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Accepted Paper:

Anthropological anxieties and the child at play: 19th and 21st century ethnographies of children in East Anglia  
Richard Irvine (University of St Andrews)

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on Haddon's 1896 ethnographic work with children in South Cambridgeshire, UK, as well as contemporary research in the same location, I consider the symbolic role occupied by the child, and argue for an ethnography that moves beyond the social and cultural anxieties projected onto children.

Paper long abstract:

What role does the evocation of "the child" occupy in our social and cultural analyses? This paper analyses archival and ethnographic data concerning the lives of children in South Cambridgeshire, UK. In 1896 the pioneering anthropologist Alfred Haddon collected data on children's games, alongside other ethnographic and anthropometric material, as part of a pilot study for the Torres Straits expedition. I will consider the place of the child - and the place of the children of Barrington in particular - in Haddon's theory of the development of cultures and social change, before moving onto the findings from more recent ethnographic work in the same location. As part of a study on perceptions of environmental change, we explored children's sense of engagement with place. Through play, storytelling, and creative engagement with their surroundings, children found ways to re-appropriate an environment from which they felt themselves excluded. Yet their intense engagement sits uncomfortably with presumptions that children are disconnected with their environment, inherent in theories such as "Nature Deficit Disorder". Today, as when Haddon was working, the child is deployed as a symbol that congeals wider social concerns. The challenge for the ethnographer, then, is to consider social life in ways that draw on the child's point of view rather than reproducing the social anxieties that are projected onto children.

Panel P35
Children and society
  Session 1