Children

Ethnographic Encounters
 Encounters: Experience and Anthropological Knowledge
ISSN: 1746-8175
Series Editor: John Borneman

Encounters: Experience and Anthropological Knowledge is a series that examines

fieldwork and experiences of contemporary anthropologists. It aims to render into
vivid and accessible prose the insights gained from fieldwork on topics such as
money, violence, sex, and food. These short collections of essays are committed
to:

• the subjective quality of sensual experience, tied to a particular time and place;
• curiosity in difference itself in translating the strange, foreign, or unassimilable;
• storytelling that contributes both to the documentary function of the ethno-
graphic encounter and to analytical potential.

Previously published in this series:

Money: Ethnographic Encounters

Edited by Stefan Senders and Allison Truit
Violence: Ethnographic Encounters
Edited by Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi
Food: Ethnographic Encounters
Edited by Leo Coleman
 Children
Ethnographic Encounters

Edited by
Catherine Allerton

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
 Bloomsbury Academic
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BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2016

Paperback edition first published 2017

© Catherine Allerton, 2016

Simone Dennis has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
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publishers.

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refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by
Bloomsbury or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN:
HB: 978-1-4742-5818-0
PB: 978-1-4742-5817-3
ePDF: 978-1-4742-5820-3
ePub: 978-1-4742-5819-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Allerton, Catherine, editor.
Encounters: experience and anthropological knowledge : ethnographic
encounters / edited by Catherine Allerton.
New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Series: Encounters: experience and
anthropological knowledge
LCCN 2016012289| ISBN 9781474258180 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781474258173 (paperback)
LCSH: Children–Case studies. | Children–Social conditions–Cross-cultural studies. |
BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / General. | SOCIAL SCIENCE /
Research. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Children's Studies.
LCC HQ767.9 .E53 2016 | DDC 305.23–dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016012289

Series: Encounters: Experience and Anthropological Knowledge

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

 Contents

Notes on Contributors vii

Foreword ix

Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1
Catherine Allerton

1 Different Childhoods, Different Ethnographies: Encounters in Rwanda 17

Maja Haals Brosnan

2 ‘Difficult’ Children: Ethnographic Chaos and Creativity in Migrant

Malaysia 31
Catherine Allerton

3 Paths to the Unfamiliar: Journeying with Children in Ecuadorian

Amazonia 45
Natalia Buitrón-Arias

4 The Exemplary Adult: Ethnographic Failure and Lessons from a

Chinese School 59
James Johnston

5 Learning to be a Child in Greater London 73

Anne-Marie Sim

6 Questions and Curiosities, Ignorance and Understanding:

Ethnographic Encounters with Children in Central India 87
Peggy Froerer

7 Protectors and Protected: Children, Parents and Infidelities in a

Mexican Village 101
Zorana Milićević

v
vi • Contents

8 Awkward Encounters: Authenticity and Artificiality in Rapport with

Young Informants in China 113
Ole Johannes Kaland

9 Growing Close Where Inequalities Grow Large? A Patron for

Qur’anic Students in Nigeria 127
Hannah Hoechner

10 Understanding the Indefensible: Reflections on Fieldwork with Child

Prostitutes in Thailand 141
Heather Montgomery

11 Guide to Further Reading 155

Catherine Allerton

Notes 175

Select Bibliography 177

Index 183
 Notes on Contributors

Catherine Allerton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology

at the London School of Economics. She has conducted fieldwork in rural eastern
Indonesia and urban east Malaysia and is the author of Potent Landscapes: Place
and Mobility in Eastern Indonesia (University of Hawai’i Press, 2013) as well
as a number of articles on landscape, animism, sarongs, kinship and unmarried
women. Her current research explores illegality, potential statelessness, and
belonging amongst the children of Indonesian and Filipino migrants and refugees
in Sabah, East Malaysia.
Maja Haals Brosnan is finishing her PhD on the politics of orphanhood and
childhood adversity in post-genocide Rwanda, in particular exploring the impact
of ethnicity and politics on the experience of orphanhood and difficult child-
hoods. She is currently involved in publishing a book on children’s rights in the
global south. Since completing her field research in Rwanda, she has held various
research positions in not-for-profit organizations, exploring issues surrounding
unaccompanied minors, early childhood care and education and evidence-based
policymaking in the field of children, youth and families.
Natalia Buitrón-Arias is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at
the London School of Economics. She has conducted long-term field research
amongst the Jivaroan Shuar of Ecuadorian Amazonia and has published on
Shuar engagement with university knowledge practices. Her doctoral dissertation
focuses on questions of political personhood, youth, professionalization, and
indigenous knowledge and governance practices.
Peggy Froerer is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University. In
addition to her work on childhood and youth, she researches on education and
schooling, and on poverty, inequality, and development. She is the author of a
number of publications, including Religious Division and Social Conflict: The
Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in Rural India (Social Science Press, 2007)
and ‘Kinship and Childrearing in India’ in R. A. Shweder (ed.) The Child: An
Encyclopedic Companion (University of Chicago Press, 2009). She is currently
working on her second monograph, on education, aspiration and social mobility
in India.

vii
viii • Notes on Contributors

Hannah Hoechner is a Wiener Anspach Postdoctoral Researcher at the

Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains at the Université Libre
de Bruxelles, Belgium, and a Research Associate at the Oxford Department of
International Development, UK. Her doctoral thesis, which she wrote at the
University of Oxford, is an ethnography of traditional Qur’anic schooling in
northern Nigeria. She is interested in the experiences of young people growing
up in poverty, and in the role of religion in the lives of young Muslims. As part
of her work in northern Nigeria, she produced a participatory docu-drama with
young Qur’anic students, showing their experiences and perspectives.
James Johnston is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the
London School of Economics. His PhD fieldwork examined the experiences of
children and young adults growing up in Anhui, China. His research focuses on
issues of education, relatedness and migration.
Ole Johannes Kaland is currently an Associate Professor of Intercultural
Studies at NLA University College, Norway. He received his PhD in Social
Anthropology from the University of Sussex. His research concerns the ways in
which internal migrant youths in China negotiate between limited educational
rights, various familial, societal and state educational pressures, and their own
dreams and aspirations for the future. He is currently developing a new research
project focusing on the children of Sino-Burmese migrants in south-western
China.
Zorana Milićević is an independent researcher and writer. She holds a PhD in
Anthropology from the London School of Economics and an MPhil in Spanish
Language from the Autonomous University of Madrid. She has conducted
research and worked on projects involving children in Mexico, Spain, Italy, the
UK and Serbia.
Heather Montgomery is Reader in the Anthropology of Childhood at the Open
University. She is the author of Modern Babylon? Prostituting Children in
Thailand (Berghahn, 2001) and An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological
Perspectives on Children’s Lives (Wiley, 2008). She has edited Local Childhoods,
Global Issues (Policy Press, 2013) and co-edited, with Laurence Brockliss,
Childhood and Violence in the Western Tradition (Oxbow, 2010) and with Karen
Wells, Erica Burman, and Alison Watson, Childhood, Youth and Violence in
Global Contexts (Palgrave, 2014).
Anne-Marie Sim is an ESRC-funded DPhil student in social anthropology at the
University of Oxford. For her research, she conducted ethnographic fieldwork
amongst nine- to eleven-year-old children in Greater London. Her thesis is an
ethnography of their everyday lives, with a particular focus on how they engage
with ideas about the future.
 Foreword

John Borneman, Series Editor

The highly reflexive essays in Children: Ethnographic Encounters examine the

fieldwork experience of contemporary anthropologists working with children.
The focus here, like that of other volumes in this series, is on personal encounters
that betray an intimacy with difference but that tend to be omitted from standard
academic accounts. The many surprises and well-drawn singularity of these
encounters has made each chapter a gem of lucid ethnographic writing, exact in
evoking a sense of person and place, yet useful for comparison and theorization
of children’s experience. In the Introduction, Catherine Allerton skillfully lays out
the specific learning opportunities and problems of focusing on child experience
in fieldwork. In her Guide to Further Reading, she gives focus to a large literature
that opens up new questions, and will help critically orient future research.
The ten authors explicate their intimate experiences of fieldwork with
children in nine countries: Rwanda, Nigeria, Thailand, China, Malaysia, India,
Ecuadorian Amazonia, Mexico and England. Rather than interview adults about
children, or inquire from the perspective of institutional frames or social norms,
they seek to depict what the experience of children means to children themselves.
To cite Allerton’s introduction,

We learn of children who are suspicious and argumentative, children who involve the
researcher in their detective games, children who are overawed by what they see as the
astonishing success of the adult ethnographer, and children who value the researcher
as a confidante with whom to share their fears and worries. In doing so, we appreciate
the emotional intensity of relationships forged during ethnography, and the unresolved
dilemmas that such encounters sometimes create.

In short, children not only share their experiences with anthropologists, but they
also speak back to them, alternately suspicious and trusting, transgressive of
social boundaries, critical of and cooperative with the researcher.
ix
x • Foreword

The diversity of countries makes it possible for the volume as a whole to

portray vividly the specific cultural texture of being a child in different places
in the early twenty-first century. Making children’s experience and the meaning
they attribute to it central does not minimize the significance of the ethnog-
rapher’s presence. That presence neither finds a voice in the discursive gloss
of how authorities talk about children, nor does it ever assume the position of
outside observer – age and cultural differences are defined in interactions. Rather,
presence is always intersubjective, taking shape through participant observation
in the unique social dramas of ethnographic encounters. Moreover, the real
life situations of children in the presence of anthropologists generate ethical
dilemmas very specific to place, culture, and ethnographer.
We asked the authors in this series to write with a particular concern in mind:
to focus on stories that showed their own engagement with children in fieldwork,
and that demonstrated the importance of children in learning about cultural
difference. We also requested that they resist the temptation to let theoretical
concerns dominate their writing. We encouraged them instead to allow their
descriptions of fieldwork to show how and in what way cultural difference is
learned in an encounter with children. We invited them, in other words, to write
outside the current normative genres of anthropology, and to risk exposing
themselves – warts, private pleasures, misunderstandings and all – in the thick
of it. Hence contributors have elaborated their specific interactions and totally
eschewed the conventions that authorize most ethnographic accounts, such as
footnoting, long bibliographies, or dense theoretical language.
Such rhetorical change makes new demands on our readers: we ask them to
enter, openly, into the often threatening, sometimes embarrassing, but always
potentially insight-bearing situations of fieldwork. In return, we hope that the
reading of these essays awakens an appreciation for the quality of subjective
sensual experience (personal, tied to a particular time and place); for curiosity
in difference itself, in translating the strange, foreign or unassimilable; and for
a kind of storytelling that contributes both to the documentary function of the
ethnographic encounter and to its analytical potential.
 Acknowledgements

This volume has had a dual conception. In the strictest sense, it began its life in
a workshop on Methods for Use During Ethnographic Fieldwork with Children
at the London School of Economics in May 2014. I gratefully acknowledge
the support of the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/
J012262/1) in funding this workshop. Thanks are also owed to Charles Stafford
and Harry Walker for acting as discussants, and to Richard Irvine, Chris Martin,
Claire Dungey and Elena Butti for their contributions. Following the initial
workshop, a plan was hatched to rewrite some of the original contributions (and to
elicit a couple more) in a more descriptive, exploratory style. This led to a second
writing workshop at the LSE, supported by the Department of Anthropology, and
a proposal for the Bloomsbury Encounters series. At Bloomsbury, I would like to
thank Jennifer Schmidt, Molly Beck, series editor John Borneman and the book’s
anonymous reviewers for their support. The second source for this volume,
particularly the Guide to Further Reading, is a course I have taught for several
years at the LSE entitled Children and Youth in Contemporary Ethnography. I
would like to acknowledge and thank all the undergraduate and postgraduate
students who have taken this course, most recently in spring 2015. Their ideas,
provocative engagements, and discussions have stimulated my thinking about
children and childhood. These students have often wanted to know, what is
ethnography with children really like? I hope that this volume will provide some
answers to that question.

xi
 Introduction
Encountering Children

Catherine Allerton

All adults – including anthropologists – were once children. Yet ideas of whom
and of what a ‘child’ is vary enormously cross culturally. This is one of many
fascinating paradoxes presented by ethnographic research with children. How
can the ethnographer connect his or her own – possibly unreliable, possibly
romanticized – memories and experiences of being a child with the children
we encounter as researchers in diverse settings? In what sense can we compare,
across time and space, the lives of children living under very different societal
expectations of the competencies, rights, and duties of a child? Do the ethnogra-
pher’s memories of childhood make the process of talking to, and working with,
children as an adult straightforward?
A further paradox concerns the predominant model within anthropology of
ethnographic fieldwork as a process of ‘total immersion’ (Carsten 2012). Is it
really methodologically possible – not to mention ethically sound – to totally
immerse ourselves in all aspects of children’s lives? Should full participation
even be attempted? Will the adult ethnographer necessarily be granted access to
everything that concerns and involves children? And if – as much of the recent
sociological and anthropological literature on children assures us – children are
competent social actors, why might ethnography with children nevertheless also
entail so-called ‘child friendly’ methods? If children are fully competent, why do
they require especially ‘friendly’ research techniques?
In this book, ten anthropologists vividly describe their fieldwork with children
in Rwanda, Malaysia, Ecuador, China, UK, India, Mexico, Nigeria and Thailand.
They do so in a thoroughly ‘warts-and-all’ manner, discussing failure, embar-
rassment, awkwardness and annoyance, and focusing on specific encounters
that epitomized what ethnographic research with children involved. Children’s
knowledge is often dismissed as wrong or incomplete by adults, and yet can shed
new and fascinating light on institutions, social processes and cultural norms.
However, gaining trust and accessing that knowledge may not be a straight-
forward process; it also requires ethnographic humility and honesty together with
a frank sense of the limitations of our research.

1
2 • Children

The purpose of this volume is neither to outline an ‘anthropology of children’,

nor to give a definitive account of how to conduct ethnographic research with
children. There are already a number of overview texts that do the former, and
various books and articles that reflect on the methods and ethics of child-focused
ethnography. Yet it is the nature of such methods texts to systematize and univer-
salize. In this book, authors describe very particular encounters with very particular
children. We learn of children who are suspicious and argumentative, children who
involve the researcher in their detective games, children who are overawed by what
they see as the astonishing success of the adult ethnographer, and children who
value the researcher as a confidante with whom to share their fears and worries.
In doing so, we appreciate the emotional intensity of relationships forged during
ethnography, and the unresolved dilemmas that such encounters sometimes create.

Childhood, Power and Structural Disadvantage

Childhood is a powerful idea. It shapes state policies, religious rituals, laws and
institutions. It influences adult encounters with young people, and children’s
everyday lives. Ever since the pioneering ethnographic work of Margaret
Mead (1928, 1931), and inspired by the later, historical research of Philippe
Ariès (1962), scholars have reflected on the multiple manifestations of ideas of
‘childhood’ across space and time. For example, Viviana Zelizer (1985), in her
history of the changing social value of children, notes that the birth of a child
in eighteenth-century rural America was welcomed as the arrival of a future
laborer and as security for parents later in life. Yet, in the early decades of the
twentieth century, with new laws against child labor and the introduction of the
‘family wage’, American childhood came to be ‘sacralized’. Children’s value
was increasingly measured in sentimental terms, as ‘priceless’, unproductive
members of a nuclear family. Around the same time as American children were
being sequestered in the family home, Margaret Mead reported (1928) that not
only could Samoan children change their names according to their own personal
whim, but they were also free to decide where they lived, moving between the
houses of different relatives as they chose. More recently Ulturgasheva (2012)
has described how the Eveny of Siberia associate childhood with ‘openness’
and precariousness. The young child, in particular, is considered to be fragile
and volatile, and at risk of spirit attack. One solution to such precariousness, in
the Eveny context, is to appoint a reindeer to be the guardian of the child’s soul,
protecting the child’s wellbeing and standing in for the child in any encounter
with evil spirits (2012: 43). These three briefly described case studies already
suggest how children’s lives are shaped by ideas of childhood, from their ability
to work, their association with a nuclear family, their autonomy to make decisions
about where they live and their intimate connections with herding animals.
 Introduction – Encountering Children • 3

If the idea of ‘childhood’ (what is a child?) has been shown to vary widely,
so too do understandings of the boundary (who is a child?) between children and
adults, as well as between different children. Just think of the multiple labels we
use to refer to different ‘stages’ of childhood: infants, toddlers, tweenies, young
children, middle children, preteens, teenagers, youth. The list is endless and
ever-multiplying, and is often utilized by those marketing products at children
and their parents. Moreover, in contexts of widespread formal education,
these labels may reference the kind of institutions a child attends – as in the
‘preschool child’ or ‘primary school-age child’ – or may simply stratify children
according to their age, class or grade. When it comes to conducting ethnographic
research with children, cross-cultural differences in such varying distinctions
can be important. A fifteen-year-old girl who according to one context might be
considered a ‘vulnerable’ teenage research participant may, in another context, be
about to embark on marriage and motherhood. A twelve-year-old who would be
considered too young to babysit in the UK might elsewhere be the primary carer
for various younger siblings whilst her parents work the fields.
Although anthropologists have long been interested in children, and have long
written about their lives, it is only relatively recently that ethnographic research
with children in and of itself (rather than in the service of studies of ‘childcare’ or
cultural ‘personality’ types) has come to be recognized and promoted. Whereas
once it was relatively uncommon to find PhD students or professional anthro-
pologists specializing in research with children, such specialization has become
more commonplace. These changes owe much to the conceptual shifts brought
about by what has been called the ‘new sociology of childhood’ or the ‘new social
studies of childhood’. Writers within this movement, influenced by Ariès’ (1962)
account of historical changes in the conceptualization of childhood, as well as
by the emerging child rights movement, emphasized how childhood was a social
construction (James and Prout 1990). This included the construction of children,
within the academy, as ‘incomplete’ beings who lacked adult knowledge and
who could be considered the largely passive recipients of a one-way ‘sociali-
zation’ process. Against such views, writers in the ‘new sociology of childhood’
emphasized that children were competent people who had an ability to act in and
interpret the world around them. Authors therefore emphasized that children’s
social relationships and varying cultural forms were worthy of study in their own
right, and that children should be recognized as contributing to the social world
around them (Waksler 1991; Mayall 1994).
The move to uncover children’s knowledge and competencies, and their role
in determining social relationships, was an interesting contrast with much earlier,
broadly observational research. Take, for example, the work of Iona and Peter
Opie (1959, 1969), who described the playground ‘lore’ of British schoolchildren
as a separate culture, beyond the world of adults. Though their work revealed
an incredible wealth of rhymes, sayings, parodies and singing games, we learn
4 • Children

little about what this ‘lore’ might mean to children themselves, or what might be
at stake for them in using it. Whilst such observations of children’s play, work
activities or domestic routines can be fascinating, the risk is that they produce
little more than what might be called a ‘natural history of childhood’: a kind of
minute accounting of what children do, but with little attention given to why they
do it or how they experience it. By contrast with the Opies’ folkloric approach,
work on playground games influenced by the new sociological and anthropo-
logical approaches to children emphasized the power dynamics between different
children, and how acquiring playground skills was a way to acquire social status
(James 1993).
Nevertheless, despite the many successes of these revitalized approaches to
children as social actors, some aspects of this ‘new sociology of childhood’ run
the risk of being uncritically applied, or of being repeated simply as ‘mantras’ in
studies of children and childhood (Tisdall and Punch 2012: 251). In this volume,
focused as we are on subjective accounts of research, we do not explicitly
address definitional questions of who should count as ‘a child’, nor do we outline
detailed, culturally specific understandings of childhood. Moreover, the ethno-
graphic accounts collected here describe encounters with children in ways that
expose some of the cracks in the new orthodoxies of studies of children. Take,
for example, the idea of childhood. Researching constructions of ‘childhood’
does not necessarily tell us anything about the lives of actual children: the two
are not the same. Despite historical and anthropological interest in differing
understandings of childhood, we need to exercise caution in how we chart such
ideas, and the weight we give to them in determining children’s experiences. The
idea that we can research and outline a single understanding of ‘childhood’ in
each setting ignores the significance of, for example, movements and migrations
to children’s lives, as well as the many profound differences – of gender, age,
class, religion, disability – between young people. In this volume, Haals Brosnan
describes two villages located in the same region of northern Rwanda, but
which have very different perspectives on children’s roles and responsibilities.
In the US context, Adrie Kusserow (2004) has analyzed class differences in the
socialization of children into individualism in three New York neighbourhoods.
She shows how working-class neighbourhoods emphasize ‘hard’ individualism,
whilst ‘soft’ individualism predominates amongst upper-middle-class parents.
Hard individualism emphasizes a tough self, and encourages children to develop
resilience to resist bad influences and strive for success. By contrast, soft individ-
ualism emphasizes the delicacy of the child’s self, and the flowering of the child
into an independent and self-confident person. What is significant about these
two forms of individualism is that they also imply two different understandings
of the child. Parents who socialize children into hard individualism strongly
emphasize discipline, respect for parents and the difference between adults and
children. By contrast, parents who encourage soft individualism already consider
 Introduction – Encountering Children • 5

their pre-school children to be ‘little people’ with their own tastes, needs, desires
and rights. Kusserow’s book demonstrates the diversity found even between three
different neighbourhoods of the same city with respect to understandings of the
character and needs of young children.
Peggy Froerer, in this volume, describes how her supervisors discouraged
her from conducting PhD research with children since it would not lead to a
proper anthropological understanding of the community under study. Though
the success of the ‘new’ studies of children and childhood make it hard to
imagine this advice being given today, the picture is not as rosy as we might
think. There still seems to be a view amongst some anthropologists that
conducting ethnography with children is a relatively minor or trivial concern,
a kind of cross-cultural social work most suited to women, and that it cannot
tell us anything about the really ‘juicy’ topics like, say, religion or the economy.
Perhaps part of the problem here is that, with the proliferation of studies of
childhood, children are at risk of being marginalized in ‘childhood studies’. Yet,
as the contributions to this volume should make clear, ethnographers who focus
on children are not simply trying to understand ‘childhood’: they are hoping to
make sense of cross-generational experiences of migration (Allerton, Kaland),
of understandings of supernatural illness (Froerer) and dreams (Buitrón-Arias),
of religious education and poverty (Hoechner) and of changing gender relations
(Milićević). One of the aims of this book is, therefore, to thoroughly normalize
the notion that anthropologists can and should do research with children, and
that in doing so they will learn about much more than ideas of child-rearing, or
understandings of childhood.
Serious research with children should not just be about ‘adding-in’ children
to our accounts, but should lead us to deeper ethnographic and theoretical
understandings, challenging conventional anthropological knowledge that has
been largely blind to the differences that age and ‘child’ status makes. There
is an interesting parallel here between anthropology’s neglect of children in
the formulation of its theories and an earlier failure to give serious attention
to women’s experiences and to the cross-cultural construction of gender. The
greater attention to issues of gender from the 1970s onwards was not simply
about creating a ghettoized ‘anthropology of women’. Rather, rethinking gender
involved rethinking theories of, for example, power and knowledge (Moore
1988). Similarly, rethinking age and children’s status has potentially profound
implications for anthropological theories and methods. For example, research on
children’s domestic work has questioned dominant understandings in economic
anthropology of labour and exploitation (Nieuwenhuys 1994), whilst research
with children at risk of statelessness problematizes dominant legalistic under-
standings of nationality and citizenship (Allerton 2014).
One of the inescapable repetitions of the new sociology and anthropology
of childhood has been that ‘children have agency’. Of course, it is important to
6 • Children

emphasize children’s active roles in the scenarios, institutions, and relationships

that dominate their lives. But there is increasing concern that the limitations
and constraints on children’s agency have been insufficiently problematized,
and that issues of the vulnerability of certain children – and the researchers’
concomitant ethical obligations towards them – may be glossed over (Bluebond-
Langner and Korbin 2007: 243–4). In this volume, we see ethnographers
grapple with the constrained agency of overworked Chinese schoolchildren
(Johnston), disadvantaged orphans (Haals Brosnan) and Thai child prostitutes
(Montgomery). Children in such contexts, even whilst they choose to rationalize
their experiences in particular ways, may often seem to have little real power to
change the conditions of their lives. The ethnographer, working hard to under-
stand children’s perspectives on their worlds, may also be aware of the subtle
and not-so-subtle ways in which children are coerced by adults. An additional
constraint on agency can be a child’s age. This is noted by Montgomery in
this volume in the context of reflecting on her painful realization that the child
prostitutes she encountered were much younger than the ‘no longer really child-
like’ teenagers she had expected to meet. Children are not an undifferentiated
collective. Despite criticisms of the unproblematic application of developmental
‘stages’ to all children, there are clear differences between, say, a three-year-old
and a ten-year-old child. Children have different competencies, and the gradual
process of human cognitive development does impose some constraints on
children’s thinking and knowledge.
Thus, although ideas of childhood vary, although the experience of being
a boy or girl child may be very different across time and space, and although
children make active contributions to social life, it is nevertheless the case that
most children are (even if only for some of the time) in positions of structural
disadvantage. Adults tend to have power over children, and may place restric-
tions on female children’s travel (Buitrón-Arias, this volume), seek to protect
them from knowing the truth about events (Milićević, this volume), emphasize
hierarchical relations within educational institutions (Johnston, this volume) or
question the motivations of those who do not uphold a boundary between adults
and children (Sim, this volume). It is this position of relative structural disad-
vantage that may shape ethnographic encounters with children, as researchers
find themselves feeling guilty or voyeuristic for examining the difficult lives of
marginalized children (Allerton and Montgomery, this volume), worried about
highlighting difficult issues and upsetting children in weak structural positions
(Kaland, this volume) and uneasy about the expectations that may be placed on
them as powerful outsiders (Hoechner, this volume).
 Introduction – Encountering Children • 7

Ethnography of and with Children

Let us remind ourselves of two key points. Firstly, research with children can
shed new and revealing light not only on cross-cultural experiences of childhood,
but also on a range of other important issues. Secondly, children’s lives – even
in remote villages in the developing world – are strongly influenced by global
structures and trends, and by global movements of people, things, and ideas. This
has been demonstrated most powerfully by the work of Cindi Katz (2004), who
has shown how children’s daily routines, play and environment in rural Sudan
were profoundly altered by their village’s inclusion in an agricultural devel-
opment programme. But how can an adult researcher go about discovering what
difference such developments make to children’s lives? How can we discover
what matters to boys and girls of different ages? How can adults, implicated as
they are in the structures of disadvantage in which children often have less power,
discover what makes individual children tick?
Researchers working in sociology, development studies and geography
have all discussed the utility of various quantitative and qualitative methods
for conducting research with children. Time and again they reach the same
conclusion: that ethnography is uniquely suited to research that aims to work with
rather than on children (James and Prout 1990: 8). One of the reasons for this,
according to William Corsaro, is that ethnography helps to capture the ways in
which children’s interactions and cultural forms ‘are produced and shared in the
present’ (2011: 53). This present focus cannot, Corsaro argues, be easily acquired
by the use of surveys or interviews. In this volume, all of the authors reflecting
on their encounters with children have been trained within anthropology, a disci-
pline for which ethnography is still one of its defining and essential features.
Anthropologists, one might have thought, must be uniquely qualified to reflect on
the process of undertaking ethnography with children, and the ways in which it
might be different to ethnography with adults. Strangely, though, they have been
relatively silent on this front.
As all anthropology students are taught, usually with reference to the myth
of Malinowski, ethnography as a method revolves around the paradoxical but
methodologically rich technique of participant-observation. When it comes to
research with children, the observation part of this formula seems fairly straight-
forward. Hundreds of documentaries, including Margaret Mead and Gregory
Bateson’s 1954 films Bathing Babies in Three Cultures and Childhood Rivalry in
Bali and New Guinea, have taught us how to observe children and their interac-
tions with siblings, caregivers and others. But what of the participation element of
ethnography? Is this possible? How, if at all, is the ethnographer to overcome their
obvious physical differences from most children, and to participate with them?
One methodological approach that is often referenced, and that influences (or
haunts) many of the contributors to this volume is the ‘least-adult’ role originally
8 • Children

advocated by Nancy Mandell. She argued that adult–child differences were

mostly ‘ideological’ and that the ‘active involvement of the researcher’ in the
lives of children is possible if they suspend ‘all adult-like characteristics except
physical size’ (1991: 40). For Mandell, this participation in children’s social
worlds must be an active participation: adult researchers ‘must engage in joint
action with children, thus creating mutual understanding’ (ibid.: 41). Indeed,
she goes on to describe her initially embarrassing but later fully immersive
‘least-adult’ role during fieldwork in a preschool for two- to four-year-old
children. When children asked her to perform adult tasks such as tying shoes
or pushing them on the swings she would refuse, telling them she was not a
teacher. Instead, she observed and then joined in with their play, ‘invaded’ their
territory, physically followed them around (as other children also do) and shared
‘social objects’ with them. In this volume, Sim describes a similar process of full
participation in the social worlds of older schoolchildren in which she learns to
appreciate the immersive flow of their games and physical activities. However,
Sim recognizes that this process was made possible by her own size, gender and
youthful appearance. For other researchers – particularly Johnston and Kaland, as
Western, male researchers in China – such participation was impossible.
Such has been the influence of the idea of the ‘least-adult’ role that ethnog-
raphers often feel inadequate when they are unable to emulate it. It is worth
reminding ourselves, then, that Mandell was the mother of a two-year-old child
working with two- to four-year-olds in her own culture. Though her participation
was impressive, it undoubtedly relied on a certain amount of previous, taken-for-
granted knowledge. In her well-known account, Mandell tends to universalize
certain conclusions about ‘young children’ in general from this experience and to
neglect factors that might work against full immersion in other contexts. In this
volume, Hoechner describes her gradual realization of the differences of gender,
status and religion that worked against her ability to become a friend (rather
than a patron) to the young Qur’anic scholars whose lives she was researching.
Interestingly, in Hoechner’s case, age and physical size seem to be two of the
least significant differences between researcher and children, further problema-
tizing Mandell’s framework. Allerton (this volume) also describes a situation
in which undocumented children were profoundly aware of the researcher’s
different status, and in which the ethnographic process became more relaxed
when she acknowledged these differences and took the children on day trips to
a beach.
For all anthropologists, there is a strong contrast between the intense socia-
bility of fieldwork and the solitude of the writing desk. But for those working
with children, this contrast can be particularly pronounced. Children frequently
cross physical boundaries that adults may carefully observe. As Montgomery,
Froerer and others in this volume describe, they play with our hair, rifle through
our bags, climb over or sit close to us and ask us personal questions about our
 Introduction – Encountering Children • 9

faces, bodies and clothes. Over the years, I have had many conversations with
fellow anthropologists who tell stories of the long lengths of time they spent in
the company of children during fieldwork. What is striking is that very few of
these anthropologists were directly researching childhood or children’s lives.
Particularly in contexts of profound cultural difference, foreign ethnographers
may be seen as ‘childlike’ by their hosts (Cheney 2007: 32). This may give them
a natural affinity with the children around them, but may also lead those children
to view the ethnographer as ‘less-adult’ than other adults, perhaps even less
socially accomplished than themselves. In this volume, Buitrón-Arias describes
how young children frequently came to her aid in the house she shared with them,
given her ignorance of basic subsistence skills. Perhaps, then, the ethnographer
might not always need to try very hard in downplaying his or her adult status
if the informants already view him or her as a somewhat unusual category of
person?
The chapters in this volume demonstrate that particular contexts – perhaps
those adjusting to recent change, or where there are heightened anxieties about
children’s futures – may make ethnographic encounters with children more or
less difficult. Sim’s chapter describes a striking paradox that, whilst children were
very open to, and happy with, her involvement in their lives, adults were suspi-
cious of her interest in simply ‘being’ with children, and doubted her motives.
Froerer’s chapter shows how adults in a central Indian village were utterly
dismissive of children’s knowledge, even whilst they appeared to appreciate her
desire to spend time with children, and certainly made no efforts to prevent this.
In some settings, there may be a strong integration of the worlds of adults and
children. This may provide many opportunities to observe apparently ‘natural-
istic’ activities of children, but may also prevent participation with children if
adults perceive them as knowing nothing. In other contexts, children may spend
significant amounts of time in schools, and researchers may find it easier to gain
access to children in such institutional settings. For many of the contributors to
this volume, ethnographic research with children involved at least some research
in schools. Though many advocates of ‘childhood studies’ question the wisdom
of basing so much research in institutions where adults clearly have considerable
power over children, institutional roles and expectations can have benefits as well
as limitations.
Barrie Thorne (1993) has described how, during fieldwork in two US
elementary schools in California and Michigan, she often felt a conflict between
her research role and her position as an adult. Although, as a researcher, she was
sympathetic to children’s attempts to escape structures of adult control in school,
teachers assumed that (as a fellow adult) she shared their disciplinary priorities.
When children violated rules in her presence she would feel ‘a little elated’
(ibid.: 18), but when the female teacher met her eye when something annoying
or amusing happened she would experience a ‘mild sense of betrayal for moving
10 • Children

into allegiance with adult vantage points and structures of authority’ (ibid.: 19).
Whilst the children were initially worried that she was recording their ‘bad’
behaviour, they gradually relaxed as they realized she was, for example, happy to
take part in their ‘underground economy of food and objects’ (ibid.: 20). Whilst
the class teacher sought to uphold the order of the classroom, Thorne herself
gradually becomes guilty of undermining it. Finally, on the day that the normal
teacher is absent and the class is taught by a substitute teacher, she has an ‘obser-
vational feast’ (ibid.: 23) as the children openly flout the rules of the classroom.
In the chapters that follow, Allerton describes her discomfort with the
Malaysian teachers at a learning centre for the children of migrants who assume
she shares their Christian, critical perspective on the children’s behaviour.
Johnston poignantly relates the sense of failure he felt when his position as an
‘exemplary adult’ in a Chinese school opened up an enormous social distance
between himself and the schoolchildren. And Kaland describes his realization
that the school where he reluctantly based his research, and which he assumed
was a less ‘natural’ space for observing children’s lives, was in fact an important
kind of ‘second home’ for these young people. Though schools are not always
perfect sites for child-focused ethnography, and certainly do not provide access
to all aspects of children’s lives, they may sometimes be presented to us as the
only possible site for research. Moreover, as many of the encounters show, being
a different kind of teacher (a ‘least-teacher’?) can be another kind of role that
opens up possibilities for accessing children’s knowledge.
Although ethnography appears to have many benefits for research with
children, even anthropologists will often supplement participant observation
with additional techniques. These might include the use of focus groups,
drama, role play, questionnaires, diaries, drawing, photography, time-use charts,
worksheets and mapping. Such additional methods are often described as being
‘child friendly’ since they may allow children to respond to research issues
in ways that they feel most confident. However, as others have also argued
(Punch 2002a), there is nothing necessarily ‘child friendly’ about any of these
techniques. They may depend on certain kinds of ‘literacies’ (most obviously
writing and drawing, but also the ability to represent space or time) that not all
children have, and their ‘friendliness’ to specific children may be dependent
on other factors such as age, gender, educational experience and ideas of
appropriate activities. Haals Brosnan, this volume, describes how some of the
Rwandan young people she knew were intensely uncomfortable with certain,
apparently ‘child friendly’, methods that Rwandan children in another village
had developed. Milićević, this volume, describes intense fieldwork encounters
that developed out of her positioning as a particular kind of adult to whom
children could confide their fears and worries. Her chapter suggests that in some
contexts children do not necessarily require any special techniques in order to
open up to the ethnographer.
 Introduction – Encountering Children • 11

Some of these ‘child-friendly’ methods have come from ‘participatory

techniques’ formulated for use in development research, policy, and practice
(van Blerk 2006). Like the ‘new sociology of childhood’, ‘participatory research’
tends to also have its mantras and with respect to children, two of these seem to
be that, firstly, children should be involved in research design, and, secondly, that
research should benefit them. However, these ideas may sit uncomfortably with
many anthropologists who, whilst they would of course not wish their research
to harm any children, do not necessarily feel it would be appropriate to intervene
in children’s lives. Should ethnographic research with children necessarily be
‘child-led’? Should it have to benefit those children? When we capture ‘children’s
voices’, should we spread the message that we hear to others in a society? When
should an ethnographer step in to protect children, and what are the ethics of
making interventions in contexts where the anthropologist is a (usually powerful)
foreigner? These are all problematic and challenging questions to which many of
the descriptions of encounters here speak, but to which the contributors do not
always have conclusive answers.

An Overview of the Chapters

Maja Haals Brosnan frames her chapter in terms of a perplexing contrast between
encounters with children in two Rwandan villages. In the first village, Kaganza, a
predominantly Tutsi community that receives substantial government aid, children
greet her cheerfully and are open and enthusiastic. She is quickly able to develop
and co-design ‘child-friendly’ methods with them, and adults are supportive of
her efforts. By contrast, in the second, predominantly Hutu, village of Mwiza,
Haals Brosnan’s initial encounters with children feel aggressive and overly
demanding, and conversations are stilted and awkward. There are no community
initiatives to support children and youth, and adults speak of children’s delin-
quency and disrespect. Moreover, the Mwiza children are deeply uncomfortable
with the drawing- and performance-based methods she has co-designed with
children in Kaganza. Whilst Haals Brosnan, in preparing for fieldwork, had tried
to focus on the cultural differences between herself and her Rwandan participants,
encounters in these two villages force her to acknowledge that there are strong
intra-cultural divergences between them. Although she was working with young
people of roughly similar ages in each place, those in Mwiza (many of who were
orphans) were not considered to be ‘children’ as such in local terms. This chapter
questions whether we can easily give a single definition of ‘childhood’ within a
specific cultural setting, and suggests that, age notwithstanding, it might be more
productive to approach some young people in adult terms.
Catherine Allerton’s chapter also draws attention to the differences between
children by focusing on her uncomfortable but memorable encounters with a
12 • Children

particular group of ‘difficult’ children. During fieldwork with the children of

migrants and refugees in Sabah, East Malaysia, she was able to get to know
some children very well. However, one community of undocumented, Filipino-
origin children – who she calls the ‘Crossroads children’ – initially refused to
engage with her, and were frequently argumentative and aggressive amongst
themselves. Allerton gradually utilized different methods to access partial
knowledge of these children’s lives. However, a chance comment by one girl –
that holidays are ‘only for rich people’ – leads her to take the children on a series
of outings to the beach. These outings prove to be a great deal of fun and made
her subsequent encounters with the children more relaxed, yet in many ways
the children continued to remain mysterious and secretive, happy to enjoy the
moment but reluctant to participate in a longer-term project. The chapter shows
that children, like adults, may exercise their agency by making explicit demands
of us as researchers, or by refusing to cooperate, or by choosing not to ‘voice’
their problems and fears.
In ‘Paths to the Unfamiliar’, Natalia Buitrón-Arias describes how her
most productive and interesting encounters with children and young people
in Ecuadorian Amazonia were those involving journeys. Though her research
was not explicitly ‘child-focused’, she nevertheless found it hard to access
children’s perspectives in what she saw as the prime sites of Shuar socialization:
the household and the school. Instead, she found that Shuar children were more
relaxed in her company, and were more likely to open up to her, when she
journeyed together with them. Although adults in this context try to develop
children’s independence and courage, in part by giving them psychotropic
plants to ingest, they also warn children of the dangers of the outside world.
Through journeying with children outside the village context, and later by
encouraging them to write their accounts of dreams, Buitrón-Arias learnt about
children’s secrets, fears and desires, as well as their alliances with powerful
others. However, she also learnt that children’s journeys are potentially more
subversive than the journeys of adults, particularly for girls. Though Buitrón-
Arias had hoped to become ‘friends’ with the children, her chapter shows how
local understandings of children’s appropriate behaviour made this difficult in
the village context. Instead, as fieldwork developed, she appreciated how her
status as a particular kind of foreigner made her a person of interest to children
experimenting with unfamiliar encounters.
James Johnston’s chapter also describes how foreignness made him a figure
of great interest to children during fieldwork in China. However, in this case,
his high educational status and actual physical height made him appear to be an
‘exemplary adult’, frustrating his efforts to develop relaxed and informal relation-
ships with children. Because of the ways in which he was initially introduced to
children, and because of the problems of conducting school-based ethnography
in a frenzied Chinese educational system, Johnston finds it impossible to reduce
 Introduction – Encountering Children • 13

the enormous status differences between himself and children. Teachers, parents
and even children themselves constantly present him as a model of ‘high-quality
personhood’ and his role within the school continually recreates this distance.
Johnston notes, with admirable honesty, how his fieldwork with children in China
felt like a failure. He finds it impossible to bridge the divide with children, and
their packed school schedule leaves little space or time for him to utilize child-
friendly methods. However, by highlighting the overpowering social hierarchies
of this setting, and the pressures on children’s time and individual expression
that the schooling system entails, Johnston does in fact present us with an unset-
tling ethnography of children, childhood, and educational stress in contemporary
China.
By contrast with Johnston’s constrained encounters, Sim describes an
intensive, fully immersive process through which she learnt (again) how to be a
child in London. She focuses in particular on ‘moments of enchantment’ in which
she participated physically in children’s games. Because of her height, youthful
appearance, and gender, she is accepted as a member of children’s social worlds.
Indeed, such is her acceptance that children often, comically, refuse to ‘hear’
her real age when it is mentioned. Sim shows how, in certain circumstances
and under certain conditions, it is possible to participate ‘fully’ with children,
but that professional ethics, and in particular other adults, place limits on this
participation. Sim contrasts the suspicions and boundary-making activities of
adults (particularly those in schools) with the relative openness of children, who
are often more interested in what a person does and how they behave than how
old they are. Sim shows that immersive ethnography with children is possible
within educational institutions, but that it is not without its problems, particularly
when the researcher is expected to demonstrate ‘adult’ or disciplining behaviour.
In her chapter, Peggy Froerer describes the gradual process by which she
finally achieved a long-term goal of conducting ethnographic fieldwork with
children in central India. Her initial attempts to research children’s worlds had
been rebuffed by her PhD supervisors, who insisted that, knowing nothing,
children could not be the focus of a ‘proper’ anthropological study. Ironically,
when Froerer returns to the tribal village where she conducted her doctoral
research, she discovers that local adults (including schoolteachers and parents)
share many of these ideas about children’s ignorance. Adults laugh at her attempts
to engage children in small-talk, and reject children’s unique interpretations of
illness causality. However, by steadfastly observing children, and participating
in their everyday tasks of work and play, Froerer gradually wins the children
round, and becomes a special kind of ‘auntie’ or ‘friend’. Her outsider status,
and in particular her clumsy ineptness at local, female, adult tasks, slowly opens
up a space for discussion with children, who start to ask her probing questions
and to physically explore her face, body and possessions. Here, as in Sim’s
chapter, ethnographic fieldwork with children emerges as a dual process of both
14 • Children

immersion in children’s worlds and an uneasy awareness of adult perspectives

on childhood. Froerer describes encounters with children in the physical flow of
games and inquisitive explorations, and encounters with adult suspicions of why
anyone might be interested in children in the first place. Her chapter shows how
taking children’s knowledge seriously poses a threat to adult worldviews, but
also perhaps a threat to anthropology too, particularly if we insist that knowing
children’s lives is critical to any holistic ethnographic understanding.
Zorana Milićević’s chapter also explores the tensions between children’s
knowledge and desire to ‘know the truth’, and adult desires to protect them
from emotional hurt. Milićević’s research in rural Mexico combined both home-
and school-based ethnography in order to explore children’s understanding of
changing gender expectations. Conducting research with children in this context
also meant conducting research with adults, primarily mothers. And during
encounters with mothers, Milićević became aware of marital unfaithfulness as a
focus for people’s jokes, narratives, gossip and suffering. Mothers saw children
as mostly innocent and vulnerable, and Milićević was warned that children’s
feelings would be hurt if she tried to talk with them about adult infidelities.
Nevertheless, her status as an ‘intimate outsider’ led children to open up to
her about the issue. Discussions of infidelities had a liberating effect on some
children and revealed the paradox that, whilst adults try to protect children
from the knowledge of infidelities, children themselves are keen to protect their
mothers.
In his chapter, ‘Awkward Encounters’, Ole Johannes Kaland notes that liter-
ature on child-focused research tends to discuss the appropriateness of research
techniques and questions and elides issues of awkwardness. However, Kaland
found his fieldwork with internal migrant children in Shanghai to be marked by
awkwardness and misunderstanding, from the embarrassment of initial introduc-
tions to the guilt of causing emotional upset to a young informant. Like Johnston,
Kaland notes the centrality of educational aspiration to current understandings
of childhood in China. However, he also describes how migrant youth face
many difficult choices along the road to educational attainment. Kaland relates
his worries about the limitations of conducting research within an educational
institution marked by specific power relations between children and authority
figures. However, he also notes that in migrant Shanghai there were very few
‘natural’ places to meet groups of children and that institutions could be a kind of
‘home’. Although he did not necessarily resolve his worries about role-conflicts
and artificiality during research in an institutional setting, the awkwardness of the
gradual process of developing social relationships with migrant youth did lead to
many research insights.
Hannah Hoechner also discusses the impossibility of becoming an ‘insider’
in some research settings. She describes problems of positionality whilst
conducting research with almajirai, young, male, Qur’anic scholars in Kano
 Introduction – Encountering Children • 15

city, Nigeria. Though she had hoped to foster relatively equal and friendly
relationships with the teenage almajirai, they easily slotted her into the position
of employer and patron. She tries to be a ‘good’ patron, but there is much about
this role that she does not understand. Eventually, eager to give these margin-
alized children a voice, she involves many of the boys in a documentary film
project. Yet, after the exhausting and rewarding work of filming and editing, she
learns about the critical speculations of many almajirai concerning her probable
profits from the film. This leaves her angry and upset, and it is some time
before her and the almajirai can make peace. Hoechner’s chapter demonstrates
how, despite our good intentions as researchers, we may be unable to control
completely children’s relationships with us. These relationships may come to
be a reflection of children’s place in the wider society. Moreover, young people
may express their agency and perspectives in ways that can be uncomfortable for
the researcher, and that can give rise to feelings of frustration and pointlessness.
Disturbing encounters with children, and discomfort with their perspectives,
are also explored in Heather Montgomery’s chapter, a reflection on ethnographic
fieldwork with child prostitutes in Thailand. Montgomery describes how her
research was heavily influenced by then-emerging anthropological work on
child rights, and on the importance of taking children’s perspectives seriously.
Yet, during fieldwork in Thailand, she is confronted by the realities of the young
age of many prostitutes, the physical injuries they sometime sustain and local
perspectives on the impact of prostitution that do not emphasize abuse. Children
rationalize prostitution in terms of fulfilling obligations to parents. She is told that
prostitution ‘only’ concerns the body and cannot lead to long-term harm, and that
it is a way to retain self-respect by dutifully sacrificing for one’s family. Though
she dutifully records such opinions in her field notes, she struggles to reconcile
them with her own perspectives on prostitution as harmful abuse. Although
Montgomery’s fieldwork is now over twenty years old, she notes that she has
many more doubts about it today than she did as a young, possibly naïve, anthro-
pologist. She wonders whether she should have intervened more, and whether
the interventions she did make were ethically appropriate. Her chapter raises
problematic questions to which she finds no easy answers. When does research
become voyeurism? When, if at all, should we intervene to protect children?
And are children’s rights necessarily supported or upheld by listening to their
troubling perspectives?
 1

Different Childhoods, Different

Ethnographies: Encounters in Rwanda

Maja Haals Brosnan

Symbolic Encounters

When I arrived in Kaganza, a semi-urban village in Northern Rwanda, excited

to be starting my field research, my appearance immediately sparked cheerful
excitement in the village children. Within moments they had gathered around
me, at first undoubtedly hoping I was an aid worker but becoming no less enthu-
siastic about my presence when they learned I was a student. The numbers of
the children continued to rise as I walked through the village with its leader,
a short woman dressed in a traditional dark-coloured Muslim dress, complete
with headscarf. It is only a short five-minute walk through the village centre,
but in those five minutes we gathered behind us a group of young children
so big that the sound of the cheer and chat rang through the village, sprawled
along the paved road. I never quite learned to slow down my pace of walking
to suit the village leader, so I was soon submerged in the excitable group of
young Rwandans. As an anthropologist interested in the particular lifeworlds
of children, I revelled in this – eager arms tried to pull me in each and every
direction, questions were fired at me so quickly I was nearly out of breath from
trying to keep up, and the interest in me as a strange and exotic kind-of-adult
was as great as my interest in the children. Language was not a barrier. The older
children, led by a confident and cheerful twelve-year-old girl, Julianne, knew
enough words in English to communicate and translate the younger children’s
questions. I knew enough Kinyarwanda to understand the basics of their enthusi-
astic enquiries. What was my country? Was that in Europe? How old was I? What
was my name? What was my profession? Did I have parents? What was I doing
in Rwanda? Why did I come to their village? Did I work with a project? Would I
come to visit their school? I never, myself, got to ask any questions. The children

17
18 • Children

didn’t have time – my impromptu translator, Julianne, left me no space or time

for questions. Knowing that this is the response most Westerners receive from
children in many African countries, I expected the enthusiasm to decline quickly
once I settled in the village. I reminded myself of the abundance of difficulties
I might still experience in designing and conducting ‘child-friendly’ research
with Rwandan children. Yet the excited and demanding appropriation of me as
an object of interest and attention, of someone to impress and possess, came to
define the process and nature of the research relationship I established with the
children and young people of this village.
When, two months into my research, I decided to include another village,
Mwiza, less than an hour’s walk from Kaganza, but more deeply submerged
in the rural hinterlands, I naively presumed that I could simply transfer my
lessons about engaging with children and employ my by then well-established
and functioning, culturally appropriate, child-friendly methodology. But then I
hit that wall so many anthropologists have had to break through. My child-led
research methods from Kaganza seemed fruitless and inappropriate in my
second location. As I walked through the steep, meandering paths that eventually
brought me into Mwiza, I gathered an equally impressive, and daunting, group
of children around me, but this time feel claustrophobically surrounded and
stressed. I feel no comfort from enthusiastic arms trying to get my attention in
order to hold my hand, or ask me questions. Instead, as young children demanded
money and sweets, I want to escape from this aggressive encounter. My research
assistant who has to accompany me on visits to Mwiza feels equally stressed,
it is obvious, but he remains placid and tranquil. He simply turns around to the
children, reminds them of how to behave appropriately with adults and with
guests; he compels them to be polite, respectful and to keep a bit of distance. To
no avail – when finally we arrive in Mwiza centre, we are exhausted from the
climb in the burning sun with the constant noise of shouting children following
us for over half an hour. We want to recuperate with a Fanta and bread roll in a
small village tea shop, but we cannot find any, and instead we turn to the eastern
outskirts of the village, where we have been introduced to two sisters living
in a small hut that used to function as their grandparents’ kitchen. The sisters
look so alike that we cannot immediately tell who is who unless we meet them
together, a rare occasion. The eldest sister, Dusabimana, eventually becomes
one of my closest informants here. But, on this first occasion, near-glimpses
of conversations that could have been but that never develop are all that define
my experience of the village. My strongest memory is of us sitting behind her
grandmother’s house, perched on the edge of the building, in prolonged silences
interspersed with strenuous attempts at conversation. She is fourteen years of
age, so I try to talk to her about the topics favoured by the young teenagers in
Kaganza: school, radio programmes, news of pop stars, boys and plans for the
future. Each of the topics leads to short yes and no answers, and, again, silence.
 Different Childhoods, Different Ethnographies • 19

School yields the longest conversation; Dusabimana and her sister left after a
couple of years of primary school, but Dusabimana speaks of wanting to return
if she gathers enough resources to do so. When I ask why she and her sister left
school, I hear her grandfather shout an answer from the other side of the house:
they were too lazy to study. Dusabimana laughs nervously, looks down, and
another conversation falls dead.
When preparing in London for my research on childhood adversity with
Rwandan children and youth a key – practical as well as epistemological –
question was how to position myself as a researcher in a different cultural setting.
In particular, child studies and anthropology debated how to position oneself with
respect to children, who seem inherently different due to their biological age and
social–psychological immaturity. Questions of empathy, of cultural and moral
relativism and of understanding the existential scruples and dilemmas of people
inherently different from ourselves as researchers were not foreign to me when
I first settled in to life in Northern Rwanda. Yet, when I now look back on my
experiences, I see that my research encounter was never shaped as much by the
intercultural differences between me and my Rwandan participants as by intra-
cultural divergences, contradictions and oppositions that research entailed in two
geographically close and apparently similar communities.

