The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, ChangelingsHow are children raised in different cultures? What is the role of children in society? How are families and communities structured around them? Now available in a revised edition, this book sets out to answer these questions, and argues that our common understandings about children are narrowly culture-bound. Enriched with anecdotes from ethnography and the daily media, the book examines family structure, reproduction, profiles of children's caretakers within the family or community, their treatment at different ages, their play, work, schooling, and transition to adulthood. The result is a nuanced and credible picture of childhood in different cultures, past and present. Organised developmentally, moving from infancy through to adolescence and early adulthood, this new edition reviews and catalogues the findings of over 100 years of anthropological scholarship dealing with childhood and adolescence, drawing on over 750 newly added sources, and engaging with newly emerging issues relevant to the world of childhood today. |
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Contents
Where do children come from? | 1 |
Valuing children | 12 |
Korowai child accused of being a khahkua or witch | 50 |
To make a child | 75 |
Otavalo market Ecuador | 117 |
It takes a village | 120 |
Chinese childminding device | 128 |
Child spectators at a funeral in Toradja Sulawesi | 142 |
Young Bamana farmers | 169 |
Hadza boys target shooting | 175 |
References | 411 |
| 516 | |
| 522 | |
| 530 | |
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Common terms and phrases
academic activity adolescents adults Africa alloparents American Anthropology apprentice apprenticeship baby Bamana become behavior birth boys Cambridge University Press caretakers Chapter child child labor child’s childcare childhood childrearing children’s play chimpanzees chore curriculum cognitive contrast Cross-Cultural culture daughters early economic ethnographic example expected father female fertility foraging gender Giriama girls Hadza Hewlett household Huaorani human hunter-gatherer Igbo infant infanticide initiation interaction Inuit investment Island kids Kpelle Kung labor Lancy learning LeVine living make-believe males Mandinka marriage Mazahua modern mother Nancy Scheper-Hughes neontocracy nursing observed offspring older one’s Papua New Guinea parents peers perspective Pirahã polygyny practice pregnancy primates rarely reproduction rites ritual role rural sexual siblings skills social societies strategies street success teachers teaching toddlers traditional urban village weaning Wogeo woman women York young youth
