Short Abstract:

Assuming that children’s epistemologies are understudied, we expect ethnographic accounts from different societies that examine children’s forms of relatedness with non-human, invisible beings and artefacts to explore how they produce their knowledge and practices in ritualized contexts and play.

Long Abstract:

While contemporary scholarship on indigenous epistemologies increasingly recognizes these perspectives as valid (Kopenawa & Albert 2013), the same cannot yet be said for children’s epistemologies. This is certainly partly due to the methodological, ethical and epistemological challenges that make it difficult to access and accurately describe and analyze children’s perspectives and experiences (James 2007). The challenge is even greater when it comes to approaching children’s epistemologies across various dimensions of social life. In this panel, we wish to tackle this issue from the perspective of the specific ways in which children relate to different “existent beings” (Descola 2013) that make up their social and cultural worlds and subjectivities (Razy & Willemsen, 2024). In this case, giving voice to children’s epistemologies means investigating the local “cultures of agency” (Razy 2019) and engaging with them as recognized social actors in their own right (Hardman 1973), in shared reflection and action regarding how they produce their knowledge and practices in their daily life (Toren 1993). We are particularly interested in ethnographic accounts that explore how children, compared to adults, engage with invisible beings (deities, animals, stones, plants, figures featured in myths and tales, etc.) which are usually associated with religion and spirituality (Ridgely 2001), but also more broadly with children’s imagination. In order to approach the diverse forms of relatedness (Carsten 2000) with such existent beings in different environments, we will pay particular attention to ritualized contexts and play, assuming that the boundary between ritual and play can often be blurred (Hamayon 2016).

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