Children of History

For a long time I was troubled and perplexed, at times even anxious, as to how
two such geographically close communities could vary so extensively in terms
of engaging with and relating to people of roughly the same age and commonly
denoted by the same generational categories of ‘children’ or ‘youth’. My ‘child-
friendly’ methods had been, to a large extent, designed by Rwandan children
themselves. However, these were completely inappropriate in Mwiza. This made
me wonder not only what made these children (and youth) different, and what
the nature of this difference might be, but also why such differences impacted so
directly on the relationship I was able to establish with the children. It took a long
time to understand how my methods could simultaneously be child-led (in one
context) and child-unfriendly (in another). Looking back on my fieldwork, I realize
that my initial experience of establishing productive, friendly and trustful relation-
ships with people in one place but not another was one of my most important
insights into the experience – and politics – of adverse childhoods in Rwanda.
Kaganza is a predominantly Tutsi community built by the government and
co-operating NGOs for those considered particularly vulnerable: repatriated Tutsi
refugees and displaced genocide survivors. Since its construction, the village has
been provided with a new health centre, a massive warehouse, a legal aid centre
for women and children as well as a picturesque guest house overlooking the
20 • Children

volcanoes. The village has taken on many of the governmental policies implicit in
its construction, and has ambitiously worked towards central government goals,
including reconciliation, economic development, cultural revival and efforts to
improve children’s lives and status. From everyday life in the village, it was
evident that families, neighbours, and community members in general concerned
themselves with the lives of children, especially orphans. The post-genocide
Rwandan government sees it as important that children’s rights are protected and
their status raised if the country is to achieve its goal of development and national
unity. Through a variety of campaigns, the government has tried to encourage the
population to help carry the responsibility of supporting vulnerable children. On
big billboard posters and at community meetings held by local authorities, adults
are asked to foster children without parents. Sugar daddies (and mamas) are
condemned for exploiting children and young people, adults are warned against
passing HIV on to children and parents are strongly reminded to do what they
can to prevent their children from getting malaria and other preventable diseases.
These campaigns were evident in intergenerational relationships in Kaganza:
most children and youth were in school and felt encouraged to take school
seriously, and they were included in village developments through an active local
youth club established for unemployed youth. Here, they discussed topics such as
genocide prevention and bad behaviour through performance and debates.
Mwiza, on the other hand, is primarily inhabited by Hutu who have always
lived in the area. The village has an inherently different history and relationship
to the government. Historically a Hutu-dominated region, the North was the
home of the members of government who organized the genocide, and it was
in this area that an insurgency war instigated by these ex-government members
cost thousands of civilian lives. Civilians were also blamed for assisting the
guerrilla rebels. In the current political landscape, Northern Hutu have gained
an essentialized status as perpetrators of the suffering that inherently defines the
modern Rwandan state. Perceived as perpetrators, not victims, Hutu-dominated
villages like Mwiza received much less support from government bodies and
NGOs. Many of my informants in Mwiza felt their village to be in decline
and the demographically dominant older generation were strongly opposed
to many government policies, including some of those focused on children.
Grandparents, aunts, uncles and older neighbours often spoke of children as too
free and independent, as neglectful of their duties and expectations of respect
towards adults. Communally, there were no initiatives such as the youth club in
Kaganza. The churches had youth choirs but for those youth who did not like
singing or were not religious there was no alternative. Contrary to children’s
status in Kaganza as the imagined future of Rwanda, many children in Mwiza,
especially older children in difficult situations, were by many older community
members framed in terms of delinquency. To many, these children symbolized
their community’s decline.
 Different Childhoods, Different Ethnographies • 21

Ethnography and the Nature of Childhood

A couple of weeks after my first encounter with Kaganza’s children I moved to

the village and the group of children gathering around me grew bigger each day
until suddenly it was quite overwhelming. I was faced with the question of what
to do with fifty or more children hovering around me, waiting for me to suggest
something we could do together. This was obviously a good start; I would not
have any problems finding children willing to participate in my research. But
how to initiate any kind of meaningful relationship with anyone, surrounded
by so many children every day? And how was I going to get a sense of their
everyday life without my presence so obviously determining our interaction? I
soon realized that it was the children’s end-of-academic-year school holidays;
they were bored and looking for entertainment. I tried to fit in with this desire,
hoping that once the school started again children would return to their normal
routine and I could enter a different phase of my research where my presence
had less influence. In the meantime, I decided to use the longest school holiday
designing a ‘child-friendly’ and ‘child-led’ research methodology. I wanted to
explore with children how they wanted to engage with me, what they wanted
to do, what topics were of interest to them and what kind of relationship they
wanted with me. Providing a ‘child-friendly’ place with lots of space, freedom
from all-too-curious and demanding adults, lots of creative aids and entertaining
toys familiar to the children (balls, dolls, and skipping ropes), I decided to let the
children guide me as to how we should work together.
The children’s enthusiasm the first day I met them continued throughout the
holidays. During this time my ‘child-friendly’ research to some extent designed
itself, or, rather, the children largely designed it for me: they wanted to perform
theatre plays for me, they held song contests, showed me children’s games
and taught me the rules, they asked me for toys, wanted a leather football, a
skipping rope, dolls, colouring pens and paper. Yet I became concerned that what
I learned from these activities was not ‘real’ but was the result of a fabricated
situation. For a while it seemed that my presence in the village had turned into
a convenient after-school club. Nonetheless, I felt that the children and young
people’s questions, their suggestions for activities we did together, the dynamics
of who tried to take charge of the group, of who disciplined each other, and who
fought or stuck together provided me with important insights into what children
defined as a ‘good childhood’ in this place. This included ideas of friendship,
morality, kinship (siblings) and appropriate ways for children to spend their
time. When the schools started back in January, it was with some relief that I
realized that what we had achieved through our temporary and accidental club
was a relatively child-led design process of a ‘child-friendly’ methodology. The
children were quick to place me in particular roles: someone with whom to
have fun and to ‘exchange ideas’, to walk with to school, to learn about the big
22 • Children

exciting world beyond the confines of the village, to help in disputes with friends,
and to establish as a prestigious family friend. Many of the children invited me
to visit their families and I was shown around the village, introduced to people,
and welcomed into homes for tea, meals, or simply for a chat. Before long, I had
become submerged in village life. It was also not particularly difficult to find that
ambiguous position in-between child and adult that has felt troublesome to a vast
range of child-focused scholars. Few of the positions assigned to me by children
(except, at times, the prestigious friend) were particularly problematic to my
objectives as a researcher. This was different with the ‘adults’: the older married,
divorced, or widowed Rwandans, the parents and grandparents, all tried to use
me in village politics, to access new positions of power, or accumulate resources.
Yet I struggled to get any kind of private time with just a couple of children,
for example siblings or small groups of friends. Nowhere in the village could
I be alone or without a big group of children following me around. Today, I
realize that this ‘dilemma’ in itself illuminated important aspects of childhood
in Kaganza: childhood was constituted as a group activity and experience, at
least in its ideal form. It was in a large group that children became comfortable,
felt happy and ‘normal’. The greatest fear of many Rwandans is the sense of
loneliness and of being so overwhelmed with worries and problems that one
cannot face social occasions and interactions. For children especially, group
activities and time are thus a sign of a good, trouble-free childhood. Through
my many and diverse encounters with children I learned that they were happiest
when they were out playing with friends, had access to toys that they could share
with others and pursued activities associated with ‘development’: making friends
with resourceful adults and participating in school-like activities like drawing. I
began to see our group activities as a shared journey to learn about good child-
hoods, a necessary prerequisite to understanding the nature, consequences and
experiences of childhood adversity. This was the first of many steps towards
a deeper understanding of what it meant to have difficult childhoods in post-
genocide Rwanda.
Due to the popularity of the majority of methods I had developed with children
in Kaganza, I also wanted to use these with the Mwiza children. Yet whenever I
used some of the much-loved ‘assignments’, Mwiza children and youth would
simply suggest that they could do them after I left and have them ready for me
upon my next visit. Few were ever returned to me; excuses were made that they
had been stolen, were left at a family member’s house that was currently locked
or that there were no pens with which to do the work. I sensed a deep discomfort
in and avoidance of the exercises and stopped pursuing this method. With a
sarcastic, uneasy, or embarrassed laugh, the Mwiza children and youth turned
down drawing and drawing-based methods without even pretending to want to
do them. Theatrical performance never seemed an option. Conversations, like
those with Dusabimana, were difficult to move beyond the weather or the price of
 Different Childhoods, Different Ethnographies • 23

potatoes. For a long time I wondered why. Having failed with my ‘child-friendly’
methods, I decided to return to the basics of participant observation, of simply
trying to be with the youth. Even this was difficult: I was not allowed to live in
the village and could only visit in daylight. I relied on NGOs to be introduced to
people, which made it difficult for more ‘natural’ relationships to develop, as they
had in Kaganza. My encounters with people felt artificial and forced, so I returned
to the basics of establishing a field site. I started to visit Mwiza more often and
spent much more time simply being visible in the streets, going for walks with the
few contacts I had established. I visited a couple of times a week and stayed for
as long as the light would allow. For the time being, I accepted the only position
I could seem to acquire, that of the prestigious umuzungu friend (Westerner)
with whom people were proud to be seen but uncomfortable to speak intimately.
Slowly, participant observation became easier. I was invited to weddings and
dowry-giving ceremonies, to join families for mass and to share a drink at the
bar. I observed families as they cooked, shared meals with them, listened to
gossip and observed family arguments and local meetings. Nonetheless, while I
could participate in rituals, structured performances and tasks of everyday life,
and while the youth and (some of) their families were happy for me to participate
in this way in their lives, conversations remained difficult, broken and slow in a
way that I never experienced in Kaganza. If family members were nearby when
I spoke to their children, they came to join the conversation and often took over.
Children and youth deferred to them. If no family members were nearby, children
and youth seemed uncomfortable at the same time that they seemed proud.
It had been a slow realization that children in Kaganza preferred to participate
in my research as a group rather than in individual encounters because it was
as a group that children felt happy, comfortable and confident. It was therefore
an equally slow realization that my difficulties in relating to children and youth
in Mwiza were an expression of these young Rwandans’ particular childhoods
and life experiences. Two methodological decisions unexpectedly opened up a
new kind of relationship. In an attempt to broaden the span of conversations, I
decided to try to get familiar with people through two general topics (bordering
on ‘moral panics’) that were of concern to many people in Kaganza: religious
conversion and a general sense of crisis in ‘the Rwandan family’. I had come
to understand that these two domains expressed many Rwandans’ existential
insecurities brought on by post-conflict tensions in sociality. Focusing on these
topics was a turning point since they were but different expressions of the same
suffering: an ostracism of orphans so intense that children without parents felt
that they were left without family at all (despite often having large networks of
biological kin). Coincidentally, various ‘crises’ in Mwiza families suddenly made
several members of those families open up to me.
One afternoon I came to visit Isabelle and her younger sister Umutesi. The two
sisters, their grandfather, and their aunt were all visibly upset. That day the girls’
24 • Children

house had been broken into while they were out labouring in the field. When
they came home everything was gone: cooking pots and utensils, benches and
the few other small items they owned. They had nothing left but a few items of
clothing. With no furniture (many poor Rwandan households only have a couple
of benches), we congregated in the courtyard, the little patch of hardened mud
that lies between the sisters’ house and their grandfather’s little hut. The aunt
brought over a bench and the grandfather pulled out the two small chairs he
owned. For a while we simply sat looking, every attempt at conversation quietly
fading as the girls were too upset and the grandfather too saddened to speak.
Yet suddenly the grandfather perked up, his sadness turned to anger and regret
that Rwandans could no longer be trusted. The girls remained quiet and visibly
uncomfortable. I felt my visit made things worse, so instead I suggested we go
for a walk so that, at least, if they did not want to spend time with me they could
return home and I could continue to other visits in the village. Not long after
saying goodbye to the grandfather, Isabelle, the eldest sister, perked up just like
her grandfather had minutes earlier and the words streamed out like I had never
heard before. She had not wanted to speak, she said, because she knew exactly
who had stolen all their stuff – her father’s family who all lived nearby – and
did not want to say so in front of the grandfather as he refused to believe her.
We walked for over half an hour and the anger towards her family flowed for
every minute of the walk; the family’s unwillingness to help them with food
and materials, their obvious attempts to harass them, their repeated attempts to
exclude the girls, the sense of being left entirely to their own devices with no
familial support, their sense of abandonment when their father was killed in the
war and their mother left to remarry, when their older brother married a girl who
stigmatized them and their continued feeling of exclusion as they failed to secure
paid temporary employment. Isabelle’s tone, the stream of words and outpouring
of emotions was remarkably controlled and contained. There was energy in her
voice, but there were no tears, no sense of emotional disquiet or unbalance.
Isabelle was talking and she was letting me into her world. Each time I saw her
since that day we uncovered more aspects of each of the glimpsed memories;
she returned to her mother’s leaving, her father’s murder, the ambiguity of her
grandfather’s place in their life as a protector and carer but also as the patron of
those maltreating them. When one day I passed her house and she wasn’t home,
she saw me in the street and excitedly ran up to me, beaming with hope when
telling me that she and her sister had been lent a small field by a neighbour so
they could grow more food for only a small token rent.
The intense feeling on my part of near-glimpses of conversations that died
before I caught them was gone; I had become a friend who was worth involving
in news and events of any nature. Through this and similar crises I learned that
children’s and youths’ difficulties in relating to me, or me to them, were grounded
in tense and problematic family relationships that had been difficult for them to
 Different Childhoods, Different Ethnographies • 25

approach. Because their families were always nearby or felt nearby, because I had
wanted to ‘protect’ them in an attempt to be as ‘child-friendly’ as possible and had
therefore not approached difficult emotional issues to do with their families, I had
not found a way of relating to the children and youth that they desired. Yet, like
Isabelle’s theft, other crises showed children and youth were willing to discuss
these tensions openly. I tried to extend the sudden intimacy of our relationships
by introducing the method of drawing up kinship diagrams. Interestingly, this
method did not work very well in Kaganza. Many adult family members became
suspicious and uncomfortable when I enquired about their family history, even
though they often volunteered such information when I didn’t ask. Most children
and youth felt they were too young for such a task, and it made them feel uncon-
fident. Thus, it was to my surprise that this method worked so well with most
of the children, youth, and their families in Mwiza. Not only were they able to
describe complicated family relations and knew the situations of distant relatives,
but during the production of the kinship diagrams children would describe their
personal relationships to many of their family members and give important
insights into their experiences as orphans or as children in difficult situations. The
exercise also opened up a space for conversations about people’s experiences of
flight and war in ways that were controlled by the person him or herself.
Charting people’s family relationships so systematically also meant that many
youth and adults started to think more about their family histories in the months
that followed. Joel, an always smiling young man, did not just open up during
this exercise – he took visible pleasure from it, so much so that a couple of weeks
later he was extremely excited to see me. He had gone to visit an aunt he had not
seen in a long time; I had asked a question that he had not been able to answer
and he had sought out his aunt to get more information. He had also then decided
that the time was ripe to, once again, try to mend the broken relationship with
his brothers. For years the brothers had tried to take his little inheritance off him
since an unrelated woman had given him a piece of land. But he had decided that
his family should be more important than this, and started to offer his help in one
brother’s newly opened cabaret. Joel’s friendly and outgoing manner made this
brother’s business a success and I was amazed to see their relationship slowly
develop in tandem with my own relationship to Joel, which grew increasingly
trustful as my research progressed. I felt that my relationship to those – such as
Joel – I had drawn kinship diagrams with had become closer: we had a shared
experience and task to which we could now relate subsequent conversations.
However, these turning points did not solve all my problems of trust and
conversation in Mwiza. Political tension, the immediacy of financial struggles
and other profound everyday challenges meant that some days were good and
some bad. With one young girl’s foster mother, kinship diagrams caused the same
suspicion and discomfort as in Kaganza. After nearly a year of visiting her foster
daughter weekly, bringing her cabbage or sitting through six to eight hours of
26 • Children

mass in burning sun, she still remained as quiet and hostile as she had been for
the first many months. Nevertheless, I felt I had found a way of approaching and
relating to Mwiza children and youth. On paper, the method seemed unfriendly
and inappropriate: to openly discuss with children and young people difficult
situations of family conflict, ostracism, accusations of theft and poisoning, as
well as painful memories of war, exile and a current official silencing of such
memories. This approach worked with adults in Kaganza who wanted to discuss
with me their difficult experiences as a result of genocide or current political
tension, but even at the end of my research such direct conversations were
inappropriate and fruitless with children and most young people. But this was
the method that children and youth in Mwiza led me to adopt and which opened
up the space for passionate discussions and intimate, trustful relationships. What
these invitations to participate more intimately in the children and young people’s
lives showed was remarkable: they were not only reluctant to participate in
‘child-friendly’ methods, but were directly asking to be researched or understood
as fully participating (but denied) persons in relationships and situations that are
commonly defined as ‘adult’ in Rwandan culture and sociality. More particularly,
I realized that children and young people, and their families, were asking me
to participate in their lives in a very particular way: by bearing witness to and
sharing their pain of conflict and tension within their family. In contrast, children
and young people in Kaganza had actively distanced themselves from notions of
suffering, with which they could not identify, and from notions of adulthood, a
generational category for which they felt too small and inexperienced.
Of course, while children in Kaganza showed me how to conduct research
with them, in part by showing me what they thought of as a good childhood,
many children also went through difficult experiences and had difficult lives.
Sometimes our ‘child-friendly’ engagements presented such children with diffi-
culties. A ten-year-old girl, Husina, with whom I had become very close, lost both
her parents to Aids and most of her extended family during the genocide. At the
beginning of my research she had not explicitly been told about her orphanhood.
Yet as my research progressed and Husina matured, she slowly began to realize
the nature of her family situation. She encountered awkward moments when
peers denoted her as an orphan but where her aunt continued to deny this. When
one day we were sitting on my lawn trying to plan a theatre play about experi-
ences of orphanhood, the eldest girl present suggested doing two plays, one in
which non-orphans depicted their lives and one in which orphans depicted theirs,
pointing to Husina as an example of who could lead the orphan play. Husina was
hurt by this suggestion, although it is more than likely that the eldest girl chose
her because of her well-known skills in acting and directing a play. Husina was
visibly upset for the rest of the afternoon and was nowhere to be seen later when
I looked for her to apologize for what had happened. The next day she came to
visit me again as if nothing had ever happened, but I remained worried, feelings
 Different Childhoods, Different Ethnographies • 27

of guilt constantly welling up when I saw her. Then, a while later, when she went
through my folder with all the different ‘assignments’ to pick one she wanted to
complete, she suddenly exclaimed that she was sick of focusing on ‘sadness’ and
only wanted to do something fun. I showed her assignments on ‘good dreams’ and
‘good memories’ and she happily set about completing the exercise. From then
on, whenever she was present, out of respect for her desire to focus on only good
things, I restricted our topics to things that children generally considered good.

Different Methods, Different Children?

Although I thought I was conducting research with children and youth of roughly
the same ages in these two communities, I was in reality conducting research
with inherently different generational and social categories that required funda-
mentally different ways of relating. In Mwiza, a large proportion of the children
and youth I knew were in their early and mid-teens and now lived without adult
carers, a situation not observed in Kaganza. Due to extensive loss of kin in the
insurgency war, Mwiza and neighbouring communities have one of the world’s
highest concentrations of child-headed households. Such households have not
traditionally been recognized in Rwandan culture. Children in these households
did not feel included in community and kin networks and showed remarkable
economic and behavioural independence from their families and commu-
nities. Both forms of independence are important factors in transitioning from
childhood to adulthood: these children and youth were socially defined as adults,
yet they occupied a rather liminal position. Even ‘normal’ youth – due to their
status as unmarried and as young in biological age – are perceived by community
members as ‘not quite’ adult and still in need of supervision. But, unlike ‘normal’
youth, these orphans did not receive such supervision due to their lack of family
and communal networks. Instead, they were framed as unruly and disruptive. The
majority of children and youth I knew in Mwiza were, as a consequence of this
status, not used to expressing themselves to adults, whether through conversation
or creative means. They were also not comfortable with school-based activities
because many had had to drop out of school when they were still quite young.
In addition, their experiences of suffering were politically sensitive in a way
that they were not in Kaganza. No doubt that my lack of a child-friendly living
space in Mwiza, where children could help to integrate me into their lives and
communities, also significantly hindered my attempts to become a trusted friend.
Like the children’s and youths’ different status, this ethnographic obstacle was
politically shaped – from a government perspective, I was not to know Mwiza
too well. With these realizations it was no longer difficult to understand why
trustful research relationships were so much more difficult to establish in Mwiza
than in Kaganza, where children and youth were used to being actively included
28 • Children

in village developments and had experience of expressing themselves, and where

the change in ideals of normal and good childhoods seemed a significant contri-
bution to the ease of my field research.

A Question of Categorical Relating

One aspect of Rwandan sociality that constantly captured my curiosity was

the importance for many people of placing themselves and others in particular
categories or at specific ‘levels’. Twenty-year-old Sabo from Kigali spoke of
the pain of always being considered as belonging to the group of poor people
who looked different from others, a concern shared by most of the youth in
Mwiza. These youth also worried about how they would progress from their
‘level’ to that of others around them. This tendency to place oneself and others
in categories influenced many social interactions and relationships. Not until a
person’s ‘category’ had been established could a trustful relationship emerge, and
without it social interactions remained awkward. It was only as I slowly began
to learn of the adversity experienced by many children and youth in Mwiza
that I realized the connection between a social emphasis on ‘categories’ and my
own difficulties in relating to Mwiza’s children and youth. My failed methods
reflected what locals perceived as failed childhoods: these children no longer
lived children’s lives or felt like children, but could not be attributed any other
available social category, except, perhaps, for that of delinquent, someone who
is outside the norms of sociality and social networks and, thus, someone who
cannot and should not be related to. I had initially failed to relate to children and
youth in Mwiza because I had placed them in the wrong category of people. My
child-led research methodology did not work with children and young people
there because I was not working with ‘children’ as such, even though I was
working with people of roughly the same age as in Kaganza.
In Mwiza appropriate methods were adult in nature. Yet I had not been able
to start my research with children and young people here in the same way that I
had with adults in Kaganza, since the children and young people in Mwiza were
also not obviously ‘adults’ or even ‘young people’. Retrospectively, I now realize
that in order to learn about good and bad childhoods I had to learn what a child
was, as a generational status and social category, something I could only learn
by a trial-and-error engagement with young Rwandans of different ages. It was
through this process of trial and error that I realized that the methods appropriate
for use with children in the two communities were intricately related to children’s
status within their community, which in turn depended on broader socio-political
responses to suffering and adversity. Once I realized these historical and political
conditions, I began to understand why trustful relationships and thus participant
observation were much more difficult to establish in Mwiza.
 Different Childhoods, Different Ethnographies • 29

Through these encounters I began to understand the importance of my role

in supporting children in establishing their self-identities and I decided not to
push topics (such as ‘bad things’) that children did not want to explore. Instead,
I sought to understand the reasons behind their decisions, whether conscious or
not. When Husina refused to focus on ‘sad things’, she asked for my support in
establishing herself as a happy child, with a good childhood, and thus not as an
orphan. The methods we created together made us relate in particular ways that
in turn highlighted particular aspects of childhood: its good and its bad sides, its
joys and fears. At other times, this made me doubt whether research on childhood
adversity can ever be completely ‘child-friendly’. Indeed, my experiences in
Mwiza made me understand that appropriate methods are not always ‘child-
friendly’ primarily because of my own and (some) local people’s assumption that
childhood should be a time free from worry. In hindsight, I now see that I felt
that methods became child-unfriendly when children became upset in ways or
at times that I had not expected or controlled for, when the course of everyday
life and dynamics of group interaction took us in unexpected and uncontrollable
directions. But were these instances of ‘unfriendly’ methods, or were they simply
a reflection of the reality of life for children? The problems we encountered
together, as group dynamics took well-proven methods in unexpected and uncon-
trollable directions, were uncomfortable. Yet they helped us to explore together
the ups and downs of childhood, the situations that can cause pain and those that
can reverse the pain, the relationships that see children through and those that
help to create children’s personalities, through good or bad experiences.
 2

‘Difficult’ Children: Ethnographic Chaos and

Creativity in Migrant Malaysia

Catherine Allerton

Our most memorable ethnographic encounters in the field are often those with
‘difficult’ characters: the sleazy small-town bureaucrat; the overly pious villager
who castigates those around him for the heathenness of their ways; the domineering
mother-in-law who treats her sons’ wives like servants. But we hear little of
encounters with ‘difficult’ children. What is the ethnographer to make of children
who refuse to be amenable to the needs of others; children who, for example,
deliberately disrupt events around them, who call others names, who steal, and
who enjoy provoking arguments? Should we celebrate their agency, even whilst
our encounters with them may be uncomfortable? Or should we try to ‘explain’
their behaviour, perhaps with reference to marginalization or structural violence?
In August 2012 I embarked on a year of ethnographic fieldwork with the
children of migrants and refugees in Sabah, East Malaysia. Previous, extended
periods of fieldwork in rural eastern Indonesia had given me a sense of the ways
in which migration to Malaysia was changing lives. And teaching a course on
children and youth in contemporary ethnography had made me passionate about
the necessity of uncovering children’s perspectives on their past, present, and
future. As I researched the possibility of fieldwork in Sabah, I read about the
politically fraught nature of migration in a state in which a large percentage of
the population were considered ‘foreigners’. I wanted to explore the experiences
of children born in Malaysia who, because of their parents’ status as foreign
workers, were excluded from education, healthcare, and access to other services.
I wanted to know about children’s own perspectives on being undocumented or
potentially stateless, and to uncover the hidden costs for families of Malaysia’s
strict migration regime.
In preparing for fieldwork, I tried to read as much as possible on methods for
working with children, mindful both of my desire to understand children’s point of

31
32 • Children

view and the urban context in which I would be working. My previous fieldwork
had been classic village ethnography, in which I was fully immersed in the daily
routines of those I lived with, and made little attempt to structure my research
activities. That early, rural fieldwork was utterly, and exhaustingly, immersive:
I had witnessed births, cried over corpses, walked over mountains to marriage
rituals and cuddled babies while their mothers chopped vegetables. By contrast,
I envisioned that in Sabah I would be complementing urban ethnography with a
range of different, participatory methods, from ‘spider diagrams’, free drawing,
and time-use charts to group discussions and photography projects. I read up on
the ethics of child-focused research and on ways to diminish one’s ‘adult’ status
during fieldwork with children. By the time I had moved to Malaysia with my
family, I was beginning to feel anxious about how difficult this ethnography
was actually going to be, and whether I had the necessary skills (which seemed
somewhat mythical to me at the time) to access children’s viewpoints.

Intimacy, Fun, and Affection

Of course, in all this anxious methodological preparation, what I had forgotten

was that ethnography is always a personal encounter with our research subjects
and that as fieldwork unfolds we are drawn – for various reasons – towards
specific individuals. Though my research in Sabah was radically different
from my previous fieldwork experiences, I found that the personal relation-
ships I developed with individual children and youth reminded me of previous
relationships with adults in Indonesia. Despite my fretting that children must be
particularly ‘difficult’ ethnographic subjects, and despite the urban, relatively
structured circumstances under which I conducted fieldwork, I actually found
many children and youth quite straightforward to get to know. Most of them were
interested in talking to me, and most were open about their lives, often revealing
quite early in our conversations if they had no legal documents. Indeed, once I
started giving out my mobile phone number to children, I found that this urban
fieldwork was starting to resemble the all-consuming qualities of my earlier,
rural fieldwork, as children would ring me up frequently throughout the day
and evening; often for no discernible reason other than to say hello and enjoy
momentarily connecting.
Early on in my fieldwork I met a group of teenagers at a school for Indonesian
children. One of them, Ardi, had particularly good English and was keen to
practice. He told me he had taught himself English by watching films during
three years spent at home, at a time when he had no documents and no access
to education. We conversed and texted in a mix of Malay and English, and Ardi,
though he was attending an Indonesian school, confessed to me that, notwith-
standing his nationality, he in fact felt Malaysian. He was often troubled by his
 ‘Difficult’ Children • 33

family’s future, knowing that it was hard to stay in Sabah, but that there were
huge land disputes brewing in his father’s natal village in Indonesia. Once,
appearing very down, he said, ‘Sometimes I just want to run away from it all’.
At other times he asked me my opinion of his school, of Islam, of Indonesia,
and of how he could get into a British university. He even asked me where the
place in the world was that childhood was perfect, and without problems. When
I answered, as honestly as I could, that I did not think there was any such place,
he seemed disappointed.
As I got to know Ardi through these philosophical chats in different places, his
status as a teenager faded into the background, and he became a key informant,
someone who strongly shaped my fieldwork. Other, younger children also
surprised me with their readiness to philosophize on their situation, or to reveal
difficult circumstances. Ruminah was a twelve-year-old girl at a learning centre
for the children of Filipino migrants and refugees. When I arrived at the centre,
she often greeted me enthusiastically: ‘Teacher! Come and sit here!’ She was
physically affectionate and, although her sporadic and infrequent education
meant she had relatively poor literacy and numeracy skills, in other respects she
demonstrated great maturity. During one class, when I was asking children about
money and household finances, Ruminah told me her mother and father were
divorced. ‘I live with my mum now’, she said. ‘My dad lives far away’. I asked
her what her dad’s work was. She grabbed hold of my arm and whispered into
my ear, ‘Stones’.
‘Stones?’ I repeated quietly. ‘What is that?’
She lent in again and whispered even more quietly: ‘Drugs’.
Then it was time for the children to go home, and Ruminah went off to work
at a restaurant near the bus terminal.
Although I spent time with some children in their homes, where I met parents
and observed interactions with siblings and others, most of my encounters
with children were at various learning centres where they accessed informal
education. These centres were dotted around the city and getting to them neces-
sitated driving through huge amounts of traffic. Since most of these centres were
short-staffed, they were all happy for me to visit them, and in some of them I
acted as a volunteer teacher. Initially, this worried me a great deal, as I was sure
that teaching would inhibit the quality of my interactions with children. However,
the reality usually proved rather different. One day, arriving at an Indonesian
learning centre, the teachers asked me if I would teach English to classes 5 and 6.
I squeezed into a small air-conditioned room with the fifteen or so older children.
I had nothing prepared, but decided it would be fun to talk about food: both their
regional cuisine and ways to order food in English. ‘OK’, I said, ‘we are going
to make a café. What shall it be called?’ The children laughed, and immediately
started shouting out funny names. Eventually we decided on a name, and then
had fun allocating roles: who would be the café owner, the chef and servers? And
34 • Children

who would clean the toilets? The latter provoked much hilarity, especially when
we chose a very confident older boy for the role.
Once the café was named and staffed, we had to decide on a menu. As the
children were all of different ethnic (though Indonesian) backgrounds, I asked
them to suggest specific regional dishes. Again, this provoked much excited
discussion, as well as a certain amount of nervous looking over their shoulders
into the main room, where their rather strict teacher was working. Why the
nervousness? Perhaps in a context where it was shared Indonesian background
that was stressed, the children were not supposed to draw attention to difference?
We came up with a menu of their favourite dishes and then started role-playing
customer and server in English. This, and similar lessons that I taught, were great
fun for me and helped the children to use English in a practical context. However,
they also proved to be genuinely useful encounters for understanding children’s
experiences, whether their knowledge of other ethnicities or their kinship
networks in Sabah. My initial worry that being a teacher would inhibit my
research was therefore rather short-sighted, since I had failed to appreciate the
extent to which my role as a very particular kind of (fun, alternative, ‘foreign’)
teacher would stimulate creative engagements with children. Of course, this was
only possible because these children were mostly receiving ‘basic’ education
from volunteer teachers in under-resourced settings, and were mostly not subject
to exam or grade pressures.

The ‘Crossroads’ Children

However, there was one group of children I encountered during fieldwork who
prevented me from assuming either that getting to know my child informants
was easy, or that being a particular kind of teacher offered a creative route to
understanding children’s experiences. I shall call these children the ‘Crossroads’
children, since they lived near to the intersection of two of the city’s busiest
roads. They, like other children I knew, were the descendants of Suluk and
Bajau migrants and refugees, originally from the Muslim southern Philippines.
A couple of them were born in the Philippines and came to Malaysia as young
children, but most were born in Sabah. At the time I knew them, none of them
had any valid identity documents. They lived either in cramped, subdivided,
rented flats in a couple of dilapidated buildings, or in small wooden homes in the
‘Crossroads’ squatter village next door. I first encountered them through visiting
the ‘Mercy Centre’, a learning centre co-ordinated by one of Sabah’s many
independent churches.
By contrast with many of the other children I worked with during my fieldwork
in Sabah, I found the Crossroads children extremely hard to get to know. Even
after several visits to their school, I felt as though I lacked quite basic information
 ‘Difficult’ Children • 35

about their lives. They were often suspicious, secretive, uncooperative and
sometimes aggressive. They were loud and argumentative, and frequently refused
to answer questions that I asked them. In short, they were rather ‘difficult’, both
as children and as informants.
On my first visit to the Mercy Centre, I turned off a busy three-lane road on
to a bumpy track next to a construction site. At the end of the track were two
rows of shop-lot buildings, where I parked. Various boys were in the dusty street,
playing football with an old flip-flop. A van was unloading onions into one of the
warehouses underneath the flats. Some girls were hanging around the sundries
shop owned by a Pakistani migrant. They came out of the store eating sweets
and drinking fizzy drinks, casually dropping their wrappers and cans into a street
gutter that was already full of rubbish. As I waited for the centre’s teachers to
arrive and unlock the metal grill at the bottom of the stairs, I chatted with the
younger children. The older children were neither friendly nor unfriendly. They
observed me, and I observed them. The teachers had told me I could come along
on Tuesdays as that was the day they usually did ‘art’. This was an activity that
seemed to mostly involve these Muslim children colouring in biblical or other
Christian-inspired scenes. I felt sure I could offer them something more inter-
esting. But on that first visit, the children were reluctant to engage with any of my
(deliberately very open) questions, or to complete any of the drawing tasks I had
designed for them. One girl, Emy, would not speak to me. She seemed to want to
do a drawing, but later, when the other children tried to look at her picture, flew
into a terrible rage.
The children were very unlike the chatty Indonesian children I had met so
far in my fieldwork. Their silence unnerved me; it did not seem to come from
shyness but from some other emotion. Defiance? Disinterest? Suspicion? I felt
wrong-footed and, despite all my preparations, un-prepared. As that first lesson
drew on, several children left my activities and gathered at a table to begin a
game of ‘thief–police’. Crime drama roles were written on pieces of paper and
drawn from a pile in secret. One child, as crime victim, would then ‘ring up’ the
child who was the police officer, whose job it was to guess which child from
those remaining was the ‘thief’. This police work involved much intimidating
staring at the other children. Eventually, if the guess was successful, the police
officer would ask the crime victim ‘How many slaps should this thief have?’
The victim invariably answered with the maximum, ten, and the thief would be
punished with some very sharp slaps to the hand.
Emy, who has recovered from her anger, joins in the game and is immediately
subject to severe punishment from Amal. The children play this game a few
times, then turn and ask me, in Malay, ‘Do you want to play, cikgu [teacher]?’ I
hesitate. The slapping is extremely violent; each ‘thief’ bears it stoically, but then
afterwards shows the others how red his or her hand is. I worry about what I will
do if I draw the ‘police officer’ role. I can’t possibly hit any of these children!
36 • Children

‘It’s ok, thank you’, I reply. ‘I just want to watch.’ I feel as though I have failed
my first hurdle of participation.

Chaos, Secrecy and Silence

A few weeks later, after several visits to the learning centre, I am less uncertain
and have definitely broken the ice with the Crossroads children. But I still find
them very unpredictable, and somewhat mysterious. By contrast with some other
children whose involvement in my research has been rapid and intense, it feels as
though I have a long way to go in understanding anything about the Crossroads
children’s lives. On one of these later visits, the children are happily drawing
their own pictures on large sheets of paper: pictures of bridal couples, houses,
superheroes and monsters. I am chatting to Roy, a thirteen-year-old, about the
town where he used to live and his recent arrival in this neighbourhood. Then I
notice that another boy, Kasim, has drawn a dinosaur and written next to it ‘Amal
the Transvestite Dinosaur’. Amal is the most popular boy in the class, whereas
Kasim is more isolated from the dominant group. I am not sure what to do. I
have been encouraging the children to draw whatever they like, but I’m pretty
sure Amal won’t like to see himself portrayed in this way. Salma, a nervous
eleven-year-old girl, is sitting nearby. She sees the description and whispers to
Kasim ‘Don’t show Amal’. But it is too late. Emy, who is often at the centre of
arguments, triumphantly picks up the drawing and hands it to Amal.
Amal is immediately furious. He takes the paper and writes on it, in capitals,
‘PIG ANIMAL KASIM THE TRANSVESTITE OF THE DEVIL’. He then
scrunches the paper up into a ball and throws it very hard at Kasim. The other
children are looking serious. Kasim starts to make strange, strangled noises. I am
not sure whether he is crying or in a rage. Amal’s sister, Siti, becomes extremely
angry on Amal’s behalf, and soon the drawing is forgotten and all of the children
are shouting. Emy hangs back, an odd smile on her lips. Five minutes later, the
teachers at the learning centre have stopped the argument, the class is over and
the children are, with some residual muttering, dispersing to their homes. I am
amazed by the speed at which the argument blew up and blew over. I find the
crumpled-up drawing of the transvestite dinosaur on the floor and pick it up.
The teachers tell me that this is what Kasim is like: he tries to make trouble
with the other children. And if it isn’t Kasim making arguments, they add, it is
usually Amal.
In these early stages, Emy, Amal and Kasim all intrigue and frustrate me
in equal measure. Emy was twelve and had moved away from the Crossroads
squatter village, though she still attended the Mercy Centre. This made her
something of an outsider in the group, and she would become angry at the
slightest hint of teasing or criticism from the other children. The teachers told me
 ‘Difficult’ Children • 37

that she had once attended a Malaysian government school, but had been forced
to leave when it was discovered that she lacked a birth certificate. Though Emy
never talked directly with me about this, I knew from other children that being
rejected from school in this way could be a very upsetting experience, particu-
larly because of the cruel ways in which Malaysian classmates might respond
to the revelation that a child was ‘foreign’ and potentially ‘illegal’. Emy would
often remain completely silent when I asked her questions, refusing to co-operate
even minimally in a conversation. However, I gradually realized that she was
happy to write her thoughts on paper. She wrote that the worst experience of her
life was ‘when I am hit by my parents’ and imagined the best experience of her
life as being in the future, ‘when I get a job when I am older, when I achieve my
ambition of being a vet’. She confused and worried me in equal measure. After a
class during which she had appeared furious and had ignored anything I said, she
handed me a piece of paper saying, ‘I love you teacher’.
Amal was a clever and attractive thirteen-year-old who attended the learning
centre with his two younger siblings, Mudin and Siti. Though I spent a great
deal of time with these siblings, and learnt much about what music or cartoons
or clothes they liked and disliked, I was never able to establish even quite basic
facts about their family, such as how many other siblings they had, or where
their parents were from. Over time, they gave conflicting answers, or even just
shrugged their shoulders when I asked them simple questions. When I talked with
Siti about her eldest sibling, a sister, she said she had forgotten her name. I sensed
that either there was a complicated story about their family life or they were
choosing not to share information with me. Once, when I was talking to another
child, Salma, about whether she knew anyone who had been held at a detention
centre, she pointed, hesitantly, to Amal. He responded by giving her a very scary
look, and she stopped saying what she had been about to reveal. Though Amal
became increasingly friendlier to me throughout my fieldwork, he liked to be
dominant in the classroom, and could intimidate some of the other children.
Unlike Amal, but similar to Emy, Kasim was something of an outsider in
the group. He seemed to resent Amal’s dominant role and would often try to
provoke him with a sarcastic remark or by writing something on the classroom
whiteboard. However, he lacked Amal’s charm, particularly with the girls in the
class, who explicitly told me not to trust Kasim. He would tease or deliberately
irritate the other children but then cry when they retaliated. I found him annoying
and disruptive. Yet it was with Kasim that I finally achieved one of my first
breakthroughs with this group. On one visit to the Mercy Centre, I introduced
a new method, encouraging children to draw a ‘road of my life’, beginning
with their birth and ending with themselves in the present and with key events
drawn or written by the side of the road. My example road – of a generic child
of Filipino migrants – fascinated the children, especially when I drove a toy car
along it. However, as usual, the Crossroads children were reluctant to engage
38 • Children

seriously with the activity. Amal would not draw anything. He told me his date
of birth, but said that he had nothing else to draw: nothing had happened in his
life. Meanwhile, Kasim had taken a sheet of paper and gone to work quietly in
the corner of the classroom. He eventually returned with a road that described
various family moves, births and marriages, but that also revealed that his mother
had died when he was a young child. By this time, I had known Kasim for quite
a while, and had had a number of conversations with him about his family, yet
this information about his mother came as a surprise. Later, when he borrowed a
camera for a project I initiated called ‘Photos of my life’, he took several photo-
graphs of his tired-looking stepmother and various very young half-siblings and
just one picture of his rather grumpy father. Though outside of these structured
activities Kasim never talked to me about his mother’s death or his current family
life, these events and images seemed to hint at possible explanations for his
‘difficult’ nature.

‘Holidays are only for rich people’

My visits to the Mercy Centre were enabled and supported by the Chinese–
Malaysian volunteers from the independent Mercy church. These volunteer
teachers were extremely friendly to me, but I experienced our connection
as a slightly awkward one, since they assumed I shared their Christian and
somewhat critical perspective on the children and their lives. My internal sense
of awkwardness was guiltily connected to my own experience of the Crossroads
children as rather ‘difficult’ informants, though my perspective on the causes of
this was different from that of the teachers. The Mercy Centre teachers told me
that when they first opened the school it had over a hundred pupils (during my
fieldwork this had fallen to under thirty) and that the behaviour of the children
was ‘completely wild’. ‘They jumped on all the tables’, the teachers told me,
‘they turned on all the taps, and shouted. They had no idea how to behave’. Over
the years, they said, they had – sometimes using corporal punishment – helped to
improve the manners of their pupils. They emphasized to me that, as Christians,
they teach the children because ‘we pity them’, since the children are ‘from the
slums’. However, this pity seemed to be mixed with fear of the children’s wider
social context. When some of the children invited me to attend evening wedding
celebrations (‘There will be four transvestites, cikgu!’ they exclaimed gleefully
as I accepted), one of the teachers advised me not to attend because ‘it is very
dangerous inside the slum’.
Over time – and despite the fondness between the teachers and some of the
children – I started to appreciate that the sometimes chaotic conditions in the
Mercy Centre classrooms were not entirely unconnected to the religious, ethnic,
and class hierarchy that separated the teachers and children. In Malaysia, where
 ‘Difficult’ Children • 39

‘foreign’ and stateless children (even if they were born in the country) are unable
to attend government schools, children and grandchildren of migrants can only
access education through what are known as ‘alternative’ learning centres. Such
‘alternative education’ is often framed as a charitable gift for which children and
their families should be grateful rather than a right to which children are entitled.
The Mercy Centre was located near to the children’s homes, but it was a gated
building that the children could only access once their teachers had driven up in
their car. Of course, I also arrived from elsewhere in a car, driving in and out of
the children’s lives. I started to wonder whether, if I took them somewhere away
from their daily environment, these children might respond to me differently.
Away from the classroom, would they be so ‘difficult’? Perhaps I could take them
to a peaceful café I knew, up in the hills? In December 2012, the Mercy Centre
broke up for a month’s holiday. The teachers wished me a happy Christmas and
new year and drove off for a rest. Left in the street with ten-year-old Asma, I
asked her, ‘What will you do in the holidays?’ She looked at me and laughed.
‘Holiday? What holiday, cikgu? I will be here, bored, with no school to go to.
Holidays are only for rich people.’
Asma’s comment pierced my bubble of researcher detachment in which
the children had become important for their stories about life as poor, undocu-
mented children, and in which I experienced them as ‘difficult’ because of their
reluctance to participate in my research. Asma was right. What kind of ‘school
holiday’ would the Crossroads children have? They lived near to the centre of
a modern city and yet never seemed to go anywhere. And so it was that I found
myself saying ‘We can go somewhere, if you like, in my car’ and arranging to
meet some of the children on the next Tuesday. ‘Where do you want to go?’
I asked. ‘Wherever you like, cikgu’, replies charming Amal. ‘What about the
beach?’

Creativity and Freedom: The Beach

The next week, on the planned day of our outing, I take my two oldest children
to school and the youngest to nursery, and then travel to Crossroads squatter
village. By this time, I’ve already spent an hour in traffic jams, and am fed up
with driving. I turn into the bumpy track at the side of the village and drive to the
shop-lot buildings. As I park my car, the children emerge from the sundries shop
and from stairwells. ‘We didn’t know if you would come, cikgu!’ they exclaim,
laughing. One of the girls, Noni, isn’t there. ‘She can’t come’, says Amal. ‘Her
mother thinks you are going to steal her.’ I am alarmed. Is this really what the
children’s parents think of me? ‘Shall we go and talk to her?’ I ask. The children
think this is a good idea. I find myself being led up a dark, stale-smelling concrete
stairwell to a large door. The children knock on it loudly. No answer. They knock
40 • Children

again. Eventually, after a very long wait, eleven-year-old Noni answers the door.
We enter a large room dominated by a massive sideboard on top of which sits an
equally enormous TV. A man is lying fast asleep on the floor. Two very young
boys are sitting on a chair watching the screen. Noni says she does want to come
with us and goes to get her mother. An exhausted woman eventually shuffles
into the room. She does not look well. I feel bad for intruding, but I introduce
myself, explain that the trip will be a short one, and that I will bring Noni back
by midday. I wonder about the ethics of this persuasion and whether my desire to
get to know these children better is going to create more problems than it’s worth.
But Noni’s mother is happy for her to go, if she gets ready first. ‘Getting ready’
in Noni’s case seems to mainly involve running to the store across the road and
buying herself a big bottle of Coca-Cola and a pack of cheesy snacks.
The children pile into the car. I have put the extra seats up in the back but there
are still too many children to safely strap everyone in. They are unconcerned,
and I think of the Malaysian cars I see driving around all the time, full to the
brim with people. Again, though, I wonder, is it ethically right to take them all,
crammed in, or should I leave some of them behind? But how could I possibly
deny some of them the trip? They are all excited and ready to go, with their spare
clothes and plastic bags of drinks and snacks. That day, we head for the nearest
town beach, a fairly short drive away. The children have a fantastic, raucous
time. They play in the playground. They run into the sea in their clothes and,
on discovering there are jellyfish, use plastic bags to scoop them up and throw
them at one another. (I think of my own children’s very tentative approach to the
seawater here and our efforts to avoid jellyfish contact.) One boy, Bobby, who
has attended the Mercy Centre school for four years to no discernible effect on
his literacy or numeracy, brilliantly sculpts himself first a pair of monster feet
and then a mermaid’s tail from the sand. Amal, Asma and Siti practice choreo-
graphed dances on the beach. Two hours later, I drop them all back safely at the
Crossroads village. ‘Thank you, cikgu’, they shout, making me promise to meet
them at the same time next week. I wave and drive off to my next fieldwork
appointment, thinking about how nice it was to see them in the flow of physical
activity, but wondering what these trips will amount to.
The next Tuesday, I meet them again outside the Mercy Centre. This time,
they want to go to a beach on the outskirts of the city. They have heard it is
a much better beach, and they are right. The journey there takes much longer.
There is loads of traffic. The children are talking loudly. They tell me about the
other children in the squatter village who don’t attend school. ‘Look out for those
children, cikgu’, they say authoritatively. ‘They are bad, they are not clever.’ I
want to tell them that I already know a lot of these children, and that they are not
so different from themselves, but I bite my tongue. They say the air-conditioning
in the car makes them feel sick and put down all the windows. The car starts to
heat up uncomfortably. The noise of traffic is loud, but they shout over it. We
 ‘Difficult’ Children • 41

drive past a water village. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ they say. A man wearing a yellow
reflective vest overtakes us on a motorbike. ‘Polis! Polis! Is he a policeman?’
they scream. ‘Look! There are some police flats!’ As soon as we arrive at the
beach, they are badgering me to stay for as long as possible. ‘Can we stay the
whole day, cikgu? Pleeeease cikgu? It’s so boring for us at home.’ I try not to
feel annoyed. Something about their constant, demanding questions reminds me
of my own children, who often ask what is for lunch when they are still eating
their breakfast.
Over the next two months, I take some of the Crossroads children on five
separate trips to this beach. I am touched by the way they always bring me some
refreshments. ‘This is for you, cikgu’, they say, sliding a can of fizzy drink across
the table where they leave their belongings. They eat and drink an incredible array
of junk food. They bring cheap sunglasses and hair decorations with them. They
hurry off to the toilets and change into shorts and t-shirts, then run, shrieking,
into the sea. None of them can swim, and I hover anxiously, looking for signs of
anyone struggling in the water. They love the decorative ponds at the back of the
beach and enjoy spotting fish and turtles in them. They play on the swings and
slide. Amal, Siti and Asma perform dances on the bridge over the ponds, using
tinny music from their mobile phones. Mudin and Jimi climb the trees at the back
of the beach. Bobby continues to sculpt the sand artistically. On the fourth visit,
I bring my toddler with me. The Crossroads children find a large, dead crab on
the beach. They show it to my daughter, scaring her. Then they continue to place
it nearer and nearer to her, finally, to her horror, putting it on her leg. Even her
sisters wouldn’t do this to her. Despite myself, I find their teasing very funny; it
reminds me of how people in my first field-site in Indonesia would interact with
children, laughing as they gradually provoked them to tears or anger. Afterwards,
the Crossroads children take my daughter gently into the sea, build mounds of
sand for her, find her shells and run off to buy rambutan fruit to share with her.

