Seeing Children and Hearing Them, Too

Anthropologists now realize that transmitting values is a two-way street

By JENNIFER K. RUARK

When a newborn wets the person holding him, the Senufo people of southern Burkina Faso say the baby is offering a gift. In Ivory Coast, the Beng people call on diviners to help them discern their infants' wishes, which are left over from the babies' previous incarnations.

Alma Gottlieb says it is time for anthropologists to take such infant communication seriously -- not just for what it reveals about the adults in different societies but for what it may say about the role even babies play in shaping their cultures.

Ms. Gottlieb, who calls for an "anthropology of infants" in a forthcoming essay in Anthropological Quarterly, acknowledges that she is taking cultural relativism to an extreme. But she is doing it to make a point: We may be mistaken in assuming that babies are mere "biobundles" -- passive collections of physical needs. As any new parent knows, she writes, "infants demand to be accounted for" right from the start. Recent psychological research has shown that the ages at which babies sit up or learn to walk -- stages long thought to be biologically determined -- vary widely around the world and are influenced by cultural expectations. By the same token, says Ms. Gottlieb, there may be more than biology to the early activities of infants.

"There's always going to be some sense in which infant communication is mediated by adult interpretations," Ms. Gottlieb, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says in an interview. "What we can do is look at the baby and ask how his engagement with others is interpreted as a social act." Focusing on the back-and-forth between infants and their caregivers, scholars in her discipline might come to understand how infants actively shape the world around them, she says. Earlier this year she published A World of Babies: Imagined Childcare Guides for Seven Societies (Cambridge University Press), edited with Judy S. DeLoache, a psychologist at the University of Virginia.

Ms. Gottlieb's work is part of a small but growing movement to pay heed to the experiences of children. For too long, some anthropologists say, children have been seen but not heard by the discipline. Many anthropological studies -- most famously, Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa -- have involved children, child-rearing, and the passage to adulthood, but the children in those studies have been seen as blank slates. Now, influenced by recent work in psychology and other disciplines, anthropologists are becoming interested in how children themselves participate in and shape their cultures. Several new university centers for the study of children have an anthropological emphasis; Rutgers University Press has just signed a book series in the field; and a journal devoted to the anthropology of children is in the works. Anthropologists are asking how children see the world, how they interpret their experiences, and what role those interpretations play in their actions.

Myra Bluebond-Langner asked such questions 20 years ago while a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but she was essentially alone in her field. "Children were the domain of developmental researchers in psychology and education," says the scholar, who now directs the new Center for Children and Childhood Studies at Rutgers University's Camden campus and will edit the Rutgers-press series. "Even when children were studied by anthropologists, they were considered acquirers of culture, not conveyers of culture."

By looking at children as willful individuals capable of making interpretations themselves, Ms. Bluebond-Langner turned the prevailing wisdom upside down. Her book The Private Worlds of Dying Children (Princeton University Press, 1980) exploded the widely held belief that dying children were too young to understand the concept of death. Interviewing young cancer patients, Ms. Bluebond-Langner discovered that, in fact, children as young as five understood both that death was final and that it was universal. The children in her study simply didn't talk about death because they realized it made the adults around them uncomfortable. "They were observing a cultural taboo. They had begun to engage in a mutual pretense," she says.

Twenty years later, she and other anthropologists say, childhood studies is where women's studies was a few decades ago. "Even though the anthropological emphasis has been 'to grasp the native's point of view,' there's been a bias against children, who are seen as less well-informed about their own cultures," says Jill E. Korbin, an anthropologist at Case Western Reserve University, which last year added an undergraduate minor in childhood studies.

That's not to say children have been entirely absent from anthropological work. Following Mead, other anthropologists influenced by Freudian psychology, most notably John and Beatrice Whiting and their students, have studied how different societies raise their children.

In the 1950's, the Whitings led a major comparative study of child-rearing in six cultures, showing how parental practices -- from sleeping with the children, to nursing on demand, to wearing a newborn in a sling all day -- fostered personality traits valued by the community. Sharing a bed with your children is much more common in Japan, for example, a society that values cooperation and group harmony, than in the United States, a society that emphasizes independence.

Critics say that work was limited by its top-down approach to acculturation and its assumption that all children develop according to the Freudian model. "The developmental process is an historical one," says Christina Toren, the director of Brunel University's new Centre for Child-Focused Anthropological Research, in Uxbridge, England. "If I want to understand politics, or kinship, or religion ... I simultaneously include how children come to hold the ideas that adults say they do. How did it come to be the case that Fijians take hierarchy as a natural principle of social relations?"

