Message from the SHCY President

 

This is a tremendously exhilarating and fertile moment in the study of childhood.  From anthropology to archaeology, linguistics, psychology, and sociology, a series of paradigm shifts are radically reshaping the way we think about children. 

 

One key shift involves a growing recognition of the role that children play in their own socialization.  For example, challenging William James’s characterization of the infant’s mind as a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” the psychologist Alison Gopnik instead depicts newborns as scientists and philosophers—as active agents engaged in a process of discovery, testing, and reflection.

 

Another major shift involves the growing emphasis on children’s culture as mediator between the individual child and the adult world. Especially suggestive is William Corsaro’s concept of “interpretative reproduction.”  Rather than conceiving of acculturation as a process in which children internalize adult culture, children engage in intricate negotiations with adults and participate in peer cultures which creatively reinterpret and comment upon adult values and behavior.

 

Yet another significant shift involves the documentation of the extraordinarily varied ways that children’s lives are structured across and within cultures. Drawing on primate studies and ethnographies, David Lancy’s The Anthropology of Childhood offers a particularly insightful look at variation in parenting practices, schooling, and the pathways to adulthood across cultures, and helps free us from constricted, culture-bound, and ethnocentric conceptions of childhood and child development. 

 

Historians of childhood have a great deal to learn from the anthropology, archaeology, psychology, and sociology of childhood—and much to contribute as well.  One challenge is to reconcile a recognition of the cultural and social constructedness of childhood with the insights of neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Another is to wrestle with anthropological, psychological, and sociological theories, including those dealing with initiation rituals, age sets, peer cultures, diversity and variation, colonialism and globalization, and children’s capabilities.

 

But we must not minimize the inputs that we can offer to cross-disciplinary conversations about childhood.  We can show anthropologists and sociologists that childhood, both as an experience and as a cultural category, is not static or uncontested, but has diachronic, dynamic, and longitudinal dimensions. We can help psychologists understand that the stages and transitions of childhood must not be viewed in excessively rigid, universal, overspecified, invariant, or teleological terms.  Above all, we can illustrate with concrete examples from the past how learning and child development is a product of an on-going process of negotiation and social interaction embedded in social interactions and specific cultural contexts.

 

Steven Mintz

Columbia University