Glimpses of Lives in the Moment

These beach trips were a completely unexpected aspect of my fieldwork in

Sabah. I initiated them out of a sense of frustration at the confinement of the
children’s lives, but also the confinements of research. Yet I was always a little
uncertain about the ethics of taking the children out in my car. And although,
with time, and as my fieldwork became busier, I grew a little bored of these trips,
I also loved watching the Crossroads children be carefree on the sand and in the
sea. Given the many restrictions of their childhood, this freedom was a wonderful
thing to see. Perhaps that was because playing freely on a beach was a core
experience of my own, and my own children’s, childhood. It would, of course,
be equally wonderful to report that these trips led to a Eureka-like transformation
42 • Children

of understanding, on both my and children’s part. Sadly, they did not. The
Crossroads children continued to be demanding. Throughout my fieldwork, they
remained my most ‘difficult’ informants. Emy and Kasim, neither of whom was
able to come on the trips, continued to antagonize their peers and teachers. Amal
and his siblings remained inscrutable and secretive, even whilst they chatted to
me about these outings.
However, these beach trips did provide me with important knowledge, both
specific and general, and a more complex understanding of the children. On
three of the trips, eleven-year-old Mira hung back from joining the others. ‘Why
aren’t you going in the sea?’ I asked her. ‘I can’t go in the water, I’m no good at
it’, she said. Then, a little later, she said, ‘Actually, it’s because of this’, showing
me a large growth on her neck. We talked about whether it hurt and what kind of
medicine she was taking for it. Then, watching the other children thrash about,
we chatted about her family – her mum’s job cleaning an office and her dad’s
death when she was eight. He died at work, killed (like several migrant workers
each month) by machinery. She lives with her mum, her younger sister and
her grandmother. Only her mum has identity documents. Mira shows me some
videos on her phone of her younger sister dancing to a popular song. We discuss
the kind of dancing performed at weddings. ‘Can your mum do the dance?’ I ask.
‘Yes’, says Mira. ‘She is really good at it, but now she is old, she feels ashamed
to dance in front of other people.’ ‘How old is your mum, Mira?’ ‘Thirty-five.’ I
laugh, wondering how ‘old’ Mira thinks I might be.
These chats with Mira are a revelation. She has always followed Amal’s crowd
in the Mercy Centre, and I have seen her deliberately exclude both Emy and
Salma. But, eating crisps and drinking Fanta, sitting watching her friends on the
beach, she is thoughtful and friendly. Perhaps, sitting alone with me, away from
the Crossroads village, she feels no pressure not to share her thoughts and ideas.
Perhaps I have just stumbled on the ‘right’ way to talk to Mira, just as I stumbled
on Emy’s willingness to write down her ideas and Kasim’s openness to draw
the road of his life. My encounters with the Crossroads children really forced
me to accept that ethnography, our prized methodology, only ever constructs a
partial truth. Even ‘child-friendly’ methods may only be friendly to one child. I
never gained complete access to the Crossroads children’s lives, but I observed
and participated in almost enough. With the Crossroads children, I saw that, as
ethnographers, we carry with us many extraordinary assumptions and privileges,
from the cars that we drive around so freely to the occasional ‘holidays’ we take,
to the carefully worded, locally ‘appropriate’ questions that we expect (and need)
children and adults to answer.
More generally, taking the Crossroads children to the beach reinforced the
gradual impression I was forming of the enduring temporariness of their lives.
For, on the beach, but also in sudden, chaotic fights in the classroom, they
seemed to live completely in the moment. Perhaps this was why my questions
 ‘Difficult’ Children • 43

about their past so often met with silence, why so many of them could not even
remember whether they had ever visited the Philippines. There was a kind of
ongoing impermanence to their lives. One week, fourteen-year-old Razmir was
at the Mercy Centre. The next, he was not, as he had signed up for construction
work, but three weeks’ later, he returned to school again. This temporariness
was reflected in the children’s responses to some of my participatory research.
For example, after borrowing one of my cameras as part of the ‘Photos of My
Life’ project, eleven-year-old Jimi showed me a wonderful set of images his
friend had taken of him working in an onion warehouse. After I had looked at
them, he promptly – with a shrug of his shoulders – deleted all of the images on
the camera. Perhaps he had forgotten my promise to provide him with copies of
them all? Perhaps it was the posing for, and taking of, the images that had been
most important? The photographs had been wonderful, vividly demonstrating the
sense of productive belonging that work provides to some children. But, in the
end, it was Jimi’s right to destroy them.
Towards the end of my fieldwork, the owners of the land on which the squatter
village was built issued the Crossroads villagers with eviction orders. Most of
the villagers decided to move their wooden homes into a forested area nearby.
I thought this might make the children anxious or worried, but they accepted it
stoically and even enthusiastically, taking time off school to help their parents
carry possessions into new house-sites in the trees, or to look after younger
siblings while their fathers attempted to string up new electricity wires. Amidst
all of this, I talked to Asma’s mother, asking her what the move was like. ‘Well,
cikgu’, she said, ‘it’s actually kind of fun’. Like Asma’s mother, the views of
the Crossroads children were often unpredictable, but frequently referenced
a philosophy of accepting the difficulties of life and trying to find enjoyment
by living in the moment. During my fieldwork, in which I saw these children
regularly, at least once a week, I became very fond of them. This was not just in
spite of my difficulty in working with them, but perhaps even because of it. Every
piece of information I uncovered about their lives felt hard won; every time they
refused to engage with my research was an important check on my assumptions.
They were also very funny, videoing suspected policemen from my car, putting
dead crabs on my daughter’s leg, and choosing to insult a class-mate by calling
him a ‘transvestite dinosaur’. If anything else, these strange and humourous
encounters taught me that marginalized children – perhaps like all children –
never act in the way we might want or expect them to. And why should they?
 3

Paths to the Unfamiliar: Journeying with

Children in Ecuadorian Amazonia

Natalia Buitrón-Arias

A Perfect Stage

Of all the mornings I spent in the Ecuadorian Amazonian montaña, one remains
impressed on my memory with almost cinematic quality. It was Christmas
2011 and it was nearing the deadline I had set for myself to begin proper field
immersion. I was still clueless as to where I would be living in the New Year,
and, despite all the travelling and negotiating with Shuar parents, schoolteachers,
and officials, a ‘field site’ had not yet materialized. Perhaps these feelings of
uncertainty go some way in explaining why I decided to accompany Victor,
another anthropologist, to the home of Manuel, who was then president of the
second-largest Shuar federation. Our visit took us to Kuamar, a community of
the Makuma area and the Evangelical end of Shuar territory – that is, miles away
from my prior field site searches.
We woke that morning to a conversation of rhythmic and cheerful howls.
After hurling the first, Manuel was echoed by a succession of invisible shouters
from other households. We were then invited to rest in the thatched-roofed house
where Targelia, our host’s first wife, was busy transforming the spaghetti and
tuna we were asked to purchase in town into a soupy stew. The conversation that
followed was at best tense and diplomatic: alluding to the rumours of foreign
spies and head-hunters that get killed for unscrupulous roaming around Shuar
territory, Manuel subtly lured us into playing it safe by becoming volunteers of
his federation. Sipping frugally from my bowl of cool tea and hoping to delay
the time of agreements, I asked Manuel about the children who had been playing
hide-and-seek with me, peering through the crevices in the wall to satiate their
curiosity about the guests. Over the past several minutes, our conversation had
been accompanied by a soundtrack of surprised giggles and hands tapping around

45
46 • Children

the house seeking a new hideout. After my mention of the children, Manuel
began ushering them into the house in a moving file of varying sizes and ages.
Without instruction, each child walked ceremoniously towards us to shake our
hands. They avoided our eyes while uttering a distant if bold ‘good morning’
in Spanish. As the file walked past, Manuel proudly recited their names and
translated their meanings for us, recounting stories or details about some of the
children that he deemed amusing or evocative. The youngest of our greeters
helped themselves to a handful of peeled taro. Meanwhile, the older children
scrambled around looking for notebooks and pencils before hurriedly leaving the
house in disarray – it was time to go to school. One of the last to make his way
into the house, Ama, a preschooler, climbed atop a pile of wobbling firewood and
reached up to try to remove one of my earrings. Manuel made the introduction:
‘Ama means “swollen river.” He is the wildest of all; he dislikes wearing clothes
and he loves the forest. We’ve told him a story about a little child like him who
went to live with the jaguars …’
The remaining children had squatted with their meals by the hearth. Also
included in the family scene, lying on a wooden mat, were Ramón, a young
nephew of Manuel, and an elderly woman, his grandmother. Noticing my
curiosity, Manuel mentioned that Ramón had returned home for a short visit after
three or more years ‘wandering’ around cities. Half grinning at this comment,
Ramón focused on feeding his grandmother the minuscule wasp larvae that he
patiently pierced out of a section of hive gathered in the morning.
Overall, the scene by the hearth seemed protected by an impregnable veil
of intimacy. It appeared far removed from the diplomatic detours, the rounds
of presentations, and the agreements to come between hosts and guests. I was
secretly jubilant: in spite of all the formalities lying between us, in this place I
could imagine a route into the lives of young people. Compared with the many
gate-keepers I had encountered during the previous months, Manuel was unique
in his inclusion of children in our first round of introductions. What else could
I have wished for? In Kuamar, I would be hosted by a polygynous marriage –
Manuel and his two wives – and their thirteen children, of whom the eldest was
aged sixteen; the youngest’s birth was expected in the upcoming days. We agreed
that in exchange for safe journeys and long-term research in the Makuma area I
would volunteer a few hours of weekly teaching in the Achunts high school, an
hour’s walk away from Kuamar. To signal my trustworthiness as an ally, I would
also accompany the eldest children in their daily trips to high school and spend a
few hours with them in the classroom. This was the closest to a win-win scenario
I could imagine. With the exception of formal teaching – which I feared could get
in the way of befriending children – the agreement actualized the methodology
plan I had designed in London. Just in the nick of time, and in the least calculated
manner, I had managed access to the key contexts of socialization in contem-
porary Shuar society: the household and the school. With children all around
 Paths to the Unfamiliar • 47

me, I mused with optimism, I just had to find a way of gaining their confidence.
I mentally fast-forwarded to the moment where I would do without Manuel – or
any adult for that matter – to make my introduction to the children, that moment
when I would, perhaps spontaneously cross that invisible barrier keeping us
insulated from the other side of the hearth and join the mat where Ramón fed his
grandmother. Gradually shifting my primary role as the guest of adults, I would
be in a position to skip the formal greetings and ask Ama more about the jaguar
story. Perhaps I could even seize my meal of taro, fetch a pen and notebook and
swiftly run off with the rest of his siblings?

Questions-in-the-making

As the art of ethnography teaches us too well, every successful entry story takes
its toll on the researcher’s untested optimism. I had set out to explore the interplay
between Shuar social organization and the novel institutional life engendered by
state-derived institutions (schools, village councils and federations), all of which
were being actively appropriated and managed by Shuar people. My presuppo-
sition was that an enquiry into the articulations and redefinitions of knowledge,
power, and collectivity emerging from this interplay of social forms would
foreground the transformative role of children within Shuar society. But, against
the temptation to compartmentalize the research in generational categories, my
research took inspiration from a couple of complementary premises: that just as
children play a substantial role in sustaining and (re)shaping adult culture, adults’
images of the past and future strongly affect children’s life experiences. My aim
was thus to simultaneously attend to the practices and understandings of both
children and adults and the continuities and discontinuities emerging from their
interaction. As these premises took more practical shape during fieldwork, I found
myself increasingly absorbed by that which remained unarticulated between
child and adult and which somehow made possible the transition of one into
other. If we remember the optimistic prospects of my opening vignette, I framed
my journey into children’s worlds in terms of gradually gaining access to ‘their
key contexts of socialization’. Yet the more I focused on children in terms of an
educational project confined to specific places of interaction (e.g. the household,
the school), the more children’s agency appeared elusive and my determination
to explore it somewhat misplaced or incomplete. It took much familiarization
with ‘socialization’ and many journeys out of its normative confines to under-
stand that children had their own ways of exploring unfamiliar domains and
harnessing potency from the peripheries of sociality. Only time would help me
understand that there was a tension between my attempts to understand children’s
worlds in familiar spaces of sociality and their growing desire to journey into the
unfamiliar. Valuable encounters, as I was to find out, were forged in transit and
48 • Children

required a certain degree of alterity and distance, not their blurring. This chapter
explores what I learned by taking part in children’s detours into the unfamiliar.
The same afternoon of my arrival I began learning something about the subtle
modulation of fear and attraction that children bring to the task of encountering
unfamiliar others. After long, drawn-out chats, numerous rounds of manioc
beer and several pauses to shield us from the irregular downpours, the family
and I started our trek towards Makuma, where an anniversary celebration was
underway. Temporarily cloistered by the rain and people’s varying trekking
paces, I found a way to persuade Ramón to tell me a little about his wanderings.
‘I work for Venus [a popular brand of home-made shoes] with a friend of mine,
a truck driver, that is, before the accident’ was the lead into his story. Ramón had
left the Makuma area when he was fifteen, after finishing middle school. Having
grown impatient in Kuamar, he dreamed of travelling; he wanted to learn ‘other
things’, ‘to find his own path’, and to ‘become someone in life’. One day he set
out on the trail as usual, but instead of walking towards the school he took off to
the city. Ramón and the truck driver transported the shoes from Guayaquil, on the
coast, to Ambato, in the highlands. Ramón had meant to return to Kuamar earlier
to see his family, but one day while travelling with his friend they had an accident
in the truck, which left him in a coma in the hospital for a long time.
Ramón continued the story of his journeys, telling about the many accidents
he and his friend had withstood together. With every feat of the story, he
emphasized a greater sense of surpassed danger and self-transformation. Yes,
he had suffered, he had even lost consciousness, but the result was that he had
made a very productive acquaintance with a tough mestizo and had acquired
much knowledge, strength, and resilience along the way. He was on the path to
becoming someone. Meanwhile his female cousins, Yaanua (fifteen) and Suanua
(thirteen), were engulfed by what seemed a mixture of curiosity, anxiety, and
jealousy. ‘Weren’t you afraid?’ asked Suanua. ‘I too am going away’, burst
out Yaanua, with an air of defiance seemingly directed at invisible obstructers.
Suanua chuckled at her sister’s suggestion and cautioned her about her lack of
money and the prospect of upsetting her parents. ‘I can visit my sister [cousin]
Soledad in Tena [an Amazonian town]’, insisted Yaanua, while delightfully going
over the narrative of Soledad’s flight from Kuamar as it had occurred the year
before. ‘Does Soledad also have friends in Tena?’ I asked, curious to understand
the extent to which girls, too, pursue friendships among mestizos when they
travel to towns. But the girls muttered a genuinely uncertain ‘don’t know’.
I wanted to find out more about how these journeys happened, about the
potential for self-realization that ensued from their empowering but potentially
fear-provoking encounters and the satisfaction with which such experiences are
reanimated through individual narratives. I also puzzled over whether girls could
befriend strangers. For, if the experience of making allies away from home was
reserved for men, what kind of relations did women establish with unfamiliar
 Paths to the Unfamiliar • 49

others in their journeys? And what were these growing children ‘doing’ when
they narrated these encounters? During the next eighteen months of my stay
in the Makuma region, some of the most memorable episodes with children
happened while trekking back and forth between places and while weaving
the experiences of these journeys with stories of potent or otherwise unsettling
encounters. But before I bring some of these encounters to life, I shall momen-
tarily linger on children’s experiences in the familiar domain of the household.
This is because it is their families that, perhaps ironically, first stir children’s
curiosity for the unfamiliar.

Living Closely as Children and Adults

I often marvelled at the extent to which children were integrated in the activities
of adults in Shuar households. In the absence of designated times or spaces
for minors, children, and adults live in close proximity, and there is a sense of
togetherness coupled with autonomy in daily life. At night, each set of siblings
– the children of Targelia, the first wife, and Carmen, the second wife – would
lie together in their respective households lulling each other to sleep with stories
while overhearing adults’ whispers. Long before dawn individual sleepers would
begin to wake as their siblings and parents, recounted their dreams to one another.
As a permanent guest of the family, children nearly always surrounded me.
Sleeping in the adjoining room, I would often awake in the middle of the night
to hear children expressing a feeling, commenting on a dream or switching on
the radio if they thought power had resumed after the rain. During the daytime
children enjoy similar freedoms and meander undisturbed unless their parents
need them. Even before toddlers begin walking, they are left to independently
explore their surroundings and experiment with the tools of adults. I would
get goose bumps seeing young children using sharp machetes to skin logs of
sugar cane taller than themselves. There are few things children can’t do in the
household. Girls can experiment with domestic chores alongside their mothers
as soon as they can walk comfortably by themselves. Girls are also left to tend to
babies for long periods even before the infants are weaned. Boys are confidently
sent out to fish, and fetch palm hearts, fruits and insects. By the age of ten, boys
are skilled enough to transport timber, with the aid of a horse or on a hanging
basket, across the Makuma River. I felt humbled the few times I was left alone at
home with young children as they came fast to aid me with the daily subsistence
activities. They seemed to enjoy accommodating this reversal of roles, for even
though I was a guest of the adults I was not the same type of adult as their parents.
For the children, as a person who dressed and acted funnily and brought home
all sorts of curious objects, I fitted well into the category of the friendly inkis
(foreign or non-Ecuadorian white). Inkis can also be unfriendly and terrifying
50 • Children

for both children and adults, as attested by the infamous rumours of head-hunters
(corta cabezas), a type of bearded and burly foreigner who is said to command
networks of indigenous clients with the purpose of capturing Shuar heads and
organs. Protecting me from such suspicions were my gender, a slim constitution
and my mestizo-sounding Spanish, a far cry from the stereotypical representation
of the sturdy head-hunter. But perhaps the most important protection was my
hosts’ acumen. By requesting that I volunteer at the high school, my family had
helped to normalize my otherwise problematic status as an unmarried visitor.
Meanwhile, since children had garnered enough evidence that I was to be treated
as an adult, they were always amused by and curious about my chameleonic
incursions into their games.
In the household, my and the children’s mutual curiosity always had to
accommodate parental requests and intermediations. Take Shaanua, a witty and
imaginative five-year-old who struggled to restrain her views and wishes, for
example. She would talk to me in every possible moment and ask to accompany
me everywhere. I repeatedly reassured Carmen and Manuel that it was a pleasure
to have her accompany me during my round of visits, and have her sneak into
my tent. But my reassurances were to no avail. They never ceased to warn young
children to avoid disturbing me. Whilst the parents like to emphasize the unique
make-up of every one of their children, they also expect them to manifest their
uniqueness at appropriate times and only with adult-like confidence and deter-
mination. The adults show little tolerance for rowdiness, confusion, or idleness
and expect children to behave with composure in their presence, especially
when visitors are around. Around the household, I found it difficult to explore
the lives of children beyond their own adaptation to the world of adults, for the
adults considered me their guest and interlocutor and protected my adult status
in conversations. A sign that this may have been difficult for the children as
well is that they never related to me employing the social roles that their parents
fashioned for me. For instance, although Manuel regularly told the youngest
children that I was like their eldest sister and Carmen never missed an oppor-
tunity to refer to me as the godmother of Jintia Nua, the youngest baby, children
never used these terms to address me or showed interest in treating me like ‘kin’.
In the household, despite the sense of proximity created by shared space and
activity, generational distance was invariably emphasized through comportment
and discourse.
Whilst the Shuar life-course does not presuppose rigid social stages or
ceremonial age-sets, children (uchi) still need to develop the self-restraint,
oratorical skills and gendered productive capacities that characterize mature
Shuar persons. This process of development is represented as taking place in the
heart (enentai), the centre of individuality where one’s self-reflexivity, deepest
emotions and the ability to act appropriately reside. During this period, therefore,
adults deploy discipline to enhance the sense of independence, courage, and
 Paths to the Unfamiliar • 51

forcefulness of character they wish to cultivate in children. In addition to parental

speech and advice, a more effective source of strength, direction, and individu-
ating knowledge is thought to derive from the visionary experiences occasioned
by the ingestion of tsaank (tobacco, Nicotiana tabacum), natem (ayahuasca,
Banisteriopsis caapi) or maikiua (Datura,1 Brugmansia sp. or Datura sp.), three
psychotropic plants that enable children to see the future for themselves and learn
to live well. But parents also resort to other treatments. They may, for instance,
request that their children bathe in the cold river before dawn. This, they explain,
helps them to grow strong, disciplined, and resilient. Overly needy or disobedient
toddlers may also find their mothers either feigning indifference or exposing
them to unpleasant psychological trials. Mothers may, for instance, confront
children with the prospect that their misconduct attracts disquieting forest spirits
(iwianch) or that they may be taken away by roaming head-hunters as a result
of disobedience. Children also routinely confront their parents’ own fear of bad
shamans. So whilst children are exposed to the value of establishing connections
with powerful outsiders and their sources of knowledge, they are also warned
about the risk of external deception and malevolent agency. So, while parental
discipline aims to instill in children a greater sense of autonomy and self-
possession, it does so by somewhat paradoxically investing the outer world with
a sense of danger and insecurity. Thus, children are simultaneously equipped with
the necessary suspicion and the confrontational readiness to interact with others
beyond the household.
Caught in this educational dynamic within the household, children and I
endeavoured to honour the composure that regulated intergenerational inter-
actions. But beyond adult supervision, children were keener to express their
enhanced autonomy and establish their reputation by proving their honed
capacity at engaging with the challenges and surprises of the unfamiliar.

Journeying into the Unfamiliar

It is Monday morning and I am trekking to the high school with a bunch of

children from Kuamar. Suddenly, Yaanua turns to me with expectant eyes: can
you run? The race starts just before the trail gets narrower, more uneven and
slippery still. The challenge consists of circumventing the swamps nested in the
centre by bending our bodies following the inclination of the slopes at the edges
of the trail, all of this while avoiding collisions with the various trekkers that
form the bouncy caravan of students headed to the school. This is how Yaanua
and her cousin Soledad used to play on their journey to school before the latter
escaped for town. And this is how the eldest children challenge me when we
journey together to the high school, to other hamlets or to the homestead of their
grandparents, some seven hours’ walk away from Kuamar. Whether the children
52 • Children

and I swim across the Makuma River, or pass a lemon fruit while running
downhill, the group-engineered trials of the journey are interspersed by more
relaxed conversations about the bemusing or extraordinary events that have taken
place on the trails.
It was with much pride, for instance, that Suanua recalled how she had
daringly walked through ‘a vision’ the day her grandparents had given her
maikiua.2 During the vision she had walked through the daily route to school, but
this time the path had been invaded by the thumping of helicopters and from the
trees descended masked soldiers intent on kidnapping the people of Kuamar. And
perhaps Yaanua so loved to initiate challenges because she could playfully dispel
the fear she had experienced when running alone along the same paths. As she
recalled, several times she had felt chased by the horrifying forest spirits iwianch
when twilight caught up with her on the trail. Around the same time, younger
children shared all sorts of frightening rumours regarding the fatal advance of a
couple of native tourist guides from a community across the Pastaza River, acting
on orders from their bosses, the foreign head-hunters. It was as if children had
come to appreciate the invigorating effects ensuing from the trials adults put them
through and with these narratives re-rehearsed and demonstrated – to themselves
and their strange visitor – they were able to realize a more combative and resilient
version of themselves.

Detouring into Adulthood

During the moments of transit, temporarily withdrawn from the contexts of daily
interactions and enclosed in the privacy of movement along narrow trails, my
young interlocutors and I entered a different modality of communication. Outside
of school time, and exempt from routine expectations, children were relaxed and
daring in my company and asked me direct questions, comfortably answering
mine in return. The act of trekking together with a curious other seemed to
provide my young informants with a kind of liminal opportunity to reveal
themselves in more depth than was possible at the household, the school, or the
hamlet. The experience of the trail also seemed to create a context reminiscent of
the sense of potentiality that my young informants had previously experienced
during fortuitous encounters with strange others.
For instance, I had seen Alfredo daily for six months, but I still knew little
about him. I knew that he was the sixteen-year-old nephew of Manuel. I also
knew that schoolteachers worried about failing him again in high school. One
day we were trekking together, alone, for the first time. We were returning from
a tournament in Makuma, where his football team had lost their game, an occur-
rence that increased his general frustration. As we walked he handed me a guava
fruit and asked me if I still really wanted to know why he was so desperate to
 Paths to the Unfamiliar • 53

drop out of school and leave. ‘Nobody understands me here’, he blurted out,
adding that because his father did not want him working in the city before he
finishes high school, he had tried to convince his father to let him enroll in the
army instead. Alfredo believed his father would consider this a feasible option.
But before this, Alfredo wants to travel to Latacunga, an industrial city of the
highlands, to visit his friend Pepe, who promised to give him driving lessons.
Alfredo explains that maybe he will be able to work as a taxi driver now that
the road to Makuma is being built. ‘Who is this friend?’ I asked. Alfredo recalls
that one night his father lost patience with him and asked his mother to give him
maikiua. With maikiua in his body, he felt stronger, and escaped to Macas and
then travelled all the way to Latacunga, where his sister, married to a highland
dweller (serrano), lives. Outside the bus station, flat broke and unable to locate
his sister, he was approached by Pepe, the manager of a company that sold
carnations at retail prices. On the spot, Pepe asked Alfredo if he knew about the
magical love perfumes sold in the Oriente, the name Ecuadorians reserve for
the eastern region of their country. Alfredo had indeed heard about the perfume
sold around the bus station in Macas. ‘This is how we became friends’, Alfredo
told me, recounting the first of Pepe’s deals. ‘Look, we’re going to be friends’,
Pepe told Alfredo. ‘I’m going to give you money, and if you buy me one of
those love potions I’ll give you more money and a job upon your return.’ Pepe
trusted Alfredo and sent him on a mission to purchase a magical love perfume
called ‘follow-me-follow-me’ (sígueme-sígueme), which bestows upon its user
the power of attracting women. On his return, Pepe kept his promises to his
new friend, and so Alfredo started to work as a security guard in the carnation
company.
As I gradually learned from the stories recalled by my young male informants,
as boys grow up they try to leave home to delay marriage and seek friendships
through employment and/or transactions with mestizo patrons and other indig-
enous and non-indigenous allies and politicians. By transforming potentially
exploitative relations with powerful outsiders into partnerships, young people
obligate external others into more or less symmetric relations of exchange.
Through the new abilities acquired during travels (e.g. driving a car, trading,
working as a security guard), boys express their mastery of relationships with
outsiders, a capacity that in their eyes facilitates their empowerment vis-à-vis
their more experienced elders.
Yet, as I slowly came to realize, the significance of these narratives lay not so
much in the fact that children and youths are exposed to entirely different kinds
of encounters, or that their narratives differ in style from those of adults. Shuar
men also narrate their experiences beyond Shuar country through the prism of
befriending powerful others. And while they are careful not to overly publicize these
experiences in the presence of other Shuar adults,3 at home and at the school, they
would eagerly recount them for children – as well as for my benefit – as a way of
54 • Children

establishing reputation and evoking their knowledge of the non-indigenous world.

The significance of the childhood narratives is that children would normally have to
wait until they become adults to openly share their experiences of the unfamiliar. In
the domains controlled by adults, children ordinarily censor their own experiences
of growth. Why so? And why were children keen to share their stories with me?
During the first months of life, babies are referred to as pasech, ‘the
undamaged’, or sometimes as kuirach, ‘little tender’, and then generically called
uchi, children. Children participate in gradually segregated gendered domains. As
they grow older, youths (natsa) are expected to abide by the etiquette appropriate
to their gender in preparation for marriage. The meaning of natsa is revealing, as
it primarily designates the status of unmarried persons. Youth as a phase of life
seems to have gained prominence as secondary education has become increas-
ingly important for Shuar people. By delaying the age at which youths marry,
and thereby delaying the preparation of the person for full adulthood, schooling
has contributed to the reinforcement of something like a Shuar adolescence.
This is a period in which unmarried youths still live with their parents and spend
much of their time travelling for sports tournaments, hamlet feasts, jobs in the
city and visits to kin in other hamlets. While these activities are tolerated and
even encouraged to some extent, they signal incompleteness and unfitness to
lead fully accomplished lives. In so far as living well requires domestic harmony
and the pairing with a conjugal partner in order to produce a fecund household,
the restless and solitary wanderings of youths are regarded with some suspicion.
These are the activities expected of unpredictable, overly willful and as of yet
immature persons. Whilst parents to some extent encourage youths to go out of
their way to gain new skills and pursue education, they are similarly ambivalent
towards the knowledge that they may bring from contact with strange others.
It is not unusual, for instance, for male youths to be suspected of entering into
dubious pacts with wealthy foreigners or malevolent mestizos intent on capturing
heads or organs from Shuar people. What’s more, if leaving home for a few years
before marriage as a way of gaining knowledge and making friends is considered
acceptable and even desirable for male youths, female youths with similar desires
or an overly outgoing character usually elicit recrimination.
So, whilst narratives of journeying attest to the fact that children are learning
to understand the world like their elders, their path to growth remains to a great
extent transgressive. The subversive potential of children’s stories is to be found
in their greater vulnerability to be led astray through the encounters that might
take place during one of their journeys. The journeys of adults, by contrast, whilst
never entirely protected from danger, attract less concern because adults already
lead fully productive and harmonious domestic lives.
The tension between the familiar realm of the house and the unfamiliar
encounters made through journeys became clearer to me as I became more
acquainted with girls’ experiences. Yajaira, the thirteen-year-old daughter of
 Paths to the Unfamiliar • 55

Carmen and Manuel, had spent most of her early childhood living with her
grandparents near Puyo, a settler town, and her schooled years in a boarding
school in Palora, another town. When I met her, she was experiencing a difficult
adaptation to the sociality of Kuamar. Although Yajaira was initially very reticent
in everyday encounters beyond the household, she gradually became more
confident, and started taking steps to ease her life in Kuamar. Her confidence
was evident to me when I saw her chatting for longer with her classmates and
taking more serpentine routes on her way back to the house. However, on the
few occasions that she delayed her arrival from high school, her father sternly
confronted her. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been told that you like to take to the
forest with friends. Do you perhaps want to wander by yourself like others?’ The
forest is the place where married couples usually engage in sexual encounters on
the occasion of hunting and gathering trips. As such, the countercultural image of
love play engaged by young girls with unsanctioned lovers was meant to under-
score an unacceptable break from the norm. The censure of female wandering is
also sanctioned in traditional mythology. In a myth, two women, Ipiak and Sua,
meander alone engaging in objectionable sexual affairs and perilous encounters,
which ultimately culminate in their metamorphosis into plants of the same
name.4 Through the reference to ‘others’, Manuel was thus evoking a canonical
suspicion of female initiative in travels. Women must journey following their
husbands. The image of a purposeless lone female traveller inevitably gives
reason to rumours. A few days after one of these episodes, Yajaira and I were
walking back home after relaying a message to another family. On the trail,
Yajaira revealed her impatience about her situation, telling me that she ‘really
doesn’t like it in Kuamar’. ‘Why?’ I asked, guessing her feelings. ‘People talk
here, they say things. I’d like to be sociable, I’d like to have friends, but you
can’t do this here.’ With this comment, Yajaira was voicing her frustration with
the limited possibilities that Shuar girls (and women) have to seek out friends or
construct connections among people other than close kin. Indeed, as I gradually
understood when someone said of a girl that she had ‘friends’, the meaning was
unmistakably suggestive: it invariably alluded to the possibility of transgressive
romantic liaisons and sexual encounters. I realized only later that my young
female informants had received my question of a few weeks ago as to whether
Soledad had any friends in Tena quite differently from intended.
Why, then, did children share their stories with me? Why would Yajaira tell
me so openly about her desire to have friends and leave Kuamar? The immediate
answer is that I was willing to listen to them and that I understood that these
stories were to be kept among ourselves. I asked questions of children that adults
do not ask. The journeys of young persons, their experiences of overcoming
fear and mastering relationships with outsiders are part of the inarticulate zones
of growth lying between childhood and adulthood. Perhaps, as I was a person
coming from an unknown faraway, children were endeavouring to meet me
56 • Children

halfway with their stories or desires of journeying. As a foreigner myself, I was

part of what children were interested in exploring, although different children
picked on different aspects of my ‘identity’ with which to experiment. Possibly,
the fact that I was myself a young (unmarried) traveller, journeying far away
from my family and learning from others, resonated with the implicit model of
my young informants and created the unspoken common ground that facilitated
our conversations.
With time, I began incorporating the insight of journeying into my method­
ological toolbox at the household. This allowed me to explore the imaginings
of even younger children with whom I had not had the opportunity to journey
outside the hamlet. For instance, one day I invited Nayap (aged eleven) to
show me his favourite sites around the hamlet. On hearing the invitation, the
boy accepted, but remained pretty inexpressive. This was the first ‘engineered’
trip of my fieldwork and I was not sure it would work. However, I later found
out Nayap had joyously spread the news that he was going to tour me around
Kuamar. Nayap transformed our journey into a ‘tourist trip’ modelled on the
tours he had witnessed during the year he had stayed with his grandparents at the
ecologic resort they managed near Puyo. During this time Nayap had personally
encountered several French visitors and knew many stories about them. He told
me, for example, that one of these visitors had been interested in purchasing
land from his grandfather but in a vision she had undergone (with ayahuasca),
God had warned her against it. Later in the trip, Nayap asked about the couple
of missionaries living in Makuma that I had been visiting in the previous weeks:
‘Are they inkis from France or Colombia?’ ‘No, they’re from the United States’,
I clarified, noting that Nayap had added my nationality to the list of places where
inkis could come from. Our journey turned out to be part of a broader schema of
travelling with inkis that Nayap was developing. Through his repeated encounters
with visitors, Nayap was also gradually forming a richer concept of the inkis:
their desires, the content of their visions, their beliefs, places of origin, and so on.
But these encounters were also illustrative of Nayap’s own developing narrative.
As I found out, Nayap wanted to become a tourist guide, an interest he creatively
rehearsed with me by re-engineering the journey exercise to fit into a tourist trip.
I also decided to probe into children’s broader interest in narrating dreams,
an interest that I had gleaned from their early morning conversations with their
parents at home. I thus decided to turn this insight into a classroom exercise by
asking the youngest children I taught (twelve to fourteen years old) if they would
enjoy drawing and/or writing down a dream they had had. The pupils diligently
launched themselves into this unorthodox piece of classwork. To my surprise, a
few of the dream-works I received sketched journeys featuring encounters with
visitors, enemies, or friendly strangers. The following is an excerpt from a girl’s
dream:
 Paths to the Unfamiliar • 57

I dreamed something sad. I was visiting my grandparents but there was no one in the
hamlet … I entered the house of a strange young man who asked me ‘what are you
doing here?’ and I said ‘I’m sorry to enter your house. I’ve got lost.’ He told me ‘Don’t
be afraid, I’m here to protect you, I do know you, don’t say you don’t know me’, but
I was very shy and didn’t say anything. Together we went to bathe in a river I knew.
On our way, he embraced me and I embraced him too, we were happy to know each
other but he was a stranger. I didn’t know who he was but I still fell in love with him
… While on the river my sister arrived and said ‘what are you two lovers doing here?’
But I answered ‘he is not my lover, he is just my friend’, lying to her … ‘My sister
ought to be in the house’ said my sister to the stranger and took me with her. At home
I began singing because I was sad, and I sang so much that I woke up.

Another reason why children might have shared these narratives with me was
that by reinserting their experiences into daily life, making use of ‘legitimate’
media – a school exercise, an invitation to tour a guest of the adults – I was
allowing them to experiment with or give expression to important themes in
their lives. The result of these experiments and our different encounters while
journeying together were, however, different. Alfredo was more interested in
exploring with me his friendship with mestizo patrons, whereas Nayap was more
fascinated by touring the inkis. Yaanua recreated with me some of the trail games
she so enjoyed with her female cousin, Soledad. More than a proxy, Soledad had
become a model for Yaanua. Not long after I left to return to London, I learned
that Yaanua had escaped to the city to work in an internet café, and later married
to a non-Shuar man. When I spoke with Soledad’s parents about her situation in
the city, they sighed and said that she was probably married to a mestizo. Nobody
expected her to return like Ramón had, with stories of truck driver friends and
accidents on the road. Indeed, if boys could confidently frame their encounters
with strangers in terms of ‘friendships’ that enabled them to eventually earn
respect in their future homes, girls were painfully aware that their befriending of
strangers would be construed as a cover for romantic liaisons, perceptions that
would sever their ties from home.
Although I went to the field with very definite ideas regarding the places
where I expected to find children and their settings and agents of socialization, it
was through my journeys with children that I was reminded about the displaced
and multi-sited nature of learning. The ways in which children opened up to me
during treks allowed me to see that experiences during childhood when the self
lies in contrast with a strange or distant ‘other’ are as important to socialization
as those experiences occurring in more established settings (home, school).
Journeying alongside children as another kind of acknowledged ‘other’, I
was privileged to become their interlocutor and attend to the process whereby
children weave encounter with narrative.
As children begin to journey away from home, they begin to dispel the
frontiers of the unfamiliar. The horrifying forest spirits (iwianch) of childhood, so
58 • Children

menacingly close to home that even a knock at the door is possible, is gradually
replaced by more challenging and distant kinds of others. As journeys take them
further, children negotiate with wealthy patrons and intriguing tourists and learn
to differentiate between head-hunters and friendly inkis. But journeys are also
fundamentally gendered experiences. For girls, the familiarization of strangers to
some extent always carries the ambiguity and stigma of unsupervised marriage.
For some of them strangers thus remain persons they only meet in dreams,
whilst for those who take the risk of leaving home they perhaps materialize into
encounters that never become stories.

Acknowledgements

My doctoral field research was supported by the London School of Economics

and the Legs Lelong of CNRS, France. I am grateful to both funding bodies
for their generous support. I am also grateful to Grégory Deshoullière, Daniela
Kraemer, Heather Saul, and Alice Pearson for their insightful and sensitive
suggestions. I owe Catherine Allerton a special thanks for her editorial guidance
in the preparation of this chapter and all of those who attended the workshops
where a preliminary version of this chapter was discussed. My greatest debt of
gratitude is to all the children of Kuamar for eagerly accepting my company on
their daily journeys and getting me started on these reflections in the first place.
 4

The Exemplary Adult: Ethnographic Failure

and Lessons from a Chinese School

James Johnston

Encounter 1: Introducing the Exemplary Adult

It is my dream to be an outstanding student like you and go to a famous university

like Cambridge University. Can you give me some advice on how to study to make
my dream come true?

An outstanding student! Really? That was not how I felt as I stood at the front
of this classroom on my first visit to a school that would become the primary
base for my PhD fieldwork on children in rural China. If I was really such an
outstanding student, then why did this encounter already seem to be falling so far
short of my hopes and expectations for fieldwork?
Sweating in the summer heat and suffering from the after-effects of an
alcohol-soaked banquet with local officials the evening before, I made some trite
suggestions about the importance of working hard and trying to enjoy learning
new things. The lack of useful advice I was able to offer did not seem to reduce
the sense of excitement with which the students gazed at me. The first question
had come from one of the older girls in the room, who was sitting near the front,
squeezed onto a chair with another girl. After being selected by her teacher, she
stood up to read her question in English from notes she had prepared in advance.
Like the other students present that day, she had come into school during the
summer holiday after news had spread around the village that a special delegation
would be visiting. More students had turned up than could be comfortably seated
in the classroom, so they had doubled up at the desks and more stood around
the edges. Some of the children hanging around in the playground and peering
through the classroom door were clearly younger than the twelve to fifteen age
group that the school served; evidently, our visit was exciting enough to draw a
wide audience of local children.
59
60 • Children

I had come to the school with a professor from Nanjing University, where
I had been studying Chinese. However, our journey to the village had been
far from direct. Following a chain of personal connections from Nanjing, we
first visited Anhui University in the provincial capital, then travelled onwards
to meet officials in the education department of Anqing municipality. In order
to help secure our welcome in Anqing, the professor had brought along one of
his postgraduate students, who originated from the area and had family ties to
local officials. Using these connections, we gained an introduction to the county
education department. From there, one of the county-level officials travelled
with us to meet members of the township government, several of whom then
accompanied us in a convoy of government vehicles on our journey to the village
school.
Though certainly grateful for the help I received in obtaining permission for
my fieldwork, it was clear from this first encounter that things were not going
according to my research plan. It had actually been my intention to avoid a
conventional school-based ethnography of children precisely because I wanted
to avoid an emphasis on formal education with its clear hierarchical division
between children as learners and adults as teachers. Instead, my aim was to
present myself to the children as someone who would take them seriously and
listen appreciatively to their descriptions and interpretations of their life in the
village. By detaching myself from the school and diminishing my status, I hoped
I would gradually be able to lessen the extent to which the children saw me as an
intimidating outsider so that I might observe and participate without either being
the constant focus of their attention or continually reminding them of school life.
Rather than assuming that schooling was the most important aspect of their lives,
I wanted to follow children through the village, learning from them which places
and activities were significant and meaningful.
In this way, my ambitions for my ethnography were broadly consistent with
the technique of inhabiting ‘the least-adult role’ (Mandell 1988). However, in my
introduction to the school and my reception by the children, I was being treated
as the opposite of this: I was viewed as an exemplary adult. Despite only being
in my mid-twenties, I had arrived as part of a delegation of important visitors and
was introduced as an expert teacher, a source of valuable knowledge and advice,
who could potentially help the children succeed at school.
As I stood in that classroom before the students, flanked on one side by the
professor and his student, and on the other side by local government officials
and the school leaders, the whole spectacle was infused by hierarchy. The
special arrangements that had been made to open the school and to bring in the
students during their holiday were a clear indication of our elevated status and
the importance of our visit. Realistically, it was the government officials, not
me, whom the school leaders were keenest to impress and who were treated as
the highest-ranking guests. Similarly, the children were very impressed by the
 The Exemplary Adult • 61

professor and student from a prestigious Chinese university. However, despite

these other guests, there was no doubt that I was the main focus of the children’s
attention. While I was disconcerted by the suggestion that I was an outstanding
student, there was no question that in the classroom I did stand out. I was the only
foreigner and naturally this had not gone unnoticed. For a foreigner to visit this
village was an exceptional event, and it was to witness this that the children had
come to school during their holiday.
As a native speaker of English, the students were keen to get my advice on
how to study the language. English teaching is heavily emphasized in the Chinese
education system and it is one of the three most important subjects in high
school. However, there is a concern that the language is not being taught well:
that a focus on memorizing vocabulary results in students that can pass exams,
but are incapable of expressing themselves or understanding spoken English.
This is symptomatic of a general fear in China that young people lack the skills
necessary to meet the nation’s development needs as a result of an excessive
emphasis on exam preparation that stifles creativity and innovation. For this
reason, it is felt that China’s education system needs to emulate foreign education
systems that give greater emphasis to raising the ‘personal quality’ (suzhi)
of students by enabling the all-round development of children’s intellectual,
physical, moral, and artistic abilities. It is in this context that foreign teachers
are greatly valued, because their presence gives students the chance to converse
with English speakers and demonstrates a school’s commitment to providing a
superior ‘quality oriented education’ (suzhi jiaoyu).
The links between foreignness, English, and quality oriented education
explain much about the way I was received in the village. As an English-
speaking foreigner, my natural place was in the school, where I could contribute
to teaching and have a positive influence on the children. Whatever ideas I might
have had about how to present myself in the village, I was recognized within it as
an expert, and therefore the expected flow of knowledge should be from me to the
children, not the other way round. As a foreign teacher, I could bring prestige to
the school and to local officials who could use me as evidence of their efforts to
provide high-quality education even in this rural area. My access to the fieldsite
was secured precisely because I provided the school with a symbol of quality and
prestige. As a result, I was in no position to reject the exemplary-adult role that I
felt was being foisted upon me.
Even leaving the school grounds did not rid me of these associations.
Throughout the village, I seemed to embody the educational hierarchies, as
though I carried the school on my back. When parents invited me to visit, conver-
sation would reliably turn towards their child’s performance at school. Eating
together would become an opportunity to quiz me about a child’s ability and a
chance for an acutely embarrassed child to demonstrate their English in front of
their family, with me present to give feedback.
62 • Children

After answering a range of queries from the students about study techniques,
the questions moved on to other subjects such as my family, my hobbies, and
what I thought about China. As they explored these topics, the students became
increasingly animated, joking with each other and calling out for more details.
However, perhaps more than anything else, it was my size that seemed to particu-
larly fascinate the children.
‘How tall are you?’
I tell them I am one metre and ninety-three centimeters, and there are audible
gasps. Then I confide that one of my brothers is even taller – nearly two metres
– and the level of excitement ratchets up.
‘Wow, he really is a colossus!’
‘Can you play basketball?’
‘Is everyone in England as tall as you?’
‘I’m going to drink milk every day so I can grow as tall as you!’
When I first entered the classroom, there had been exaggerated expressions of
amazement about my tallness. Several of the livelier students had tried jumping
up beside me to see if they could reach a similar height. The boys were especially
keen to know what I had eaten as a child in order to grow so big and strong.
Judging by their conversation, being tall was taken by the children to be
something that was not only desirable, but something they felt they could
directly influence so long as they had access to the right diet and exercise. In this
way, having a healthy physique is another aspect of the multiple, overlapping
hierarchies that contribute to the Chinese notion of personal quality. Spending
too long sedentary in the classroom and eating a poor diet were understood by
the children to risk stunting their growth and thereby damaging their all-round
development. As a tall, highly educated foreigner, I had evidently success-
fully navigated my way through these risks; therefore, the children sought my
advice on this too. For me, then, being tall was not just a physical obstacle to
blending in with the children – it was also a social obstacle. It both captured the
attention of the children when we met and continued to serve as a reminder of
my exemplariness.
My ambition to do fieldwork in a way that reduced the status differences
between myself and the children rested on the assumption that I would be able
to control to a significant extent my own status and subject-position in the
village. In making sense of my first encounter with the children in my fieldsite,
I have shown that this was far from possible. My access to the field was condi-
tional on me slotting into a subject-position that preceded me and substantially
limited my agency in the field. In the village, wherever I went, I was the foreign
expert and was expected to be a model of high-quality personhood. Separated
from the children by a range of mutually re-enforcing status hierarchies tied to
education, nationality, ethnicity, language, and physique, my difference from the
children was accentuated and inescapable. I was treated as an exotic spectacle;
 The Exemplary Adult • 63

a strange- yet-exemplary adult accepted in the village in the expectation that I

might have a positive educational influence on the children.

Encounter 2: Remote Observation

From Tuesday to Friday at 6.15 a.m. each morning those who boarded at the
school – the vast majority of the student body – would assemble on the school
playground for morning exercises. As the rhythmical music began to boom from
the loudspeakers around the playground, the children would perform the synchro-
nized calisthenics designed to wake them up and stimulate their minds and bodies
ready for a long day of study. At 10.00 a.m., after the first two classes of the day,
there would be another session of morning exercises, but this was part of a more
formal ritual. All students and teachers were expected to be present and they
might be addressed by the headmaster or one of the other school leaders. It was
at this time on Mondays that the national anthem would be played and the flag
was raised, saluted by the students.
Through this daily performance, the hierarchies of the school were neatly
marked out in the spaces of the school. Everybody knew their correct place.
The teachers would gather on the raised area of land that extended out from the
teachers’ block to create a stage overlooking the playground. When present at
the school for the morning exercises, I was expected to stand with the teachers
on this stage, joining in their conversation and inspecting the students assembled
beneath. Standing there together on the stage, I imagine we made for an imposing
sight with the flag flying above us. Beneath our feet, the school rules were written
in large characters on tiles attached to the front edge of the stage. For the students
gathering in the playground, looking up at their teachers and confronted by these
symbols of authority, the status differences between themselves and the adults
could not have been clearer. Only the class teachers would descend from the
platform to check on the students they were responsible for, noting attendance
and calling out and correcting any misbehaviour or half-hearted performances of
the morning exercises. Job done, they would return to the fold of teachers back
on the stage.
My position beside the teachers, watching the students from our elevated
position on the stage, seemed to represent all too clearly the frustratingly
restricted encounter I was having with the schoolchildren. Separated from the
students and performing the role ascribed to me as a foreign expert, I found I was
unable to form close relations with the students. Indeed, at the school, I seemed
to be less conducting participant observation amongst the children than carrying
out an inspection that served mainly to intimidate and silence them when in my
presence. I had come to the school to learn about the children, but it was only the
teachers I had got to know well. Limited to my position as a remote observer, I
64 • Children

struggled to recognize the children as individuals, knowing them only vaguely

according to their grade and class within the school.
I perceived this as a double ethnographic failure. On the one hand, it was a
failure in my encounter with children, with whom my relations felt stilted and
narrow. On the other hand, it was also a failure in my encounter with the page,
for I struggled to write engagingly in my diary, and later in my thesis, about
the children, without being able to capture more of their individuality. I grew
dispirited by the paucity of my ethnographic description and frustrated as my
diary filled with pages in which the students seem to blend together, their person-
alities lost from view and their individual voices silenced.

