Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Studies of children have been central to the development of the social sciences, and especially of psychology, but the social scientists’ perspective tended to project onto all children, everywhere, an idea of childhood that was peculiarly Western. Childhood was taken to be a natural state of presocial *individualism, one which required that children be rendered social by adults. It is perhaps because anthropologists held this idea that the study of childhood in anthropology has been fitful rather than systematic.
The earliest work is Kidd’s (1906) Savage Childhood—a detailed and, given the prejudices of its time, remarkably sympathetic description of the lives of Bantu children in *South Africa. In Britain, *Malinowksi’s followers routinely included children in their accounts and analyses of *kinship but, with the exception of Read (1960), none produced a full-length monograph on children’s lives.
Read described how, among the Ngoni of *Central Africa, adults transmit certain cultural skills and values to their children. Her account concentrated on how children learned practical skills (e.g. how boys learned cattle herding and hunting), the respect proper to relations between children and their seniors, and respect for the rule of law. But studies of children had little place in the development of theory in British social anthropology.
By contrast, †Margaret Mead, a pupil of the founder of American cultural anthropology *Franz Boas, made children the focus of her ethnographic and theoretical endeavours—working first on adolescent development in Samoa and later with children of all ages in the Manus Islands, Papua New Guinea, and (with †Gregory Bateson) with Balinese children.
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