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1、,Text,Cultural Childhoods 1 When I look back on my own childhood in the 1970s and 1980s and compare it with children today, it reminds me of that famous sentence “The past is a foreign country: They do things differently there“ (from L. P. Hartleys novel The Go-Between). Even in a relatively short p
2、eriod of time, I can see the enormous transformations that have taken place in childrens lives and in the ways they are thought about and treated.,Text,2 Looking further back I can see vast differences between contemporary and historical childhoods. Today, children have few responsibilities, their l
3、ives are characterized by play not work, school not paid labour, family rather than public life and consumption instead of production. Yet this is all relatively recent. A hundred years ago, a 12 year old working in a factory would have been perfectly acceptable. Now, it would cause social services
4、intervention and the prosecution of both parents and factory owner.,Text,3 The differences between the expectations placed on children today and those placed on them in the past are neatly summed up by two American writers, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English. Comparing childhoods in America toda
5、y with those of the American colonial period (16001776), they have written: “Today, a four year old who can tie his or her shoes is impressive. In colonial times, four-year-old girls knitted stockings and mittens and could produce intricate embroidery: At age six they spun wool. A good, industrious
6、little girl was called Mrs instead of Miss in appreciation of her contribution to the family economy: She was not, strictly speaking, a child.“,Text,4 These changing ideas about children have led many social scientists to claim that childhood is a “social construction“. They use this term to mean th
7、at understandings of childhood are not the same everywhere and that while all societies acknowledge that children are different from adults, how they are different and what expectations are placed on them, change according to the society in which they live.,Text,5 Social anthropologists have shown t
8、his in their studies of peoples with very different understandings of the world to Western ones. Jean Briggs has worked with the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic and has described how, within these communities, growing up is largely seen as a process of acquiring thought, reason and understanding (known
9、 in Inuit as ihuma).,Text,Young children dont possess these qualities and are easily angered, cry frequently and are incapable of understanding the external difficulties facing the community, such as shortages of food. Because they cant be reasoned with, and dont understand, parents treat them with
10、a great deal of tolerance and leniency. Its only when they are older and begin to acquire thought that parents attempt to teach them or discipline them.,Text,6 In contrast, children on the Pacific island of Tonga, studied by Helen Morton, are regularly beaten by their parents and older siblings. The
11、y are seen as being closer to mad people than adults because they lack the highly prized quality of social competence (or poto as the Tongans call it). They are regularly told off for being clumsy and a child who falls over may be laughed at, shouted at, or beaten.,Text,Children are thought of as mi
12、schievous; they cry or want to feed simply because they are naughty, and beatings are at their most severe between the ages of three and five when children are seen as particularly wilful. Parents believe that social competence can only be achieved through discipline and physical punishment, and tre
13、at their children in ways that have seemed very harsh to outsiders.,Text,7 In other cases, ideas about children are radically different. For example, the Beng, a small ethnic group in West Africa, assume that very young children know and understand everything that is said to them, in whatever langua
14、ge they are addressed. The Beng, whove been extensively studied by another anthropologist, Alma Gottlieb, believe in a spirit world where children live before they are born and where they know all human languages and understand all cultures.,Text,Life in the spirit world is very pleasant and the chi
15、ldren have many friends there and are often very reluctant to leave it for an earthly family (a fictional account of a spirit childs journey between the spirit and the earthly world is given in Ben Okris novel, The Famished Road). When they are born, they remain in contact with this other world for several years, and may decide to return there if they are not properly looked after. So parents treat young children with great care so that theyre not tempted to return, and also with some reverence, because theyre in contact with the spirit world in a way that adults arent.,