Encounter 3: On the Basketball Court

At break times, the playground would usually fill quickly as students rushed out
from their dark, crammed classrooms into the open air. Some students – especially
those in their final year feeling the pressure of the upcoming examinations –
would collect their food from the school kitchen and return to their desks keen to
squeeze some additional study into their already crowded timetable. But for most
it was a relief to get outside. In summer, the classrooms could become oppres-
sively hot and stuffy. In winter, they were unheated and dimly lit, and the students
complained of feeling bitterly cold. Running about or even just basking in the sun
was a chance for the students to warm up their bodies and shake off the lethargy
brought about by long hours of study.
After accompanying teachers to class or joining them for meal times, I would
often find myself back with the teachers observing the students playing below.
Occasionally, a teacher would call out a student from the playground and ask
them to come up and practice their oral English with me. The students selected
for this were usually amongst the brightest in the school, but, having been singled
out in this way, they came forward quaking with nerves and often too tongue-tied
to say more than a few words. Other children, having spotted a spectacle to rival
basketball (which was hugely popular at the school) for interest, would gather
close by, teasing the student who had been selected or suggesting funny things
he or she could ask. Rapidly, any dialogue would break down into a confusing
hubbub of Chinese and English, and the teacher would release the student, who
would then beat a rapid and relieved retreat.
This still felt like failure. I remained a novelty to the students with our inter-
actions feeling staged and uncomfortable. Although school rules required the
use of standard Mandarin Chinese, in reality students would only use it when
reciting texts aloud in their Chinese class. At almost all other times, whether at
school or at home, students would communicate using their strong local dialect,
which remained almost incomprehensible to me. Being selected to talk to me
 The Exemplary Adult • 65

was like performing in class and left them open to judgement by teachers and
peers. Whether we spoke in Mandarin Chinese or English, for the students these
were classroom languages and marked off our communication from the casual
chatting of dormitories and the playground. They didn’t enjoy the pressure
they felt in my presence and, recognizing their discomfort, I felt loath to allow
it to continue. Linguistically, physically, culturally, I remained marked off by
foreignness and my connection to elite education. There remained a chasm
between the students and me, which prevented me from immersing myself in
the children’s lives. The individuality and personality of students remained
hidden from me and my ethnography seemed desperately thin. I could write
about school structures and organization, and I could describe the performances
and rituals of school life, but I knew little of what the students felt about school
or their lives beyond school, which had always been my primary interests. If I
were to stand any chance of achieving these insights, I needed a different type
of encounter. I was sure I had to remove myself from the pedestal on which I
had been placed.
Almost from the moment the students first saw me, there was excited specu-
lation about how my great size must indicate a prodigious talent for basketball.
Top basketball players were idols to the students, none more so than Yao Ming,
then the Chinese star of the Chicago Bulls, whose image was pinned up in
dormitories and plastered over many desks in the school. During breaks, when
the weather allowed, a large basketball game would take place in the playground.
Those enjoying the outside air, but not taking part might watch, shouting out
encouragement or criticism as the players showed off their skills.
Never having really played the game before, I knew this was one area in
which I should be able to shatter the students’ illusions and make myself look
distinctly ordinary. Perhaps this was a method by which I could not just spend
time with the children, but also help bridge the divide between us. So, next time
I was asked if I could play basketball, I didn’t just modestly protest my lack of
ability and experience. I agreed to give a demonstration of just how bad I really
was by joining them in their game, an offer met with great enthusiasm by players
and spectators alike.
I participated regularly in the games for a couple of weeks and then
occasionally thereafter. Throughout, my performances were indeed consistently
disappointing. I’d lollop around, waiving my arms, lacking the dribbling skills
that allowed the students to move the ball quickly and precisely around the
court. Yet, arms raised, I was about two feet taller than any other player on the
court, and even I was able to put this obvious advantage to good use blocking
shots and catching long throws. While this didn’t seem entirely fair, it was useful
to the team so long as I never got carried away and attempted a shot myself.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t resist the temptation to keep trying, to the amusement
of all, except perhaps those on my team.
66 • Children

Playing with the children did change my relationship with them. From my
point of view, I got to know some of the individual children a little better, but
this was still limited to a narrow group of boys confident in their ability on the
court. For the students, I must have appeared less intimidating on the court than
when looking down from the teachers’ block. Certainly, the students were happy
to mock my performance and involve me in the rough and tumble of the game.
However, this greater intimacy on the court did not transfer well into other spaces
of the school. The boys who were confident on the court tended to be relatively
quiet in the classroom, where my presence remained intimidating. It was one thing
to barrack me on the court, quite another to speak to me in class or in the presence
of teachers, where it was the student who was likely to be judged, not me.
The students rapidly went from wanting me to play basketball with them
because they thought I would be a great player to wanting me to play with
them because they found me a hilarious novelty. I was the strange foreigner
who was ‘as high as the net, but still can’t score!’ Funnier still was to inflict me
as a handicap on the opposing team. In contrast, there was another adult at the
school from whom the students really did feel they could learn some basketball
skills: the school’s sports teacher. The Bull, as he was affectionately known by
both students and teachers, was renowned for his strength and his skills on the
basketball court. Crowds gathered to watch him take on the best of the student
players, charging through gaps, swerving round defenders and leaping up to slam
the ball though the net. Even when not playing, he had a more relaxed, jokey
relationship with the students than me or most of the other teachers.
The Bull was a jovial character around the school, somewhat removed from
the pressures felt by other students and teachers, all of whom were ultimately
judged by the exam results they or their students achieved. Sport carries little
status in Chinese schools and, when the exams loomed large, The Bull’s classes
would frequently be replaced by the core exam subjects of mathematics, Chinese
and English. This had the effect of distancing The Bull from academic hierarchies
and the pressures of exams. At the same time, he also served as a reminder of
alternative structures of hierarchy and aspiration, which might be downplayed
within the school, but still presented some students with alternative ways of
imagining their futures. The Bull was a strong, masculine figure who had gained
popularity and prestige because of his sporting talent and laid-back attitude to
life. He had attended a teachers college, and thus had by no means failed within
the education system, but the entry requirements for those studying sport are
lower than for other degrees so long as applicants demonstrate sporting ability.
He might never become wealthy as a sports teacher, but his was a comfortable job
with a reliable salary. For students anxious about the exams and constantly being
told that gaining good results and going to top universities was the only measure
of achievement, The Bull showed that there were other opportunities and other
forms of success available.
 The Exemplary Adult • 67

I had hoped I might become closer to the students by demonstrating my

inability at basketball, but this was a mistake. I had assumed that being incom-
petent made me more childlike, but basketball was a game these children took
seriously. Many had spent years honing their skills. To minimize the differences
between us, I needed to do more than just be present on the court … I needed to
show that I also valued the game sufficiently to dedicate myself to improving so
that I could make good use of my height rather than waste it with my hopeless
attempts at shooting. Without showing this commitment, playing basketball may
have made me seem less aloof, but it did not help me connect with the other
players. They tolerated my participation because of my value as a curiosity, but
it was still an encounter structured by difference. By playing basketball badly,
I was labelled as ‘bookish’ with limited interest or ability in sport, which to the
frustration of many students, was just the type of personality that the school
system seemed to encourage. I may have provided an example of success for the
bookworms studying in the classroom, but it was The Bull who really connected
with the students on the basketball court, not because his sporting success made
him less adult, but because he demonstrated an alternative adult role to which the
sport-loving students could aspire.

Encounter 4: An Encounter on the Page

In the last week of term before the children would leave for the long Spring
Festival holiday, I was finally given the chance to organize a research exercise
with each of the three final-year classes at the school – a total of almost a 180
students. The students had taken their end-of-term exams – a rehearsal for the
crucially important senior high school entrance exam taking place in June – and
now, for a short while, the pressure on them was slightly reduced. Students were
excited about the holiday, when many would see their parents and older siblings
for the only time that year. That week, many of the teachers were leaving the
school in the evenings to attend banquets organized by parents to thank them
for their work and in hope of special treatment for their children the following
term. The pre-holiday festive atmosphere meant that it would be possible for the
students to give up one – but only one – of their evening self-study classes to
help me with my research.
The terms at the school are long and intensive. The first term begins in
September and runs until late January or early February, when the school breaks
for the Spring Festival holiday. The children get a few days off for the National
Holiday in October and the New Year, but are expected to come in at the weekend
to make up for this lost time. Students in their third and final year at the school
had an especially tough schedule as they prepared for the senior high school
entrance exam. They remained at school on Saturdays and Sunday mornings,
68 • Children

making the often long journey home on Sunday afternoons only to return for the
new school week on Monday morning. In addition, time for eating, resting, and
sleeping was pared back so that four extra study periods could be squeezed into
their already long and busy days. No one actually enjoyed this heavy workload
or considered it an ideal education, but everyone accepted that it was necessary
if they were to compete with students at other schools and gain entry into good
senior high schools. Parents and teachers emphasized to the children how every
moment of study counts. Students spoke of how much they suffered, but they
hoped it would be worth it. Success in the exams was their best chance of
escaping the bitterness they associated with life stuck in the countryside.
Intense academic pressure and a crammed timetable meant that leaders at
the school had little interest in indulging an ethnographer’s research fancies.
If I could provide a good example to the students or offer practical advice on
studying, then my contribution was welcome. I was free to investigate what was
being taught at the school, but not to interfere with the timetable or get in the
way of the teaching. I would not have wanted to challenge these priorities: exam
performance really could determine the children’s whole future. Yet a timetable
that determines the children’s activities from when they wake until they sleep and
an ethos that describes any time not spent studying as potentially wasted time
presented me with real challenges. It became obvious that many of the research
methods that other anthropologists have found useful for working with children
in schools were not appropriate here.
Research opportunities are shaped by school context and educational ethos.
Where there are low expectations of educational success or little realistic oppor-
tunity for progress through the education system, there may be little concern
about the opportunity costs of letting anthropologists conduct their research,
perhaps even a sense in which it does not matter greatly what children are doing
at school as long as they are occupied. Where the qualifications of local staff
are limited, it might be thought that any time spent with an educated outsider
might be advantageous. Schools that emphasize periods of free play, creativity,
or flexible learning might provide opportunities to incorporate the child-friendly
research methods of ethnographers into the school curriculum. Even just shorter
school days would allow more opportunities for such research techniques to be
undertaken as extra-curricular activities. None of these applied to this Chinese
school, where I had already spent months of my time, dispirited and frustrated by
how little I seemed to know about the children’s lives beyond my observations of
them in the classroom and the playground.
Finally, I had an opportunity to do something different, though it could hardly
be described as ethnography. Obviously, a research exercise lasting only one hour
was not going to be in any way comparable to the type of long-term, intimate,
and immersive participation in the children’s lives that I had originally hoped to
achieve. Instead of shaking off my special status to get closer the students, I was
 The Exemplary Adult • 69

deliberately embracing my status as a foreign expert to lobby the school leaders

and claim some space in the timetable for my research. I was using my authority
as a teacher to run a class, standing at the front of the room issuing directions.
I couldn’t see any other way of getting it done to the tight schedule I had been
given. I might be failing as a participant observer, but I was getting desperate, and
I hoped it would give me a chance to learn something of children’s own sense of
their lives and in their own words.
My plan was to ask the students to write, in Chinese, about one of four themes:
their school life, their family, their village or their hopes for the future. I told them
why I thought their lives as young students in the village were so interesting and
important. I explained that they were free to write about anything they felt was
relevant, but suggested some possible issues for each of the topics. I empha-
sized that I wanted truthful and honest accounts rather than fictional stories,
and I assured them that their texts would not be shown to any of the teachers or
students at the school and that in my own writing they would be anonymous. I
made it clear that no one was compelled to take part. Students were free to read
their books or sleep on their desks if they wanted, but to show my gratitude to
those who helped with my research, participants would be entered into a raffle
for a selection of small prizes – mostly toys, sports equipment, and sweets from
the village shop, plus a few items I had brought from the UK.
About 90 per cent of the students took part in the exercise, but even more
impressive than the participation rate was the level of detail and insight provided
by the students in their writing. Individual personalities and biographies emerged
from the pages. The uniformity with which children often presented themselves
in the classroom, afraid of standing out or attracting too much attention, was
replaced by colourful characters with strong opinions and senses of humour.
The exercise transformed my research by giving a voice to the majority of
students who had previously been silenced by my presence because they were
too nervous to say more than simple sentences or reluctant to explain themselves
to a foreigner whose Chinese was far from perfect. Now I could see for myself
that these students were thoughtful and reflective, able to write eloquently about
the conditions they faced at home and in the school. The children described their
frustrations with the education system, which they found dry and suffocating, yet
which they recognized was so important for realizing their dreams. They wrote of
their ambivalent feelings about their village and their hopes and anxieties about
the future. I read about dormitory life and how the dormitories were places that
offered some insulation from the pressures of school life, where children could
swap stories and broaden their knowledge of the world outside of the curriculum
and beyond the village. There were moving descriptions of the unequal treatment
of sons and daughters, and the loneliness and anxiety that children were suffering
as a result of the migration or death of parents. Following this exercise, I not only
felt I knew the children better – I had gained a deeper understanding of village
70 • Children

life. On the other hand, these new insights showed how much I had previously
been missing, and this re-enforced the sense that I had failed as an ethnographer.
It was clear from what they had written that the children had enjoyed this
exercise, and this was confirmed by a conversation I had with a group of them
that week. Far from seeing this as yet another arduous school task, the students
contrasted the type of activity I had asked them to do with the rote-memorization
of textbooks and the endless answering of multiple choice questions that
dominated regular school lessons. From their perspective, the exercise had
given them a taste of what they considered to be quality-oriented education.
The students at the village school were very familiar with the idea of quality-
oriented education, if not its practice, and they complained about how their own
education fell well short of this ideal. The students told me they had never previ-
ously had the chance to write freely while at junior high school. The opportunity
to give their own opinions and to write about what they considered interesting
or important, without judgement and without being criticized for wasting time,
came as a welcome relief. The children suspected that students in Chinese cities
received a higher-quality education than they experienced in the village, and they
were quite convinced that schools in developed countries must offer this kind of
superior education.
The students had enjoyed the written exercise, not because it was seen as
less educational or childish fun, but because it gave them a glimpse of an alter-
native, more desirable form of education: that is, an education aimed at fostering
the children’s personal qualities rather than just preparing them for the senior
high school entrance exam. Furthermore, it made sense to the students that I
would instigate this kind of activity. My teaching style reflected my status an
outstanding student and a foreign expert. If I was the exemplary product of a
high-quality education system, it seemed natural that I would also teach in the
style associated with quality-oriented education. The differences in background
and opportunities between the students and me could not have been more obvious
in these discussions. Yet despite this, on this evening at the end of term and as I
neared the end of my time living in the village, I really felt the students opened
up to me. Through this research exercise, I had shown that given the chance I
would do something different from the other teachers, something that challenged
what was normal within the school. I had given the children a chance to express
their opinions and I genuinely valued what they had to say. Consequently, I was
viewed as a sympathetic ally who would listen to their complaints about school
and village life. The students felt we shared a common ideal of how education
could and should be, while I exemplified how successful this alternative approach
to education could be. After the Spring Festival, as the pressure of the impending
exams built up, life in the classrooms would return to normal, but I expect that in
the dormitories the children’s critique continued.
 The Exemplary Adult • 71

Conclusion

I have described four encounters with children and four ways in which these
might be understood as ethnographic failures. Certainly, none came close to
my ideal of immersive participation allowing ethnographic insight relatively
unhindered by hierarchies of age and status or cultural difference. In the first and
second encounters, I failed because my difference from the children was accen-
tuated. I was placed in an elevated position within the status hierarchies of the
school and I was presented as an exemplary student and foreign expert. This not
only made me an intimidating presence, but implied that it was the children who
should be learning from me, not me from them. I was present in the school, but
unable to participate beyond the role that had been ascribed to me, and too remote
from the children to get to know their individual personalities.
In the third encounter, I took steps to challenge my status as an exemplary
adult in the hope of connecting with the children. I wanted to minimize my
difference, but my hapless performance on the basketball court only made me
a curiosity. Participating in their games made me appear less aloof, but not less
adult. Instead, I was identified as belonging to the category of bookish adults. The
limited extent to which I was able to build up a connection or sense of common
interest with the children meant that this was both a sporting and an ethnographic
failure.
Ironically, it was the fourth encounter, when I failed even to attempt participant
observation with the children and instead took advantage of the educational
hierarchy to direct them in a written research exercise, which the students found
most enjoyable and which finally seemed to create a sympathetic bond between
us. For the children, the class I organized was fun, not because my behaviour was
childlike or because the activity was childish, but, on the contrary, because it was
perceived as an exemplary form of education that took seriously their ideas and
creative potential.
Of course, failure is relative and subjective. Others have looked at my
research and suggested that it comfortably meets the messy, imprecise demands
of successful ethnography. ‘This is just what fieldwork is like’, I’ve been told
many times. However, my sense of failure reveals a contradiction in the way that
anthropologists approach ethnography. On the one hand, there is a clear sense in
which ethnography is a technical skill in which researchers should be trained.
From this perspective, it is by identifying the right techniques, becoming skilled
in their use and then putting them into effective practice in the field that one
becomes a competent ethnographer. For ethnographers working with children,
there is a canon of techniques whose value and success has been demonstrated
by worthy forebears. Approaches involving detached, impersonal observation are
shunned in favour of attempts to minimize distance and build up strong personal
relationships. At a minimum, ethnographers working with children should
72 • Children

befriend them, appearing unthreatening and unintimidating in the way that other
adults may be perceived. Ideally, adult researchers should fully participate in the
children’s lives, entering into the children’s world, and, while physically unable
to pass as a child, at least taking on the least-adult role adopting the speech,
mannerisms, and behaviour of the children with whom they participate.
It was my inability to enact my research using such research techniques that led
to my sense of failure, which malingered throughout my fieldwork and long after.
I blamed my lack of technical competence and poor planning for the difficulties I
had. However, this assumption that ethnography is a technique under the control
of the researcher is made problematic by a second understanding of what ethnog-
raphy involves. In this contrasting approach, hierarchies and cultural differences
are not something to be overcome through good technique, but characteristics
that need to be investigated as part of the ethnography. From this perspective, the
ethnographic encounter is recognized as being shaped by the social, cultural, and
political context in a way that may facilitate or limit the agency of the researcher.
When, as was the case for me, access to schools is conditional on performing
the role of a high-status foreign expert, and research must take second place to
preparing students for examinations, then the ethnographer’s capacity to shape
the encounter is severely restricted. In these circumstances, acknowledging that
local hierarchies have presented a challenge to researching children’s lives is not
an admission of ethnographic failure, but is itself ethnography: a form of valuable
data and a source of insight into the social and cultural world of a Chinese school.
In such ethnographic encounters, it can feel deeply frustrating to be appro-
priated by local actors into their own cultural hierarchies. We may feel a sense of
failure as we lose agency and influence over our own research, as I certainly did.
Yet, as Sahlins (1985) showed in his discussion of Captain Cook’s fateful return
to Hawaii, even when as outsiders we are being subsumed – even consumed –
within local cultural structures, our worst failures may still be anthropologically
enlightening.
 5

Learning to be a Child in Greater London

Anne-Marie Sim

‘I’m going to push you!’ says Lena. It is a threat and a boast. I catch the wicked
glint in her eye and throw back a look of defiance tempered with real and mock
terror.
‘Nooooo!’ I say, exaggerating the ‘o’, holding out my arms in front of me as a
protective barrier, and edging back along the ledge we’re balanced on.
And then, when there is distance: ‘I’m going to push you!’ I retort, my smile
widening to a grin.
Spurred on, Lena darts forward. I step back. And then suddenly I feel a shove
at my back. It is only slight but I am caught off guard and let out an inadvertent
shriek of surprise. I raise my arms to balance, but I can see Lena’s self-satisfied
smirk, can hear Laila’s whoop of delight at my back, and I know that I want
to fall. My feet teeter on the edge of the slope, and then I take a leap. I am
flying through the air. For the briefest of moments, I feel my inadequate ballet
pumps clinging on tenuously, and I raise my toes to keep hold of them. And
then I am falling; a butterfly and a scream I hadn’t known were there escape
into the warm summer air. Abruptly, my feet collide with the dusty earth. My
knees buckle and I propel myself downwards in rapid steps to stay upright. I
keep on running, long leaps, accelerating as I near the foot of the slope. I want
to prolong this moment – the exhilaration of my flight – for as long as I can.
But then, it is gone. All has been absorbed into the soft grass of the field, and
I turn around.
‘That was soooo scary!’
‘You went really far!’
‘Laila pushed me! I thought I was going to fall!’
‘Yeah, she pushed me too! We should get her this time!’
‘Let’s do it again!’
‘I’m going to go backwards this time!’
‘It’s even scarier backwards, ’cause you can’t see where you’re going!’
73
74 • Children

The very first time I try ‘running down the slope’ – a favourite activity, for a
time, of the girls at school with whom I spend break and lunchtimes – I make it
down in two paces. It’s barely more than half a meter high. I’m not that much
bigger than the others, and I know that many enjoy the same rollercoasters and
theme park rides that I do. So, as the girls scramble to the top to go again, I realize
that I’m not doing it right. It isn’t just about the slope, this gently inclined ridge
hemming in the sports field from the fence. Rather, the appeal of ‘running down
the slope’ is the drama that is created by those present, in conjunction with the
slope that helps to sweep one up (or in this case, down) in the drama. As I learn
to run down the slope properly, I discover that an adult emphasis on whether
things are real or made up is misplaced, because it is neither and both at once. I
feign and exaggerate my pushing, falling and running, and my before and after
narratives of my feats of bravado and experiences of fear. And in doing so – in
this very creative act of implicating myself and creating a reaction in others – my
moving body experiences, perpetuates and intentionally prolongs the thrill and
excitement of its own performance as I leap, fly, fall and accelerate my way down
to the field and back up the slope again.
I suppose I hadn’t fully thought through, if this is possible to do a priori,
what exactly participant-observation with children would entail. I had read
various ethnographic accounts, most of which had the ethnographer positioned
as an adult with ‘special’ friend status relative to the children he or she was
working with. Meanwhile, ‘full participation’ with children – a ‘swinging-from-
the-monkey-bars’ approach – tended to be deemed impossible or inappropriate.
Thus, in line with what it seemed was best practice, I simply had in mind that I
wanted to minimize any notion of adult authority between myself and my child
participants. In addition, from an ethical perspective, I did not want to be too
much of an imposition in these children’s lives, unless they sought my presence.
After all, adult authority means adults can impose on children’s lives even where
they aren’t welcome. As it turned out, however, the form my participant-obser-
vation has taken has for the most part been that of full participation, as described
by Mandell (1988) – that is, of joint action and meaning-making with children.
Whilst limited to particular situations, I think that full participation with children
is nonetheless a worthwhile epistemological starting point and can be fruitful,
even if it is never wholly realized. In the different environments in which my
fieldwork takes place, I am, at times, variously a ‘friend’, ‘teenager’, older cousin
type, ‘teacher’, ‘student’, and blurry figure defying categorization. There is no
moment of epiphany that describes my acceptance into the worlds of my child
participants. Whilst I have wished for, and been frustrated at the lack of, a neat
narrative, the reality is that there are up and down days, or even just moments,
in my encounters with children in the field – in making friends, getting attention,
having fun and, at a basic level, being accepted.
 Learning to be a Child in Greater London • 75

‘Full’ Participation

The purpose of my research in London was to gain children’s perspectives on

their everyday lives, with a particular focus on how they engage with the future.
In the UK, as in many other countries, most children spend their time variously
at home(s), at school, at various after- or before-school clubs or activities, and in
moving between these places. As such, I had decided that I would spend time in a
number of these different environments. Thus, in May 2013, I began to meet with
Alex, a ten-year-old boy living in Greater London. Every few weeks, I would
spend usually a whole Saturday or Sunday with Alex and his friends, in addition
to chatting on Skype or by phone. In the same month, I also started attending
a primary school close to where I lived.1 I became a teaching assistant in the
school’s two Year 5 classes (with pupils aged nine and ten), attending initially
twice and then four times a week when the children moved up to Year 6, the final
year of primary school. A short time after this, I also began volunteering at the
school’s breakfast and afterschool club, a separately administered wraparound
care service that takes place in the early mornings and late afternoons at the
school site (catering for five to eleven-year olds). I also volunteered at Guides
(part of the international Girlguiding Movement), a weekly multi-activity group
for girls aged ten to fourteen, held in the nearby church, which a few girls from
school attend.
The first time I meet Alex at his home in a suburb on the outskirts of Greater
London, Liz, Alex’s mum, entreats me to sit and have tea with her. I’m tentative
about this, because I don’t want to come across as being ‘on the adults’ side’
(if there is one). Sitting in the living room and drinking tea are both markers
of ‘adult guest’ status. Alex himself immediately runs up to his room when we
arrive back from the station, where they’ve come to pick me up, and when he
comes back down he goes to the fridge for a soft drink. Nevertheless, as it’s
with her permission that I’m able to be there, I follow Liz to the kitchen, where
she puts on the kettle and tells me about the family. After tea, Liz puts Alex in
charge, and we spend the rest of the day (the next seven hours) either in Alex’s
room playing ‘Zombies’ on the PlayStation2 or else out in the local area. We
go to the park, knock on the doors of his friends’ houses, get sweets from the
shop and generally walk around, with Alex pointing out and telling me about
various things of interest. Although it’s far less extreme than at school, I notice
the adjustments in speech, conversational style, bodily comportment, and taste
that I make, almost unthinkingly, when moving between an adult-supervised
area and a child-led one. With Liz, I want tea, with Alex, Fanta Orange. It’s only
when children and adults are present together that I feel an uncomfortable sense
of hypocrisy, as if I’ve been being fake with one or the other group, usually the
children. As I discover, this is one of the hazards of conducting anthropology ‘at
home’. Whilst I find myself learning from my research participants in much the
76 • Children

same way as one might when doing fieldwork abroad, it is the constant presence
of other adults (my ‘home’ community) that creates an awkward tension in my
performances of identity. On the other hand, my behaviour is possibly not so
extraordinary to children, since they are constantly engaging in these differential
performances, in particular when talking with adult caretakers.
At school, my first encounter with my participants begins in a classroom,
where I loiter at the back, am briefly introduced by the teacher, and receive a
few smiles, some surreptitious stares or else nothing at all. To be fair, though, the
children are supposed to be facing the teacher at the front. The buzzer finally goes
for the end of the lesson and the children file out for break time; I follow, up the
stairs, on to the field. Soon, I am accosted by various Year 5s running over to me,
and am bombarded with a cacophony of questions: ‘What’s your name, again?’
‘We got your letter – are you writing a book about us?’ ‘How old are you?’ ‘What
will the book be about?’ ‘How long are you here for?’ ‘Are you staying ’til next
year?’ ‘Do you want to ask us about the future?’ ‘Do you want to race me?’ ‘Do
you want to play with us?’ As I try to answer the questions in turn, some children
wander off again, whilst some stay and others join. Other year groups are told
about me: ‘Yeah, she’s in our year!’ ‘She’s in our class!’ ‘She’s writing a book
about us!’
I am invited to play by various children and, despite awareness of notions of
appropriate ‘adult behaviour’, I immediately find myself joining in. I’m not sure
how I wouldn’t: to do so would be to draw divisions that must be adult constructs,
since the children themselves are not discriminating against me by inviting me
to play. Further, it would be a rejection of their attempts at befriending me. And
on the vast expanse of the school field I feel less subject to the scrutinizing gaze
and potential disapproval of staff. Having not articulated beforehand exactly
what form my participant-observation would take, I realize then that being a
friendly adult on the sidelines, to whom children choose to relate incidents and
in whom they confide, is not sufficient for the kind of children’s perspective I am
hoping to gain. I want not only to be sympathetic to children’s concerns, but to
be a part of the action: to learn what it feels like to participate in – and, as I also
find out, to be excluded from – children’s peer-to-peer social interactions. Thus,
over the course of my fieldwork, I engage in pretend-games, learn dances and
clapping routines, play football, ‘Manhunt’3 and other chasing games, compete in
races, hurl myself down the slope, make myself dizzy, tell scary stories, procure
a PlayStation, stealthily eat sweets, and walk about in pairs or sit in groups on
benches and on railings. More than this, though, a desire to be accepted means
caring – and worrying – deeply about whether I will have anyone to sit next to
at lunchtime, whether I am included in games, conversations, and secrets, and
whether I am counted as a friend.
As I join in with Alex and the other children I make friends with, I learn, in
some senses, how to be a child. Since it is adults who usually set the agenda and
 Learning to be a Child in Greater London • 77

ask questions to children, I try to let the children I talk with take the lead, asking
back questions I am asked – such as ‘Do you have phobia?’ – and commenting
on topics raised by others, rather than instigating topics of conversation myself.
I try to act and speak in as close a way to the children as I can, going with the
flow of talk and action rather than asking questions, demanding context and
desiring reflection. The adult’s, and in particular the adult researcher’s, desire for
knowledge of origin, context and causality – of asking what is going on, or why,
rather than actually joining in – is an ingrained reflex that I learn, though never
completely successfully, to suppress. For example, when the fad for making
loom bands, a type of rubber band bracelet, first arrives in school, I try to find
out when and how the craze started and spread: ‘Who started doing loom bands
first? When did you first make them?’ I ask. I am rebuffed with some nonchalant
shrugs and talk shifts to something else. Children’s concerns tend to be with the
object or event itself, or its humour and current value in getting a reaction from
peers. Going with the flow often means simply ‘agreeing’ rather than demanding
clarification, and ‘telling’ about personal experiences of similar things, rather
than probing for detail from the prior speaker: ‘I’ve got glow-in-the-dark loom
bands!’ ‘I’ve got smelly loom bands! Mmm, they smell of …’ he takes a sniff:
‘strawberry!’
I learn that whilst advocates of child-focused research call for adults to listen
to children (something I absolutely agree with), as a participant, it is impossible
to know whom to listen to, or for how long, as people often speak at the same
time, groups fragment if different people want to carry on different conversa-
tions, and then re-form or take off somewhere else if a drama or enjoyable
performance seems to be taking place there. There is a constant looking around,
an openness to things happening elsewhere and to new potentialities to engage
in. Conversation darts around much more rapidly than that amongst adults, so
that in note-taking, which I do at the end of most days, I sometimes find myself
confused about what was said when, and, despite copious notes, am sure I
leave out many things. Whilst I learn some of the art of flitting between groups
and conversations that take my interest, and some of the skill of the dramatic
performance that draws people towards oneself, I sometimes feel my learning
is impeded by my ethical concerns. For example, at school, in particular, I feel
unable to give opinions on matters of ‘liking’ and ‘disliking’ – a popular topic
– when it is about peers and teachers. I worry that if my opinions get back to
any teachers I will be deemed irresponsible and my access might be curtailed.
Yet, the reciprocal nature of such exchanges means that without information
or opinions to share, conversations are cut short and resulting bonding oppor-
tunities limited. Being constantly wary of what I can and cannot say and being
unable to confide in my ‘peers’, whilst simultaneously caring desperately
about peer social success and being included, is also stressful and emotionally
exhausting.
78 • Children

Limitations; Benefits

As well as wariness about what I can say to my participants, I worry about the
perceived inappropriateness of a ‘strange’ adult spending time with children.
Having read about this beforehand, in both the anthropological literature and
ethical guidelines, I am anxious about how my practices might be perceived, by
both adults and the children themselves, even when I am invited to participate.
Meanwhile, when not directly invited to do so, I sometimes hold back, for fear
my intrusion may be regarded with suspicion. For example, although I am happy
that Alex and his parents trust me, when Alex goes up to the doors of his friends
to ask them to come out, I find myself staying a measured distance away and
perceive myself to be scrutinized by parents. Yet my worries in the out-of-school
environment turn out to be misplaced, for the ‘strange adult’ that lurks on street
corners does not look like me. In the popular press, rather than the more gener-
alized pages of institutional ethics and disclosure forms, the threat is visualized as
characteristically male and older-looking. Yet in the school environment, which
marches to the same institutional beat in which I have been immersed, it is indeed
the out-of-place adult (as an absolute category, in opposition to the child) who
is the threat. Loitering and chatting with John and Sachin in the school atrium
(we are supposed to be going to the field), a teacher passes and asks them if they
are okay. In the playground, Mr Lawrence calls out ‘Are you alright, Sophie?’
as she puts her face close to mine to tell me a story. And Amina, one of the girls
I chat with most at school, tells me that she’s been told by Ms Jameson that she
shouldn’t spend so much time with me. Needless to say, whilst I don’t feel as
though I’m doing anything wrong, these suspicions exert a checking effect upon
my ability to fully participate, and, although this never appears to be the case,
I particularly worry about children themselves feeling uncomfortable about my
presence. The scrutinizing gaze and threat of removal of access from the school,
and other environments, are both a real factor and something that I direct upon
myself, even with permissions in place, and even in the absence, in the out-of-
school environment, of any actual scrutiny or suspicion occurring.
Another checking effect is caused by my attempting to fit into the peer
environment by being a follower rather than a leader, attempting not to implicate
any power imbalances by bringing into talk too many experiences that I might
have gained from the longer course of my life, or things I might have access to
that my participants will not have. In this way, I eschew the easy social success
that I might have gained by being a desirable adult or older child/teenager with
whom many of the children think it ‘cool’ to talk. However, not using desirable
information and knowledge that I might have, nor other external sources of
‘coolness’, to draw others to myself is inherently contradictory to these children’s
peer culture. For example, at Guide Camp,4 whilst at times friendships between
the elder and younger girls occur on an even-handed, peer basis, at other times
 Learning to be a Child in Greater London • 79

bonding is a direct result of the benefits afforded by the age differential. The
elder girls tell the younger ones desirable information about their imminent
futures in secondary school, with the younger ones reciprocating the relationship
with a certain level of awe and respect. Sometimes, the elder girls ‘mother’ the
younger ones by doing their hair, giving them piggybacks and calling them ‘my
mini-me’, all practices that at Guide Camp I follow. At other times, the older
girls exclude the younger ones, declaring them ‘too young to listen to this sort
of stuff!’ when, for example, Hayley, the Guide leader, begins explaining the
meanings of various sexual terms. The nine to eleven year olds I work with,
similarly, take up this sometimes nurturing, sometimes patronizing attitude
towards children in Year 3 and below (four to seven year olds), emphasizing
their older status. The protective/dismissive (care/control) attitude I assumed to
be unique to the adult–child relationship is in fact occurring between older and
younger children at various ages. This, I think, accounts for why by adulthood
one can be so dismissive of the full personhood of the young child that everyone
once was: there is not simply one schism that occurs upon adulthood (whenever
this might be), but a continual revising downwards of the agency experienced at
prior times. For children, there is an attraction to being, and presenting oneself
as, older. Yet, for me, then, in trying to be like a child – in trying to be younger
than I actually am – I am, paradoxically, not being like a child. This is something
I never really resolve.
Whilst I learn much from the difficulties of attempts at ‘full’ participation, I
also learn a great deal from the ‘moments of enchantment’ that I experience when
full participation occurs. In these moments, such as the one documented at the
start of this chapter, I find myself being ‘carried away’ by the affective changes
and momentum that the requisite bodily movements, performative practices,
and imaginative leaps demand. This experiential level of engagement is, I think,
one of the key benefits of ‘full’ participation. Whilst my bodily experience of an
activity may vary significantly from a child’s experience because of my different
habitus and range of embodied experiences, issues of dissonance in meaning
apply no less when interpreting on the basis of observation only. Meanwhile,
there are many times when I experience first-hand what I believe are communally
created sensations such as delight, approbation, fear, and hilarity that can only
be felt through bodily motion. What participation allows for is an understanding
of the impelling force of momentum in movement and narrative that occurs in a
connection with peers and material objects, and in combination with a desire – an
agency – in creating, prolonging, and maximizing pleasant or exciting affective
sensations. If, as has been discussed, embodied, situated knowledge is hugely
important to children, then developing a ‘feeling’ for how such knowledge might
come to be created, in combination with movement, in the material environment
and peers, is crucial.
80 • Children

Movement and Momentum

It’s a Friday morning in October 2013 and I have just entered the school refectory
for ‘breakfast club’. Beyond a scattering of mostly younger children eating
breakfast or playing, I spot Hazel and Mia from Year 6 and head over to them
with some Year 5 friends, Kim, Tanisha and Lani. Hazel has a small whiteboard
propped up against the wall. ‘We’re just doing factfiles of books we’ve finished
recently’, she explains. ‘Have you read anything recently?’ I tell her I’m reading
Moonwailer and after asking me for various bits of information about the main
character, Billy Hardacre, Hazel writes up the following:

Name: Billy Hardacre

Age: 11/12
Hobby: Sees spirits
Best friend: Callum Truelove
Lives: Lives with mum

‘That’s one … two … three … four … five facts we know about him!’ she says,
counting them off in front of everyone. ‘’Cause, we’re doing this thing, like – do
you watch any police dramas? You know, like, CSI and stuff? I love them, and
we’re doing this thing where we – you know they do, like, profiles of the people
they’re looking for? Well, that’s what we’re doing.’ She continues: ‘Next we need
to work out where he is. What do we know about him? He sees spirits. So, you
have a choice of two places: he’s either in the yoga studio or in an old building
with candles. What do you think?’
We all adopt ‘agent’ names, and then Hazel dispatches half of us to ‘the old
building’ and the other half to ‘the yoga studio’. This involves physically getting
up and going somewhere else. I’m in Hazel’s group, and we head off to the
opposite side of the room. At this point, I don’t know what we’re supposed to
be doing, but Hazel picks up various bits and pieces, such as a toy pram wheel
and spade, and I join in. ‘Oh, that could be the old building’, I say, pointing to a
toy house that opens. ‘And inside the wardrobe, we find loads of money!’ Hazel
opens the little wardrobe inside the house and pulls open a tiny drawer. Hidden
inside are some bits of Lego. ‘Did you know that was going to be there?!’ I ask
incredulously. Hazel shakes her head. ‘No!’ she exclaims. ‘But it went exactly
like I said!’ We head back and compare evidence with the other group. ‘We
found … a blood-stained cloth’, Mia says, producing a reddish-soiled tissue, ‘a
doll …’ ‘Ooh, a cursing doll!’ interrupts Hazel, excitedly. ‘And this clue’, says
Mia, pulling out a piece of paper. ‘It says: double this number and add 16, makes
37.’
I suppose that, looking back on this, it isn’t so strange that a scrap of paper
with a maths puzzle should be found in a school refectory. Yet with the preceding
 Learning to be a Child in Greater London • 81

events that have unfolded, all overlaid with the emergent, open-ended, yet
bizarrely coherent narrative that Hazel has fashioned with help from the rest
of us – the money in the wardrobe, the blood-stained cloth – this maths puzzle
really does seem like a clue, or a taunt, left by a dangerous serial killer. From
not knowing what’s going on, the game is actually starting to feel quite ‘real’ and
scary. Like being absorbed into a television crime drama, the bright and noisy
refectory has taken on an eerie glow; the background hubbub has faded into a
blanket of white noise behind the propelling force of the storyline.
Hazel says: ‘So, what can we work out from this information?’ We look to the
board, with the information about Billy Hardacre. Hazel says: ‘So, he’s killing
all the people who … Wait, how many people have been killed?’ ‘Eight’, is
ventured. ‘Okay, so what are their names and what are their jobs?’ Hazel writes
up the suggestions. ‘What about the two billion?’ I say, referring to the money we
found in the wardrobe. Hazel replies: ‘He’s actually working with Peter Rocky
… what’s his name?’ ‘Rockefeller’, says Mia. ‘Yeah, Peter Rockefeller’, says
Hazel. ‘And so they go round together and Billy kills the people; they’re business
partners.’ ‘Maybe the clue you found can tell us something’, I say to Mia. ‘What’s
the clue?’ Mia reads it aloud again. ‘It’s 10½’, I say to Hazel. ‘So what does this
tell us?’ she asks.
Now, not because I am trying to think of a narrative, but rather, without
thinking, but simply by being so caught up in the narrative, I feel like I know what
the clue means. With the intuition of a detective agent, I say: ‘Ooh, I only know
one address with 10½. It’s 10½ Vicarage Road – ’cause it was number 10 – it was
a big house, and it got split into two, so one half got called 10½’.
‘Okay, so we need to move!’ barks Hazel. ‘Let’s get down there – go, go! I’ll
stay here. You’re all going to the same place.’
We scuffle off. Mia searches, picking something up. I’m looking with her
when Lani and Tanisha come towards us, shrieking, ‘We saw the cupboard door
open!’ Lani pulls us over to the door of the cupboard. ‘It opened and the broom
moved!’ ‘Did it?!’ I ask rhetorically, half for real, half in the game. We stare at the
slightly ajar door for a while, spooked, before tentatively getting back to ‘work’,
grabbing a handful of things.
‘We found loads of stuff!’ exclaims Mia, when we return. But the plot thickens,
as Hazel says: ‘I worked out that it’s not 10½ Vicarage Road – that was a trap!
Vicarage has “vicar” in it. So he’s actually gone to kill the vicar! At number 9,
Rose Lane!’ she says, pointing to where she’s written it up on the board. I feel a
searing chill run through my spine – a trap! How could we have been so stupid?
But then, Gina is at the refectory door. Breakfast club is over and we need to go.
We pick up our coats and bags from plastic chairs and formica tables and line up
next to the food counter.
82 • Children

Being Accepted

In what ways do the children I am researching accept me as a participant in their

practices? I think my openness to being included and attempts at joining in are
clearly important to my being accepted. As well as this, or perhaps prior to it,
my appearance, including dress and bodily practices, are also crucial factors. In
appearance, I look young. Whilst I do not look, or manage to behave, quite like
the nine- to eleven-year-olds that I am studying, I could be confused, age-wise,
with a teenager, with whom the children are familiar from out-of-school environ-
ments, such as siblings, or friends from Guides. The importance of appearance
and dress, especially to the girls I encountered, should not be undervalued. When,
in March, I suffer from a terribly short haircut, the Year 6 and Year 5 girls I know
lament my bad decision and its results: ‘Miss Sim, your hair!’ ‘Why did you
cut your hair?’ ‘You don’t look like Miss Sim anymore – you’re someone else!
You’re an imposter!’ And one girl, Tanisha, asks me every day until the end of
the school year in July: ‘Has your hair grown yet?’
Meanwhile, the girls in my class complain about the fact that ‘You always
wear the same clothes!’ Amina asks: ‘Why do you always wear grey jumpers?
You look like a pupil ’cause it’s almost like school uniform! If I was over there
[indicating a spot further away], I wouldn’t know you weren’t a pupil’. Despite
sometimes condemning my style as boring, and not what they would choose to
wear if they didn’t have to wear school uniform, my clothes do, to some extent,
help me to ‘blend in’. On the other hand, on a particularly cold day, when wearing
a rather extravagant long coat with fur trim, I receive compliments from some
of the girls: ‘I like your coat – it’s really cool!’ But Amina says: ‘You don’t look
like Miss Sim anymore! You look like a thirty-year-old now!’ I don’t wear the
coat again.
It has been argued that if childhood is an age-based social structural category,
adults cannot, in view of their age and related physical development, ‘become’
children. Yet it seems to me that the category of ‘adult’ is perhaps not as
monolithic and the boundaries defined by age not as clear-cut as researchers often
seem to make out. Although recent sociological writings discuss adulthood as an
uncertain and blurry category, the label of ‘adult’ still seems to have hegemony
from an adult viewpoint, and especially when used in the context of ‘child’.
Yet for children, although frequently reminded by adults that they are children,
the category of ‘child’ is not necessarily always foremost in mind in relations
with others. Although ‘age’ is a constant talking point and point of comparison
amongst children, as previously mentioned, this comes up situationally, and in
fact requires certain behaviours to mobilize it. That I was asked my age multiple
times by the same children, suggests, I think, that it is not something that is borne
in mind as a fixed and separating factor. That they proffer incredulity each time
I tell them my ‘real age’ is because their imagination of a necessary ‘adult’ of
 Learning to be a Child in Greater London • 83

my age does not fit with their perception of me at that particular time, based on
my appearance, bodily habitus, or the practices I am engaging in. Meanwhile,
knowledge of people who do not fit into the stereotypical image of an adult,
such as ‘adult’ relatives and friends who live at home, and ‘teenage’ relatives and
friends with whom some aspects of peer culture are shared, means that famili-
arity with category-blurring non-adult figures or teenage peers already exists.
Of course, this also has to do with the particular age group that I am studying,
because many of them know or are friends with twelve to fifteen year olds and
older teenagers who, from the perspective of physical development may look like
‘adults’. Hence, at one point when I tell a small group of children at afterschool
club I am thirty, one girl says, ‘You’re thirteen’.
‘No, thirty’, I say.
‘You mean thirteen’, she says.
‘You’re not thirty’, another girl says. ‘My mum’s thirty.’
At afterschool club and Guides, familiarity with teenage helpers lends prece-
dence to this assumption. Meanwhile, out on the streets with Alex, and feeling
self-conscious about what people might think about my hanging around with
children, I am surprised to find that his friends and even adult neighbours we
meet often assume that I am a child too. ‘Do you go to school with Alex?’ I am
asked, or, ‘What school are you at?’ When I tell people I don’t attend his school,
Alex tends to be asked how he knows me. He usually responds with the fact that
his aunt works with my mum (which is indeed how he comes to take part in my
research). It is only when we encounter some ‘bullies’ in the park one day that
Alex says defiantly: ‘She’s writing a book about me! She’s thirty!’
‘No, she ain’t’, is the response from both the bullies and Alex’s friend Charlie,
who is with us.
When Alex later explains to Charlie that I really am thirty and a research
student, Charlie says (referring, I think, to the nature of our relationship rather
than any similarities in appearance): ‘Oh, I thought you two were related! You
should be related!’
In the out-of-school environment, then, whilst being perceived to be a strange
adult hanging out with children is something that I worry about, it appears, at
least amongst the families I encounter, not to be noticed due to my appearance
and behaviour. When my age and research status are revealed, such as amongst
Alex’s friends at his sleepover birthday party, there tends to be a momentary
‘oh!’ before the information seems to rapidly recede behind the more immediate
factors of behaviour and appearance. I am treated largely as before: given shares
in sweets and game-playing, and competed with and heckled, as the others are.
At school, on the other hand, becoming a teaching assistant (a suggestion I
rashly make to the deputy head in our first meeting because I think it will be easier
to explain than ‘classroom observer’) turns out to be an immutable label and role
that I never come to terms with. What I don’t realize is that the teaching assistant
84 • Children

role is almost entirely disciplinary, in the sense of the everyday overseeing,

shushing, and harrying of children into doing work, and in reporting back to the
teacher. In this sense, teaching assistants are very much part of the teaching staff,
and children usually conflate the labels. There are many occasions, then, when I
hear: ‘Shh! There’s a teacher!’ Frequently, I am accepted as something other than
a teacher. Thus, in response, I hear, ‘Miss Sim’s not going to tell you off!’ or ‘It’s
just Miss Sim!’ Or, on one occasion, ‘Miss Sim knows all the gossip! Do you
remember how Ollie said he likes Jemima in Wales, Miss Sim? You’re not really
a teacher, you’re kind of more like our class counsellor or something!’
That I’m not quite a teacher, or am other things as well, often comes up.
Drawing in the library with Shivani and Annabel, Shivani asks rhetorically:
‘What jobs do you have? You’re a teacher, a writer …’
‘I think of Miss Sim as more of a friend’, says Annabel.
‘Yeah, she is a friend’, says Shivani, ‘but she’s also a teacher, and a writer, oh
yeah, and a student’. Meanwhile, a five-year-old boy in breakfast club asks me:
‘Are you a pupil or are you a teacher? ’Cause you look like a pupil.’
‘I’m not a pupil’, I say.
‘Are you a teacher then?’ he asks.
Hazel, from my Year 6 class, says: ‘She’s not really either’.
In the end, the biggest problem I encounter is not to do with acceptance
by the children, but by the school. Despite trying to perform certain aspects
of the teaching assistant role as well as I can, I can see that in refraining from
exercising adult authority I am not living up to the school’s expectations, and
feel increasingly distanced from staff. Meanwhile, contrary to my out-of-school
experiences, where I have perhaps been overly and unnecessarily worried about
the child protection environment and negative perceptions of my hanging out
with children, in school I feel consistently watched and undermined. Whereas,
out of school, my acceptance by the children themselves is positively received
by the adults around us, in school this is viewed with suspicion. Yet to my face
staff relations with me remain cordial, if distant. I feel caught in multiple traps
of knowledge and silence, the result of which, outside of moments of fun and
enchantment, means being in a state of continuous tension and exhaustion. Near
the end of the school year, the final straw is when I’m added to a WhatsApp
chat group by Shivani. From feelings of excitement at being included and
participating in the chat, as well as the typical worry that accompanies all of
my acceptance into the worlds of children, I am swiftly plunged into terror as
information gets back to me that a class teacher has found out, that some of my
‘friends’ have got into trouble and that I face being ‘spoken to’ by the school.
Being backed by the parents of the girls in trouble consoles me somewhat; then
resentment at the school kicks in as I’m told that as a ‘sort of’ member of staff,
contact with children outside of school is strictly not allowed, and I must delete
myself from all groups. I’m angry because I’m treated like ‘a member of staff’
 Learning to be a Child in Greater London • 85

when it suits the school’s objectives, yet at all other times I’m marginalized. It
just doesn’t seem fair. As usual, however, amidst the spectre of losing access,
I’m polite and tow the line: perhaps to the adults too, then, I’m the epitome of
the ‘good’ ‘does-what-she’s-told’ child. And, like a child who has had a phone
confiscated, I feel suddenly excluded and alone, unable even to see if I have the
support of others because I’m now out of the loop. It’s almost the end of the year,
yet it feels ruined for me, because everything is happening around me, now, and
I’m left out, and maybe it’s my own fault. In the face of my powerlessness, I take
to writing in my notebook ‘I HATE SCHOOL’. I scratch it in deep-set capitals,
with daggers doodled around it. Perhaps this, too, then, is something akin to the
experience of being a child.
 6

Questions and Curiosities, Ignorance and

Understanding: Ethnographic Encounters with
Children in Central India

Peggy Froerer

The Impossibility of Doing Research with Children

In 1997, having spent a couple of years studying in and traveling through India,
I embarked on a PhD in anthropology. One of the motivating factors behind my
interest in pursuing anthropological research was the opportunity to focus on
children’s perspectives: their ways of seeing the world, their experiences, their
cultures. Given my familiarity with India, it seemed only natural that I return to
the subcontinent to carry out my research. Armed with some rudimentary Hindi,
a finely argued research proposal and a great deal of enthusiasm, I approached
my two supervisors with my plan.
Absolutely not, said one. Out of the question, said the other. Impossible, I
was told, to ‘get at’ children’s perspectives without a pre-existing, substantive
knowledge of the more ‘dominant’ (adult) culture. What did I think children
could tell me? They’re young, they’re ignorant, they don’t know anything. Why
would I want to waste time on them?
Children had, of course, been recognized as valid subjects of anthropological
enquiry since the 1970s, and child-focused anthropological research and accom-
panying methodologies had been on the rise since the early 1990s. But my
supervisors – both highly respected specialists in the field of anthropology, with
decades of ethnographic research between them – seemed oblivious to these
trends. What I was proposing, apparently, was more suitable for a postdoctoral
study: the kind of ‘off-track’ thing that is carried out on the back of a more
foundational piece of work; a supplement to something more serious. And with
that I was effectively banned from working with children during the course of
my PhD research.

