychology, British anthropological studies that centered on children were uncommon before the 1970s. There were a few exceptions (Goody & Goody, 1967; Read, 1968) and a larger number of ethnographic monographs where children made fleeting appearances, or merited an implicit acknowledgment that they had a role in legitimating marriage or fulfilling the filial obligations that lie at the heart of kinship (see Montgomery, 2009), but neither socialization nor social development were of great interest. Children were seen as knowing little about their culture, they did not take part in the public practices of religion or politics, or if they did it was completely passively, and they had not yet learnt how to behave or think “properly.” As Jean La Fontaine put it (1986, p. 10), anthropology was characterized by “an outdated view of children as raw material, unfinished specimens of the social beings whose ideas and behaviour are the proper subject matter for social science.” Even those who worked directly on issues affecting children did not ask them about the processes they were going through. Writing in the 1950s about girls’ initiation rites among the Bemba of Zambia, for example, Audrey Richards (1956, p. 63) acknowledged the absence of the girls’ opinions and wished she had asked them what they had experienced and how they understood it. Instead in her published work she commented that the girls being initiated “are both the centres of the ceremony, and yet the least interesting of the actors in it.”
By the early 1970s however this marginalization of children started to be questioned by anthropologists and sociologists who began to reconceptualize studies of childhood. Spurred on by the rise of feminist anthropology in the late 1960s which argued that women had been systematically side‐lined in both description and theory, by (usually) male social scientists who looked only at the public, male world of politics, religion, or other formal institutions and had ignored the domestic world of women and children, there were calls for a critical rethinking of children’s lives and their role in society. In 1973 Charlotte Hardman published a ground‐breaking article which tentatively asked, “Can there be an anthropology of childhood?” In it she claimed that childhood and children’s worlds were valid and valuable subjects for ethnographic research, making the point, since taken as axiomatic by later anthropologists, that “children [are] people to be studied in their own right”’ (1973, p. 87). This article also set the tone for some of the later debate about the role of psychology, arguing that studies of social development were intrinsically adult‐orientated and future‐focused and a way of using children to discuss other issues but failing to see them as interesting or relevant in their own right. Hardman was explicitly critical of the work on children’s social development pioneered in the previous decades by Mead, the Whitings, or LeVine, claiming that such work viewed children:
to a greater or lesser extent, as passive objects, as helpless spectators in a pressing environment which affects and produces their every behaviour. They see the child as continually assimilating, learning and responding to the adult, having little autonomy, contributing nothing to social values or behaviour except the latent outpourings of earlier acquired experiences.
(Hardman, 1973, p. 87)
Building on these insights, others began to reconceptualize and rethink ideas about childhood, looking at what childhood means in contemporary societies and calling for the critical re‐examination of categories such as “the child,” “childhood,” or “children” (James & Prout, 1997). Such studies were often grouped together under the umbrella heading as the “New Social Studies of Childhood” which took as one of its main premises that childhood must be understood as a socially and culturally constructed phenomenon, which changes over time and place, and that there can be no singular concept of childhood. Anthropologists argued that both the patterns of physical and psychological development, and the meanings given to them, vary enormously within and between cultures, so that childhood should always be understood as “a matter of social definition rather than physical maturity” (La Fontaine, 1986, p. 19). This emphasis on childhood as a socially and culturally constructed category led to many criticisms, not only of studies of socialization, but also of some of the basic premises of psychology itself. Pioneers of the New Social Studies of Childhood variously accused psychologists of: being obsessed with the “normal” child and its universal, unchanging needs; being ethnocentric, and taking little account of diverse childhoods while researching almost exclusively middle‐class children in Western countries; using Western developmental patterns as the norm and downplaying the different capacities, competences, interests, and developmental trajectories of poorer and less‐privileged children both in the West and in other parts of the world; promoting a deficit model of childhood that fails to understand the complexity of children’s different competences, or appreciate individual or cultural diversity; and finally believing themselves to be part of a neutral scientific endeavor, positioning themselves above politics and claiming to generate value‐free “objective” knowledge and evidence on which policy and practice is based (see Morrow, 2011; Tatlow‐Golden & Montgomery, 2021). In their seminal book, Theorizing Childhood, James et al. memorably argued that developmental psychology belonged in the “dustbin of history” (1998, p. 9).
Another article of faith – and a reason for discarding psychological studies of development – was that children were human “beings” rather than human “becomings.” Looking at social development was problematic, it was argued, because it focused on what children would become in the future, and how they would get there, not on what children were now. In contrast, the New Social Studies of Childhood conceptualized children as highly knowledgeable and experienced experts on their own contemporary cultural worlds and denied that they were in any way incomplete, incompetent, or ignorant. It also rejected the idea that children’s social or cultural development was a linear process unfurling in measurable, universal stages, during which the incompetent and incomplete child gradually learnt social competence and developed into a fully formed adult. Competence, it was argued, was not solely an adult characteristic achieved with biological and cognitive maturity, but rather was a “fluid context‐dependent performance that can be staged by children and adults alike” (Valentine, 1997, p. 82).
Anthropologists working in this new paradigm often call their work “child‐focused” or “child‐centered” to differentiate it from previous studies of socialization or childrearing. Child‐centered anthropology conceptualizes children as active and capable people, embedded in social relationships, within particular social, cultural, and historical contexts. Instead of looking at what adults do to children and how they are socialized by others, child‐centered anthropology looks at children’s perspectives and privileges the mundane, everyday lives of children, previously dismissed as uninteresting or unilluminating. This is exemplified in the work of anthropologists like Marianne Gullestad (1984) who examined children’s daily lives at home in Norway and revealed the previously hidden importance of children’s roles and responsibilities within the family.
