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 language they are addressed. The Beng, who’ve been extensively studied by another anthropologist, Alma Gottleib, believe in a spirit world where children live before they are born and where they know all human languages and understand all cultures. Life in the spirit world is very pleasant and the children have many friends there and are often very reluctant to leave it for an earthly family (a fictional account of a spirit child’s journey between the spirit and the earthly world is given in Ben Okri’s 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 they’re not tempted to return, and also with some reverence, because they’re in contact with the spirit world in a way that adults aren’t.

There’s a tendency to view children in the UK, and in the Western world in general, as incompetent and dependent. But this isn’t the case throughout the world. In many societies children work and contribute to the family in whatever way that can from a very early age. A good example of this is child care. In the UK, it is illegal for a child under the age of fourteen to look after another child unsupervised, because they’re deemed incompetent and irresponsible. In other cultures, this is not the case. Michelle Johnson has written about the Fulani of West Africa describing how by the age of four, girls are expected to be able to care for their younger siblings, fetch water and firewood and by the age of six will be pounding grain, producing milk and butter and selling these alongside their mothers in the market.

Across the world, among the Yanamamö of the Amazonian rainforest, another anthropologist, Napoleon Chagnon, has shown how different these children’s childhoods are from Western ones, and also how differently boys and girls grow up in comparison with other parts of the world. He has written how a Yanamamö girl is expected to help her mother from a young age and by the age of ten will be running a house. By the age of twelve or thirteen she is probably married and will have started to have babies. Boys on the other hand, have far fewer responsibilities. They don’t marry until later than girls and are allowed to play well into their teens. Western notions of childhood simply do not ‘fit’ in these cases, where children’s competence and responsibilities are understood very differently.

Social anthropologists ask questions about how childhood, and the role of children, is seen within the communities they study, rather than how it fits into Western ideas about childhood. By doing this they seek to avoid imposing outside ideas onto people with very different understandings of the world or of making value judgments on other people’s ways of raising their children. While Westerners might take exception to eight-year-old girls working or to twelve-year-old girls marrying, within their own communities such activities are seen as a normal and positive part of childhood. Indeed, seen through the eyes of non-Westerners, many ‘normal’ Western childcare practices are seen as extremely bizarre and possibly harmful to children. Placing children in rooms of their own, refusing to feed them on demand, or letting them cry rather than immediately tending to them, are viewed very negatively in many societies and lead some to think that Westerners don’t know how to look after children properly.

Childhood is a changing social phenomenon, of continual fascination and concern. Looking at it from a cross-cultural perspective shows the wide variety of childhoods that exist across the world and warns against interfering in or criticising people whose lives, and understandings of the world, are very different to our own. All societies recognise that children are different to adults and have particular qualities and needs; what anthropologists and other social scientists are interested in are the ideas that each society has about the nature of childhood and the impact these views have on children’s lives.

References
Never in Anger. Briggs, J. 1970, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Yanamamö: the fierce people. Chagnon, N. 1968, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston

For Her Own Good. Ehrenreich, B. and English, D. 1979, London: Pluto Press, pp. 185-6

The Afterlife is Where we Come From. The culture of infancy in west Africa. Gottleib, A. 2004, Chicago: Chicago University Press

The Go-between. Hartley, L.P. 2004, London: Penguin, p. 1

The View from the Wuro: A Guide to Child Rearing for Fulani Parents. In A World of Babies. Imagined Childcare Guides for Seven Societies, Johnson, M. 2000, Edited by Judy DeLoache and Alma Gottleib, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 171-198

Becoming Tongan: An Ethnography of Childhood. Morton, H. 1996, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press

The Famished Road, Okri, B. 1992, London: Vintage

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Content last updated: 17/08/2006

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