87
88 • Children

Feeling naïve and more than a little nonplussed in the face of this unexpected
reaction, I dutifully set out to conduct a ‘proper’ anthropological study, one with
adults situated firmly at the centre. While I by no means ignored children in this
initial research, I kept them firmly at a distance: my ethnographic encounters with
them were minimal, almost incidental, and they appeared only at the periphery of
the monograph that later emerged from this study.
Five years later, PhD in hand, I dusted off my original proposal and embarked
upon a second research project, this time with children at the centre. Much had
changed since my initial foray into child-focused research, and in the intervening
years I had come to be aware of how deeply flawed and problematic my ethno-
graphic distancing of children had been. Children, I had learned, are not only
active participants in the (so-called adult) worlds around them; their perspectives
are critical for a substantive anthropological understanding of the way those
worlds are perceived, reproduced, and transformed. Such perspectives are still
deemed by some anthropologists to be less meaningful, somehow, than adults’
views, and the idea that children can possibly be authorities on their own experi-
ences is regularly dismissed on the grounds that they are ignorant. Fortunately,
nowadays the field of anthropology actively supports this sort of early-stage
ethnographic research with children.

(Re)settling In: Questions and Curiosities

It was with this knowledge that I returned to the same tribal village in central
India where I had conducted my earlier research. My return followed a three-year
absence, and I spent the first couple of weeks meeting old friends, reacquainting
myself with members of the community and catching up on all the local news.
I visited nearly every one of the 170 households in the village, explaining to
people over endless cups of tea the reason why I had been gone for so long, and
why I had returned. I had taken several copies of the ‘book’ (my PhD thesis)
to present to the village headman and my village family. People were very
pleased to discover that their words, stories, and photographs had, as promised,
been immortalized in this text. I told them that, whereas last time my research
focused on the experiences of grownups, this time I was interested in the views
of children. They agreed that that this was sensible: since I had previously learnt
‘the ways of the old people’, it was now time for me to learn ‘how the young do
things’. Following this period of reacquaintance, I settled back into the groove
of fieldwork.
As any ethnographer can attest, one of the most important criteria for
conducting ethnographic fieldwork is gaining rapport and establishing trust with
those with whom research will be conducted. This can take time – weeks, months,
even years. While I am firmly of the camp that children and their perspectives can
 Questions and Curiosities, Ignorance and Understanding • 89

(and should) be the focus of an initial doctoral study, I was forced, grudgingly, to
admit that it was extraordinarly useful to have had a pre-existing relationship with
the people in my field site. My previous research, where I had spent two years
thoroughly immersed in village life, provided me with an invaluable grounding
from which to study the worlds and perspectives of children. Ethnographic famil-
iarity aside, this meant that the village ‘gatekeepers’, including the headman, the
school teachers, and parents, were more than happy to support me in this latest
research endeavour, and I quickly reassumed my role as ‘adopted daughter’ to my
host family and the local community.
My relief at the ease with which I slipped back into the community was short
lived, however. Sure, I had pre-existing relationships, along with a wealth of prior
knowledge of local life, beliefs, and practices. But this didn’t mean that children
shared this knowledge. And it certainly didn’t mean that they were prepared to
talk to me about it. So I found myself back in that awkward, uncertain stage
with which all ethnographers are familiar: slightly insecure about how to situate
myself within this unfamiliar world of children, and unsure how to proceed with
this new ethnographic endeavour.
I began with the method I knew best – seeking out sympathetic informants
with whom I could ‘hang out’ and establish a rapport. These were my ‘nieces’
and ‘nephews’: children who lived near to my house, whose parents I knew well
from my earlier fieldwork. Most of them had only scant memories of my earlier
presence in their lives, and the way I used to hang out, chatting endlessly to their
parents over glasses of tea or local beer, asking questions, and writing in my
notebook. From the early morning hours, when people began to arise, I would
search out and join two or three of these children as they warmed themselves
near the communal fire. In an effort to break the ice with these children, I tried
to engage them in small-talk about what I thought were subjects of common
interest: the previous night’s thunder storm, or the chilly morning temperature,
or their plans for that day. Their clipped responses reflected both the inappro-
priateness of this sort of approach, and their discomfort over the uncustomary
interest and attention being directed toward them by another adult.
Young children in this community never engaged in this sort of conver-
sational ‘small-talk’ with adults (unless that adult happens to be a visiting
schoolteacher, priest or other kind of ‘big person’). To the contrary, young
children are typically ignored, unless they are being ordered to fetch something,
or to carry out a particular task, or are being disciplined or reprimanded for
some infraction. Needless to say, my bumbling attempts were highly misplaced.
Even adults (the parents of these children) made fun of my efforts to engage
in bachit (conversation) with their children. ‘Why are you talking to Vikesh?’ I
was asked when I was chatting with an eleven-year-old boy about the slingshot
he was making. ‘He’s a child. He doesn’t know anything; he can’t even speak
properly.’
90 • Children

Feeling chastened, I left the safety of the morning fire and began to accompany
children as they went about their chores and activities: the girls as they washed
up the previous night’s cooking vessels, fetched firewood from the jungle or
looked after small animals or younger siblings; the boys as they ran errands to the
village shop, scouted around for birds on which to practice their slingshot skills
or played marbles in the dusty courtyard in front of their houses. Initially, I would
situate myself on the sidelines of these activities, watching and occasionally
asking children for more details. Occasionally, another child or adult would
wander by, asking my companion what I was doing. The response, invariably,
was a disinterested shrug followed by ‘Who knows?’
My perseverance eventually paid off. Or perhaps children simply felt sorry
for me, or realized that I wasn’t going to go away. While my questions were still
met with short answers, or ignored altogether, soon children began responding
with questions of their own. Their initial queries revolved around the particular
activity in which I inserted myself and whether it took place in my country.
Whilst scrubbing pots one morning with seven-year-old Laurencina, for example,
I was asked about how I did the washing up in my own home: ‘How do you get
the cooked rice off the pan if you don’t have any coconut bark?’ ‘How do you
keep the cows from eating the washing up soap?’ And ‘Do you really stand up
when scrubbing the pots?’
Engaging with children in this way made me acutely aware, once again, of my
different and clumsy status as an adult, female outsider, not particularly adept at
anything that local female adults (or children, for that matter) were expected to
be adept in: cooking, hauling wood, even drawing water for my own daily bath.
My ineptitude was a source of great hilarity for most of the children, as I found
myself invariably soaked with water, or unable to keep the wood firmly balanced
atop my head. But it also highlighted the fact that the local notion of ‘adulthood’
was not a ‘role’ that was automatically associated with me. Unlike ‘normal’
village adults, I was not married at the time, nor did I have children of my own,
or occupy prescribed, locally familiar ‘adult’ roles like ‘farmer’, ‘landowner’,
‘mother’, or ‘housewife.’
At first, most children found it odd that this awkward adult person wanted to
spend time with them and was interested in their views and activities. I found
myself explaining on numerous occasions my reasons for wanting to hang out in
their company: that I wanted to learn about the children in the village, about what
they did and how they did it, and about what they thought about things, so that I
could return to write another book and teach ‘my people’ about them. They never
refused my requests to join them, but they sometimes seemed incredulous when
I gave a positive response to their query of ‘Do you really want to come with us
to collect wood from the jungle?’ And more than once I was asked whether all
grown-ups in my country spent time with children in this manner. But gradually
I was accepted into children’s worlds, participating in whatever activity they
 Questions and Curiosities, Ignorance and Understanding • 91

happened to be engaged in. I knew my presence was considered to be routine

when my requests to tag along were replaced with children’s unsolicited invita-
tions for me to join in, and their calls, outside my house, of ‘Come on, Tachi
(aunty), we’re waiting for you’.
In addition to the routine daily chores, such activities included making
mud-pies and playing ‘guest’ with Michelle (aged three) and her big sister
Niskalong (aged six), herding buffalo in the jungle with older boys like Vikesh,
or cousins Johnny and Ravi (both ten), or using tree sap to paint ‘tattoos’ with
older girls like Asa (aged twelve). Each new activity in which I participated was,
of course, accompanied by a series of new questions, mainly revolving around
their counterparts in my country: do children play these kinds of games where
you come from? Where do they take buffalo to be herded? What other kinds of
work do children in my country do? Do they get beaten if they don’t do their
chores?
In addition to ‘my country’, children were particularly interested in me and
my physical appearance. As a tall, gangly, white woman, whose country of
origin (the United States) was extremely far away, I was perhaps the most exotic
person they had ever met, and they wanted to know more about it, about me,
and especially about why I looked so different. There were lengthy discussions
about the brown spots (freckles) on my face and arms, and the aesthetic value of
such spots. ‘Don’t you want to get rid of them?’ I was often asked, along with,
‘Does everyone have such spots?’ and ‘Do they hurt?’ Most children couldn’t
quite believe that freckles were fairly ordinary in my country; that many people
had them, and that indeed they were considered, by some, to be attractive. I was
advised by (especially) older girls to try different kinds of creams that might get
rid of them.
While many of these questions (and suggestions) resonated with those their
parents had asked me when I first arrived in the village some five years previously,
children responded with their own reasoning. For example, when I was asked by
Niskalong why I went so red in the sun, Vikesh interrupted my response with his
own explanation: ‘Her body is not used to heat because the sun in her country is
weak’. Eventually, he reasoned, I’d ‘turn brown’ if I lived in the village perma-
nently. My hair was also an endless source of fascination, and children requested
and received permission to inspect my hair clip, and eventually to examine my
hair, which was curlier and of a lighter colour than they had seen before. They
wanted to know why it was this colour (a sort of dullish light brown), and if
others in my country had this kind of hair. Like my skin, it was assumed that my
hair would eventually turn black if I spent enough time in the Indian sun. They
also wanted to touch it or stroke it, and, while some declared it to be ‘soft’ or
‘silky’, most commented on the fact that it was so thin. On one occasion, Sisa
(the thirteen-year-old sister of Asa), whose particularly thick, black hair was a
source of admiration in the village, informed me, matter of factly, that my hair
92 • Children

was more akin to that of a dokri – an older woman whose hair had grown gray
and brittle – than a woman my age. She advised me to dye it with henna, the red–
orange pigment favoured by older people to fend off the inevitability of greying
locks. Other children agreed that then I might not look so old.
For the most part, I found these kinds of questions and observations quite
amusing, and used the opportunity to talk about the different kinds of people in
‘my’ country. Sometimes, however, I felt annoyed, and even a little defensive,
particularly when I had to explain, again and again, my decision not to use the
special skin creams, or to dye my hair bright orange. I found myself wishing,
on more than one occasion, that I had the kind of features that more resembled
theirs: dark hair, brown eyes, and tanned, freckle-free skin.
Questions about me and my person also extended to my family. How many
siblings did I have, and did I like all of them? Didn’t I miss my mother, and, if
so, why didn’t I bring her along with me to the village? Why, at my advanced
age of thirty-two (an age at which some of their parents had already become
grandparents), was I not yet married? And (perhaps most importantly) when
was I going to have children? Didn’t I want children? Who would look after me
when I was old? Sometimes, children didn’t trust my response. For example, one
day I was told by Lakhan, a confident, talkative nine-year-old boy, that he and
his friends had decided that – given my age – I surely must be married. But, they
reasoned, my husband must have got fed up with me and banished me from my
home. Said husband had then decided that a period spent in the village, thinking
about what I’d done, was what I needed. Because why, otherwise, would I have
been allowed to come here on my own? This sounded entirely plausible, particu-
larly when viewed against the backdrop of the kinds of practices and incidents
that the children themselves had probably witnessed.
Another favourite topic revolved around air travel. I was regularly interro-
gated about what it was like to fly. Most children in the village had never made
the journey to the nearest city, some forty kilometers away, though they had
occasionally waved a parent off on the bus that travelled along the winding,
bumpy forest road between the village and metropolis. Upon returning to the
village, the parent was invariabily met with questions about how many people
had gotten sick – and how often – on that particular journey. Children were
incredulous at the idea that travelling by plane, through the air, was quite
smooth (in comparison with the bumpy bus journeys with which they were
familiar, and which made ‘everyone’ sick). They were also interested in the
fact that the airplane typically travelled at heights that matched the distance
between their village and one several kilometres away. Such information led
to concerns about what happens if one felt sick, or needed to go to the toilet
during the flight, and disbelief about the fact that the windows on the airplane
were sealed shut. Long discussions about the merits and particulars of airplane
travel – the lack of fresh air, the difficulties of breathing in such an enclosed
 Questions and Curiosities, Ignorance and Understanding • 93

space, the provisions for toileting – continued to take place months after these
initial discussions.
Conversations about travel usually led to discussions about time. ‘What time
is it in your country?’ and ‘What is your mother doing at the moment?’ were the
most common queries. My usual response – that it was nighttime and that my
mother was probably sleeping – was repeatedly met with surprise and disbelief.
This news spread rapidly, and in those initial weeks back in the village I was
often approached by children (and adults) from other parts of the village, wanting
confirmation: ‘Is it true that it’s dark in America right now, and that your mother is
sleeping?’ The fascination (and endless discussions) that this fact held for people
was a carryover from my first period of fieldwork, when adults showed an equal
interest in this unbelievable news. This was underscored when visiting strangers
would approach me about this ‘funny’ thing they’d heard from a couple of
children. Was it actually true? I was once told, by a visiting relative of my research
assistant, Shantilal, that this must be false,, as the story had been related by a child.
Children, indeed, were excellent bearers of information, and the small group
of ‘nieces’ and ‘nephews’ in whose lives and activities I had rather assertively
inserted myself became known (and presented themselves) as the ‘go to’ author-
ities on the exotic ‘aunty’ living in their midst. They were often stopped on their
way to school, or when visiting one of the local shops, and questioned by those
who lived in another section of the village and didn’t have the same day-to-day
access to me about what I was doing, why I was here – and was it really true that
it was dark in America right now? They would take it upon themselves to educate
others about me: my oddities, my appearance, my country and my reasons for
returning to the village without a husband.

Going to School, Gaining Friends

A few weeks into fieldwork, I felt I had the confidence – and legitimacy – to
branch out beyond the section of the village I knew best and the children with
whom I was most comfortable. I began to accompany some of my ‘nieces’ and
‘nephews’, along with the larger body of local children I didn’t know quite so
well, to the village primary school, located in the opposite end of the village from
where I lived. At the time, there were nearly seventy village children registered
for classes 1 to 5, although on average only around fifty children attended. I knew
that I would be spending a great deal of time over the course of the next twelve
months in this setting, where most of the local children spent a majority of their
day, and I felt it was important to introduce myself and establish a presence there
as soon as possible.
I would normally arrive at the school an hour or so before the formal school
day began at around 10.00 a.m. I had discovered that this one-hour period before
94 • Children

school, during which children begin to arrive in twos and threes to play in the
sandy school yard, along with the hour-long ‘lunch break’ and the thirty-minute
recess time in the afternoon, were some of the only times that I could witness the
interactions of a relatively large group of children outside the presence of an adult
authority. This not only provided me with an opportunity to learn about children’s
practices in their own ‘social worlds’, but it also presented me with some
excellent data with which I could compare children’s behaviour and practices in
situations where adult authorities were present or otherwise ‘in charge’.
During my initial days in the school yard, I positioned myself in a fairly
central position on the porch of the school building. This both allowed me full
view of the playground area, and it gave the children open access to me. All of
these children had met me earlier, on my earlier visits of each village household,
greeting old friends and acquaintances. They had also been formally introduced
to me by their teachers, who had told them that I would be spending time with
them at the school. But most of this larger cohort of children did not know me
intimately, nor I them. Seeing me sitting on the porch, children would come
up to me shyly, standing in twos and threes at a safe distance in front of me,
making the usual comments about my hair, my skin and freckles, along with the
sunglasses I often wore to protect my eyes from the intense Indian sun. During
the first day, whenever I said ‘hello’ to them, or asked one of them their name, the
children would giggle to each other, hands covering their mouths, or sometimes
rush away.
At this early stage of fieldwork, I avoided any sort of direct questioning of
the children beyond asking them their names and the class they were in. Because
children found my name so funny and difficult to pronounce, I was requested
to repeat it over and over again. I also invited them to call me ‘Peggy’, instead
of the more customary ‘Dee Dee’ or ‘Auntie’ (Tachi or Mausi). First names
are reserved for young people and their peers and children initially found my
request highly amusing, as the inevitable round of giggles that accompanied
their pronouncement of my name demonstrated. This request had the effect
that I desired, however, which was to encourage some distance between me
and ‘normal’ grownups, and children seemed pleased with the fact that I was
somehow different from other adults and more like them. A couple older girls in
year 5, Kranti and Jhelo, even declared that I was their ‘friend’ (saheli).
Children’s observations of me gave me the opportunity to observe them
in return, and to begin to note the friendships, the gangs, and peer groupings,
and the leadership roles that were displayed. My notes in these early stages
of fieldwork are filled with descriptions of the setting, children’s dress and
comportment and their questions and possessions, along with initial impressions
of the daily routine, the pattern of which I hadn’t yet grasped.
Eventually, some of the older, braver children demanded to know and see what
was inside the cloth bag (jhola) I always carried. For the first several weeks, this
 Questions and Curiosities, Ignorance and Understanding • 95

bag was an object of great curiosity, possibly because I was rarely seen without
it. With the exception of the cheap carry bags used by shopkeepers, or the slightly
fancier plastic bags in which visitors to and from the city carried their posses-
sions, people in the village rarely carried bags (cloth or otherwise). Instead, they
tied the items they needed (tobacco, door key, money) in the edge of a sari, or
tucked them into the top of their trousers or lungi (sarong), or put them into a
pocket. Consequently, this bag of mine received a great deal of attention, due to
its presumed importance, and was deemed (by other adults) to be off limits to
children.
One morning, as I perched in my usual place on the porch of the school, a
small group of children came up to me and asked permission to look inside my
bag. To their surprise, I emptied the contents of the bag – a water bottle, a small
notebook and pen – right there on to the ground, for all to see. Each item was
passed around the group. When others joined the small gathering, these children
took it upon themselves to authoritatively inform the newcomers of the bag’s
contents, confidently displaying each item for physical inspection.
This inspection process went on for days. My notebook and pen were of
particular interest to all children. Both had been purchased in the city and had
no resemblance to the cheaper village-style ‘copies’ and pens that the children
used in school. The children were amazed by the smoothness of the paper, and
the clarity of the ink and pen. They were also enthralled by the kind of writing
(English, as opposed to Hindi) that I did in the notebook, which so differed from
theirs. They alternately commented that it looked ‘beautiful’ or that it looked like
‘chicken footprints’, and some of the older ones often took turns with my pen and
book in order to try to imitate my writing. While adults sometimes made similar
comments about the objects in my bag, these objects held particular interest for
children. I suspect this was because children themselves used such objects on a
regular basis at school, and enjoyed comparing and commenting on the differing
quality between my pens and paper and their own. Adults, in contrast, were
more interested in the ordinary household items that I had purchased in the city,
and took it upon themselves to inspect, scrutinise and assess the merits of my
purchases: my bedding and mosquito net, my water buckets, mugs, and pressure
cooker and even my nail clippers and soap.
By allowing children (and adults) to have access to and to inspect both my
person and my possessions in this way, I was slowly able to demystify myself
as a different type of person. As I expected, they soon grew accustomed to my
notebook and began to instruct me to write a particular word or joke down, or
remind me that I should probably note down the details of a new game, or a new
piece of information, lest I forget. After a couple of weeks of this sort of two-way
observation, the novelty of my presence began to wear off entirely: I became old
news, my notebook and pen became ordinary and the children returned to their
own business in the playground.
96 • Children

This initial period during which children got used to my presence had given
me a chance to learn some of the sophisticated rules of some of the children’s
games, the most popular of which was a version of marbles called bati. Here,
between two and ten children would contribute one ‘betting’ marble to the game,
whilst using a ‘striker’ marble to strike their competitors’ marbles out of the
game, in a ‘winner-takes-all’ scenario. Nearly every school-going child possessed
at least one or two marbles and could invariably be found playing a version of
this game.
In context of the school setting, I found that achieving a close relationship
with the children was facilitated most effectively around valuable objects – in
this case, the bati. Having noted the importance of this object, I began clumsily
practicing with a borrowed marble with one or two children. After a few days,
I felt sufficiently skilled, and began to play ‘real’ games of bati with children. I
even won a round on a couple of occasions, much to the delight and astonishment
of my competitors and the observing children. It was my willingness to squat
down into the sand and participate in an activity that was exclusively theirs, at
their level and on their terms, that helped me to overcome my strict association
with adult authorities and enact the role that I had adopted as ‘least-adult’. Such
squatting also produced its own amusement, as my physical inability to sustain a
crouch on bent knees meant that I would frequently topple over or have to slowly
straighten up – much like an actual old dokri – or engage in periodic jumping
about as I tried to relieve the inevitable cramp in my knees and legs. Once I
caught two boys commenting quietly as they watched me take my turn with the
bati. Thinking that they were commenting on my technique, I asked them if they
could advise me on it. They giggled and said no, nothing was wrong with my
technique; they were just debating how long it would be before my leg cramp
meant I started dancing around like a baby goat.

Knowledge, Ignorance and Understanding

These ethnographic encounters eventually carried me inside the classroom

setting. While the teachers welcomed me into the school, it was initially
difficult for me to convince them that my research was specifically to do with
children and their perspectives and experiences. Like other adults in the village,
they didn’t entirely understand my interest in children’s knowledge, and I was
reminded, quite categorically, that ‘children are ignorant, they know nothing’,
and that if I was seeking ‘real’ knowledge I’d be better off talking to other
adults. Their lack of belief in my ‘genuine’ interest in children’s perspectives
was so great, I learned later, that they were concerned that this was simply a ruse
to gain access to the school in order to record their levels of absenteeism, or to
judge the quality of their teaching. It was one thing hanging out with children
 Questions and Curiosities, Ignorance and Understanding • 97

in the school yard, passing around my jhola and playing bati in the sand; it was
quite another to sit inside the classroom, observing formal lessons and learning.
Eventually, I convinced the teachers of my genuine research interests in children
perspectives, and joined the children as they sat together in rows in the main
school setting.
I was also given access to a disused classroom in an adjoining building to
conduct more formal discussions with small groups of children. One of the topics
I was interested in exploring was children’s understandings of illness. In my
previous research, I had gained a good deal of knowledge about ‘supernatural’
illnesses, and how these are caused by different kinds of ritual wrongdoing and
transgressions (trespass into sacred ground; neglect of propritiatory obligations).
My aim this time was to try to ‘get at’ the meanings that children gave to super-
natural illness causality – something that my doctoral supervisors advised me,
years earlier, was impossible – and to see how these meanings cohered with local
adults’ understanding.
I already knew that children’s knowledge is routinely dismissed by local
adults as unimportant, or devalued on the basis of being flawed or, worse, funda-
mentally wrong. Indeed, since returning to the village, I had been told again and
again by well-meaning adults that children couldn’t possibly know the answer to
some of the questions I was asking them, especially if such questions revolved
around something as complex as supernatural illness. Because of their presumed
ignorance (anjam) or lack of knowledge about such matters, moreover, children
were held by adults to be innocent of the wrongdoings that resulted in supernatural
illness. Explanations for such illnesses were instead blamed on adult misconduct.
I often reflected on the irony of this seemingly universal attitude – shared by
such different individuals across such different cultures – when comparing local
adults’ views about children’s presumed ignorance with that of my own PhD
supervisors back in the UK. While my supervisors were dismissive of the impor-
tance of children’s perspectives, or indeed the possibility of ‘getting at’ children’s
perspectives in the first place, local adults went so far as to challenge the actual
veracity of their knowledge, particularly when it was related to something
considered to be out of the purview of children’s understanding. The similarities
in these views about the value of children’s perspectivies are striking, though there
are of course important differences between local adults’ ideas about childhood
and those held by my former supervisors. Some of these include attitudes toward
corporal punishment, which is regarded by villagers as an acceptable disciplinary
response to a child’s errant behaviour; views about the utility of schooling, which
remains of questionable value for local children’s future livelihoods options; and
a child’s marriageable age, which tends to be much younger than the legally
stipulated age of eighteen years for girls and twenty-one for boys. Other distinc-
tions include more abstract ideas about children’s economic utility, or about
gender and the cultural value of boys over girls in India.
98 • Children

Despite such differences, notions about children’s (lack of) competence and
their claims to knowledge remained steadfastly similar. In this respect, I found it
fascinating how local adults continued to challenge my findings, or questioned
my information about children’s views or versions of events. I tried to make
it clear to them that I was interested in what children thought and said about
certain issues, and in how they came to such conclusions – not, as they assumed,
in whether children provided me with what might be construed as the ‘correct’
information. What I found – and contrary to what local adults reported – was
not only that children held a variety of different perspectives between them, but
that they also had a surprising degree of knowledge on issues about which adults
insisted they were ignorant.
This isn’t to say that children’s knowledge was the same as adults’. When I
talked with children about illness casuality, for example, their responses often
countered adults’ explanations. Take the example of fourteen-year-old Pandru, a
popular boy who, some five months into my research, died suddenly from what
was later determined to be a supernaturally caused illness. His grandfather, it
transpired, had failed to carry out an important household ritual in honour of a
local deity. As punishment – and in order to teach the grandfather a lesson – the
deity had taken Pandru’s life.
This explanation for the premature demise of (especially) a young person fits
well within the dominant (adult) cultural conceptions about supernatural illness
causality and human culpability. But in discussing Pandru’s death with other
children, I was given a different explanation. I was told that his demise was
indeed supernaturally caused, but that it was due to the fact that he had killed
and then consumed a rare bird that was under the protection of a local deity.
Some of Pandru’s closest friends claimed that he even did this knowingly; others
argued that he wasn’t aware of the bird’s ritual significance. But all agreed that
this was the deed that led to his death – and that Pandru himself was culpable.
When I reminded these children that the post-death divination rituals attributed
Pandru’s death to the ritual misdeeds of his grandfather, they acknowledged that
of course adults would tell me this. And while this might be so, they insisted that
Pandru had also killed and eaten this special bird, and that it was this particular
transgression that led to his death.
What I found so interesting in this encounter was that, whereas adults tend to
exonerate children entirely from culpability and blame – because they ‘do not
understand’ – children actually possess an extraordinary amount of knowledge of
subjects (like supernatural illness causality) about which they purportedly ‘know
nothing’, and articulate their own reasoning and ideas about local conceptions of
supernatural wrongdoing and retribution. While I took these responses as repre-
sentative of the different ways that children give meaning to the world around
them, such responses were, of course, scoffed at as being ignorant and childish, if
not totally false, by the few local adults with whom I shared some of my findings.
 Questions and Curiosities, Ignorance and Understanding • 99

The reaction to children’s explanations about the ‘sacred bird’, for example, was
met with scorn by local adults who denied the existence of any such thing and
explained that this was just another example of the kind of colourful lies that
children are so good at telling. Once again I was inevitably provided with the
‘correct’ answers by these same adults, who advised me (like the schoolteachers,
and my PhD supervisors before them) that I should simply talk to the grownups
if I was looking for the ‘correct’ information about such issues. And once again,
I patiently responded to such well-intentioned ‘advice’ by reiterating that it was
the children’s views that I was interested in, not necessarily the ‘correct’ or ‘adult’
answer.
This sort of pattern – of children demonstrating a wealth of understanding
about what is routinely deemed to be ‘adult’ knowledge, and adults correcting
this knowledge and reminding me that it is unfounded – continued to define my
research with children and will likely continue to do so as long as I remain inter-
ested in their perspectives. Sometimes I puzzle over this seeming disjuncture.
Perhaps local adults’ reaction to children’s knowledge is related to the threat
that children’s knowledge represents in the face of their claims to cultural status
and authority. But what continues to strike me are the similarities between the
perspectives of my adult villagers and those of my UK-based supervisors about
the value that children’s perspectives can contribute to our broader understanding
of culture, and the way that knowledge evolves, and is reproduced and trans-
formed from one generation to the next.
As I write these words, I am preparing to return to the village once again, this
time after a seven-year absence. I will undoubtedly be met with a new generation
of children who will have heard about this far-away, odd-looking Tachi with
an unusual penchant for children’s perspectives. I will likely be reminded, by
well-meaning adults, that ‘children know nothing’. But I will be most interested
in the ways in which the perspectives of children like Vikesh, Asa, Niskalong
and Michelle have evolved, and of course in whether the expected questions –
about why I’ve never managed to get rid of my freckles, about why I’ve left my
husband and children behind, and about whether it is still dark in America – have
changed.
 7

Protectors and Protected: Children, Parents

and Infidelities in a Mexican Village

Zorana Milićević

‘Have you talked to your boyfriend today?’ Nadia asked me while we were
knitting in her living room.
‘Yes. You know that we never miss a day on Skype’, I smiled.
‘He’s a good man. You’ve been so far away from each other for such a long
time. He’s probably doing his things with other women, but he’s always there for
you’, the woman remarked calmly without looking away from the loom.
I laughed off her comment and confidently responded that I was sure he
‘wasn’t doing anything with anyone’.
‘Oh, my friend! I know he’s a good man. But, after all, he’s still a man. It’s
been such a long time, and they have their needs’, she explained.
I was not convinced by her idea of the inevitability of male infidelities, but I
decided not to push my argument any further. Nadia still occasionally recalled
the frustration and impotence she felt when she found out that her husband had
had an affair with a Puerto Rican woman while he worked in Los Angeles a few
years earlier. Although her understanding of men’s sexuality apparently helped
her make sense of her partner’s behaviour, it did little to alleviate her feeling
of betrayal and the breach of trust between the spouses. However, the way she
and other women in the Mexican village of Metztitlán recounted how unfaith-
fulness affected their lives revealed that coping with infidelities was not seen
merely as a marital problem but as a more pervasive family matter that particu-
larly exposed children’s vulnerability. ‘It hurts, of course, it hurts’, Nadia once
admitted, and tellingly added ‘You can’t do anything to protect yourself but you
have to do your best to protect your children from suffering’. She found comfort
in the fact that her children were little when the news of her husband’s infidelity
reached the village and ‘it wasn’t difficult to protect them from all that’.
It was easy for me to identify with Nadia’s words about child protection. I

101
102 • Children

had no doubt that, if I had children, I would be equally concerned about their
exposure to tense and painful situations and that I would, as she put it, ‘do my
best’ to save them from suffering. I was determined to protect my own children
from unsettling experiences as a mother in the future and ready to do the same
for Nadia’s and other villagers’ children as an ethnographer in the present.
Researchers are continually reminded of the importance of protecting all their
research participants from any risk or harm and, when it comes to children, this
message is strongly emphasized. While understanding what ‘doing your best’ to
protect someone actually means is often less than straightforward, many women
in the village were convinced that, in the case of infidelities, avoiding the issue
in front of children was the safest way to go. They never translated this idea
into recommendations or warnings about the topics I could address with their
children, but the awareness of these concerns stayed with me throughout my
fieldwork.

Research with Children in Rural Mexico

My research in rural Mexico focused on children’s understanding of the

tensions underlying the coexistence of traditional and modern gender expec-
tations. The twelve-month ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Metztitlán
was based on participant observation but the specific methodological tools I
used depended on the kind of relationship I had with particular informants.
The possibility to spend time with children in their homes and the school
contributed to defining three groups of child informants. The first consisted of
seventeen children, aged between six and eleven, with whom I interacted at
the school and whose families I regularly visited and had a close relationship
with. I usually spent most of the day with them. We talked, laughed, watched
Mexican telenovelas, played football with their fathers, knitted with their
mothers, prepared and ate meals, did homework, danced at family fiestas, went
to the market or walked around the village. I elicited information from these
children by observing them at school and participating in their daily routines at
home and through interviews, short essays, drawings, role play, photographs,
reactions to hypothetical scenarios, or activities with picture cards. In the
second group were eight children with whom I frequently interacted at the
school and whom I occasionally visited at home. The third group was made up
of over 300 primary school pupils whom I observed in the school playground
and in the classrooms and with whom I held individual and group interviews
and administered questionnaires.
Children appeared to be intrigued by the fact that an adult actively sought
out their opinions and seriously engaged with their comments. I explained to
them that there were neither ‘right’ nor ‘wrong’ answers to my questions and
 Protectors and Protected • 103

that whatever they had to say was valuable and might prove to be important for
my research. They suddenly realized that the roles most of them were used to
in their relationships with adults switched and many of them enjoyed being in
the position where they were the ones who knew and the adult was the one who
was eager to learn. Girls and boys alike seemed to show their appreciation for
this arrangement by granting me a special status. While in front of their teachers
they were careful not to hit, push, or insult one another, in front of me they freely
engaged in this kind of behaviour. When a newcomer once expressed his concern
that I might tell the teacher that they were shouting in the classroom while she
was away, another boy harshly responded ‘No! She’s not like that!’ But my status
did not differ only from that of teachers. When a child whispered in my ear that
she would tell me something confidential once ‘the adults’ left the room, or a boy
pulled me to one side and explained that he did not want ‘the women’ to hear him,
I felt confident that they, at least in part, downplayed the relevance of my age and
gender. I had equal access to both boys and girls and interacted as intensely and
frequently with one sex as with the other. However, I was occasionally reminded
that this apparently special status did not imply that I was perceived as one of the
children. ‘Zorana, come to separate them!’ someone would shout during a break,
urging me to stop a fight that was becoming too serious. At the same time, my
gender proved to be quite salient in my contacts with adults. Compliance with
the local dynamics of cross-gender relations gave rise to the fact that, although
I often talked to men, women were my main adult informants. This meant that I
built stronger and closer relationships with women, knew much more about their
ideas, feelings and experiences and collected more information about children
through mothers than through fathers. The mothers of my main child informants
and I frequently met on our own and they shared with me their most intimate
confessions so I was familiar even with the details that children themselves
ignored about their parents’ interactions.

Gendered Unfaithfulness

Throughout my fieldwork in Metztitlán, references to marital unfaithfulness

continually emerged in people’s narratives as villagers joked about hypothetical
and suffered over actual infidelities, confessed their own, cried over their partners’
or gossiped about their neighbours’ transgressions. Most people censored both
men’s and women’s extramarital affairs, but the evaluations of female infidelities
were strikingly more derogatory and their social implications more far reaching.
A woman whose unfaithfulness was exposed could hardly escape the most
dreaded label of ‘whore’ (puta). Being a puta was not simply about hurting a
husband and did not only impinge upon the perception of one as a wife. Being
a puta was about being seen as an unreliable relative, neighbour, or friend, and,
104 • Children

even more importantly, mother. At the same time, in spite of the fact that an
unfaithful man provoked his wife’s suffering and was regarded as an imperfect
husband, the social esteem he enjoyed seemed to remain unaffected. This differ-
entiation was sustained by the widespread conviction that male unfaithfulness
was biologically determined and reinforced by the deeply entrenched association
of women with the home and men with the street.
It was not surprising that, in this climate, the information about men’s
sexual misconduct became far more easily available than women’s. The men
who engaged in extramarital relationships with young, single women were not
unconcerned about the impact of these affairs on their families and they usually
avoided public appearances with their lovers. Yet most of them often failed
to ensure no one witnessed their encounters, occasionally left lovers’ texts or
pictures on mobile phones and received suspicious phone calls in front of their
wives. Women who had reasons to doubt their husbands’ faithfulness readily
investigated their movements by putting to work intelligence skills of a carefully
selected network of relatives or neighbours. Even though some of them were
convinced that men were inherently inclined to breach the vows of monogamy,
this did not mean that they dealt with the realization of these predispositions
lightly. Women recalled that in a workshop organized by the local office of the
agency for Integral Family Development (DIF), infidelities were defined as
a form of psychological violence and they wholeheartedly subscribed to this
definition. They agreed that, whether male infidelities were inevitable or not, they
were painful and humiliating and they did not hesitate to angrily confront men if
their suspicions were confirmed, alter their everyday interactions for a while and
alert them about the consequences of their wrongdoings. However, few of them
eventually opted to abandon the partners who ignored these warnings. ‘I know it,
our kids know it, our families know it, our neighbours know it. Everybody knows
it. We fight over it and then we make up and we go on and then we fight again. I
guess we’re hypocrites but we’ve kind of learnt to live with it’, Araceli reflected
upon the relationship with her persistently unfaithful husband. Then she added:
‘Perhaps it’s a bad example for my daughters but, at the same time, I know they
love their dad and they want us all to be together. I would put up with anything
for them’. Yesenia occasionally criticized Araceli for appearing in public holding
hands with her husband and smiling ‘as if they were happily in love and as if all
the neighbours didn’t know that he’s constantly cheating on her’. But she paused
for a moment and admitted: ‘Well, perhaps I should just shut up. Who knows how
I would behave if it happened to me. At the end of the day, I wouldn’t leave my
husband either. Why should I just leave to another woman everything that I have
been building for so many years? My family, my home, my marriage. Imagine
how much my children would suffer if we split!’
My closest friends were positioned quite differently along the spectrum of
possible marital arrangements. For example, Malena left her unfaithful husband
 Protectors and Protected • 105

and took her children with her; Gloria, Isabel and Araceli continually struggled
with their husbands’ affairs with younger women; Adriana’s husband abandoned
her and her daughter and went to live with his lover and their newly born son;
Nadia still recalled a bygone infidelity; whilst Yesenia, Antonia and Carmen lived
happily with faithful husbands but insisted that ‘a woman should not laugh at
those who have been cheated on because you never know whether you’ll be next
and whether your family will be in danger’. The role of children in the accounts
about preserving the union between spouses was marked by circularity: while
children were protected by the presence of a union between their parents, this
same union was protected by the presence of children. In the local narratives, a
childless married woman was not presented as someone who would be free to
more easily abandon a troubled relationship but as someone who would be more
at risk of being abandoned. A man cheating on a childless wife was not expected
to act in the same way as the one cheating on the mother of his children, just as
maintaining an affair with a lover was not equated with having a child with a
lover. The differences primarily lay in the stability of these arrangements. Women
explained to me that as long as a man did not have children with his lover, a wife
could rest assured that he would stay with her or, at least, eventually come back to
her. In cases where a lover had a child, a man’s attachment to his original family
was challenged. Most villagers believed, and the cases I heard of confirmed, that
if a wife had female children and the lover male children, a man was even more
tempted to abandon his wife and form another family. In other cases, the outcome
was less predictable. In this way, children and mothers tacitly became allies in
preserving family unity.

Exposing Children to Infidelities

While women perceived infidelities as a threat not only to their relationships

with their partners but also to the well-being of their children and the future of
their families, they had no doubt that the conflict over this issue should be settled
between adults. Children were seen as innocent and vulnerable and the parents
were expected to protect them from uneasy experiences as much as possible.
Yet, despite the widespread appeal of this idea, children became exposed to the
information about men’s infidelities in myriad ways. Women explained that they
sent children out to play in the front yard or ordered them to go to another room if
they intended to confront their husbands over rumours or evidence of infidelities,
but they were aware that the effectiveness of these efforts was rather limited.
Although Isabel usually lowered her voice or waited for the children to go away
when she wanted to share with Antonia and myself any information related to
her husband’s ongoing infidelity, on one occasion she was so overwhelmed by
the news that Juan had been spotted with his eighteen-year-old lover again that
106 • Children

she recounted everything in front of her and Antonia’s children. While two boys
and one girl gawped at Isabel’s talking about a possible divorce, Antonia warned
Isabel’s seven-year-old son Miguel that, in case of a separation, he should never
go to live with his father because he would bring home another woman who
would be mean to him. The boy remained silent. Noelia could not forgive her
nine-year-old son Ernesto that, during his parents’ temporary separation, he
allowed his father’s girlfriend to ‘kiss him, hug him, and buy things for him’.
Many years later, she reminded the boy: ‘You enjoyed the company of your
father’s puta. You let her hug you and accepted her gifts. Do you want her to be
your mum?’
‘No, I did not hug her’, the boy replied, sounding confused.
When, on another occasion, they saw the woman in the street, Noelia teased
Ernesto: ‘Here comes your mummy’.
Although Yesenia’s husband had never had an affair, she occasionally joked
with him about this possibility in front of their three-year-old son, and playfully
asked the boy: ‘Would you like your daddy to bring another mummy?’
The unfaithful husbands that I knew of dated single women. In spite of the
fact that being single did not justify getting involved with a married man, some
lovers occasionally confronted their boyfriend’s wife in order to demand that
she ‘let him go’ and let them ‘be happy’. Isabel recounted how she was walking
down the street with her sons when her husband’s lover and her friend started
to insult her and shout at her to let the man go because he ‘did not love her’.
Gloria was at home with her nine-year-old daughter Victoria when her husband’s
girlfriend Fernanda banged on her door screaming that she should let the two
lovers be happy. Months later, Gloria took a taxi and, accompanied by her
daughter, went to visit Fernanda. The girl knew where they were heading to and,
although she stayed in the car, she could overhear her mother’s tense row with
her father’s lover.
While children usually felt uncomfortable and remained silent in the face of
the references to their father’s misbehaviour, a ten-year-old girl once joked about
the bargaining potential of finding out about her father’s infidelity. Manuela and
I were talking about romantic relationships and the woman recalled that before
getting married her husband cheated on her with a maid. Her daughter was
distracted by the appearance of her favourite actress on a TV show and Manuela
seemed to hope that the girl would not pay attention to what she was saying.
When she suddenly realized that Blanca was listening, she quickly checked on
her: ‘Blanca, you’re watching the show, right?’ The girl looked back at the screen.
A few minutes later, she exclaimed, grinning, ‘What a good piece of information,
mummy! I can make my dad get me whatever I want now’. Manuela and I tried to
figure out what she had heard and the girl proudly remarked: ‘You did not realize
but I am very intelligent. I am watching TV and listening at the same time’. She
did not want to repeat the information itself but made it clear that she understood
 Protectors and Protected • 107

what Manuela was saying: ‘I heard you say that your cousins confirmed it to you
and that you told him “I see that you like inditas [young Indian women]”’. We
explained that we referred to something that took place a long time before, when
her parents were still novios (boyfriend and girlfriend), but the girl insisted: ‘It
doesn’t matter. I can still make up a lot of things he’s done. He’ll have to buy me
whatever I want’.

Protecting Children, Protecting Adults

Blanca’s parents were one of the most stable couples I had met in the village and
they rarely struggled with insecurities over unfaithfulness. For their daughter,
the information of her father’s bygone infidelity seemed to be something remote,
abstract, and, at the same time, intriguing, something she could joke about. When
trying to downplay the significance of this account in front of her, Manuela and
I were more concerned about Blanca’s father finding out about our conversation
than about the impact the news had on the clearly entertained girl. Yet many
other children had a much more tangible and dramatic experience with fathers’
infidelities and their mothers were worried about how family tensions might
affect them. While these women recognized that boys and girls occasionally
witnessed upsetting scenes provoked by men’s affairs, they insisted that they
sought to minimize children’s exposure to these kinds of situations. ‘I don’t want
my children to suffer’, mothers often remarked, and suggested that keeping silent
about infidelities was the only way to achieve this goal. ‘Sometimes a comment
can slip out in front of my sons but I don’t want to talk to them about that. That
would just make things worse’, Isabel explained, referring to her husband’s
ongoing affair. Teachers shared this conviction about the benefits of silence. A
teacher once told me that the topic of infidelities should never be raised in the
classroom because it might ‘hurt the feelings of some children’. Her colleague
added that the ways infidelities were dealt with in the village reflected deep
gender inequalities but pointed out that primary school children were ‘too young
to understand these connections anyway’.
I was interested in children’s ideas about infidelities as I expected they might
help me learn more, not only about their understanding of gender relations,
which was the main focus of my research, but also about their hopes, fears, and
family relationships. However, discouraged by mothers’ and teachers’ concerns
about ‘making things worse’ and ‘hurting the feelings of some children’, I
refrained from asking girls and boys about infidelities for many months. While
I actively explored and openly inquired about many other topics, such as the
division of labour or gender appropriateness of toys, I usually kept silent about
unfaithfulness. I engaged in conversations about this issue only when children
spontaneously raised it themselves. Some of them seemed relieved to simply
108 • Children

find an understanding listener, others requested advice or reassurance that their

parents would be able to resolve their tensions. Nine-year-old Laura once asked
me whether I had heard of any men who left their lovers and ‘fell in love with
their wives again’. I occasionally talked to the girl in the schoolyard but I had
never met her family. After providing some anonymous examples of cheating
husbands who decided to break up the relationships with their lovers and stay
with their wives, I showed interest in what motivated her question. She gazed in
the distance for a while and suddenly muttered: ‘I know you won’t talk about it to
anyone’. These words served as an introduction to an account about her father’s
affair with a young woman who had just completed high school. The girl kept her
eyes on the ground while drawing in the dirt with a twig and slowly recounting
how she learnt about this relationship, what troubled her most about it and how
her mother coped with it.
These confessions corroborated my intuition that children reacted very
emotionally to infidelities. Occasionally, they took advantage of apparently
unrelated topics to express their frustration and condemn unfaithfulness. When
I invited a group of boys and girls to discuss the division of labour, Berenice
observed that ‘men don’t want women to work because they are jealous’. I
was curious to know more about jealousy and, while the boys and a younger
girl remained silent, ten-year-old Berenice and eleven-year-old Cristina eagerly
sought to help me understand how the relationships between men and women in
Metztitlán worked. Berenice remarked that ‘men are jealous but they don’t allow
women to be jealous’ and readily provided an example:

B: A man is jealous of his wife, and he is going out with another woman, and his wife
suspects that he has another woman and she tells him: ‘Oh, you have another woman’
and he says ‘Oh, that’s not true’. And if a [male] friend greets his wife with a kiss on
her cheek, men become jealous, and they don’t want women to be jealous of them.

C: A woman sees that another woman who’s a friend of hers, not a very good friend
of hers, but they know each other, she’s her friend a little bit … and she sees that she
is flirting with her husband, and her husband denies it all. And then that woman’s best
friend tells my mum, I mean this woman, when she asks that woman: ‘What’s going on
here?’ she says ‘I haven’t seen anything’. And the woman asks her husband: ‘What’s
wrong?’ because he’s almost never home and he says: ‘No, nothing’s wrong’.

B: The thing is that men are very jealous.

C: And women do love them and they just want to know the truth.