"It's absolutely essential to include children in the work you do to know what the hell is going on," says Ms. Toren. She, Ms. Gottlieb, and a Brunel colleague, Suzette Heald, are negotiating with Cambridge University Press to start an international journal, Child, Culture, and Society. Next June, her center will sponsor a conference called "'Children in Their Places"' intended to correct what she and her colleagues see as a mistakenly "universal" view of children, instead emphasizing how variations in time, place, and ethnicity affect the complex relationship between beliefs and practices.

Jean L. Briggs took that emphasis on local uniqueness one step further by focusing on a single child in her book Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old (Yale University Press, 1998), which won two prizes from societies of the American Anthropological Association. The book examines the development of a little girl named Chubby Maatas as she deals with the Inuit practice of presenting children with difficult, even dangerous choices. The adults ask her questions like "You carry your brother around. Why don't you drop him on the floor and kill him?" and "Your mother is sick. Do you want to come live with me?"

Such dramas shock Western parents, but Ms. Briggs, an emeritus professor of anthropology at Memorial University of Newfoundland, says Western-style scolding and punishment are just as disturbing to the Inuit. "There, children learn all the plots of everyday life, and experience consequences as integral to action," says Ms. Briggs. "They aren't subjected to irrelevant parental punishment."

Studying just one child, she says, helped her focus on the process of learning rather than on what was learned. Instead of saying "the Inuit value generosity" and looking for how that trait was developed, she looked at each drama to see how Chubby might develop meaning from it.

"It's one piece of a larger picture of what people do with culture, instead of culture as something you get stamped with like a cookie cutter," says Ms. Briggs.

Similarly, Ms. Bluebond-Langner's next project will focus on how children with incurable cancer help make decisions about their care. She will compare children in the United States and Britain, where equivalent forms of treatment exist but the economics of health care are quite different. "Decision-making is a social act, a dynamic process," she says.

Much of the new work has been inspired by a growing public awareness of children's vulnerability to abuse and neglect. Anthropologists are examining child labor and the embroilment of children around the world in war, either as civilians or as child soldiers.

Scholars at the Brunel center, for example, are studying the Teso rebels of Uganda to learn how those young people, who often fought against their own families, are reintegrating into their communities.

Philip L. Kilbride, an anthropologist at Bryn Mawr College, studies AIDS orphans and other poor children who live on their own in the streets of Nairobi, where schooling is available only to those who can pay for it. His book Street Children in Kenya: Voices of Children in Search of a Childhood (Bergin & Garvey, 2000), written with Collette Suda and Enos Njeru, two sociologists at the University of Nairobi, documents the children's survival strategies -- which include theft and prostitution -- and how they understand their place in Kenyan society. "They accept the definition of them as chokora -- snatchers of food and pickers of unclean things from dustbins," says Mr. Kilbride, "but they also see themselves as the working poor."

And they urgently wish to go to school. The book recommends a coordinated policy to alleviate poverty and corruption in Kenya and provide education and job training to children.

It's not a coincidence, says Ms. Bluebond-Langner, that interest in children is on the rise at the same time that anthropologists are increasingly doing "applied" or "clinical" work. The childhood-studies center at her university not only conducts research but includes an outreach program to help children in the local community.

"To change conditions for children, you have to think about the child's perspective," says Case Western's Ms. Korbin. "For example, in the case of child labor, will ending child labor in household industries result in the children being hungrier? You've got to take that into account."

Deborah Durham's latest research looks at the ways international aid projects have intervened in notions of youth. "For example, there's a new concern about sexuality in Botswana because of AIDS," says the anthropologist, who teaches at Sweet Briar College. "Controlling the sexuality of children has been a concern in Botswana from time immemorial, but now responsibility is vested in state programs and schools." As a result, the way youth are defined and "circumscribed" results from a combination of local customs and official advice, says Ms. Durham, who is writing a book tentatively titled New Directions in Youth and Anthropology.

Ms. Durham, who is editing the special issue of Anthropological Quarterly devoted to children in Africa in which Ms. Gottlieb's article will appear, says the new work offers scholars a chance to reexamine the concept of "agency." News-media reports from around the world foster the perception that "children are becoming more homogenous products of the new consumer-oriented globalism," at the same time that they are "among the most dynamic local agents of such globalist movements, and of the hybrid cultures that emerge," she says. "It seems to me that 'agency' has been treated as a fairly undifferentiated concept; but in fact there are many different kinds of agencies."

The Kenyan children in Mr. Kilbride's study -- who cry and play and suck their thumbs even as they work and cook and fight to survive -- are clearly victims of the Kenyan political and social structure, and don't have a lot of agency. But they have some, he says. "Structure and agency must go hand in hand. That's why ethnography is so important. To understand how much agency children have, it's important to get out there and talk to them."

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