Anthropological Perspectives On Child Development

Historical anthropology is a revision of the German philosophical anthropology under the influences of the French historical school of Annales and the Anglo-Saxon cultural anthropology. Cultural-historical psychology is a school of thought which emerged in the context of the Soviet revolution and deeply affected the disciplines of psychology and education in the 20th century. This book draws on these two schools to advance current scholarship in child and youth development and education. It also enters in dialogue with other relational approaches and suggests alternatives to mainstream western developmental theories and educational practices. This book emphasizes communication and semiotic processes as well as the use of artifacts, pictures and technologies in education and childhood development, placing a special focus on active subjectivity, historicity and performativity. Within this theoretical framework, contributors from Europe and the U.S. highlight the dynamic and creative aspects of school, family and community practices and the dramatic aspects of child development in our changing educational institutions. They also use a series of original empirical studies to introduce different research methodologies and complement theoretical analyses in an attempt to find innovative ways to translate cultural-historical and historical anthropological theory and research into a thorough understanding of emerging phenomena in school and after-school education of ethnic minorities, gender-sensitive education, and educational and family policy. Divided into two main parts, “Culture, History and Child Development”, and “Gender, Performativity and Educational Practice”, this book is useful for anyone in the fields of cultural-historical research, educational science, educational and developmental psychology, psychological anthropology, and childhood and youth studies.

In An Introduction to Childhood, Heather Montgomery examines the role children have played within anthropology, how they have been studied by anthropologists and how they have been portrayed and analyzed in ethnographic monographs over the last one hundred and fifty years. Offers a comprehensive overview of childhood from an anthropological perspective Draws upon a wide range of examples and evidence from different geographical areas and belief systems Synthesizes existing literature on the anthropology of childhood, while providing a fresh perspective Engages students with illustrative ethnographies to illuminate key topics and themes

This unprecedented collection of articles is an introduction to the study of cultural variations in childhood across the world and to the theoretical frameworks for investigating and interpreting them. Presents a history of cross-cultural approaches to child-development Recent articles examine diverse contexts of childhood in ecological, semiotic, and sociolinguistic terms Includes ethnographic studies of childhood in the Pacific, Africa, Latin America, East Asia, Europe and North America Illuminates the process through which people become the bearers of culturally/historically specific identities Serves as an ideal text for anthropology courses focusing on childhood, as well as classes on development psychology

The study of childhood in academia has been dominated by a mono-cultural or WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) perspective. Within the field of anthropology, however, a contrasting and more varied view is emerging. While the phenomenon of children as workers is ephemeral in WEIRD society and in the literature on child development, there is ample cross-cultural and historical evidence of children making vital contributions to the family economy. Children’s “labor” is of great interest to researchers, but widely treated as extra-cultural—an aberration that must be controlled. Work as a central component in children’s lives, development, and identity goes unappreciated. Anthropological Perspectives on Children as Helpers, Workers, Artisans, and Laborers aims to rectify that omission by surveying and synthesizing a robust corpus of material, with particular emphasis on two prominent themes: the processes involved in learning to work and the interaction between ontogeny and children’s roles as workers.

Enriched with findings from anthropological scholarship, this book provides a guide to childhood in different cultures, past and present.

The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood offers a portrait of childhood across time, culture, species, and environment. Anthropological research on learning in childhood has been scarce, but this book will change that. It demonstrates that anthropologists studying childhood can offer a description and theoretically sophisticated account of children's learning and its role in their development, socialization, and enculturation. Further, it shows the particular contribution that children's learning makes to the construction of society and culture as well as the role that culture-acquiring children play in human evolution. Book jacket.

of older children, adults, and the family unit as a whole. These moral evaluations are, in turn, influenced by such external contingencies as popula tion demography, social and economic factors, subsistence strategies, house hold composition, and by cultural ideas concerning the nature of infancy and childhood, definitions of personhood, and beliefs about the soul and its immortality. MOTHER LOVE AND CHILD DEATH Of all the many factors that endanger the lives of young children, by far the most difficult to examine with any degree of dispassionate objectivity is the quality of parenting. Historians and social scientists, no less than the public at large, are influenced by old cultural myths about childhood inno cence and mother love as well as their opposites. The terrible power and significance attributed to maternal behavior (in particular) is a commonsense perception based on the observation that the human infant (specialized as it is for prematurity and prolonged dependency) simply cannot survive for very long without considerable maternal love and care. The infant's life depends, to a very great extent, on the good will of others, but most especially, of course, that of the mother. Consequently, it has been the fate of mothers throughout history to appear in strange and distorted forms. They may appear as larger than life or as invisible; as all-powerful and destructive; or as helpless and angelic. Myths of the maternal instinct compete, historically, witli -myths of a universal infanticidal impulse.