The girl struggled to finish the sentence as she broke down in tears. When he saw
her crying, nine-year-old Fernando groaned with annoyance, took his bicycle and
disappeared for a few minutes. Ten-year-old Jesús was touched: ‘May she not
 Protectors and Protected • 109

cry, because she’ll make me cry, too’. Seven-year-old Claudia did not understand
what was happening. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked insistently. Cristina remained
silent. Her mother Yolanda was my friend. I was aware of her husband’s infidel-
ities and knew that she went to great lengths to keep her daughters away from her
suffering. ‘This really is a sensitive issue’, I thought to myself while hugging the
girl and trying to calm her down. ‘She just remembered something that happened
to a friend of hers a long time ago’, I responded to Claudia. When Fernando later
asked his cousin Jesús to explain to him why Cristina had cried, Jesús reproduced
my explanation. That night Berenice whispered to my ear that Cristina probably
cried because she remembered how her dad was treating her mum.
The attempts to veil their personal confessions in the form of imaginary
scenarios were not an unusual practice among children who engaged in discus-
sions about infidelities. Language slippages (e.g. ‘She tells my mum, I mean
this woman …’), their emotional reactions and frequently my own knowledge
of children’s situation at home through their mothers or other sources helped
me contextualize and better understand their narratives. Berenice and Claudia
occasionally shared with me some details about their father’s affair, which I was
well informed about through my friendship with their mother, Araceli. Yet, in
the presence of their eight-year-old cousin, Carla, the older girl discouraged her
sister from bringing up their family matters. While we were discussing violent
behaviour, Claudia started recounting a tense dispute between her parents that
had taken place the previous night (when her father arrived home after spending
a few days away with his lover, as I learnt from her mother). I noticed that the girl
suddenly interrupted her account after catching a glimpse of her sister frowning.
She promptly announced that she would simply make up ‘an example’ and
reformulated her story. She skillfully combined actual and imaginary elements
and explained that the girls whose parents were fighting over the man’s infidelity
were twins, which she expected to dispel any potential similarities with her own
family situation.
As time went by, children’s familiarity with this topic and the readiness many
of them showed to discuss it encouraged me to explore their understanding of
extramarital affairs more actively. It was clearly a sensitive issue, but talking
about it seemed to have a liberating, even empowering effect on some boys and
girls. I still avoided straightforward, personal questions but I began to invite them
to discuss topics that I anticipated to be easily relatable to the issue of infidel-
ities, such as same-sex and cross-sex friendships among married adults, and
to explicitly seek their opinions about unfaithfulness more generally. Children
passionately criticized cheating husbands. Some of them spontaneously moved
beyond imaginary scenarios and seamlessly shifted from referring to ‘men’ and
‘women’ to talking about ‘my mum’ and ‘my dad’. The importance of suffering
in children’s narratives about adulteries revealed that ‘going out with others’
was not perceived only as a sexual transgression. Since children very rarely had
110 • Children

an opportunity to witness their fathers’ extramarital encounters and spent many

hours a day with their mothers, it was not surprising that the images that most
powerfully dominated their accounts of infidelities did not depict the activities
men engaged in with their lovers so much as the scenes of lonely women strug-
gling with their husbands’ emotional and physical absence. Although in these
situations girls and boys clearly also suffered themselves, they commonly
expressed both their mothers’ and their own pain through the portrayal of a
‘suffering mother’.
It was striking how many of these conversations ended up with children
confessing that they were ‘happy to get a chance to say what they think’ and
that ‘it felt good to talk to someone about these things’. An oxymoronic status of
being an intimate outsider seemed to render me too close to be threatening and,
at the same time, too distant to be vulnerable. On the one hand, children were
convinced that neighbours and distant relatives could use the information about
their parents’ conflicts against their family. On the other, they were reluctant to
share their thoughts and feelings with their mothers or close relatives because
they wanted to protect them. Talking to me apparently provided them with an
opportunity to engage with troubling experiences without exposing their family
to the risk of being publicly humiliated and without hurting their loved ones.
Children were aware of their parents’ efforts to keep them away from their
rows but many of them believed that it was better for the children ‘to know the
truth’. As Blanca once put it, ‘if parents hide something from their children, the
children will discover it anyway but in a more painful way’. She illustrated this
idea by relating an example from a soap opera in which the parents tried to hide
from their daughter that her father was having an affair. When the girl finally
found out what was going on, she became a drug addict. Occasionally, children
encouraged their mothers by clearly referring to their fathers’ affairs. A nine-
year-old girl, Malena, recalled: ‘I once told my mum that she was more beautiful
than the other woman and she just smiled’. Ten-year-old Óscar recounted how he
consoled his mother by telling her that he had heard a neighbour say that ‘sooner
or later a man ends up coming back to his wife and his children because he gets
tired of fooling around’. However, in spite of the appeal they recognized in open
communication between children and parents, most of the time girls and boys
whose fathers engaged in extramarital affairs avoided raising this issue in front of
their mothers. The reasoning underlying children’s preference to keep quiet about
men’s affairs in front of their mothers mirrored the explanations that women
themselves used to justify their silence. While mothers struggled to protect their
children, children were determined to protect their mothers. When I asked Laura
whether she and her mother spoke about her father’s infidelity, she shook her
head and explained: ‘I don’t want to make her think about it and become sad’.
Óscar once told me that it felt good to be able to ‘take out his anger’ over his
father’s affair and share it with someone. ‘Can you talk to your mother about it?’
 Protectors and Protected • 111

I was curious. ‘No! She would be even more depressed [than she is now] if she
knew how I feel. Why should I do that to her?’ the boy replied. ‘And what about
your father? Do you think a child could talk about this with his father?’ I insisted.
‘If I was like sixteen or seventeen, I would ask him: “What are you doing?” but
I can’t talk to him about it now. I’m only ten. He wouldn’t pay attention to me.
He would be like: “Mind your own business, little kid!” Perhaps he would even
give me a good slap’.
While both boys and girls showed solidarity with women by sympathetically
relating their mothers’ suffering and by seeking to remain silent about their own
suffering in their mothers’ presence, boys also attempted to depict themselves as
their mothers’ protectors in more tangible ways. Although Roberto’s parents had
been divorced since he was four years old, he vividly recounted how his father
used to leave his mother and him at home ‘bored to death’ while he went out and
drank with his friends and another woman. The ten-year-old boy stressed that
the man took his lover to places and bought her things that he had never bought
for his mother. He described how his mother cried waiting for her husband to
come back and how he tried to console her by telling her how much he loved
her. He assured me that although he was ‘so small’ he defended his mother when
his drunk father returned home and tried to hurt her. Unlike the children who
preferred to share the information concerning their parents’ marital problems
with me in private, Eduardo freely spoke about his father’s infidelities in front
of his classmates. While a group of eleven-year-olds were telling me whether
children paid attention to adults’ conversations or not, Eduardo admitted that he
had to watch out for what his father said to his mother. ‘She is sick and I know
that he’s cheating on her. I have to make sure that he doesn’t tell her that because
that would make her get even sicker’, the boy explained. His claim prompted his
classmate Patricio to point out that he also took care of his mother. Similarly to
Roberto, he recalled that he pushed away his father when he came home drunk
and attacked his mother.
Children who never witnessed tensions over infidelities at their own home
seemed convinced that their fathers would be unable to betray their mothers.
‘My father is not like that’, ‘My father respects my mother’ or ‘My father would
never hurt his family’, they confidently claimed. Yet, similarly to boys and girls
who had direct experience with fathers’ unfaithfulness, they did not hesitate to
remark that men were generally far more likely than women to commit adulteries
and that ‘children had to find a way to protect their mothers’. Unfortunately,
my ethnographic material cannot shed any light on how the voices of unfaithful
fathers fit in these narratives of suffering, silence and protection or provide
insights into children’s experiences with unfaithful mothers and suffering fathers.
By eliciting responses to hypothetical situations involving female infidelities, I
found that boys and girls did not perceive suffering mothers as more vulnerable
than suffering fathers. They recognized that men and women alike suffered
112 • Children

when they were neglected, hurt or abandoned by their partners and claimed that
children of unfaithful women should also protect their fathers by keeping silent
about their mothers’ affairs. ‘If a wife cheats on her husband, a child should not
remind him of that. He should tell him jokes, make him think about other things’,
Ernesto explained.
I found it curious that, even though villagers often seemed to avoid reminding
their loved ones of unsettling experiences they were going through, they never
warned me not to raise certain issues in front of their family members. When
I made this remark to one of my closest friends in the village, she suggested:
‘Parents trust your good judgement’. Her comment was grounded in a widely
accepted idea that associated concerns about the appropriateness of exposure
to particular contents exclusively with adults’ attitudes towards children. By
overstating this intergenerational divide, this approach fuels adult-centred notions
of child-friendliness while ignoring the possibility that children themselves might
share similar preoccupations about the information that is made available to
the adults they care for. The relationships that emerge through ethnographic
encounters and the oddity of an intimate outsider provide a privileged position to
recognize an ageless need for protecting loved ones.
Five years after I completed my fieldwork, fifteen-year-old Pedro sought to
explain to me through a Facebook chat how his life had changed since the last
time we met in Metztitlán. His school performance was not impressive but he
was determined to improve it and pursue a university degree some day. He played
in a music band, occasionally wrote lyrics and was particularly inspired when he
was feeling down. He was curious when I would visit the village again and I was
touched when he wrote: ‘It felt so good being able to share with you the things
that I was going through. I’ll always hold you in my heart as someone who knew
how to listen to me’. I thanked him and kept to myself the memory of one of
our last conversations when he assured me that ‘The only thing I can do about
it [his mother suffering over his father’s infidelity] now is tell her funny things,
nice things, try to make her stop thinking about that. But in a few years I’ll be
able to help her much more’. I didn’t ask Pedro about his parents’ relationship
through Facebook and I don’t know whether growing up has allowed him to
‘help [his mother] much more’, but letting girls and boys guide me through the
process of understanding their ‘best interest’ helped me realize that protecting
children sometimes implies showing interest and appreciation for their need to
protect adults.
 8

Awkward Encounters: Authenticity and

Artificiality in Rapport with Young Informants
in China

Ole Johannes Kaland

In 2010, I travelled to Shanghai to study the education of internal migrant children

and youths, given the way the household registration system (hukou) and educa-
tional laws limit non-local denizens’ access to public welfare. I chose Shanghai
since it has gained worldwide recognition for repeatedly attaining the highest
scores in international tests such as PISA (Programme for International Student
Assessment) while also exercising a more progressive set of policies towards its
migrant population. In 2008, the local government became one of the first among
the larger cities in the country to enable migrant children to be enrolled in local
primary schools. This stood in contrast to other cities and provinces, wherein
migrant communities had little choice but to open their own non-sanctioned
private schools, to allow their children at least a modicum of basic education.
Education has historically been the principal way of achieving upwards social
mobility in China and is therefore a subject of much public debate. It is seen as
vital for the wellbeing of individual families and for the continued progress of
the country as a whole. Although Shanghai boasts some of the best academic
institutions in the country, and the local government has taken steps to allow
migrant children into the public education system, there still exist fundamental
limitations on access. Migrant children do not have the right to attend the local
national entrance examinations at the end of middle school (zhongkao), which
govern access to local high schools. Nor are they eligible to attend the university
entrance exams at the end of high school (gaokao). In order to do so, they have
to migrate back to the places of their household registration (hukou). For the
majority, this entails leaving their families, friends and the urban and cosmo-
politan environment of their upbringing for schools in the interior provinces of
China that their parents left in order to secure their families a better future.

113
114 • Children

Rural schools are often highly competitive, while their resources in terms of
finances, teaching personnel and facilities are inversely related to their rank in
the educational system. Although certain quota regulations exist, it is a system
that in many ways reproduces social inequality. Hence, while middle and high
schools generally present young Chinese with tremendous pressure to succeed
academically, migrant pupils face additional challenges of an academic, social,
cultural and economic nature. Their alternative is to stay in Shanghai, where they
may enroll in local vocational schools and technical colleges. However, these are
understood as being for under-achieving students and leading to a life of manual
labour. For migrant youths, this represents a less prestigious pathway, but one in
which they can avoid the stress of secondary education and stay with their family
and friends in ‘modern China’. With this in mind, I originally planned to study
how governmental structures shaped educational and vocational pathways for
migrant children and youths.
Throughout my fieldwork, one of the things that I worried about most was my
rapport with my informants. The human geographer Elin Sæther has argued that
‘fieldwork is based on an idea of knowledge being situated in space’ (2006: 42),
but for anthropologists I would supplement that we also see this as embodied
in the people we study. Hence, in addition to gradually becoming friends, my
informants were sources of knowledge and experiences that I could only access
through developing and maintaining good relationships with them. What I did not
expect, however, were the ways in which I found this process awkward so much
of the time. While awkwardness is a natural part of human interaction, it might
seem more palpable in fieldwork given the underlying purpose of the researcher’s
presence. Moreover, due to the nature of my fieldwork, my awkward moments
arose specifically in my encounters, as an adult researcher, with young informants.
Much has been written about the insecurities that particularly junior researchers
experience in the field, to the point where this is now understood as an inherent
part of the fieldwork experience. At the same time, the emergence of child- and
youth-focused anthropology has seen the development of methodological liter-
ature exploring proper ways of doing fieldwork with young people that respect
their different competencies and that are ethically sound, given young people’s
vulnerability. For child-focused anthropology, questions have been raised about
whether fieldwork with young people is feasible, whether children’s experiences
and reflections are reliable, but also whether anthropological ideals of insidership
and participant observation are at all possible. Researchers of young people face
common concerns that they are not able to interact well with their informants
due to the age gap, as well as dilemmas over roles and power relations. However,
because of the rigorous ethical and methodological ideals involved in research
with young people, my experience is that fieldworkers tend to downplay difficult
encounters in their narratives from the field, or portray them as examples of their
own failures. The issue of awkwardness in child- and youth-oriented research
 Awkward Encounters • 115

undoubtedly deserves further discussion and so, in the following, I offer glimpses
of my encounters with my informants, focusing not least on how awkwardness
was an intrinsic part of these. Ultimately, awkwardness should not be seen as a
problem, but as a part of the multi-faceted ways we encounter our informants.
Furthermore, while awkward situations may be perceived as failures when they
happen, they may not only serve as foundations for later encounters, but also
provide insights precisely because of what is experienced as awkward.

Natural and Artificial Beginnings with Young Informants

The realization suddenly hit me, right there at the metro station. From having
contemplated what the field would be like a few weeks earlier, I was suddenly
standing amid the hustle and bustle of downtown Shanghai. I had lived in several
Chinese cities during my undergraduate studies, but as I stood on the platform,
staring at the surrounding cityscape and trying to shake the feeling of drowsiness
induced from my enduring jetlag and the extreme heat and humidity, I felt both
terrified and excited. I was intimidated by the prospect of the fieldwork itself, the
immensity of the challenge at my feet. A range of questions and doubts churned
through my mind, but once on the metro I felt my anxiety and insecurities
gradually give way to feelings of excitement about finally being in the field and
thoughts about the experiences waiting for me.
I was, after all, on the way to what seemed like a viable fieldsite. An old
contact was on the board of a charitable NGO that I call Holding Hands Volunteer
Centre, and he had invited me to meet some of its young members and its leader.
As I peered out of the window of the metro carriage, I noticed the view changing
from the cosmopolitan downtown one characterized by the colours of tall
neon-lit buildings and skyscrapers to an increasingly grey and industrial-looking
landscape of highways, older apartment blocks and neighbourhoods.
I met Fang at the final station. Outside, hawkers shouted out offers for trans-
portation on their cheap but prohibited rickshaws, while I heard the crackling
sound of spiced bread being fried in portable oil cookers and smelled freshly
grilled lamb kebabs. On the short walk along the highway over to the NGO,
several lorries with workers on their backs rushed by, and Fang noted that
migrant workers were strongly represented in most trades in the district. Indeed,
local industries were dependent on this labour. He elaborated that, given long
working hours, a vital aspect of the NGO was the way it offered the children
of these workers a social and educational space away from home. While there
were no particular signs of the NGO’s presence on the outside, as we walked
up the stairs and entered the premises the centre’s popularity became apparent.
Children in school uniforms were chasing each other, while others were occupied
with board games or their books for homework. Further along, an older youth
116 • Children

prepared food on a kitchen worktop, her chopping knife meshing with the mixed
sounds of others practicing the traditional Chinese instrument guzheng, an
electric guitar and a drumset. The building seemed old and worn and there were
discernible patches of mold and flaky paint on some of the walls. Nevertheless,
these patches were interspersed with colourful posters of everything from ‘Hello
Kitty’, Mona Lisa and motivational slogans to portraits of the youths frequenting
the centre. I also saw teddy bears, an aquarium, a bird cage, a library of films
and books, and a large shelf where the members could put their backpacks. ‘It’s
pretty lively [re nao] in here, huh?’ the leader of the centre Wang Yucheng said as
he came over to greet us. After introductions and tea, he suggested that I should
meet some of the members of the centre, and took me to what appeared to be a
classroom where some youths were busily engaged in a ping-pong match while
others were texting on their phones. ‘Come say hello to Wu Lang from Norway’,
Yucheng told the youths, and a couple of them came over as he proceeded to tell
them about my academic background in England. I felt completely out of place
at this, my first meeting with those who would become the main informants of
my fieldwork.
My feelings of awkwardness were soon to be heightened. Fang and Yucheng
went to catch up and I was left to my own devices. I approached the ping-pong
table and Liujie, a friendly and smiling sixteen-year-old lad, lowered his bat and
said with an exaggerated accent ‘Hello, nice to meeeet you’ in English before he
laughed together with the others. I stuttered my response in Mandarin: ‘Errrr …
Ni hao … Errrr … wo jiao Wu Lang, ni ne?’ (literally: ‘Errrr … Hello … Errrr
… My name is Wu Lang, and you?’). ‘Wooooooooooow’, Liujie almost shouted,
before continuing ‘You can speak Chinese! Ni hen niu bi, ah!’ At this, the others
laughed hysterically. From their reaction, I was not sure if I had said something
wrong or if my tones or accent were that off. I knew the first two words in his
response – ‘ni’ and ‘hen’ – meaning ‘you’ and ‘very’, respectively. I did not,
however, know the last bit, and Liujie could tell, because he followed up, ‘Ey,
Wu Lang, do you know what is niu bi means?’ I shook my head and pulled up my
phone to access my dictionary. Noticing it was an iPhone, Liujie, exclaimed, ‘Oh,
iPhone, you really are niu bi’. I inputted the characters the way Liujie showed
me, and looked in disbelief at the screen as ‘niu’ was translated as ‘cow’ and ‘bi’
literally as ‘vagina’ (vulgar).
For a moment, I felt my heart sink. Already, on my first day in the field, my
informants were cursing me. Yet it was evident that the joke was about more than
that. In reality, they were laughing at the double meaning of the phrase. When I
combined the words, I discovered it was slang for ‘awesome’, although this was
a phrase I had certainly not learned while studying the language at Chinese and
British universities. While I later found out that this word is quite common in
spoken Mandarin, the episode made an impression on me, as it came to signify
two things. First, it became an initial example of how challenging I found the
 Awkward Encounters • 117

language barrier, especially for the first half of the fieldwork. Not only was my
vocabulary of standard Mandarin initially very limited, but so was my knowledge
of the particular vernacular that the youths spoke, which included Shanghainese
slang, words from their particular dialects and Japanese, given their fascination
with the pop culture of that country. Secondly, it became the first of several
instances where I felt out of place and experienced my presence as awkward.
While I gradually understood and accepted that this was part of the terms of my
fieldwork, in the beginning I to some degree expected that I would meet and
gradually befriend my informants naturally. But what is a natural way for an
adult anthropologist to encounter youths?
I think I had naively expected that I would meet young people spontaneously
on my own. That I might, for example, befriend them by incidentally walking
past a basketball court one day, joining the game either by their invitation or
on my own initiative. We would casually start talking during a break whilst
quenching our thirsts on sodas. Or maybe I would meet them in a park, where in
the past I had seen and experienced so many youths practicing their English and
asking foreigners to be their language partners. Or maybe I would get to know a
whole family working in the wet market that I frequented close to where I lived,
and gradually befriend and expand my network through them. Whether these
imagined situations were realistic or not, I had not expected my entry into the
field to happen the way it did. As I stood in that classroom with the children and
youths who would become my informants, I had the sense that there was some
something artificial about the way we had met.
This is not to essentialize what are natural or unnatural ways of encoun-
tering or interacting with youths, since feelings of artificiality induced from
role-conflicts are common in many human relationships. Given the vulnerable
positions of children and youths, there is an emphasis in the child- and youth-
oriented literature on approaching them in ways that respect and cater to their
different competencies, and protect them from harm. However, that the leader
and chairman of the NGO, adult guardians of authority, had introduced me to
these children and youths as a researcher from another country who they should
speak with, with all the power-relations that this entailed, seemed to break
completely with the notions of both smooth immersion and ‘child-appropriate’
introductions. In hindsight, that the older youths jokingly called me a ‘cow
vagina’ may have been a way for them to defuse the awkward tension that they
themselves probably felt. Furthermore, while it did not exactly help alleviate
the awkwardness I was feeling in that situation, it was quite an icebreaker.
It gave us something to talk and laugh about, and it made it easier for us to
introduce ourselves to each other. In a sense, then, what at first felt unnatural
and artificial was made into a common experience on which to build a more
authentic relationship. Importantly, it also told me something about these youths
that broke from the established image of them in the literature. It was the first, if
118 • Children

only a small, sign that these were not only vulnerable victims of adult structures,
but also individuals who negotiated and acted upon the structures in which they
found themselves.
That first day, after I had spent some time with the youths, I went for a meal
with Yucheng and Fang during which time I explained my research in more detail
and asked for permission to do my research at the centre. Yucheng agreed, but
on the condition that I would work as a volunteer teacher of spoken English. I
knew that taking on such a role would affect the power relations between my
informants and myself, and affect my relationship with them. However, faced
with either taking on this role or having no access, I decided to be pragmatic. My
fieldwork in Holding Hands Volunteer Centre therefore began with me coming
in for lessons, three times a week, where I taught fifteen youths ranging in age
from twelve to twenty, in addition to shorter one-on-one tutorials. For a long
time, I thought that my role as a teacher impeded my access with the youths. I
was striving towards the methodological ideal of participant observation, and I
was frustrated with the ways in which my role at the centre categorized me as a
teacher. In China, as in many other places, the role of teacher is one of authority
that demands a relative level of respect and distance between teacher and student.
As an anthropologist, however, I wanted the opposite, as I strove to befriend
my informants and gain a close relationship with them. Hence, I initially found
myself in a role-conflict. I wanted to be an ‘insider’, but felt like these roles made
me a perpetual outsider.
A part of anthropological mythology is that, provided they play their cards
right, fieldworkers can ultimately attain a form of ‘insidership’ with their
informants, through which they can get the ‘insiders’ perspective’. But there I
was, a bearded, blond, tall, foreign man nearly twice the age of my youngest
informants, whom they moreover knew was not only their teacher, but also a
researcher who would like to learn about their lives in general and their education
in particular. While my difference was palpable, so was my purpose for being
there. Throughout my fieldwork, the fact that I as a Westerner was interested
in migrant education was something that for many aroused both suspicion and
curiosity. While certain teachers and officials I spoke to suspected I was a form
of foreign agent gathering information about the more uneven and less savoury
aspects of Chinese economic development, for others, including some youths,
it was incomprehensible that I, as a person hailing from Northern Europe, was
interested in the plights of poor rural people living in what they saw as an under-
developed part of the city. Surely I would be more interested in studying the
economic development going on in the Pudong special economic zone, or the
gentrification of the former trade concessions, where moreover the cosmopolitan
and modern conditions would assure my comfort?
Despite coming regularly to the centre, I was frustrated by my lack of access to
the wider contexts of children’s lives. Yet, when I asked the children and youths
 Awkward Encounters • 119

if we should not go somewhere else to hang out, they rhetorically asked me,
‘Where?’ As my fieldwork progressed, I had two epiphanies about this. Firstly,
I realized that while the centre was important in the way it provided extracur-
ricular classes to its young members, it was equally if not more important for the
way it offered a free social space for the children and youths. Here, at the centre,
they could surf the internet, play instruments or games, attend dance classes, or
pursue a number of other hobbies and pastimes that they would otherwise not
have access to. It was not without reason that they referred to it as their second
home. Hence, what I had seen as a formal institution that hindered access to other
settings in the young members’ lives was in reality of profound domestic impor-
tance to them. From then on, I viewed the centre differently, and actively began
seeing how different youths interacted and engaged with it.
Secondly, because of the previous epiphany, I started coming in to the centre
much more frequently when I did not have teaching scheduled and did my best
to invite myself to any activities that I heard about. Gradually, the youths began
asking me to come along as well. I also started receiving feedback on my way
of teaching from the students. One example was Dawei, who was sixteen years
old and tired of both school in general and the predicament of her educational
situation as a migrant in particular. Following parental pressure, she had tried
moving back to the rural place of her household registration (hukou) in Henan,
but did not get along well with her teachers, relatives or peers there. After a year,
she had decided to return to Shanghai, where she enrolled in a vocational school.
One day, after class, she approached me. Leaning her head against the doorframe
of the classroom, she looked down, sighed and complained about how tired she
was of the educational pressure in her life. She had not been happy in middle
school where her teachers had emphasized discipline, criticism, rote learning and
exam pressure. ‘All they care about is good grades’, she said, before elaborating,
‘but none of them are teaching us how to think for ourselves’. When I asked
how things were in her vocational school in Shanghai, she remarked that the
teachers did not really care whether the students were paying attention or not. By
definition, most of the teachers saw them as bad or ‘failed’ students, since they
had ended up in vocational schools. Like most of her classmates, Dawei was not
motivated to study, except for the ways in which the volunteers and her peers
in Holding Hands inspired her. In addition to offering extracurricular education
and a social space, the centre served a third important role in the way it tried to
empower its young members through instilling autonomy and social awareness
in them. With reference to this, Dawei noted how important she thought the
centre’s work was. ‘A person without a critical mind is like a dead person’, she
said, before reflecting on how some of the other volunteers and I were different
from her regular teachers. We taught her how to actually use what she learned,
she said, and emphasized how I included roleplaying, praise, jokes and fun in
my classes.
120 • Children

Participant observation does not have to mean becoming a member or

becoming one with the people one studies, but in different ways trying to take
part in the community one researches. Rather than a hindrance, I started viewing
teaching as a way in which my informants and I could have distinct but related
roles, and as an activity from which I could learn much about the educational
issue I was studying. Nevertheless, doubts about the ways in which my roles as
a researcher and teacher affected the relationships with my informants remained,
in particular the awkward feeling that there was something artificial about the
reasons for my attempts to befriend them. While I became fond of and cared
much about them, there was an underlying and uncomfortable truth in that the
original reason for my presence was my research. I am certainly not the first
anthropologist to have had this feeling. Did this mean, however, that our friend-
ships were not authentic?
Authenticity is commonly understood as something that is genuine and pure,
while real friendship is often understood as being selfless and without interest
for personal gain. However, I would argue that the reason why anthropologists
see friendships with informants as valuable beyond their profound intrinsic value
is an underlying assumption that deeper friendships provide access to deeper,
higher-quality data. Through becoming good friends, we may in some way be
able to bypass the front stage and access the backstage – the deep feelings, reflec-
tions, and experiences of individuals. Of course, there are a number of conceptual
and ethical problems with such an assumption. Perhaps it is problematic to think
that friendships in general, and field relations in particular, can ever be genuine,
pure, and without interest. While I felt awkward about taking advantage of my
field-relations for professional gains, it was in reality clear from day one that I
was not the only one benefitting from this relationship. As noted, the leader of
Holding Hands Volunteer Centre, Yucheng, would only give me formal access
on the condition that I would contribute through my teaching. However, it also
became clear that my informants and their families saw friendship with me as
beneficial.
One day, after the youths and I had an enjoyable time playing basketball, I
seized the opportunity and asked if they had any plans for the following day,
when the centre was closed. Xiaofeng, a key informant of mine, said she would
be home with her siblings and the others and asked me to come as well. I felt
my heart jump – I had finally been invited! However, while underway to their
home the day after, I received a text message from Xiaofeng saying that she
and the others were busy, although her sixteen-year-old brother, Taotao, and her
mother, Fanghua, were waiting for me. I was a bit disappointed at this, but soon
found myself in the flat that they shared with another migrant family in a 1980s
residential block. After showing me the communal kitchen, bathroom and living
room, Taotao and his mother invited me into the family’s bedroom. Taotao sat
down on the siblings’ bunk bed and played with his cell phone while Fanghua
 Awkward Encounters • 121

poured tea and asked me more questions than I was able to answer. She was one of
the very first parents I met in the field and had many opinions about my research
and the issue of migrant education. Taotao helped translate when I was not able to
understand, but was not very interested in partaking in the conversation. Indeed,
his posture gradually shifted from the upright position of an awake person to a
horizontal one. He clearly found the situation boring. Fanghua barked that Taotao
was to wake up and invited us out for lunch at a nearby restaurant, where she
made sure constantly to fill my bowl and cup with food and drinks.
I was at first disappointed by this encounter because I was unable to meet my
young informants as planned. When Taotao fell asleep, the meeting seemed like a
failure altogether. However, my encounter with a parent proved to be very fruitful.
Fanghua provided me with insights on the generational changes of migrants’ living
conditions in the urban areas, her views on migrant policies, and parental reflections
on the value of higher education versus manual labour. She also repeatedly asked me
to do my best to help her children with their studies, to advise them about the world
and where they should study, and whether I knew of any viable foreign scholarships.
To me, this was awkward, because she asked for more than I could actually deliver,
despite my endeavours to help the youths with their studies. However, throughout
my fieldwork, I received the same requests and questions from a range of people of
various ages and backgrounds. As such, it became clear to me that while my field-
relations were based on friendship, they were not without self-interest for either my
informants or myself. I found it helped to be open with my informants and talk with
them about these issues. In one such conversation, my main informants Xiaofeng
and Chunhua commented ‘It’s fine, you help us with our studies, and we help you
with your research. No problem, in China friends help friends’.

Building on Awkward Encounters

With reference to the country’s cultural history, Yunxiang Yan (2009) has noted
how the concept of youth is relatively new in China. Traditionally, there was
no intermediary stage between childhood and adulthood (ibid.: 109), and one
was considered a child until marriage. While the Confucian principle of filial
piety (xiao) also governs contemporary child–parent relationships, this is upset
by youth cultures emphasizing individuality and independence both in the rural
and urban parts of China. In my own fieldwork, I found parental authority being
further challenged by the ways in which migrant youths quickly gained a higher
educational level than their parents, and, as they grew older, earned their own
money. I therefore reflected that I needed to stay open to local conceptions of
what constituted ‘children’, ‘youths’, and ‘adults’.
Despite being called children, several factors meant that my young informants
not only had to relate to an adult world but also had to make adult choices. They
122 • Children

were not only students but in many cases breadwinners who worked together
with adults. They had to make existential choices regarding their future vocations
that mattered not only to themselves, but also to their entire families. Importantly,
in order to attend middle and high school so they could pursue higher education,
they would have to leave their families and friends in Shanghai to enroll at a
school in the village their parents hailed from.
In the spring of 2011, I left Shanghai to visit rural Henan together with
Xiaofeng and Lao Yu, a volunteer with the centre. We planned to visit Chunhua,
who had decided to try her luck in high school and with the university entrance
exams (gaokao). We arrived outside the gates of her school in the evening and
Chunhua smiled awkwardly as she approached us. Although she knew I was
coming, it seemed as though she thought it was strange to see me, as if I was out
of place in the setting of the rural township in which she lived. Chunhua talked
to the security guards and let us into the school. At that moment, the school bell
rang, and I could hear the combined noise of hundreds of students finishing their
studies for the day, closing their books and heading for their dormitories. The
security guards cried into their megaphones that they should go straight to sleep.
However, Chunhua was allowed to go with us to a local restaurant to catch up.
As we ordered dishes, she again smiled awkwardly. This was not like the restau-
rants she liked in Shanghai, including the outdoor one her family ran for a living.
Xiaofeng and Lao Yu jokingly asked if life was good, and Chunhua laughed
shyly. She was tired of it all – the endless studying, the lack of anything else to
do and the alienation she felt from the other students. Over the course of my stay,
it became apparent that she felt out of place.
Both Dawei and Chunhua were struggling with feelings of not fitting in and
being different in the rural environment of their hometowns (laojia). Among
the migrant children and youths I knew during my fieldwork, ties and feelings
of belonging to these places varied, but most children and youth had only been
back a few times, primarily during the Spring Festival. Because of this, many
of my informants did not have close relations with their extended families still
living in the countryside. Moreover, having grown up in the urban and cosmo-
politan environment of Shanghai, they felt alienated from the environment of
their rural hometowns. In Chunhua’s case, she remarked how there were few
shops selling cool clothes, very limited variety in restaurants, and, rather than
pulsating and lively billboards lighting up the evening cityscape, here it was pitch
black. Chunhua also noted how limited the occupational opportunities were in
her hometown. Because of having grown up in such different environments and
milieux, she felt she had little in common with her classmates. The youth culture
in Shanghai in general, and that of her friends in Holding Hands in particular,
meant that she had different frames of reference.
The next day, Chunhua gave us a tour of the school before taking us to her
room, where we could talk more privately. She lived on the top floor of her
 Awkward Encounters • 123

dormitory and, compared to the facilities of other schools I had visited, condi-
tions were quite spartan. Her little room contained a bed around which she had
wrapped cardboard to insulate and protect herself from the dusty walls, a wooden
desk for self-study, and a wire she had fastened to a nail in the wall on which
she hung her clothes. A window and a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling
illuminated the room. We sat down, and I asked if we could talk a bit about her
life in the school, while I fetched my notebook from my bag. Meanwhile, Lao Yu
produced a tripod and film camera from his backpack and set it up. Among other
activities, Lao Yu had been documenting the centre’s activities and its members’
lives over the course of several years in order to raise awareness of the centre and
the issue of migrant education.
The youths, including Chunhua, were quite used to these documenting
activities, but I was wary about how Lao Yu’s filming would affect the interview.
Chunhua was not very happy in the school, and I judged that while she might
want to talk to us as friends, preserving her frustrations for posterity on film was
a different matter. However, both Chunhua and Lao Yu said it was fine. She began
by telling us how she found the township backwards and traditional compared to
Shanghai, and how she missed her friends and family back home. Her teachers told
her that if she did well in the exams, it could forever transform the life of herself
and her family. This put incredible pressure on her. She felt compelled to succeed;
otherwise, she would feel ashamed for letting everyone down. She did not have
a particular dream towards a specific career. All that mattered to her was passing
the exam. I then asked about her friends, but Chunhua fell quiet and looked down.
When she had been back in Shanghai for Chinese New Year, she had told me that
she had gained a couple of friends that she was so close to that she referred to
them as brothers. Remembering this, I asked specifically about them, but Chunhua
just shook her head, still looking away. Noticing that I was clearly upsetting the
girl, I said we could stop the interview there, or talk about something else. Lao
Yu, however, said that this was an important question and told us to continue.
Here, I should have broken the interview off, but I did not. Before I knew what
was happening, Chunhua had stormed out of the room crying, walked outside to a
balcony, and locked the door behind her. From outside, I could hear her sobbing.
To say that this was an awkward situation would be a profound under-
statement. I had clearly caused distress to Chunhua by pressuring her, and she no
doubt felt cornered by the whole situation. Xiaofeng talked with her, and after
a while she returned. I apologized for placing her in that situation and upsetting
her, but she said it was the loneliness and academic pressure that made her sad.
Nevertheless, I felt terrible afterwards. My pursuit of good data had ended up
hurting Chunhua and had added to the pressure she was already feeling. I felt like
I had failed methodologically and ethically as an anthropologist.
Due to a crisis in Xiaofeng’s family, she and Lao Yu had to leave the same
day. Chunhua and I joined them for part of the journey to a larger town in Anhui
124 • Children

where they would catch a bus onwards, whereas Chunhua and I would meet her
old classmates who were attending high school there. Together with her friends,
we spent the day going to a peaceful temple, taking group photos and eating a
massive meal before walking to a square where old and young were dancing,
rollerblading, and buying snacks from small stalls. Chunhua quickly transformed
into the chirpy and cheerful youth that I had first befriended in Shanghai. We
ended the night by writing wishes on hot air lanterns for the upcoming university
entrance exams (gaokao) and sending them floating towards the sky.
I stayed with Chunhua for a couple more days and joined in with the daily
routines in her school. I did the compulsory morning run around campus together
with hundreds of other students to the tune of old marching songs, talked with
local students and teachers, taught English, ate in the school canteen, played
ping-pong and basketball during breaks and generally did my best to collect as
many impressions and encounters as possible. While I asked the other students
questions about life in the villages and in the school, in addition to questions
about their dreams and aspirations for the future, I held back from doing so with
Chunhua. I avoided asking her any personal questions about her own situation,
and instead focused on just spending time with her. Given the bombardment of
new experiences and impressions, the days went by very quickly, until it was
finally time to leave for Zhengzhou, from where I would catch the train back to
Shanghai.
Chunhua insisted on coming with me to make sure I made it safely, but
ironically I missed the train and had to take a later one. The weather was mild,
so we sat down on the steps outside the train station as the sun was setting and
listened to the hum of the city. While chatting about this and that, Chunhua
calmly returned to the issue of why she was crying that day in her dormitory.
She explained that while she felt very stressed from the academic pressure,
there were also other forms of pressures that were equally important. For her
as a migrant, a higher education represented ‘a way out’ of the life of manual
labour that her parents had gone through. While she did not have a household
registration (hukou) in Shanghai, and as such was not counted socio-politically
as a citizen, a degree from a good university would, in many ways, offer her
a form of cultural citizenship and right to belong in Shanghai. Her classmates
experienced similar pressures. Passing the entrance exam with a good score
entailed an escape from the countryside and rendered possible new subjectivities
elsewhere. The alternative would be that they returned to their villages, married,
had children, left them behind with their parents and travelled to the cities for
manual labour (dagong). Chunhua also reiterated her experiences of the socio-
cultural tensions she was feeling in school and how she had completely different
frames of reference from local youth culture. While her local peers wanted to
perform well in the exams in order to escape the countryside and go to the cities
to see another world, she already knew what the countryside lacked. Having had
 Awkward Encounters • 125

different upbringings, she did not get on well with her peers, and felt extremely
lonely in a context of otherwise intense pressure.
As we sat there and calmly talked with the open and tranquil landscape
ahead of us, it dawned on me that this setting was the polar opposite of
the formal interview situation in her cramped concrete dormitory room. In
hindsight, however, I have realized that our talk on the steps of the train station
would probably not have taken place in the same way had it not been for the
awkwardness and difficulty of the previous interview. Although the interview had
led to a difficult situation where I was afraid I was alienating Chunhua due to the
distress I caused her, by talking openly with her about why it had been difficult
and by spending more time with her this became an experience that made our
friendship stronger.
Even though I have focused on specific awkward and difficult episodes in this
chapter, most of my days with the youths did not stand out in this sense. There
were good days where I felt I gained important insights from the positive things
that happened in my informants’ lives, and there were days that I experienced as
wholly uneventful. Awkwardness was usually not isolated to specific events, but
a fluid part of the experience of spending time with my informants, just as joy,
fascination, curiosity, tiredness, boredom and a range of other emotions were.
Yet the kinds of awkward and difficult encounters with children and youths I
have described were useful and should not necessarily be seen as signs of failure.
Through talking about and reflecting on these encounters, I decided to shift my
focus from educational structures in my informants’ lives to how they experi-
enced them, reflected on them and negotiated them.

Final Thoughts

Finding one’s own place in the field and doing fieldwork is rarely a straight-
forward process, and while it may be difficult for young and senior researchers
alike we should embrace awkward and difficult situations as an inevitable part of
encountering our informants during ethnographic research. While I have talked
about awkwardness in relation to my roles as a researcher and teacher and in
attempts to befriend and interview my informants, I have not focused much
on the age gap. In fact, I rarely found the age gap between my informants and
myself to be the main challenge in communicating, interacting, and establishing
rapport. The language barrier and my limited knowledge of Chinese and Japanese
pop-cultural references were for me bigger obstacles in my daily engagements
with children and youths. It became evident to me fairly quickly that trying
to become some sort of ‘insider’ by emulating my informants’ behaviour and
interests was completely futile. While the age-gap was a part of this, it meshed
with a number of ways in which I was different from the youths. Instead, I did
126 • Children

the opposite. While I certainly tried to learn about the different youth cultures my
informants were part of, and their related vernaculars, I found it best to just be an
obvious outsider. Indeed, the children and youths were quite curious about what
things were like where I was from – what brands of jeans were popular, what
were the coolest computer games, what sports my friends and I liked watching or
playing. They asked questions about family relations, about having a boyfriend
or girlfriend, about alcohol, tobacco, and partying, about education, work and
aspirations, about gender pressures, sexuality and marriage. Contrary to being
a limitation, I often found that my subjective differences both in terms of my
background and age facilitated my rapport with my informants.
The focus on age-gap in the methodological literature is there because
many researchers struggle with this issue. But this emphasis can also end up
constructing the very problem it seeks to remedy, as researchers start fretting too
much about age-differences. I would therefore like to end this chapter with two
simple points of advice. Firstly, while there is little that can be done about actual
age differences, this does not mean researchers cannot be youthful. Secondly,
while I joked and laughed with (and was often laughed at by) my informants, I
think a primary reason why they thought it was worthwhile spending time with
me was because I took them and their opinions seriously, and did so by talking
and discussing with them openly and honestly. While there can sometimes be
awkwardness, to me, this is the most appropriate way of encountering children
and youths.
 9

Growing Close Where Inequalities Grow Large?

A Patron for Qur’anic Students in Nigeria

Hannah Hoechner

Learning to be a Patron

It is 7.30 a.m. and the knocking on the door to our compound, albeit somewhat
timid, does not stop. I am fighting sleep as well as the desire to just turn around
and ignore Aliyu. Getting enough rest is a challenge at Sabuwar Ƙofa, Kano
city, Nigeria, where heat and mosquitoes make it difficult to find sleep in the
evening and where the morning call for prayer from the neighbouring mosque
unfailingly wakes me at dawn. This is, of course, not Aliyu’s fault, and I know
the boy, whose schedule starts on some days with Qur’anic lessons before the
morning prayer, is getting even less sleep than me. Nonetheless, this morning I
wish he wasn’t there knocking, waiting to be let in to start his three-times-weekly
morning cleaning round. Once he starts work, I do, too. Not that there was neces-
sarily any work awaiting me at 7.30 a.m. in the morning. But sitting down idly
with a cup of tea or even breakfast, while Aliyu, maybe fifteen years old at that
time, sweeps up fallen leaves, bent over his straw broom, then mops the linoleum
floor of the veranda, now kneeling down with his rug, then takes out the rubbish?
The mere prospect makes me uncomfortable. Which serious researcher with a
minimum awareness of power relations employs their informants as domestics,
minors of age at that?! Knowing, in the abstract, that poor young people in poor
countries probably cherish opportunities to work under decent conditions for
decent wages – even if they are research subjects – does not assuage my unease.
So I find myself something to do, wash dishes, sort papers that didn’t need sorting
until then, pretend to have urgent computer work – anything really. Sometimes
I even help sweep and mop, which obviously defies the purpose of employing
somebody to do that. I know it is silly, and it does not efface my privilege. I
sometimes wonder what Aliyu thinks of my contrived morning hustling.

127
128 • Children

I had come to northern Nigeria to study the almajirai, as ‘traditional’ Qur’anic

students are known in Hausa, the region’s lingua franca. Now I found myself
living in a compound where they worked as household helps. The least I could
do, I thought, to make a research relationship possible and ethically defensible
was to avoid employing any almajirai myself. So I hid behind my flatmates, first
VSO (Volunteer Service Overseas) volunteers from the UK, then, for most of my
time in Kano, a young man, also a VSO volunteer, from Uganda. I slipped my
flatmates money so they would pay our domestic workers and left the room when
they did so. I did anything I could to hide that I was part of that power structure
that made young people bend and kneel and take out other people’s rubbish
to earn their daily bread. Yet our household helps (Aliyu, fifteen and Ismaila,
thirteen) benignly ignored my efforts to efface myself from the employment
equation. They asked me, the woman in the house, rather than my male flatmate,
whether they should mop here or there, today or another day, and when I’d expect
them back next.
To ease into my role as employer and ‘patron’ would take me time and became
possible only after I developed a better understanding of how social relations
work in northern Nigeria. With time, I started discovering the opportunities that
even relationships involving status inequalities had to offer not only to me as a
researcher, but also to the young people with whom I conducted my research. But
this came after some time of desperately trying – and failing – to be somehow
‘equal’ to the young people I had come to study in Kano. With hindsight, it
seems obvious that this was an endeavour doomed to failure. How could I – a
white, agnostic woman in her mid-twenties with a return flight ticket to Europe
in her pocket and the prospect of an academic career before her – be equal to
the almajirai?
First of all, the almajirai are all male. Naively, I had been hoping I could
become their friend. But friendships do not, or very rarely, traverse gender
boundaries in northern Nigeria. In Hausa, the word used to refer to a woman’s
close friend is ƙawa (female); a man’s friend is his aboki (male); friendship bonds
between the sexes are not provided for linguistically. Men and women in northern
Nigeria relate to each other as siblings, kin, spouses, (secret) lovers and patrons
and clients – but not as friends. ‘Befriending’ the almajirai and other male youths
was thus not an option readily available to me.
Secondly, the almajirai are young (from primary school age to their early
twenties) and age hierarchies are almost as important for social interactions in
Kano as gender hierarchies. Juniors are expected to show respect to their seniors
and to not challenge their views or behaviours openly. Most of the time, I did not
behave as would have been appropriate for my age. Why was I not married yet?
Most women my age in northern Nigeria are long since married, and therefore
secluded, which means they leave their compound only with their husband’s
permission. I, on the other hand, like pre-pubescent boys and unmarried girls,
 Growing Close Where Inequalities Grow Large? • 129

moved about as I pleased. This did not, however, do much to alter people’s
views of my relative status, and I would still mostly be treated with the respect
and deference appropriate for an adult and elder. When I refused to accept the
benefits coming with this status, for example by refusing to let a boy who came
running carry a heavy bag for me, this resulted in consternation. Did I not trust
him enough to hand over my bag?
Thirdly, the almajirai and I were set apart by religion. While I had been
brought up agnostic, they dedicate many years of their childhood and youth to the
study of the Qur’an, word for word, surah for surah, and to this end live with a
Qur’anic teacher who hardly has the means to shelter let alone feed them. I soon
abandoned my initial advances seeking admission as a ‘participant-observer’ (or
even just an ‘observer’) to the Qur’anic schools I was curious about. What would
I have been doing during their lessons? Most teachers – and bystanders, whose
opinion weighs heavily as gossip and can make, or break, a Qur’anic teacher’s
reputation – wondered whether I intended to convert to Islam or not. And if
I didn’t, why did I want to learn the Qur’an? Sure, they affirmed, they would
happily answer any questions I might have – but the Qur’an was reserved for
believers. In northern Nigeria, Islam’s holy book is believed to be full of mystical
secrets that convey power upon the one mastering them. Why, if not for financial
gain, would one give away these secrets to a non-Muslim?
This leads me to the last but probably most important difference between
the almajirai and me. The Qur’anic students are almost all precariously poor
and depend on charity and occasional employment opportunities for their daily
subsistence. From their teenage years – and sometimes even before – most poor
families in northern Nigeria expect their children to contribute to, rather than
merely draw on, the household budget. The almajirai, who live at a distance
from their overwhelmingly poor rural families, may enroll in school equipped
with a bag of provisions, but soon these are eaten up and they have to manage
on their own. Was it really a surprise that they conceived of me as an extra
resource to be mobilized in their daily struggle to find life’s essentials? These
included a place to sleep, food to fill the stomach, money to (occasionally) buy
new clothes, money to buy slippers (if they were again stolen from the mosque
during prayer), money to buy soap to wash clothes and the body, money to use
the public bath (as not every school has its own bathrooms), money to buy gifts
for parents and younger siblings (on the rare occasion of a visit home), money to
pay for transport costs, money to buy second-, or third-, or fourth-hand mobile
phones and money to buy the smallest top-up possible for these phones. In brief,
needs are numerous.
Historically, traditional Qur’anic students – as the future depository of sacred
knowledge – could expect to be fed and looked after by the ummah, the Muslim
community. But today society values other forms of knowledge: both secular
knowledge and modern Islamic knowledge. Society has become increasingly
130 • Children

individualistic, and many amongst the wealthy no longer support the almajirai.
To make ends meet, the almajirai not only beg for food and money, they also,
from the age of eight, nine, or ten, seek work, including work as domestics.
Towards the end of puberty, when entering another man’s compound ceases to
be age-appropriate, they seek other work activities.
Living in Kano, I first had to overcome my discomfort and get used to my
new role as employer and ‘patron’. By contrast, for Aliyu and Ismaila, being
workers and ‘clients’ came fairly naturally: this was how they related to all the
women in the middle–upper class neighbourhood where I was living and where
their school (hosted by a wealthy patron) was located. As many women live
secluded lives, they depend on children as go-betweens for their transactions
with the world outside their compounds. Women who don’t have children of
an appropriate age, women whose children attend secular or modern Islamic
school throughout the day, but also women from upper-class households who
don’t want to bother their own offspring with menial tasks, employ almajirai to
fetch water for them, to clean around the house, to take out the rubbish, to run
errands and to do the daily shopping. Such employment arrangements are crucial
to the almajirai’s economic survival. Sometimes, they give rise to very close and
symbiotic relationships between the women and the almajirai involved. That
the arrangement is a ‘patron–client’ one, that it is based on status inequality and
that it involves economic transactions does not preclude closeness and mutual
affection. Women whom the almajirai consider just or even generous (with
however much or little they have) are especially beloved. Since many employers
do disregard the almajirai, do treat them condescendingly and do pay them
abysmal wages, the exceptions stand out.
I, of course, wanted to be one of the almajirai’s ‘good’ employers, a ‘good’
patron. Aliyu and Ismaila received wages well above the local average. My
flatmate and I would watch the time and encourage them to leave, regardless
of whether they had ‘finished’ their tasks, when the beginning of their classes
or prayer time approached. We would insist that they sit level with us on the
couch or chairs rather than below us on the floor if we sat down for a chat. We
were polite and respectful and asked them about their health, their studies, and
their families. These were the easy ways of being ‘good’ employers. Other roles
were more difficult to play: Should we share our food with the almajirai, as so
many other households did? But what did the almajirai like? Wouldn’t they find
our ‘half-cooked vegetables’ repulsive, like other Nigerian guests who were less
constrained by the dictates of politeness in their judgement of our eating habits?
Yet, on the other hand, what would it mean if we did not invite them? Luckily,
both Ismaila and Aliyu also had jobs elsewhere, which helped them procure
their daily meals. Eventually, we resolved to invite them explicitly for what we
thought were treats (which meant putting food on a plate and pushing it into their
hands) and rhetorically for everything else we ate (since rhetorical invitations are
 Growing Close Where Inequalities Grow Large? • 131

mostly considered acts of politeness and rarely accepted). Admittedly, we did not
always get it right, and the sweet pancakes, for example, that my flatmate and I
thought were delicious were pushed from one side of the plate to the other.
As I became more fluent in Hausa and developed a better understanding of
the almajirai’s daily lives and their challenges, I also became more conversant
with culturally appropriate patron behaviour. Slowly, I began to realize all my
shortcomings. ‘Good’ patrons offer their almajirai a place to sleep in the entrance
hall to their compound. The alternatives, the teacher’s entrance hall, which is
crowded with students, or the school’s forecourt, where students sleep unshel-
tered from the elements, are far more precarious. ‘Good’ patrons sew clothes for
their almajirai on the major Muslim holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Kabir, and
give transport money for visits home on these occasions. ‘Good’ patrons offer to
enroll their almajirai in secular school and pay for fees and materials, provided
the almajirai’s teacher and parents do not mind secular schooling.
I also learned about what makes a ‘good’ patron through my own evolving
‘patronage’ relationship with the almajirai. Aliyu and Ismaila spent increas-
ingly large amounts of time in our compound, often accompanied by friends or
younger almajirai. From how they acted and reacted towards me, I could roughly
gauge what a patron–client relationship within the Hausa cultural repertoire
usually entails. Ismaila, for instance, a very upright and forthcoming teenager
who always found the right words to express his needs and desires without ever
coming across as demanding, would ask for English lessons, and approach me for
my advice and financial support for his education and business plans. He would
take me to his parents’ house for the Eid al-Fitr celebration and ask me to ‘lend’
him money on that occasion so he did not have to go empty-handed. He would
also visit me to chat if I had been away for some days and carry my bag if he met
me on the street. Being made part of his ‘patronage network’ in this way helped
me understand the kind of relationships almajirai develop more widely with
people belonging to a different social class.
Gradually, I also began to learn what the almajirai considered ‘bad’ patron
behaviour. Aliyu, for example, complained about his other employers who hardly
paid him any cash but merely gave him food and a place to sleep in their entrance
hall, even though he carried heavy water buckets for them every day, which made
his neck hurt. He also doubted they would stick to their promise of putting him
through primary school. As an ethnographer, I encouraged these conversations:
I was curious about the almajirai’s position within wider society, and there
seemed no better way of learning about it than by discussing their relationships
with the well-off who employ them. In retrospect, I think these discussions were
also a way for me to ‘redeem’ myself. By concurring with their frustrations, their
sense of injustice, by sniffing together with them at the comportment of some
of the rich in Kano, I sought to show whose side I was ‘really’ on. I sought to
declare myself loyal to their cause and to obliterate that I was also rich (relatively
132 • Children

speaking), which opened up my patron behaviour to critical scrutiny. Later, I

found out that I did not always live up to the expectations. But that would be a
slow and painful discovery.

Filmmaking

After some months of fieldwork, during which I continually encountered negative

stereotypes about the almajirai, I had the idea of producing a documentary
film together with some of the Qur’anic students I had started to know better.
I thought that through a film they would have an opportunity to make their
views known of their education and of how society treated them. A film project
promised to provide opportunities not only to spend time with the almajirai, but
also to learn about what they would want to document and communicate. I had
become an almajiri employer/patron at Sabuwar Kofa, and I had set up English
classes not only for our employees but also for almajirai from other Qur’anic
schools in Kano and in my rural field site, Albasu. But both employing and
teaching inevitably put me in a position of authority. A joint film project promised
the opportunity to develop somewhat less hierarchical relationships.
I secured funding and support from the Goethe Institute Kano, the patronage
of Kano State’s Commissioner of Information, and permission from three
different Qur’anic teachers to let their students participate. The project involved
nine teenage almajirai from three different schools, amongst them my ‘protégés’
from Sabuwar Ƙofa, Aliyu and Ismaila and several almajirai who attended my
English classes in Kano and Albasu. It unfolded as follows. Firstly, we met
for various script writing sessions, then for practical filmmaking training with
two professionals from the Kano film industry, Kannywood, then for shooting
sessions at the Qur’anic schools of the participating almajirai, then for labourious
editing sessions at the Goethe Institute, then finally for a glorious, well-attended
premiere with high-ranking government officials, students and teachers from
several Qur’anic schools, and a large, interested public present. The almajirai
had been involved in all stages of the film production, had performed all tasks
more or less independently, and, under the guidance of two film professionals,
had taken most directorial decisions themselves. It was by any account a
remarkable achievement.1
The docu-drama we had produced tells the story of Aminu, who is sent to
Qur’anic school in the city because his father believes he will progress better in
his studies away from home. Aminu struggles to find a place to sleep, enough food
to eat every day and money to buy soap. He is bullied by an older student in his
school, abused by his employer and denigrated by people in his neighbourhood.
But against the odds he eventually manages to secure reputable employment as
a shop assistant and succeeds in his Qur’anic studies. The film’s most critical
 Growing Close Where Inequalities Grow Large? • 133

message is for the communities in which the almajirai live, which treat them
condescendingly, fail to support them and consider them as labour power rather
than as persons. The almajirai received a lot of praise for their film, which got
a great deal of media attention, and numerous people declared that the film had
made them see the almajirai in a new light. It seemed that all had gone well.
However, one day, a couple of weeks after the premiere and a couple of days
before the end of my fieldwork in Kano, my version of reality broke into pieces.
I can still feel the anger and helplessness – desperation even – that seized
me when I had finally pieced together the almajirai’s version of reality. I had
conceived of the project as a neat way not only of spending time with the
almajirai and of learning about their experiences, but also of making my research
‘useful’ to them, enthused as I was by the readings I had done at university about
participatory research as a means to ‘give voice’ and to ‘empower’ marginalized
groups. Through the film, I thought and hoped, the participating almajirai would
have experiences that would be valuable to them, learn skills that would be useful
to them and further the public’s understanding of their most pressing concerns.
In brief, I considered the project my way of ‘giving something back’. However,
I now learnt that some of the almajirai felt instead that I was taking something
away from them. I began to feel as though a rug was being pulled from under my
feet. I needed to believe in my research as worthwhile, useful, ethical, in order
to keep going. Otherwise, why bother? Why not just go home and not struggle
any longer with the heat, the noise, the pollution, the rubbish and grime lining
every road, the constant demands for money, the constant pressure to dress appro-
priately, to greet appropriately, to behave appropriately, the feeling of looking
ridiculous in my headscarf and wrapper, the frustration about the pimples on my
face, and the never-ending comments about them, the oily, monotonous food, the
fat accumulating on my body, the physical inertia, the boredom, the loneliness?
From the beginning it had been clear that the participating almajirai would act
in as many capacities as possible and that we would try to cast other children’s
roles with almajirai from their schools and children from the neighbourhood,
not least because we didn’t have the funds to engage many professional actors.
But finding and training lay actors for adult roles was difficult as those likely to
perform best in the roles we needed (traditional Qur’anic teachers and almajirai’s
parents, who are often rather conservative; nasty employers, who are by definition
uncooperative) were least likely to agree to participate. The almajirai greeted
enthusiastically the decision that we – that is, the two film professionals accom-
panying the project, the director of the Goethe Institute and myself – eventually
took: we would engage locally famous Kannywood actors to act in the roles we
were otherwise struggling to fill. They would be paid for their participation; not
much by their standards, but a very significant amount by almajirai standards.
Given how poor most almajirai are, I did not think it wise to discuss the details of
our budget decisions with them. I was worried, I guess, that such a conversation
134 • Children

would make the economic differences between us too blatant, too jarring and
that it would break down the egalitarian spirit of the participatory project. But
my attempt to obscure our differences did of course not stop the almajirai from
investigating who was paid how much and, when asked directly, I did not lie.
Initially, the director of the Goethe Institute and I had planned to compensate
the almajirai with a small amount of money for the income they would forego
by participating in the project. Yet, after our first sessions, we dropped this idea.
We feared it would increase inequalities amongst the select few almajiri ‘partici-
pants’ and the many ‘non-participants’. The boundary between them was fuzzy
at times. We met for training at the premises of an NGO that supported a large
number of almajirai. Non-project children listened in on the training sessions
and contributed ideas to the script. During the shooting various students from the
three participating Qur’anic schools stepped in as actors. Would it be ethical to
pay the work of some and not of others?
We also felt that paying the almajirai would unnecessarily commercialize the
project, detracting from the idealistic enthusiasm and curiosity for filmmaking
skills sustaining it at least in the beginning. Of course, we did not want any
almajirai to suffer financially from participating in the project. The Goethe
Institute paid for food and transport costs during training, and my flatmate and I
stepped in during the ‘after-work hours’. We hosted the almajirai who had come
from rural Albasu to Kano city for the project in our compound, got up at dawn
to heat buckets of water for everyone to shower and to fry piles of omelettes in
time for breakfast. We cooked huge amounts of jollof rice for dinner (sometimes
after late filming until deep into the night) to feed not only our guests from
Albasu, but also the other almajirai participating in the project, who would
stop by to visit and get fed. We cleaned up after the boys and made sure they
slept comfortably. After the youths from Albasu told me that the project (and
‘weekend’) days Thursday and Friday were the only days on which they as ‘rural
almajirai’ had a chance of earning cash by hiring out their farm labour, we agreed
that I would give them some money each week so as to cover their basic expenses
(such as soap). As none of the urban-based youths approached me with a similar
grievance, I assumed that losing Thursdays and Fridays was not a particular
problem to them. In this way, the project went on for almost three months.
I remember having been frustrated at times with the boys’ ‘laziness’ as soon as
they entered our compound: they would hardly lift a finger and would take it for
granted that my flatmate and I served them. Also, apart from a formulaic ‘thank
you’ here and there, they never showed any gratitude. This was at odds with the
image I had of them from our previous interactions during my English lessons or
as a ‘patron’ at Sabuwar Kofa. I shrugged it off as a show of adolescent manliness
in a society where women in general are expected to be at the service of men.
All in all, I remember these project days, despite my exhaustion and occasional
frustration, as extremely rewarding. After long days of work, we would all sit on
 Growing Close Where Inequalities Grow Large? • 135

our veranda around our dim electric torch (the electricity supply being as erratic
as usual) discussing the events of the day, sharing stories from our lives as well
as the feeling of being part of something important and meaningful.
Perhaps my later hurt and disappointment were so sharp because I had
cherished these moments so much? Fieldwork had often been a lonely experience
for me. I did not manage to feel really close to people who held values very
different from mine, for example, about the lesser value of women or the greater
value of people of aristocratic origin. Also, I was often put off by the indifference
and condescension with which better-off people thought about and treated
those who are poor. I relished my relationship with the almajirai so much, I
think, because I managed to feel unstintingly affectionate towards them. Their
challenging life stories had touched me deeply. I admired the light-heartedness
with which they managed difficult circumstances, the solidarity with which they
could care for friends or younger fellow students, their ability to reason and act
in deeply moral ways despite all their hardships.
Eventually, I began piecing together bit by bit a more complex, and less rosy,
picture of the almajirai, and of my relationship with them. Several of the boys
who had participated in the film project approached me with demands that I
thought were rude to say the least. Some, for example, stopped by my compound
one afternoon. I offered them water to drink and was told what was the point
of offering them water if I didn’t offer them any food? On another occasion, I
discussed the details of their secular schooling with some of them, which I had
agreed to pay for even before the film project had started. Whereas in the past
the tenor had been gratitude, now I was confronted with demands: for transport
money, for a school bag, for this and for that. I was disappointed and offended –
even more so, as I had learned by now how much Hausa society values modesty
and self-restraint. I understood that trouble was brewing. Eventually, I plucked
up the courage to ask Ismaila, whose behaviour towards me hadn’t changed in all
this time, and to whom I felt closest, what was going on.
It was then that I learned that the film youths had been debating amongst
themselves for some time whether it was fair that they contributed so much
work and energy and weren’t paid just like the professional actors. Some had
even considered dropping out halfway through the project. They had come to
believe that the film was my PhD project, which I would hand in as such to get
my degree. If they did the work for me, why did I not pay them? Rumours and
gossip in their neighbourhoods and schools had further spurred the disgrun-
tlement some youths harbored. People insinuated that the Goethe Institute and I
envisaged making a lot of money with the film by selling it in Europe, behind the
almajirai’s back. (In fact, the Goethe Institute had financed some 300 DVDs to
be distributed for free in Nigeria.)
It turned out that the almajirai had speculated widely about what they would
receive in exchange for their participation at the end of the project. Without any
136 • Children

ulterior motive I had one day offered Khalidu, an almajiri from Albasu and part
of the ‘film crew’, an old bicycle that some VSO volunteer had left behind in our
compound. He was the first person to ask for it and the bike had been standing
around unused for a long time, so I was happy to answer his request. Khalidu was
acting in a minor role in the film. From the fact that he got the bike the almajirai
concluded that the boy who was acting as the main character of our film could
expect to be given a car at the end of the project! When the project ended and I
did not hand out any cars, frustration began to mount up.
When I found out about this frustration, I was torn between severe self-
doubt, disappointment and anger. The self-doubt was strongest: had I not been
sufficiently clear about my motivations for the film? Was I honest to claim that
I had invested so much energy in the film for the almajirai’s benefit? After all,
it had been an enormously lucky methodology for me, allowing me to learn
an incredible amount about the almajirai’s lives and perspectives. Yes, they
had spent many hours and days on this film, probably many more than they
had expected, and it was true that our project had eaten up days they would
otherwise have used to earn an income. And had I not, naïve and thoughtless
as I was, mentioned to Aliyu and Ismaila some time before the project, when
I had just finalized the agreement with the Goethe Institute, that they would be
given something as compensation for their foregone income? Also, should I not
have known better than to assume that money issues weren’t something to worry
about merely because none of the almajirai (the agreement with the youths from
Albasu aside) brought them up explicitly? As I said, by that time I had – in theory
at least – understood that one does not voice straightforward demands, and that
one does not openly criticize one’s ‘superior’ in Hausa society.
On the other hand, I felt it was hugely unfair that the almajirai so easily
reinterpreted my behaviour as self-interested and forgot all the moments when I
had been supporting them for no particular reason except that I liked them and
that I knew how they struggled. I had always had an open ear for their worries
and had never hesitated to step in when they approached me for help. Most
importantly, I had offered to sponsor the secular education of a whole range of
them, which, on a PhD scholarship, was no small commitment. I was also angry
at what I then considered hubris and greed. Did everything always have to be
about money? Seriously? How pathetic! Did they not care about the opportunity
to stand up for the almajirai’s concerns in front of a wider audience than they
would ever have again? They had been new to filmmaking, and a major element
of the project had been to teach them. Since when were students paid to learn?
They were lucky if people bothered to watch their film, the amateur production
that it was! How on earth could they believe anybody would spend money to buy
it?! How could they consider their own clumsy acting equivalent to that of the
professionals? How could they not have noticed the constant efforts our two film
professionals and I made to smooth over their mistakes?
 Growing Close Where Inequalities Grow Large? • 137

Once I had my emotions halfway under control again, I summoned the

almajirai. Some of them had travelled home or were back in rural Albasu,
but those I could get hold of came promptly. I was first fighting tears and
then asserted that the last thing I wanted was to do them wrong. I had invited
them because I cared about their views, and because I wanted to understand
them. Why on earth had they not told me that they were not happy with how
I managed things? When the boys present denied having been discontented
in any way, and instead declared the boys who were absent that day the true
‘instigators’, I was at first relieved. So maybe not everyone felt ill-treated? Yet,
as I spoke to the presumed ‘instigators’ on the next occasion, it turned out that
the boys denying any discontent had also harboured grudges. Even now, after I
had emphasized that I really cared about their views, they were afraid to voice
them. I began to realize that I had misunderstood something quite fundamental
about our relationship.

Making Peace

How did we make peace? I would like to believe that my explanations helped:
the film was not my PhD and it would not sell in Europe. Over time they would
realize the value of the skills they had learned, the experiences they had had and
the connections they had built. Some months after my departure, the film won an
AFRICAST award, which its director Abdullahi was invited to accept at the prize
awarding ceremony in the capital, Abuja. None of the participating youths had
travelled that far before let alone spoken in front of a comparable audience. The
prize money was distributed amongst the almajirai. While it is difficult to know
for sure from telephone conversations only, I gained the impression that this was
an important landmark event lending substance to my assertions.
How did I make peace? It helped me to learn about the context of the boys’
discontent. In their communities, they had been accused of being either dupes,
agreeing to ‘work’ for free for me and the Goethe Institute, or liars, who hid the
money I presumably paid them so they wouldn’t have to share it. The attendance
of Kano State’s Commissioner of Information at the premiere screening ignited
such rumours further: if such a powerful politician was there, surely there must
have been money involved as well. If I refused to pay them, they should steal my
computer and all of my things! Surely the photographs that I had taken during
the filmmaking were also for sale. They were told it was film money that I used
to pay their school fees (if I would pay them at all). They should wait and see:
I would disappear without saying goodbye and never be heard of again – that’s
how Europeans are! I began to understand better the context I had been working
in: hardened suspicions towards Westerners are widespread in northern Nigeria,
as is the conviction that both the NGO sector and politics are vehicles for
138 • Children

personal enrichment. Seen in the light of what other people thought I was capable
of doing, the almajirai’s reproaches seemed innocuous.
‘Try to understand why they are thinking the way they are … the whole
episode is not about you; it’s a statement of where they are in Nigerian society.’
I spent a long time thinking about these wise words from my supervisor. Where
were the almajirai in Nigerian society? And where did I unthinkingly assume
they were? To learn how taxing it was for them to defend their participation in
the film project against critics and enviers made me realize their vulnerability.
I felt negligent for not having taken account of these potential risks before the
project.
The teen-age of the participating almajirai certainly contributed to the pitfalls
of our film project. Neither adults nor children, they were caught in an uncom-
fortable position of vulnerability vis-à-vis their elders, who could call them dupes
and liars, while at the same time they had to shoulder an increasingly heavy
burden of responsibility. Given their age, they were expected to contribute to
rather than draw on family resources. They knew they had to organize whatever
support they needed for their daily needs and for their future projects – secular
education, small business ventures – themselves. Younger children might have
felt under less pressure to make money, whereas older participants might have
been better protected from suspicions and accusations in their communities.
In retrospect, I think that many misunderstandings took root in my dogged
refusal to acknowledge that the almajirai thought of me as their ‘patron’ and
‘superior’, not as their ‘friend’ and ‘equal’. Naïvely, I trusted that they would
speak up and tell me if something bothered them. This, however, is not a smart
way of relating to a patron. Aliyu put it in words when I, stupefied, asked him
why he hadn’t just told me that he was discontented: ‘one doesn’t tell one’s
superior – he could get angry’. I don’t think I had apprehended quite adequately
how my promise to pay for school fees, and the almajirai’s fear that I might
withdraw this offer if they upset me, affected the dynamics of our relationship.
Finally, I trusted that they perceived me as an inherently benevolent, sympathetic
actor who would put their needs and concerns centre-stage. Such an interpre-
tation of my behaviour, however, did not tally with their horizon of experience
within the social and political context of northern Nigeria.
Today, over three years later, I still become restless thinking about these
experiences. Given the political situation in northern Nigeria today, and the
havoc wreaked by the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency, I have not been able to
return to Kano. I have instead started comparative work on Qur’anic education in
Senegal. I have subtitled our film in French and shown it to talibés, as Qur’anic
students are called in Wolof, in Dakar. Was I planning a similar project in
Senegal? I was asked. Would I now produce a film with talibés? Even if I wanted
to, I am not sure I could. I am not sure I still have the energy, the enthusiasm,
the ingeniousness necessary to carry out a comparable project. Maybe I have
 Growing Close Where Inequalities Grow Large? • 139

learned too much through the project; maybe I am too well acquainted now with
the inevitable ambiguities and contradictions. Certainly, I would not want to miss
this knowledge. But I still sometimes regret having become so cautious in how I
relate to people in the field.
 10

Understanding the Indefensible: Reflections on

Fieldwork with Child Prostitutes in Thailand

Heather Montgomery

Sompot

On Wednesday 20 April 1994, Sompot, an eight-year-old boy who worked as a

prostitute in the slum village in Thailand where I was conducting fieldwork for
my PhD, came home to his mother after visiting a client. He was bleeding after
the encounter but seemed in high spirits. The other children crowded around
him and teased him, saying ‘Sompot’s having a period – he’s bleeding!’ Sompot
laughed and not one of the other children appeared to be shocked with what had
happened to him, despite my horrified reactions. For the first time in the field (I
had then been there around nine months) I lost my temper and hurled abuse at his
mother. She looked at me blankly, as if I was being particularly stupid, and said,
‘It was just for one hour. What harm can happen to him in one hour?’
That night I went back to the tiny room I rented next to a drop-in centre for
adult sex workers and cried before deciding I had had enough of fieldwork,
of anthropology, of cultural relativism, of ideas about children’s agency, of
children’s rights that meant nothing in reality, of the ignorance and stupidity of
people and of my own helplessness. Reading through my diary for that night –
not my carefully constructed and meticulously neutral fieldwork notes – I can
still see the rage and self-pity coming through. The entry is filled with expletives,
hatred of everyone around me and anger at the whole notion of undertaking
fieldwork on such a horrible topic in a place I hated and among people I despised.
I decided there and then to give up and come home.
Three months later and my resolve had failed. I didn’t return home but
soldiered on, determined to finish my PhD, not let down my funders, the workers
at the small NGO who had helped me and introduced me to these children, my
supervisor, or myself. I tried to pride myself on my stoicism and commitment

141
142 • Children

while dismissing my tears as self-indulgence. I did, though, promise myself that

if anything like this happened again I would do something. In July of that year I
had an opportunity to prove myself – Sompot once again came back to the village
injured. This time it was a broken or badly sprained arm, but he was in obvious
pain. Without hesitation I borrowed the NGO worker’s car, took him to the local
hospital and had them check him over. He protested that he did not want to go
and told the nurse there he had been in a fight with another boy. When I brought
him back, the community and the NGO were in uproar. Having given my word
to the NGO, and the children themselves, that I would not draw attention to the
slum in which they lived, that I would not call the police, or get other authorities
involved, I had reneged on all of these promises. They accused me of acting
beyond my remit and interfering where I had no right. Sompot’s mother never
trusted me again and Sompot himself rarely talked to me after this. Once, when
I visited him with a Western friend, his mother asked me very pointedly, ‘Have
you betrayed us again?’
There were many other children I encountered when I was doing fieldwork
but somehow my relationship with Sompot and my behaviour and actions around
him sum up many of the problems faced when working with such vulnerable
children. I would like this chapter to be a triumphal account of all the ethical diffi-
culties I overcame and guidance for others on how to conduct research in these
circumstances. I would like it to show how being knowledgeable and believing
in children’s rights can make a real difference to research. Unfortunately, it can
be nothing of the sort. I finished this particular fieldwork almost twenty years
ago and the longer the length of time that has elapsed since I left the field, and
the older I have become, the more doubts and dilemmas I have about the ethics
of this fieldwork and the less certain I am about my interpretations and ideas
about the children I encountered there. I still don’t know whether I should have
intervened more often, or never at all, whether I should have simply condemned
without trying to understand, or whether my instinct that night in April 1994 to
give up, which I ignored, was the right one.

In the Beginning

When I started to think about my PhD, I had little interest in children. I knew
I wanted to go and work in Southeast Asia, an area of the world that had long
fascinated me but to which I had never been, but I was not entirely sure what
I wanted to research or focus on. Two things changed my mind. The first was
the presence in Cambridge of the late Judith Ennew, a charismatic anthropol-
ogist and author of The Sexual Exploitation of Children (1986; for a personal
account of her influence and appeal see Morrow 2014). Since the opening for
signature of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1979,
 Understanding the Indefensible • 143

Judith had been interested in the anthropological study of children, focusing on

promoting children’s rights and developing ethical methods of studying children.
In the 1980s she started a series of ‘Ethnography of Childhood’ workshops in
Cambridge and along with others, such as Allison James, championed the idea
that children were a vital source of information and that there could be no holistic
understanding of society without listening to them. She was also a passionate
advocate of children’s rights and the idea that acknowledging these rights would
lead to improvements in the lives of children and to a shift in the balance of
power from the strong to the weak and from adults to children. She believed that
implementing children’s rights could transform children’s lives and make them
better. It was an appealing notion, fervently argued, and one that resonated deeply
with me.
Heavily influenced by this new way of thinking, I started to research child
labour in Thailand. Although it appeared that there was a problem of children
working in sweatshops, the most pressing concern seemed to be the numbers
of children who were working in the sex trade, particularly those selling sex
(or being forced to sell sex) to foreign men. Both the international and English-
language media in Thailand were full of stories of Western men travelling to
Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand and the Philippines if they wanted young
girls, Sri Lanka if they wanted young boys, and buying sex. There seemed to be
no repercussions and, on the rare occasions these men were caught, they were
often able to leave the country without penalties. The injustice of this, and the
very obvious violation of the rights of the children involved, drew me to the
topic, along with the belief that my work could somehow change the situation.
This media interest was the second reason I started to study child prostitutes. I
felt instinctively that long-term fieldwork could offer a very different narrative
from the one presented in the newspapers and that in order to know how best to
help these young people it would be important to know a lot more about their
lives and experiences. In particular, my hypothesis was that many of the girls
were fourteen or fifteen years old, and I speculated that within their communities
they may not be seen as children. Believing firmly in the idea that childhood
was a social construction, I assumed that by showing the realities of their lives
I would be able to change policy and show the world the ‘truth’ about these
children’s lives.
Today, university ethics committees provide guidance and restraint on
researchers going into the field to undertake work with difficult, dangerous or
vulnerable people. There are many books on ethics and methods for fieldwork
with such groups, especially children, and on how to conduct ethical and appro-
priate research (for one of the best see Alderson and Morrow 2011). Twenty years
ago there were no such guidelines or advice and I set off to Thailand in 1993
as a rather naive, and probably rather pompous, twenty-four year old. I knew
the theories of participant observation, of the importance of using children as
144 • Children

informants, of listening to their voices and of ethical engagement. I believed that

research could empower those being researched. The realities, as I found, were
very different.

Problems of Access

Before I left for the field I had spent a lot of time writing to various organizations
asking if I could work with them and the children they were helping. In the days
before the internet, this was not easy, and, unsurprisingly, finding children who
were willing and able to talk was extremely difficult without being on the ground.
I therefore arrived in Thailand with no clear idea of where I would be working,
what sort of children I would be working with or how I was going to access them.
Furthermore, by 1993, the international concern about Thailand’s child prosti-
tution problem had become an embarrassment. Stung by inter­national criticism,
the Thai government had begun to crack down on underage prostitution; by 1993,
none of the tourist bars or brothels would risk employing girls under eighteen,
and finding children who were working as prostitutes was, therefore, extremely
difficult. In addition it was impossible to get a research visa on this sort of topic.
The Thai government was under great pressure to tackle the problem and it was
not issuing foreigners with research visas on topics such as sex work or child
abuse. This meant that my research was, to a certain extent, covert, done in
secrecy, and rather than have a recognized research visa I had to leave the country
every three months to renew my tourist visa.
Once I arrived in Thailand I started to make contact with the various organi-
zations to which I had been writing. At that time civil society in Thailand was
only just developing and many were understandably nervous that I did not have
the correct paperwork and was not formally affiliated with any Thai university. I
also quickly discovered that the publicity and concern about the problem of child
prostitution had led to a proliferation of charities and NGOs set up to try to tackle
the problem, but when I went and spent time with them it was clear that many
had been set up in response to concerns from the West but were actually simply
recycling information from the media and doing no first-hand work with children.
It took me over five months of visiting various anti-child prostitution
projects before I eventually found a small, church-based NGO whose practi-
tioners worked with young prostitutes and street children, as well as with adult
sex-workers, and who were prepared to let me work with them. I had to promise
that I would not name the organization, its workers, any of the children I worked
with or indeed the town I worked in. I also had to guarantee that I would not take
any decisions or undertake any actions, such as involving the police, without the
NGO workers’ consent. Their focus was on a community that I have called Baan
Nua (North Village in Thai), consisting of rural migrants and their children living
 Understanding the Indefensible • 145

in a slum village set up on the outskirts of a larger town. There were sixty-five
children there, around thirty-five of whom worked regularly or occasionally as
prostitutes. Both boys and girls were selling sex and, significantly, they were still
living with their parents, who knew what they were doing. The children had a
variety of clients but relied in particular on three long-term European clients who
had been coming to the slum for several years and bought sex from several of the
children. The NGO had set up a small school in the village, provided food, and
aimed to ease the children gradually out of prostitution by offering them training
for alternative employment and by persuading their parents to reject prostitution
as a legitimate occupation.

Problems of Methods

I did not feel it was safe for me to live in Baan Nua itself. Not only would the
presence of a foreigner there draw attention to the community, but the levels of
drug and alcohol misuse were high and disputes regularly erupted into violence.
So instead I visited daily, observing the children and asking them and their parents
how they understood and justified prostitution. I tried, as far as possible, to follow
the ‘classic’ model of fieldwork: becoming a participant observer, learning the
language, taking part in the community’s everyday lives and activities and
writing up my notes in the evening, although in reality my methods were much
closer to Clifford Geertz’s description of fieldwork as ‘deep hanging out’. I had a
research assistant for some of the time, when my Thai was not of a good enough
standard to complete the interviews, but often formal interviews were ineffective
and the children were wary of direct questions about prostitution. Some of my
most productive sessions with the children were when I let them brush my hair
and paint my fingernails, both of which they were able to do for hours, without
getting bored, during which they would talk more freely about their homes, their
families and their clients.
I was heavily influenced by ideas about child-centred anthropology and my
belief in children’s rights. I wanted to take the children’s own perspectives and
understandings seriously and to listen to their voices. I believed that children’s
participation in research was important and their role as informants vital and that
ensuring this would mean my research was ethical and rights-based. As I under-
stood it, child-centred, rights-based research meant recognizing that children
possessed agency and that they could, and did, influence their own lives, the
lives of their peers and that of the wider community around them. Yet, of course,
this was extremely problematic in relation to child sex work. I could neither
participate in nor observe the one aspect of their lives I was most interested in
and it was hard to verify what they told me. It was also a very sensitive topic
that the children did not always want to talk about, and they would occasionally
146 • Children

turn on me and ask why I was always going on and asking them about such an
‘ugly’ thing.
Another difficult issue was the age of some of the children. I had expected to
be working with older children or teenagers and I had hypothesized that some
of these may not have been considered children within their own communities.
However, instead of the twelve- to sixteen-year-old age range I was expecting, the
majority of the children were much younger, some as young as six. Clearly, this
posed huge ethical and practical problems: is it possible to interview a six-year-
old in a language with which the researcher is not entirely familiar, and, more
importantly, is it ethically prudent to do so? I certainly tried to include the younger
children in my research, spending long periods of time playing with them, asking
them about their experiences and experimenting with techniques such as body
mapping (asking them to draw me pictures of themselves and marking on them
any place where they sometimes felt hurt), asking them to show me the places
in their community that were important to them or following their daily routines
closely and taking detailed notes on how they spent their days. However, not all
of these techniques were successful – younger children did not always want to
draw for me, or even to play with me, and having an intrusive stranger in their
midst was clearly an irritant and annoyance to them at times. Often they did not
have the vocabulary to talk about what they did or they had started prostitution
only recently and had little idea of what it actually involved. Sometimes I was
wary of asking too much and imposing my own views or understandings on
them and communicating to them the disgust I felt at what they had to do. With
hindsight, with more imaginative methods, I may have got closer to some of the
younger children. The children I knew best therefore were usually older and more
articulate and also had a longer history of prostitution. They were also children
that I had the closest personal relationships with and who were prepared to trust
me. In this respect it is instructive to note that, although both male and female
prostitution occurred in the village, the boys were considerably less willing to
talk about it to me than the girls, thereby causing me to place greater emphasis on
the girls’ experiences. One of the reasons that the boys may have found it harder
to talk to me (and vice versa) was that we shared few common interests. I did not
want to play computer games and could not play football and knew little about its
stars – particularly those from Manchester United – that were their most intense
passion and they were consequently not interested in hanging out with me. They
remained very much children, often getting bored or irritated with me or laughing
at my attempts to play their games or speak their language, sometimes being
quite spiteful and sometimes very affectionate.
 Understanding the Indefensible • 147

Child Prostitution in Baan Nua: My Findings

Since I left the field, I have written over twenty articles, book chapters and books
about Baan Nua and in all of these I emphasize that prostitution cannot be under-
stood in this context without looking at wider cultural ideas about kinship and
social relations (this argument is articulated at greatest length in Montgomery
2001). I argue that in contrast to the Anglo–American world (and to an increasing
extent among middle-class urban Thais), where parents are expected to make
sacrifices for their children and to look after them with no expectation of recip-
rocal support, in traditional, rural Thai society, children are said to owe a debt
of gratitude (bun khun) to their parents, especially their mothers. Children are
consequently obliged to express their gratitude through a series of lifelong duties.
This sometimes takes the form of working on the family land in rural settings or
taking up factory work in nearby towns and sending money home. It may involve
sons entering the monasteries, which brings spiritual benefits to their parents, or
it may mean a daughter taking care of her parents in their old age. In Baan Nua it
meant making money in whatever way possible in order to support their families
and ensure their survival.
I found that perhaps the most obvious answer to the question of why the
children sold sex and why their parents allowed them to was that it was the
quickest and most lucrative way of raising the money needed to fulfil their
perceived obligations to their parents. There were few jobs available to unedu-
cated children from the slums and work such as scavenging on rubbish tips for
scrap metal, begging, or selling food in the street were often tried but rejected as
dangerous and frightening. Children spoke of their fears of rats on the rubbish
dump where some of them scavenged or of being mugged by older street children
who would take any money they earned from begging. In the circumstances,
prostitution was the highest-paying job available, and was sometimes seen to
have other benefits, such as the chance to eat well and stay in good hotels or
apartments.
Yet the children themselves rarely justified it in these terms and consciously
downplayed its monetary aspect. Prostitution carried a stigma and children
were often reluctant to admit that they did sell sex, preferring euphemisms such
as ‘being supported by a foreigner’ or ‘going out for fun with foreigners’. It
was clear, however, that some clients were customers who simply bought sex
and these sorts of relationships were disliked and rarely talked about. What
the children preferred to discuss were the European men whom they claimed
as ‘friends’ and who came back to the slum several times over the season and
who had been visiting them for some years. These men were in contact with
the children between visits and often sent money when requested to do so. This
enabled the children to claim that they had some sort of reciprocal relationship
with them and that sex was only a small part of the relationship. They deliberately
148 • Children

downplayed the importance of the money to them, preferring to emphasize the

friendship and the ongoing relationship rather than the commercial transaction.
They never set a price for sexual acts and money that was given to them after
sex was always referred to as a present. Sometimes a client would not leave cash
but would pay in kind, for example, through the rebuilding or refurbishing of a
girl’s house. Given this, it was easy for the children to deny prostitution; they
argued that the men who visited them were not clients but friends who helped
out whenever they needed it.
The children rejected the identity of prostitute and emphasized instead their
own self-image as dutiful sons and daughters, fulfilling their obligations to their
parents. A powerful mitigating circumstance for many of them was the financial
support they provided for their families and when they did speak about selling
sex (however obliquely), they referred explicitly to ideas of obligation and
gratitude to their parents. I was always told that being supported by foreigners
was a means to an end, a way of fulfilling the filial obligations of duty and
sacrifice for their families and the way in which children fulfilled bun khun and
therefore retained self-respect.
These reference points gave the children strategies for rationalizing prosti-
tution and for coming to terms with it. They had found an ethical system whereby
the public selling of their bodies did not affect their private sense of humanity
and identity. When I asked one thirteen-year-old about selling sex, she replied
‘It’s only my body, but this is my family’. She could make a clear conceptual
difference between her body and what happened to it and what she perceived to
be her innermost ‘self’ and her own sense of identity and morality. Betraying
family members and failing to provide for parents were roundly condemned but
exchanging sex for money, especially when that money was used for moral ends,
was not blameworthy and violated no ethical codes.
I also found very different attitudes to the potential for selling sex to cause
life-long physical and emotional damage to the children and found that the adults
in Baan Nua saw the short- and long- term effects very differently. This was why,
when I asked Sompot’s mother about whether or not she was worried because
her eight-year-old son was a prostitute, she could reply, ‘It was just for one hour.
What harm can happen to him in one hour?’ Even when children returned from
their clients’ hotel rooms with obvious physical wounds and bruises, the mothers
rarely looked beyond the physical. They would do whatever they could to soothe
any pain, but their understanding of the effects of such abuse was very different
from mine. Mothers did not see this as fundamentally harmful in the long term
to their children or as damaging to their mental health. Such occurrences were
viewed entirely in physical rather than psychological terms, and there was no
belief that long-term damage could be inflicted on a child in ‘just one hour’.
 Understanding the Indefensible • 149

Problems of Ethics and Interpretation

I started this paper with a vignette that raised all sorts of questions about ethics
and, importantly, about interventions. I was very struck before I did fieldwork by a
quote from Jean La Fontaine in her book Child Sexual Abuse in which she argues
that anthropologists who write about these issues without thinking through the
question of interventions lay themselves open to charges of ‘academic voyeurism
[which are] no substitute for more action on behalf of the victims’ (1990: 17).
This charge of academic voyeurism is one that I have always struggled with,
perhaps because it seems very close to the mark. This research, like all research
with vulnerable populations, raises questions about whether anthropologists
are morally required to do something with their research other than make an
academic career out of it. In particular, in what ways should research findings be
used to alleviate the difficult situations that children face?
I could always argue that my work has enabled me to describe the perspective
of a particular group of vulnerable children and that any outside intervention
in their lives, in order to stand any chance of success, must take account of the
complex ways that economic activity and kinship relations interact. I could also
point out the practical difficulties of intervening effectively and the further ethical
dilemmas this would raise. In Thailand, when I was doing fieldwork, services for
families and children were patchy, there were no specialized child abuse teams
and I had little idea who I could have brought in to help. Perhaps I could have
involved the police, even though I had specifically promised not to, and this
might have resulted in either the children or their parents being arrested or the
family being split up. In 1992, the Minister for Youth suggested that parents who
allowed their children to become prostitutes should lose all parental rights, and
there have been many calls for harsh penalties for parents of child prostitutes. In
1996 the law was changed to allow for the prosecution of parents and procurers
and for jails sentences of between two and six years to be imposed on for any
parent who allowed a child under fifteen to become a prostitute, and three years
for those who child was between fifteen and eighteen years old. With this in
mind, it was almost guaranteed that the children I knew would not have asked
for help because they feared separation from, or punishment of, their parents.
Therefore, I trod very carefully and did not involve anyone from outside the
community. Even during fieldwork, however, I was aware that this stance might
be hypocritical and not as ethical as I tried to believe. Writing about children’s
rights from an academic perspective while having no effective ways of imple-
menting these rights for the children I was working with, and whose rights were
being violated on a daily basis, was very uncomfortable.
There may well have been alternatives and certainly some people who have
read my research or challenged me at conferences I have attended have disagreed
strongly with my approach to this research. They have felt that whatever promises
150 • Children

I gave, and however limited the alternatives, the opportunity to prevent abuse to
children should have overridden all other considerations and I should, therefore,
have intervened somehow, in whatever way possible. Others have argued that
academic research should not be placed above the protection of children and
that in attempting a long-term research project I prioritized my own interests
over those of the children. I share these concerns. I am also aware that the inter-
ventions I did make are open to challenge and many people might see them as
unethical and immoral and that they may not have been the right ones. It is an
acknowledgement, much made by anthropologists in informal conversations, but
much less rarely publicly stated, that even with the best of intentions mistakes
are sometimes made, and, when these involve vulnerable children, there are
consequences. I discuss these here less as an exercise in self-criticism and more
because I believe that transparency about methods must allow for a discussion of
mistakes and problems.
My findings also raise huge ethical implications and, once again, I can offer
no easy answers. The use of children as informants revealed things about child
prostitution that I could never have anticipated; my own understanding of the
situation became complicated by the children’s and their families’ own agendas.
I found the children’s accounts of their lives deeply problematic because what
they told me did not fit with my own worldview and also because they did not
say what I expected and indeed wanted them to say. I was expecting rage and
anger against the men who abused them and yet the children expressed no such
feelings. Indeed, they would sometimes ask me to help them write letters saying
how much they loved these men. I was expecting parents to do everything in their
power to prevent harm coming to their children and yet they claimed to see no
harm and supported and encouraged children to sell sex. I was expecting children
clamouring to have their rights respected (after I had explained what they were)
and found no such demand or desire.
The children resisted my claim that their involvement with foreign clients
was a form of abuse that violated their rights. They claimed radically different
beliefs about the nature of parent–child relationships and what is right for adults
to expect children to do. The only way out of this dilemma is to say that children
do not know what they are talking about, that they lack the wider economic,
social, or political understanding that would allow them to see that they are
being exploited by both their parents and their clients. One might claim that the
children are victims of a form of false consciousness, unable to see their own
oppression, or knowing it, refusing to acknowledge it. Certainly, I could find
some evidence to justify this view, not least in their extensive drug and alcohol
use. Up to 80 per cent of the children sniffed glue and used alcohol regularly. Yet
my interpretations are again problematic. When asked explicitly about their drug
use, the children always denied that they took drugs to cope with prostitution. In
Baan Nua there was limited entertainment: when they were not working some
 Understanding the Indefensible • 151

of the young men would occasionally stage cockfights and bet on the outcome,
but other than that they did not do much other than sniff glue and drink alcohol.
Several children claimed it was boredom, not prostitution, that made them
use drugs.
I continue to feel uncertain about this. Once the children had entered prosti-
tution, they endeavoured to justify it as a legitimate form of work; within the
constraints of adult expectation, they struggled to retain a degree of strategic
control over their lives through the cash earned from sex work. In the same
way, although both parents and children claimed to see prostitution as a way of
fulfilling filial duties and obligations and that it was the most lucrative way of
doing this, I sometimes saw hints that suggested that this view was not entirely
unchallenged. When a five-year-old girl told me, for example, ‘I don’t want to go
with foreigners, but my grandmother asks me to, so I feel I must’, then, no matter
what the norms of filial duty and obligation, it is hard to see the child’s situation
in terms of anything other than manipulation and abuse. Similarly, when I asked
Sompot’s mother why she allowed him to be a prostitute and she told me ‘I am
his mother. If I ask my son to make money for me, he will go. I don’t send him, he
wants to go for me’, it is difficult to take this at face value and not to detect some
coercion. Although the children told me that the money they earned fulfilled
filial obligations, there was an obvious degree of manipulation on both sides, and
a vested interest by both mothers and children to deny that pressure had been
exerted on the children. Furthermore, it was clear to see that only rarely was the
money actually used for the good of the family. Occasionally, a new roof would
be put on the house, or a television bought, but generally the money seemed to
be spent on gambling or drink; although the children said that they gave all their
money to their mothers, it was also apparent that they had a degree of purchasing
power – they bought glue to sniff or drugs to take, so they did keep some money
for themselves. Yet I never heard any children comment on this, or criticize their
parents. Rather, children consistently spoke of their pride to be able to help their
parents. They told me repeatedly that they were never sent to be prostitutes. They
had seen for themselves that the family was in difficulties and had wanted to help.
Another difficult problem was the way my research distorts the importance of
prostitution in the children’s lives. They spent, in fact, very little time working
as prostitutes or talking about it. The vast majority of their time in Baan Nua
comprised playing with friends, attending classes in the makeshift school that
the NGO I was involved with had set up, playing hand-held computer games or
talking to me. It remains hard to write about these children because I am the one
calling them prostitutes, analyzing their lives in terms of prostitution and giving
it a significance that it did not necessarily have for them. Asking children slightly
esoteric questions about their identities was always going to be problematic and I
rarely attempted it, but, if they had been able to answer such questions, I suspect
they would have replied that they were sons and daughters, sisters and friends,
152 • Children

residents of Baan Nua, Buddhists, Thai, supporters of the King and Queen,
followers of David Beckham, etc. If they mentioned prostitution (or ‘having
guests’) as part of their identity, it would, I am sure, have come very low down
their scale of priorities. And yet to almost everyone else the only important fact
about them was that they sometimes exchanged sex for money. It remains a
dilemma I have never satisfactorily answered – how can I say I worked with child
prostitutes when the child prostitutes themselves always categorically denied that
is what they were?
All anthropologists have to deal with issues of cultural relativity, but I think
there is a line beyond which most people cannot go. Although there has been
criticism of children’s rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights
of the Child in particular for being too Western-centric and for failing to take
into account the varieties of childhood throughout the world, there are very few
people who work with children who would not support its basic demands to
protect children and prevent harm to them. There are important questions about
cultural relativity to be raised, but for me my limit was the issue of the physi-
ological and psychological effects of selling sex. I started this chapter with an
anecdote about Sompot and personally such physical evidence of abuse seemed
proof that these encounters were unbearably exploitative and abusive. I still find
it hard to accept his mother’s assertion that not much could have happened to
him in one hour and I cannot take her comments at face value. Even though I
can accept that the people in Baan Nua had a radically different understanding
of sexuality and their bodies, I still believe that any child would be inevitably
damaged by this abuse, both physiologically and psychologically.
In the end I have tried to make sense of what I saw in Baan Nua through
the well-worn and even clichéd defence that understanding is not the same as
condoning. The children’s rejection of the idea of abuse and exploitation can be
seen as a denial of their true feelings and as a way of refusing to face the unpal-
atable facts of their existence, but it can also be understood as a strategic way of
exerting some control and agency in their lives. Whatever my personal feelings
of anger and pity, I remain unhappy about seeing these children only as victims,
exploited by both Western men and their own blindness to their true situation. The
children themselves specifically rejected this categorization and although their
choices were extremely restricted they did struggle to take some control over their
lives. I felt that it was important to believe the children when they talked about
this and to see their attempts to control certain aspects of their lives as active and
informed choices among very limited and very hard options. Much as I might
believe that, I also think it would have been wrong to destroy the children’s idea
of their own strategic involvement in their families’ survival. What could I put in
its place except the idea of them as helpless victims of adult desires?
Fundamentally, I believe that children deserve, and have the right, to be under-
stood, and that the success of any proposed intervention depends on a thorough
 Understanding the Indefensible • 153

understanding of the interpretations and understandings of children who are to

be affected by programmes of assistance. I remain wary of interventions based
on claims about children’s best interests when children themselves have, more
often than not, not been consulted. While it is possible to imagine the difficulties
that child prostitutes face, it is harder to know how they can be helped if there
is no baseline data or proper research about their understanding of the situation
they find themselves in. Too often child prostitutes are treated as a homogenous
category facing identical problems and needing similar help. I have used my
own work to argue that this way of viewing child prostitutes is theoretically and
practically wrong and potentially damaging for children.
While fully supporting the impetus for child-centred research, we also have
to acknowledge, as researchers, that child-centred research does not always
give us the answers that we want and that our own ideas about children may be
profoundly challenged. Believing in children’s rights is not always enough to
protect them or prevent harm. In the end, it is only comparison across cases and
a full and honest account of problems that will enable a fuller discussion of the
ways in which anthropologists resolve ethical issues arising during fieldwork
with children in difficult circumstances. It is my hope that this chapter contributes
in some way to that discussion.
 11

Guide to Further Reading

Catherine Allerton

In this concluding chapter I will suggest theoretical, historical and ethnographic

work for a reader interested in exploring the ever-growing literature on children’s
lives in diverse contexts. My choices are highly selective and often idiosyncratic.
Specialists in particular areas of research, such as street or working children, will
find many important and influential works missing from this guide. I have also
not listed many works that were central to the formulation of the ‘new’ sociology
and anthropology of childhood from the 1990s onwards. This is partly due to
space limitations, but also for two more specific reasons. Firstly, many more
programmatic works exploring the benefits of ethnography with children tend
to heavily and repetitively reference the same limited selection of writings, most
of which concern research with children in Western countries. Secondly, recent
years have seen an exciting growth in the numbers of books that utilize detailed
ethnography with children in order to address important theoretical concerns.
Where possible, I have tried to point the reader to such texts, particularly those
concerning children in non-Western contexts, as a way of highlighting more
cutting-edge research.
For a more systematic overview of the history of ethnographic and anthro-
pological work on children and childhoods, the reader should consult one of a
number of texts that provide an introduction to the diverse work within this field.
David Lancy’s The Anthropology of Childhood (2008) presents an encyclopedic
overview of ethnographic research with children in order to elucidate and explore
key themes, including child-rearing, children’s play and work. The substantial
list of references at the end of the book is a testament to Lancy’s commitment to
trawling the ethnographic archive for studies of children. Heather Montgomery’s
An Introduction to Childhood (2009) contextualizes research with children in
terms of wider anthropological theories and shifts in emphasis and provides a
particularly helpful comparison of approaches in British and American anthro-
pology. LeVine and New’s Anthropology and Child Development (2008) is a
155
156 • Children

reader that collects together a range of classic and more recent work on infant
care practices and child socialization, including broad, comparative, and quanti-
tative work in the predominantly US-based tradition of cross-cultural surveys.
A classic and highly influential edited collection exploring the construction
of childhood and arguing for research exploring children’s own perspectives
is Allison James and Alan Prout’s Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood
(1990). The book includes contributions from sociology, history, psychology,
anthropology, and feminist and development studies. Sharon Stephens’ Children
and the Politics of Culture (1995) explores children’s contested ‘rights to culture’
in the context of state and global developments that put many children and child-
hoods ‘at risk’. The collection includes accounts of problematic developments
in children’s lives in South Africa, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Singapore,
Brazil and elsewhere, always with a focus on both threats to children, and their
responses. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent’s edited collection Small
Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood (1998) also examines the impacts on
children of new understandings of childhood and parenthood, violence, war, and
poverty. The papers in the volume show how understandings and experiences of
childhood are affected both by global political–economic structures, and by local
practices at the micro level.

Childhood across Time and Space

The key (though also keenly disputed) text in the comparative social and
historical study of childhood is Philippe Ariès’ Centuries of Childhood (1962).
Ariès argued that the specific understanding of childhood as a distinct phase of
life was a relatively recent development in Western societies. In the Middle Ages,
he argues, children were seen and treated as little adults and did not have separate
clothing, games or spaces. Ariès draws in particular (and, for later critics, contro-
versially) on medieval paintings that depict children as small adults rather than in
physiologically accurate child form. Through an examination of gradual changes
in paintings of families, as well as developments in games and pastimes and
the development of schooling, he shows how children’s activities and interests
gradually came to be separated from those of adults. This gradual separation of
the child from adult society led, he argues, to new emotional attitudes to children
and to the ‘child-centred family’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Ariès’ book is an essential text for anyone looking to disrupt ideas of the ‘natural’
state of childhood. More recently, Hugh Cunningham (2006) has written a history
of childhood in Britain, drawing, in particular, on the kinds of domestic histories
and personal accounts that are largely missing from Ariès’ argument.
In anthropology, Margaret Mead was one of the first to draw attention to
radically different conceptions of childhood held by those in different places.
 Guide to Further Reading • 157

Through consistent interest in child-rearing practices and children’s lives in

Samoa, New Guinea, Bali and elsewhere, she created an influential body of
work that sought, in particular, to dispute arguments about universal experience
based on American understandings of childhood and adolescence. For example,
she outlined the considerable autonomy of even quite young children in Samoa,
who were able to choose their own names and homes (Mead 1928). She also
described how, among the New Guinean Manus people, children had strong
bonds with their fathers, considerable freedom and were able, at a very young
age, to acquire the physical skills necessary for survival, including swimming
and paddling a canoe (Mead 1931). Mead co-wrote, with Gregory Bateson, a
photographic book, Balinese Character (1942), an innovative early work in
visual anthropology. The book reproduces sequences of photographs of interac-
tions between children, caregivers, and others, providing a unique, temporal,
and fine-grained perspective on the lives of young Balinese children. The book
focuses most centrally on child-rearing, but also considers children’s role in
ritual, theatre and dance. As with other anthropologists of the ‘Culture and
Personality’ school, Bateson and Mead were interested in early childhood experi-
ences and their role in the development of character. Robert LeVine has noted
that Balinese Character has something of a ‘judgemental cast’ since, like other
psychiatrically inspired ethnographies, it implies ‘pathological consequences of
the culture-specific parental practices they describe’ (2007: 252). Nevertheless,
this book still merits close reading, in part because the use of photography to
document ethnographically children’s interactions shows us just how radical
Mead’s interest in cross-cultural studies of childhood could be.
In British anthropology, Meyer Fortes, with E. E. Evans-Pritchard, one of
the founders of ‘descent theory’, is best known. However, prior to undertaking
anthropological research, he had received a PhD in educational psychology, and
these earlier interests undoubtedly informed his fascinating 1938 publication
Social and Psychological Aspects of Education in Taleland. Fortes draws an
explicit contrast between Tale and British society. He argues that whilst the
latter maintains a fundamental dichotomy between the ‘aims, responsibilities,
compulsions, material objects and persons’ of the child and adult worlds, the
social sphere of Tale society is undifferentiated for adults and children. This
means that, in Tale society, nothing is hidden from or barred to children, who ‘are
actively and responsibly part of the social structure, of the economic system, the
ritual, and ideological system’. This text is a fascinating example of an appar-
ently rather conventional anthropologist taking children’s lives seriously. Fortes
demonstrates considerable observational skill, detailing important contrasts
between children of different ages, and between girls and boys. He gives a
complex account of the many ‘educational agencies’ that exist in a pre-literate,
rural society, and of the ways in which knowledge is actively passed from one
generation to the other.
158 • Children

Other noteworthy studies of children in early British anthropology include

Otto Raum’s Chaga Childhood (1940), a study of ‘indigenous education’ in
present-day Tanzania, which showed how the Chaga indulged ‘infants’ but
imposed gradually more severe discipline as they grew into ‘children’. Audrey
Richards (1956) wrote a whole ethnography of girls’ initiation rites among the
Bemba of Zambia, whilst Raymond Firth’s study of the Tikopia of Polynesia
contains detailed descriptions of children, including the wonderful comment
that children were ‘the emollient which allows the household machinery to run
smoothly’ (1936: 150). In American anthropology, the ‘Culture and Personality’
school evolved into a number of cross-cultural studies of child-rearing and early
development. This includes the famous ‘Six Cultures’ study (Whiting 1963),
which developed a common methodology to compare issues of child-rearing
and child behaviour in fieldsites in Kenya, Mexico, the Philippines, Japan, India,
and the US. Robert LeVine, an original member of this team, has continued this
kind of comparative research through studies of childcare in Africa (LeVine
et al. 1994).
Given the long-standing interest in child-rearing in anthropology, I want to
end this section by mentioning a more recent, utterly compelling ethnography of
infancy in rural Cote D’Ivoire. Alma Gottlieb’s The Afterlife Is Where We Come
From (2004) is perhaps the only full-length ethnography completely devoted to
understanding babies’ lives in terms of a local, cultural conception of infancy. At
the centre of her account of Beng infancy are ideas about a place called wrugbe,
the ‘afterlife’ from which babies are thought to have emerged as the reincarnation
of a deceased person. This spiritual journey of emergence is a long and difficult
one, and therefore infants and young children are thought to have a fragile hold
on life. Gottlieb describes how, in conducting ethnographic research focused
on babies (but drawing on her earlier work amongst the Beng), she aimed to
treat and view babies as agents with individual personalities and specific family
histories. The book therefore contains a fascinating discussion of whether babies
have culture and, if so, how the ethnographer might uncover it. One way, she
emphasizes, is to pay close attention to babies’ bodily communications. Another,
in the Beng context, is to appreciate how babies’ necklaces, bracelets, anklets
and facial paint constitute a distinctive ‘text’ to be read by the astute observer.
The chapters of the book explore the many different dimensions and experiences
of Beng infancy, from spirituality to dirt and cleanliness, social relationships,
sleep, milk and food, growth and sickness. Gottlieb engages productively with
the literature on child development, but lets her own account of babies’ lives be
shaped by Beng perspectives on development and growth. The book is illustrated
with an evocative selection of photographs of babies and their child and adult
caregivers, though the descriptions often hauntingly note whether specific babies
later died. Though in many respects Gottlieb outlines the benefits to Beng babies
of social lives that are strikingly more active than their American counterparts,
 Guide to Further Reading • 159

she is also realistic about the poverty and infant mortality that shape many local
perspectives on care-giving.

Taking Children Seriously as Knowledgeable Social Actors

As child-focused research has become more acceptable and popular within

anthropology, there have been an increasing number of ethnographies published
focusing on children and childhood. Happily, these are now many, and too varied
to list in their entirety. In this section, I highlight three particularly compelling
ethnographies of children and childhood that demonstrate the ethnographic and
theoretical power of taking children’s actions and interpretations seriously. In
these works, children’s agency and knowledge of their social worlds emerges
strongly, although often in ways that are unknown, unexpected, or troubling
to the ethnographer and other adults. In subsequent sections, I highlight ethno-
graphic work under significant sub-themes.
Myra Bluebond-Langner’s The Private Worlds of Dying Children (1978) is
almost forty years old and yet has lost none of its originality of voice, nor its
power to shock us with the extent of children’s knowledge of what no adult
has ever told them. This ethnography – in which the primary data is presented
in the form of a play, in order to highlight the everyday hospital experiences of
terminally ill children – is one of the strongest arguments for taking even quite
young children’s competencies seriously. It offers a powerful counter-argument
to anyone who might dispute children’s abilities to shape social life, or their
awareness and knowledge of the world around them. Bluebond-Langner describes
how, as their illness progresses and they endure more and more medicines, tests,
and procedures, leukemic children come to learn about the world of the hospital,
about their parents’ desires, and about their own grim prognoses. Despite the
reluctance of both medical personnel and parents to talk explicitly about their
condition and treatment, children manage to gather accurate information about
disease and death. Bluebond-Langner argues that, because of the particular
understanding of American childhood as ‘a period of formation, of becoming’ in
which children are ‘moulded for their futures’, dying children practice ‘the rules
of mutual pretense’, maintaining the ‘illusion of their normalcy’ (1978: 210–14).
In doing so, they demonstrate their own social competence, since, by pretending
not to know that they are dying, they protect both their parents and their doctors.
Heather Montgomery’s Modern Babylon? (2001) examines the difficult topic
of child prostitution in Thailand by exploring the everyday lives of children
who become involved in sex work and by taking seriously their own perspec-
tives on this work. Montgomery notes that such children have become figures
of enormous concern to the international community, yet their own voices have
rarely been heard. Her study is based on fieldwork in Baan Nua, a squatter
160 • Children

community in which child prostitution has become central to maintaining

household incomes. Montgomery argues that the lives and perspectives of these
children problematize the kinds of stereotypical images that are central to the
work of activists aiming to end child prostitution. Contrary to these stereotypes,
children do not see themselves as passive victims, but as working to uphold a
moral obligation to their parents. As Montgomery notes in her contribution to this
volume, acknowledging these children’s agency and ‘choice’ to work as prosti-
tutes is by no means unproblematic, but it is important to contextualize children’s
limited opportunities with reference to ideas of kinship and obligation, and the
realities of extreme urban poverty and limited alternative options to earn money.
Amy Paugh’s Playing with Languages: Children and Change in a Caribbean
Village (2012) makes a strong argument for putting children’s experiences at the
centre of efforts to revitalize endangered languages. Paugh outlines a complex,
multilingual situation on the Caribbean island of Dominica, where English
appears to be squeezing out the local Afro-French creole, Patwa. English is
the official language of government and schools. It is the language that parents
want their children to master. And so adults expressly forbid children to speak
Patwa, even whilst adults speak it amongst themselves, and sometimes speak
it directly to children. By taking children’s verbal interactions with adults and
peers seriously, and by analyzing them at a micro level, Paugh shows how
children are contributing in their own ways to the language shift in Dominica.
For, whilst Patwa may be a forbidden language to children, it is nevertheless one
that they utilize during peer and sibling play that is unmonitored by adults. Thus,
the very fact that Patwa is forbidden to children and is used by adults in ‘affect-
laden socializing activities’ means that children use it in specific ways amongst
themselves, most notably to ‘intensify their speech and control others’ (2012:
19). Paugh therefore argues that those Dominicans concerned with revitalizing
Patwa as a language should pay more attention to children’s play as a key site of
language transmission. Paugh’s book draws on a strong tradition of research in
language socialization that produced some fine ethnographies focused on young
children, most notably Bambi Schieffelin’s The Give and Take of Everyday Life
(1990) and Elinor Ochs’ Culture and Language Development (1988), that focus
respectively on children in Papua New Guinea and Samoa. However, whilst this
earlier tradition focused on monolingual societies, the great power of Paugh’s
approach is that she shows the significance of children’s talk within a multi-
lingual context where language use carries complex socio-political messages.
Moreover, by attending to peer interaction in a variety of ‘child-controlled
settings’, Paugh is able to move beyond earlier work that focused mainly on
adult–child interactions.
 Guide to Further Reading • 161

Play and Work

Play has long been approached as the quintessential activity of children. As

mentioned in the Introduction to this volume, the Opies’ studies of children’s
playground games approached such ‘folklore’ as unique cultural forms that circu-
lated ‘from child to child, usually outside the home, and beyond the influence
of the family circle’ (Opie and Opie 1959: 1). A more recent perspective on
such playground games is Donna Lanclos’ At Play in Belfast (2003), an ethno-
graphic account of games and rhymes amongst Belfast primary schoolchildren.
Lanclos situates children’s play and games in the context of their everyday
lives in a divided city. She analyzes how children’s folklore is used to explore
and negotiate identities of gender, age, and religion. As with the terminally ill
children studied by Bluebond-Langner, these Belfast children are perfectly aware
of the (in this case sectarian, violent and sexual) realities from which adults
try to shield them and utilize folklore to explore and transform various social
divisions. For example, in her discussion of ‘rude’ jokes and rhymes (something
the Opies refused to consider), Lanclos demonstrates children’s subtle awareness
of adult hypocrisy surrounding cursing and rudeness. She argues that children
‘do not passively accept the definitions of “child” that are imposed from without’
(2003: 48). They are cleverly able to present adults with the ‘expected’ mask
of innocence even whilst they joyfully express ‘obscene’ materials amongst
themselves, testing loyalties and establishing friendships.
By contrast with the ‘folkloric’ study of children’s play, Jean Briggs has
written a full-length ethnography exploring the role of playful interactions at the
heart of Inuit education. Inuit Morality Play (1998) innovatively focuses on the
‘story’ of six months in the life of a three-year-old girl living in a permanent camp
on Baffin Island, who Briggs calls ‘Chubby Maata’. The book argues that Inuit
adults encourage children to think deeply about moral issues by presenting them
with emotionally powerful problems in an exaggerated and personally relevant
style. This takes several forms, most notably the asking of dangerous questions
– ‘Will you come and live with me?’ ‘Shall I be your new mother?’ ‘Shall I
kill your father?’ – often in a sustained ‘interrogation’. Briggs argues that such
interrogations can be considered as play or dramas, and that they are central not
only to processes of socialization but also to personality development. Through
these complex dramas, adults test children, experiment with their developing
emotions, and try to seduce them with other emotional possibilities. The dramas
demonstrate Briggs’ argument that Inuit culture can be considered a ‘mosaic
of dilemmas’ (1998: 209). Through micro-attention to Chubby Maata’s words,
gestures and actions, Briggs is able to show what such interrogation might feel
like to a three-year-old Inuit girl, and how complex, playful jokes might lead
her to control her behaviour in specific, culturally valuable ways. This is, most
emphatically, a ‘child-centred ethnography’, but it is one that strongly embeds
162 • Children

children’s actions and experiences in the world they share with various adults of
different ages, gender and family connection.
Adults in Western contexts often tend explicitly to oppose ‘work’ and ‘play’,
but in many cultural settings these may be blurred categories in the context of
children’s activities. Inge Bolin (2006) argues that in the high Andes of Peru there
are no specific toys or areas set aside for play, which can take place everywhere
and with everything. Children’s play activities lead directly to an understanding
of tasks that they will need to master for adult life, such as when they play at
building ‘homesteads’ out of stones and other natural materials. Lancy’s The
Anthropology of Childhood (2008) contains two excellent chapters, ‘Making
Sense’ and ‘Of Marbles and Morals’, which both explore the role of play in
different cultural contexts and examine the idea that play and work are not always
clearly distinguished.
The research of Olga Nieuwenhuys has been central to anthropological
attempts to problematize what she describes as the ‘dissociation of childhood
from the performance of valued work’ (1996: 237) and to rethink children’s labour
in the developing world. Her monograph, Children’s Lifeworlds (1994), is a study
of rural children’s work in the South Indian state of Kerala. The book concen-
trates on the activities of children that are crucial to family livelihoods and draws
on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews and survey and census data. Nieuwenhuys
locates her analysis not only in scholarship on the history of children’s economic
roles, but also in economic anthropology, particularly work on peasant house-
holds, gender and exploitation. She disputes the widespread belief that a high
incidence of child work is incompatible with schooling, showing how rural
children have begun to challenge their subordination by demanding that, as well
as working, they receive time and means to spend on schooling. The book makes
a case for taking children’s perspectives on their work seriously by describing
how children’s views often clashed with those of adults. For example, although
adults do not see girls’ domestic tasks as ‘work’, Nieuwenhuys discovers that the
girls themselves do. She argues that current discourses on child labour make light
of the huge differences between the work of male and female children, where
the work of the latter is economically undervalued, and justified by ideologies of
gender and seniority. More widely, she concludes that neither the local fishing
economy nor coir yarn production would survive without the participation of
children in activities that are central to their success.
Mélanie Jacquemin takes a similar approach to the undervalued nature of
girls’ work in her research on child domestic workers in Abidjan, Côte D’Ivoire.
She describes how a large workforce is working under a number of different
names that reference wider notions of kinship and obligation. For example, girls
working as ‘little nieces’ are considered foster children and work in the homes of
a family member, often for no pay. By contrast, a minority of ‘little waged maids’
may live with their employers but receive a direct monthly salary. Jacquemin
 Guide to Further Reading • 163

argues that in many situations the distinction between being a family member
and a paid employee is kept ‘purposefully blurred’ in order to ‘obscure but
maximize exploitation’ (2004: 385). Like Nieuwenhuys, Jacquemin argues that
common-sense understandings of the differences between paid ‘employment’
and domestic work do not capture the complex realities of this situation. She also
describes how the girls themselves, despite the difficult conditions in which they
live and work, do not necessarily have a negative perception of their condition.
As unqualified and poor children coming to Abidjan from rural villages, they
see their role as a promotion that will enable them to earn clothes for the future.
Moreover, although Jacquemin shows us how discourses of kinship mask the
girls’ exploitation, she notes that it is important for them to feel part of the family
where they work. In a later article (2006), she describes a child rights-framed
NGO project supporting ‘Young Female Domestics’. This project, fuelled by
global rhetoric against ‘child labour’, was focused on abolishing paid work for
those under fifteen. However, it inadvertently contributed to local understandings
(shared by the girls themselves) that what ‘little nieces’ do is not work (since they
are not paid in cash). This research demonstrates the gendered complexities of
children’s work and the negative impacts of heavy-handed rights-based attempts
to ‘abolish’ child labour.
A critical perspective on rights-based interventions in the lives of urban
children is seen in Rachel Burr’s Vietnam’s Children in a Changing World
(2006). One of the strengths of this book is that it draws on Burr’s fieldwork
with a range of children in Hanoi who were considered marginalized by various
child-focused aid organizations. She thus describes the lives of children working
and/or living on the streets, boys in a reform school, children living (often
temporarily) in an orphanage and disabled children in a special needs school.
Burr pays close attention to the ‘coping strategies’ of poor children in difficult
situations, including an insightful analysis of boys’ tattooing practices in the
reform school. Through her research with street children, in particular, Burr also
shows children’s awareness and subtle manipulation of public perceptions of
their situation. For example, Hai, a fifteen-year-old boy, tells Burr that he never
wears his best clothes when selling postcards, since he needs to look a little
run down in order to attract the sympathy of tourists. The book outlines a clash
between children’s desires to work and the beliefs of (privileged) NGO workers
that they should not. Indeed, one of Burr’s goals is to analyze why so many child
rights-framed aid programmes fail to achieve their goals in Hanoi, including a
project that sent street children back to their impoverished rural homes without
providing them with any livelihood strategies in the village. The book concludes
by rejecting the notion that these were children on the margins of society, arguing
that they were actively involved in ‘mainstream activities’ and contributed both
to their families and to the local economy.
164 • Children

Education and Schooling

Anthropologists have long been concerned with the broad process of education
and see a major difference between this process and the rather specific institutions
of modern schooling. As mentioned, Fortes’ ethnographic account of education
in Taleland emphasized the ways in which children mastered the skills necessary
to become a productive and competent Tale person. This interest in education as
practical mastery and ongoing learning of moral and social norms continues to
be seen in ethnographic accounts of children.
Charles Stafford’s The Roads of Chinese Childhood (1995) is an ethnography
of childhood and learning in a Taiwanese fishing community. Stafford empha-
sizes that ‘education’ cannot be considered a discrete category: childhood, in
this community, involves a ‘shifting back and forth’ between community-based
everyday morality and school-taught moral transmission. He describes a process
by which, on the one hand, children’s attention is drawn to certain relationships
and social connections and, on the other, children produce their own represen-
tations of that to which their attention is drawn. In an innovative format, the
book proceeds to list 62 ‘widely distributed representations’ that children may
encounter, whether in daily interactions with kin, through participation in ritual
events, by attending school or by reading textbooks. This format allows Stafford
to cover a great deal of varied ground, from children’s participation in ritual to
their consumption of traditional medicine to their often teasing punishment by
adults. Rather than describing specific personalities of individual children, the
book outlines, through the elucidation of the sixty-two representations, a Chinese
theory of childhood, personhood and the life-cycle.
A later ethnography that shares Stafford’s interest in processes of moral
education, but that gives specific attention to individual children, is Helle
Rydstrøm’s Embodying Morality (2003). Rydstrøm conducted research on
children’s learning under somewhat difficult conditions of surveillance in a rural
commune in Northern Vietnam. Her book focuses on thirteen children (nine
girls and four boys), aged between eight months and thirteen years. She outlines
adult Vietnamese perspectives on children and morality, transcribes and analyzes
interactions between children and adults, and gives detailed descriptions of, for
example, children’s responses to adult instructions and threats, or their gendered
bodily styles. Rydstrøm argues that, because daughters are ‘outside’ the patri-
lineage, their bodies are considered blank slates and they are treated as needing to
learn morality in ways that are different from boys. She shows how girls’ actions
and words are constantly evaluated and how they are expected to show that they
have learnt good female morality through demonstrating appropriate ‘sentiments’
in social interaction. Whilst girls are expected to be obedient, boys are allowed
to be naughty and mischievous. Thus, when boys ignore or refuse adult requests,
there are no negative consequences for them. This subtle ethnography explores
 Guide to Further Reading • 165

the difference that gender makes to moral education within a patrilineal context.
Moreover, by attending to individual children – their personalities, health, birth
order, and position within the family – Rydstrøm is able to describe how even
this apparently rather strict system of education allows some flexibility for the
particular circumstances of children and their kin.
With the rise of nation-states, formal schooling has become more and more
prevalent around the globe and is an institutional process encountered by ever-
larger numbers of children. There is, of course, an enormous literature on the
sociology of education, much of which employs ethnographic research methods,
so I shall mention only a very small proportion of the most influential work
for anthropology. One consequence of the insistence on a distinction between
education and schooling is that researchers recognize that in different contexts
the ‘educated’ person is defined by culturally specific sets of skills and infor-
mation. However, this local knowledge may not be taken seriously – indeed,
may be openly disparaged – by formal educators in schools. Bourdieu and
Passeron (1977), in a very influential study of French schooling and inequality,
argue that the educational system reproduces social hierarchies by valuing the
cultural capital of children from upper-middle-class backgrounds and devaluing
the cultural capital of lower-class children. Schools make middle-class cultural
capital appear as ‘natural’, whether this is conceptualized as children’s natural
talent, skills, or gifts. In doing so, the educational system naturalizes and
legitimates the reproduction of class privilege. This imposes a kind of symbolic
violence on non-elite children, who develop a sense of their ‘social limits’ and
begin to self-censor in the company of the elite.
Bourdieu’s work on the connections between schooling and inequality has
come to be known as ‘reproduction theory’. One of the striking things about this
work, however, is that it fails to consider the perspectives of the very children
who are being marginalized by the educational system. Students are seen largely
as the passive recipients of the reproduction of class privilege, and there is little
attention given to peer influence or other, mediating factors such as gender or
ethnicity. By contrast, another hugely influential text on inequality and education,
Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour (1977), gives more space to a consideration
of young people’s agency and their struggle against the schooling system. The
book is an ethnographic study of ‘Hammertown Comprehensive’, a school in an
industrial, urban setting in the English Midlands. Willis’s primary focus is on ‘the
lads’, a group of twelve boys who were members of ‘some kind of an opposi-
tional culture in a working class school’. Willis argues that the lads’ opposition
to school was expressed mainly as a ‘style’: a constant fidgeting, a tutting at any
request, a ‘foot-dragging’ corridor walk and a readiness to erupt into ‘derisive
or insane laughter’ at the expense of the school conformists. Willis shows how
the lads were active participants in school life and were not simply socialized
by the institution to accept their subordinate position. They were aware of their
166 • Children

exclusion from certain future jobs and resisted the middle-class ideology of the
school by celebrating a particular working-class masculinity. By contrast with
some simplified analyses of class ‘reproduction’, Willis therefore approaches the
boys as autonomous agents with their own cultural practices and preferences,
their own perspectives on their class position, and with an ability to talk back
to institutional power. Nevertheless, in choosing ‘having a laff’ over conformity
to the educational process, the lads ultimately sealed their fate, since they left
school without qualifications to take up working-class jobs.
Although both Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction, and Willis’s classic study,
are firmly within a Marxist tradition emphasizing the role of class structures in
determining life chances, more recent critical ethnographic work on schooling
in the US has emphasized the particular significance of race and of gender. Ann
Ferguson’s ethnography Bad Boys (2000), explores how male African American
youth are constructed as ‘bad boys’ in and by school. Although Ferguson builds
on the pioneering research of others who have examined the experience of African
American students (see, for example, Ogbu 1988), she highlights Willis’s work as
a key influence on her approach to the boys in her research. Ferguson conducted
fieldwork in a mixed elementary school in California, where African American
boys made up only one quarter of the student body, but accounted for nearly half
of those students sent to the Punishing Room. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of
symbolic violence, she argues that school labelling practices and the exercise
of rules operate as part of a ‘hidden curriculum’ that marginalizes and isolates
black youth. For example, the apparently objective classification of ‘politeness’
recognizes only one kind of politeness, thereby denigrating the manners, style,
body language and oral expressiveness of African American students. Like other
scholars before her, Ferguson draws attention to the specificity of ‘Black English’
as a linguistic form that African American males grow up speaking, and that they
associate with important people, family, and moments in their lives. In the school
environment, Black English is viewed as inferior and is constantly corrected,
a process that involves ‘a violent and painful assault’ on the boys’ very sense
of themselves. This is an engaging and thought-provoking ethnography, with
evocative Field Notes inserted between chapters, and with some painful and
honest reflections on Ferguson’s own positioning as an ethnographer.
American high schools have long provided fertile ground for popular (particu-
larly cinematic) explorations of the constitution of gender and sexuality. In
Dude, You’re a Fag (2007), C. J. Pascoe explores the construction of masculinity
amongst students, focusing not only on teacher–student interactions but (like
Willis) also giving emphasis to peer interactions. Pascoe describes high school as
a heightened venue for assertions of masculinity by male students who consist-
ently attack those who they see (either temporarily or permanently) as ‘fags’.
Masculinity, then, is fundamentally tied to heterosexuality, and to be a ‘fag’ is to
be the opposite of masculine. Pascoe describes how students can be called a ‘fag’
 Guide to Further Reading • 167

for all manner of minor transgressions, including being incompetent, dancing,

caring too much about clothing, being too emotional or expressing interest in
other boys. This is an innovative and shocking ethnography that argues that
upholding masculinity is important not only to students, but also to the high
school itself, as an institution invested in rituals that affirm gender roles.
As formal schooling has spread, so anthropologists have charted its devel-
opment in particular contexts, including the ways in which it is mediated by
local cultural understandings. Ethnographies on this theme are too diverse to
mention, so I will simply draw attention to one influential edited volume, The
Cultural Production of the Educated Person (Levinson, Foley and Holland
1996). This is a fascinating collection of papers exploring the ways in which
schools and education often become sites of cultural politics, in which national
education practices may be pitted against local understandings. For example, in
her chapter on the introduction of formal schooling amongst the Huaorani of the
Ecuadorian Amazon, Laura Rival outlines a striking contrast between the spaces
of schooling and the social environments in which children are raised. She argues
that schools are all about learning to be ‘modern citizens’ and that, although there
are aspects of this process (for example the wearing of uniforms by only school-
children) that the Huaorani resist, formal schooling is deskilling local children
in the forest knowledge essential to Huaorani identity. In his chapter, Bradley
Levinson discusses his fieldwork in a secondary school in Mexico, in which
he tried hard to gather individual children’s responses to, and perspectives on,
the creation of a national identity as a ‘schooled person’. He shows how many
children do embrace this identity and come to see themselves as very different
to the ‘unschooled’ children who might share the same neighbourhoods as them.
However, other students, including a girl who has a boyfriend who does not
attend school, develop a more critical attitude to their classmates, pointing out
their hypocrisy in not extending the egalitarian rhetoric they acquire in school to
those who are ‘unschooled’.

Violence and Resilience

Child soldiers have, for some time, been a focus on intense interest and concern,
with first-person accounts selling in large numbers (see, for example, Beah
2008). Anthropological work on children’s experiences of war tends, for obvious
ethical and practical reasons, to explore young people’s narratives of their past
involvement in violence. Children and Youth on the Front Line, a collection
edited by Jo Boyden and Joanna de Berry (2004), frames young people’s accounts
in terms of cultural narratives of war, and warns against the overuse of concepts
such as trauma at the expense of acknowledging children’s potential resilience.
The editors note, however, that children’s war testimonies can be elusive and
168 • Children

hard to gather, and may be marginalized by meta-narratives of war that gain

dominance in specific contexts. Joanna de Berry’s contribution to the volume
focuses on the narratives of women who, as adolescent girls in settlement camps
during the Ugandan civil war, suffered rape and sexual abuse by government
soldiers. De Berry emphasizes that children’s vulnerability is a structural rather
than a natural position, a product of the interrelation of biological features and
social constructions. The girls’ vulnerability was therefore a consequence of the
way of life that existed in the camps and was not permanent. Harry West’s contri-
bution to the collection is an intriguing contrast with de Berry’s research, since he
analyses interviews with women who served as children in FRELIMO’s ‘Female
Detachment’ during the anti-colonial independence struggle in Mozambique.
West argues that these women presented their participation in combat as
empowering and liberating, rather than traumatic, since it was influenced by the
revolutionary ideology of a movement that stressed women’s emancipation. By
contrast with these accounts of direct experience, Jason Hart’s chapter concerns
fieldwork in refugee camps in Jordan with Palestinian children, many of whom
were ‘third-generation refugees’. Hart argues that humanitarian organizations
providing services to the refugee population tend to approach refugees as a
depoliticized, general category. He shows how such organizations’ stereotypical
representations of refugee children as the grateful recipients of aid contrast
strongly with children’s own self-representations, which emphasize specific
family histories, political struggle and religious faith.
A fascinating recent ethnography by Susan Shepler, Childhood Deployed
(2014), focuses on the demobilization and ‘remaking’ of former child soldiers
in Sierra Leone. Shepler outlines how, since the decade-long civil war came to
an end in 2002, forty international and local NGOs have worked to reintegrate
an estimated 7,000 former child combatants. However, she describes how UN-
and NGO-sponsored programmes for former child soldiers can have unintended
effects, since they tend to be framed in an individualistic way and can harden
the child soldier identity through labelling. She argues that Sierra Leoneans
have their own ‘culturally specific reactions to child soldiering’ that are not
reflected in global child rights discourses. What is most disturbing to them is
not ‘lost innocence’, but the separation of children from family and training and
the resulting generational break. She pays detailed attention to children who
bypassed the institutions designed for them and simply went home and ‘sponta-
neously’ reintegrated on their own. She argues that although such children and
youth do not have access to the benefits that NGOs provide, they are able to
more easily blend back into their communities than children who are ‘formally’
reintegrated according to NGO understandings of childhood.
Child soldiers are not the only children deliberately targeted by violence.
J. Christopher Kovats-Bernat (2006) has studied children sleeping rough in
Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He describes street children’s experiences of the street as a
 Guide to Further Reading • 169

‘rite of passage’ in which identities are moulded and social networks established
for sharing food, goods and information. However, he also outlines the Haitian
state’s paramilitary response to violent disorder in the street, and the systematic
attempt to remove street children from Haitian public space. Even the Lafanmi
Selavi orphanage, set up as a safe haven for street children, has been a target for
attacks, including firebombings, by secret police organizations. Kovats-Bernat
argues that the criminalization of street children allows the authorities to see them
as dangerous political agents and deny them human rights. This is a powerful
and alarming book, interspersed with ‘interludes’ that describe the life of a single
child on the street, and that does not shy away from describing Haitian street
children’s experiences of violence and poverty.
Some of the literature on street children has also followed the kinds of subtle
routes seen in approaches to child soldiers, showing both the risks of life on the
streets for children, but also the benefits that such a life may bring to specific
children, and why they may therefore choose it over a home-based existence.
Tobias Hecht (1998) has argued that, although street children in North East Brazil
are at heightened risk of a violent death, they are also better nourished than their
siblings who remain at home. Hecht’s ethnography stands out from much of the
work on street children because of the ways in which he pays serious attention to
children’s self-representations. He argues that children’s self-identity hinges on
their relationship to a mother figure. A street child is a child who has abandoned
his mother and left the ‘right track’, unlike poor children who continue to nurture
their maternal household. Street children, he argues, therefore see themselves as
having betrayed motherdom or the matrifocal family more generally in order to
follow a way of life on the street that has a kind of addictive power.

Globalization and Children’s Everyday Lives

In more recent years, as research with children has moved away from descrip-
tions of childhoods and evocations of children’s cultural worlds, it has become
increasingly oriented towards broader theoretical issues, including globalization
and economic change. Cindi Katz, a feminist geographer, has written the kind of
long-term, ethnographically detailed but theoretically powerful study of which
most anthropologists dream. Growing Up Global (2004) is at face value a longi-
tudinal, ethnographic study of rural Sudanese children, examining processes
of economic development and global change from the vantage point of these
children’s everyday lives. However, a highly original aspect of the book is that
it is also, in its later chapters, a comparative study of the impact of economic
restructuring on children’s lives in New York City. The book, which is illustrated
with many photographs of children at work and play, begins with detailed descrip-
tions of a typical child’s day in the Sudanese village of Howa. Katz shows how
170 • Children

children’s work and play are easily, and profoundly, connected. However, when
the village is included in a large agricultural development project, these easy
connections and the environmental knowledge with which they are associated
are altered. In particular, through the longitudinal nature of her study, Katz
shows how the project imposed disjunctions between what her informants learnt
as children and what they needed to know as adults. In comparison, she argues
that in New York economic restructuring led to a loss of ‘richness’ (particularly
recreational and leisure spaces) in children’s urban environments. As in Sudan,
Katz argues, this left young people deskilled.
In her wider theoretical work, Katz (2001) has introduced the idea of
‘vagabond capitalism’ to describe the ways in which modern states access labour
without paying for its reproductive costs. Such costs would include the kinds
of playground spaces that children in New York saw being ripped out of their
neighbourhoods. This emphasis on the costs of social reproduction is a powerful
theme in work on transnational migration and its implications for the lives of
children whose parents migrate. In Children of Global Migration (2005), Rhacel
Salazar Parreñas examines the lives of the children ‘left behind’ in the Philippines
by migrant parents. She argues that the migration of parents led children to
express emotions of longing, grief, anger, and disappointment. In particular, she
describes how a discourse of ‘abandonment’ was far more prominent amongst
the children of migrant mothers than migrant fathers. Even when such children
received a good deal of care from their extended family, and were in frequent
contact with their mothers, they talked about themselves as abandoned and
emphasized the inadequacy of care in their families. Parreñas connects this with
naturalized gender ideologies that continue to emphasize the idea of the nurturing
and physically intimate mother, and that have not yet adjusted to the phenomenon
of transnational households. The ‘gender paradox of globalization’, in which
women are pushed to work both inside and outside the home, seems therefore to
have mostly negative psychological consequences for the children in her study
However, wider research on the impact of parental migration on children
suggests that children’s suffering is relative to their cultural expectations of care.
In contexts where flexible family arrangements are the norm, children do not
necessarily feel ‘abandoned’ when they are separated from their mothers. Cati
Coe, in The Scattered Family (2014), shows how transnational migration between
Ghana and the US is an extension of a common phenomenon of migration and
travel throughout Ghana and West Africa. She describes how the region has a long
history of ‘fostering’ in which children move between households and how many
children – not just those whose parents are transnational migrants – ‘circulate’
between family members. Children grow up in communities where migration is
an ever-present possibility, something that the ten- to eighteen-year-old children
Coe worked with aspire to as a way to contribute to ‘reciprocal care’ in their
families. Nevertheless, although Coe describes a context where migration seems
 Guide to Further Reading • 171

to be less personally damaging for children than the situation Parreñas describes
in the Philippines, the picture is not completely positive. Whilst parents tend to
be relatively upbeat in their representations of migration, children’s emotional
responses to their living arrangements in Ghana reveal feelings of a lack of
control over their situation. Moreover, Coe shows how transnational migration
can be disruptive of traditional practices of circulation since it may be hard, and
can take many years, for Ghanaians to bring their children to the US.
Another powerful ethnography of globalizing processes and discourses is
Kristen Cheney’s Pillars of the Nation (2007), which analyzes the connections
drawn between childhood and nationhood in Uganda, and the practical implica-
tions these connections have for the lives of Uganda’s child citizens. Cheney
shows how children respond to and participate in nation-building, despite the
‘paradox of powerlessness’ in which they find themselves. What makes this an
exploration of the influence of globalization on children is the book’s concern
with charting the impact of two global movements: those for ‘child rights’ and
for universal primary education. Cheney’s ethnography draws on a life history
methodology and therefore contains many interesting accounts of individual
children. The book also makes a contribution to the literature, noted earlier, on
children’s involvement in war. Cheney describes how North Ugandan children
have been excluded from the paradigm of child citizenship because of their
involvement in the civil war.
Finally, another (rather different) ethnography that examines clashing under-
standings of childhood and the influence of global movements on children’s
lives is Jenny Huberman’s Ambivalent Encounters (2012). Huberman analyzes
encounters in the Indian holy city of Banaras between Western tourists and
children working as guides and peddlers on the city’s waterfront. She examines
tourists’ perspectives on, and locals’ reactions to, these children, but also
children’s own experiences of work and the ways in which they imbue it
with meaning. Tourists tend to have very strong reactions (both negative and
positive) to the children working on the riverfront, and these reactions reveal
particular ideals of childhood. Huberman argues that many tourists sought a
more ‘authentic’ experience of India by developing personal connections with
the children. Thus, Banaras’s child workers were not simply selling postcards or
tours – they were also engaging in various forms of ‘emotional labour’. Her book
contains detailed portraits of individual children and demonstrates the power of
incorporating the perspectives of both children and adults in our analyses.

Ethnography and other Methods for Research with Children

Although there are several edited texts and journal articles dedicated to methods
for, and the ethics of, conducting qualitative research with children, some of the
172 • Children

best individual accounts can be found as separate chapters or appendices in single-

authored ethnographies. For example, Myra Bluebond-Langner’s (1978) account
of children’s knowledge of their terminal illness includes an appendix giving a
personal account of her hospital fieldwork and the complex relationships that
this involved with medical staff, parents and child patients. In Kristen Cheney’s
introduction to her Pillars of the Nation (2007), she reflects on the process of
conducting fieldwork with children in several different sites, and in particular the
benefits of utilizing a life-history approach. Chapter 2 of Barrie Thorne’s Gender
Play is entitled ‘Learning from Kids’ and explores her strategies for conducting
ethnographic research with children in two elementary schools in the US, as well
as many of the surprises that this research entailed. Thorne describes how she
wanted to approach the world of children in the same way that an anthropologist
might approach a ‘radically different culture’: with ‘open-ended curiosity’ and
‘an attitude of respectful discovery’ (1993: 12). Nevertheless, fieldwork awoke
within her ‘a jangling chorus of selves’ (ibid.: 11–12), from teacher and mother
to the ten-year-old elementary school child she had once been. Thorne vividly
describes her responses to certain key figures in the schools – the popular girl, the
quiet loner, the smelly and unkempt pariah – who reminded her of remembered
children from her own schooldays. For example, when she notices that she has
started obsessively documenting evidence of one girl’s popularity, she realizes
that her note-taking is in part motivated by envy and by her own remembered
‘middling social status’ as a ten-year-old (ibid.: 24). Thus, part of Thorne’s
account of her ethnographic methods is an honest reflection on how moments
of reconnection with one’s remembered child self can be a source of insight but
also distortion.
Samantha Punch has published a number of excellent articles that draw
attention to methodological issues and that describe some ‘child-friendly’
techniques for adaptation in particular contexts. She has discussed the issue of
how research with children may or may not differ from research with adults in
the same context (2002a), various creative strategies for use during interviews
with young people (2002b) and the benefits of a longitudinal, ethnographic
approach to children in order to make sense of their developing work roles and
choices (2012). Tobias Hecht (1998), in his account of his fieldwork amongst
Brazilian street children, describes a technique called ‘radio workshops’ in which
children took it in turns to interview one another. For an overview of different
participatory techniques to complement ethnographic research with children, see
Jo Boyden and Judith Ennew’s ‘Manual’ (1997), produced for Rädda Barnen, the
Swedish section of Save the Children International.
Finally, discussions of the ethics of research with children can be found in a
number of different places. Young Lives is an international study of childhood
poverty based at Oxford University, involving longitudinal research with children
in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. Its website (http://www.younglives.org.uk/)
 Guide to Further Reading • 173

is an excellent resource for researchers and has a number of ethics guides and
information on ‘practical ethics’ during work with children. A comprehensive
discussion of all aspects of ethics during the research process is Priscilla Alderson
and Virginia Morrow’s The Ethics of Research with Children and Young People
(2011). Those who prefer their ethical discussions to be less programmatic and
more personal could read Rachel Burr’s (2002) account of ethical dilemmas
during her fieldwork in Vietnam, which focuses on her discovery that many of
the children she had been working with were, as they creatively tattooed one
another in her presence, infecting each other with the HIV virus. She reflects on
her decision at the time not to intervene and get the boys tested and argues that
myths of being a ‘neutral observer’, as well as insecurities about cultural barriers,
led her to make the wrong decision.
 Notes

Chapter Three

1 Also known as Jimson weed, Angel’s trumpet or Stramonium.

2 The ingestion of the sap of the maikiua plant is a widespread visionary
practice among Jivaroan groups (Shuar, Achuar, Shiwiar, Huambisa and
Awajun), which enables the acquisition of arutam souls and is said to shape
the destiny of the person. This ritual is known in the Jivaroan literature as
‘arutam quest’.
3 This is because the figure of the wanderer is dubious and problematic for
everyday sociality. Moderately accepted yet routinely distrusted ‘wanderers’
are shamans (uwishin) – specialists in symbolic relations with the outside –
who go out of their way to acquire invisible powers in faraway places. But
ordinary Shuar may also classify as wanderers upon being serially ejected
from Shuar hamlets for trouble-making or acting on orders from dangerous
strangers (i.e. head-hunters) after their repeated journeys to Ecuadorian
cities.
4 Ipiak: Achiote (Bixa Orellana) and Sua: Genipa (Genipa Americana).

Chapter Five

1 Ideally, I would have studied the same children at home and in school, but
this was not possible due to access reasons.
2 ‘Zombies’ is how Alex and his friends refer to Call of Duty: Black Ops
II, zombie mode, a video game played on various consoles including the
PlayStation3.
3 Manhunt is a variation on ‘tag’ whereby being tagged results in also
becoming ‘it’. The winner is the last to be tagged.
4 Guide Camp is a Guides weekend away in which the girls sleep in dorms or
tents and take part in various directed activities.

175
176 • Notes

Chapter Nine

1 The finished film is available online at: http://www.qeh.ox.ac.uk/research/

video/odid-student-research/video-hlg. I reflect on potential lessons from my
filmmaking experiences for participatory research with stigmatized groups
more generally in Hoechner (2015).
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 Index
adult attitudes to children
clash with attitudes of ethnographer
141, 150
expectations of appropriate behaviour
50, 51, 54, 151
as ignorant 97–8, 99, 132
negative 13, 20, 27, 28, 38, 166, 169
protective 14, 20, 101, 107, 150, 159
as unique individuals 50
agency, of children 5–6, 15, 47, 145, 152,
160
anger 24, 35, 36, 138, 141
anthropology
of childhood 2, 5, 14, 87, 142–3, 145,
155–6, 157, 158
economic 5, 162
Ariès, Philippe 2, 3, 156
artificiality of ethnographic encounters 14,
21, 23, 75, 117, 120
awkwardness 14, 18, 89, 114, 116, 117,
123, 125
Berry, Joanna de 168
Bluebond-Langner, Myra 159, 172
Bolin, Inge 162
boundary between adults and children 6,
9, 10, 13, 47, 63, 75, 82–3
Bourdieu, Pierre 165, 166
Brazil 169
Briggs, Jean 161–2
Britain 3–4, 13, 73–85 passim, 156, 165–6
Burr, Rachel 163, 173
Cheney, Kristen 171, 172
‘child-focused’ research see also
ethnography
negative impressions of 5, 13, 87
‘child-friendly’ methods
designing 11, 18, 19, 21–2
problematizing idea of 1, 10, 29, 42, 172
as unfriendly in some settings 18, 19,
22–3, 42
variety of 10, 32, 102, 146, 172
child-headed households 24, 27
child labour and work 2, 5, 43, 48, 53,
127, 130, 132–3, 133–14, 143, 145,
147, 151, 162–3, 169–70, 171
child rights 15, 20, 142, 142–3, 145, 150,
152, 163, 168, 171
child soldiers 168–9, 171
childhood
different understandings of within one
society 4–5, 11, 19, 26, 28–9
notion of a ‘good’ childhood 21–2, 26,
29, 33, 41
as a social construction 2, 4, 27, 50–1,
121, 156, 164
stages of 3, 50–1, 54, 158
children
as the future 20, 171
as independent 27
as innocent 105
as secretive 12, 35, 37
as vulnerable 2, 3, 6, 14, 51, 54, 101,
105, 142, 149, 168
children’s knowledge
and competence at daily tasks 49, 89,
157, 162
dismissed by adults 1, 9, 13, 61, 89,
96–7, 97–9
of marital infidelities 106–7, 108–10,
111
183
184 • Index
revealing new truths 1, 14, 54, 88, 98,
99, 150, 152, 159
ways for ethnographer to acquire 51, 97
children’s narratives 48, 52, 53–4, 56,
80–1
‘children’s voices’
and emotion 24, 26, 108–9, 123–4, 125
multiplicity of 77
problems with accessing 12, 18–19, 69,
137
sharing with others 11, 133
China 10, 12–13, 14, 59–72 passim,
113–26 passim, 164
Coe, Cati 170–1
conflict between children 36, 40
Cote D’Ivoire 158, 162–3
dancing 40, 41, 42
development, economic 20, 169–70
differences between children
age 6, 79, 82, 138, 146, 151
class 4, 129, 165–6
experience of suffering 26
gender 6, 48, 53, 54, 55, 57, 69, 146,
162, 163, 164–5, 166–7
race and ethnicity 166
rural/urban 114, 122, 124–5, 129, 163
Dominica 160
dreams 5, 56–7
Ecuador 12, 45–58 passim, 167
education
and aspiration 14, 19, 20, 66–7, 68, 97,
124, 167
educational pressure on children 61, 62,
64, 67–8, 114, 119, 123, 124–5
as general social process 157, 164
‘hidden curriculum’ of 165, 166
‘high quality’ education 61, 70
institutions and hierarchy 6, 9, 12–13,
60–1, 63, 113–14, 165–6
see also schools
ethical concerns 6, 11, 15, 40, 77, 127,
136, 141–2, 143–4, 145, 149–50,
152, 172–3
ethnographer
adult views of 9, 13, 25–6, 39, 76, 78,
84–5
as ‘childlike’ 9, 67, 82, 90
as ‘exemplary adult’ 10, 12, 59, 60–1, 70
as friend to children 12, 13, 83, 84, 94,
112, 120, 124–5
as ‘intimate outsider’ 14, 92–3, 110, 126
as patron to children 8, 15, 128, 130–2,
135, 138
physical differences with children 7, 8,
19, 62, 65, 66, 91–2, 96, 118
as a powerful outsider 6, 8, 12, 23,
39, 49, 55–6, 61–2, 64–5, 72, 118,
135–6, 137–8, 145
as subversive 9–10, 78, 103
as teacher 10, 14, 33–4, 46, 56–7,
68–70, 83–4, 118, 119–20
ethnography
‘failures’ of 18, 23, 35–6, 63–4, 64,
68–9, 70, 71–2, 114–15, 121, 125,
128, 136, 141–2
fieldwork as total immersion 1, 47, 79
see also participation
as method for child-focused research
7–11, 71–2, 89–91, 94–5, 102,
114–15, 117, 143, 171–3
exclusion 27, 28, 31, 37, 38–9, 121, 124,
129–30
Ferguson, Ann 166
Fortes, Meyer 157
freedom 41, 49
friendship 48, 55, 57, 78–9, 94
future, children’s ideas about 69, 75, 122
gender 5, 50, 55, 102, 108, 128, 134, 166,
170
generational categories 27, 28, 47
Ghana 170–1
Gottlieb, Alma 158–9
Haiti 168–9
Hecht, Tobias 169, 172
Huberman, Jenny 171

illness 5, 42, 97–8, 159
India 9, 13, 87–99 passim, 162, 171
Indonesia 31, 32, 34, 157
Jacquemin, Mélanie 162–3
jokes 41, 43, 62, 107, 116–17, 161
journeys, of children 47–9, 52, 54, 55–6,
57–8
Katz, Cindi 7, 169–70
kinship and family
and care 46, 101, 105, 110–11, 170
children’s views of 15, 24, 25, 42, 69,
98, 108–10, 148, 151, 169, 171
crisis of 23, 105
expectations of children’s contributions
to family 147, 151, 162–3, 164–5
reluctance to discuss 37
see also methods, kinship diagrams
Kovats-Bernat, J. Christopher 168–9
Lanclos, Donna 161
language socialization 160
liminality 27
Malaysia 10, 11–12, 31–43 passim
Mandell, Nancy 8, 60, 74
marginalized children 43, 129, 163, 166
marriage 14, 101, 103–5, 106, 111
Mead, Margaret 2, 7, 156–7
methods
direct questions 26, 42, 77, 89, 90,
107–8, 124, 145
drawing 35, 36, 37–8, 56, 146
film 15, 123, 132–4, 135–6, 138
games and sport 65–7, 71, 75, 96, 120,
146
journeying with children 12, 46, 51–2,
56
kinship diagrams 25
‘least-adult’ role, 7–8, 22, 32, 60, 74,
82–3, 96
photography 43, 157
radio workshops 172
theatre 26
Index • 185
trips out with children 39–42
that work for individual children 12,
37–8, 42
writing 37, 56–7, 67, 69–70, 71
see also ‘child-friendly’ methods;
ethnography; participation
Mexico 14, 101–12, 167
migration
independent migration by children/
youth 12, 46, 48, 52–3, 122, 129,
132–3
parental migration shaping children’s
lives 5, 12, 14, 31, 33, 34, 38–9, 43,
113, 121, 170–1
Montgomery, Heather 159–60
Mozambique 168
New Guinea 157, 160
Nieuwenhuys, Olga 162, 163
Nigeria 14, 127–39 passim
Opies, Iona and Peter 3–4, 161
orphanhood 11, 23, 26–7
Palestine 168
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar 170, 171
participation
full, with children 1, 8, 13, 74, 76, 79,
80–1, 90–1 see also methods, ‘least-
adult’ role; ethnography
limits to 8, 9, 13, 50, 62–3, 72, 78–9,
118, 125–6, 128, 138
participatory research 11
Pascoe, C. J. 166–7
Paugh, Amy 160
Philippines 33, 34, 170, 171
play and games 3–4, 8, 13–14, 21, 22,
35–6, 40, 96, 116, 161–2, 169–70
power 5, 6, 127
prostitution 15, 141, 143, 144–5, 147–8,
149, 151–2, 159–60
Punch, Samantha 172
refugees 12, 19
religion 8, 35, 38, 129
186 • Index

Rwanda 4, 11, 17–29 passim ‘new sociology of childhood’ 3, 4, 11,

Rydstrøm, Helle 164–5 155
Stafford, Charles 164
Samoa 157, 160 street children 163, 168–9
schools structural disadvantage of children 6, 27,
and adolescence 54 85, 151, 169–70
and everyday life 46, 60, 63 Sudan 169–70
informal learning centres 33, 34, 39,
115–16, 119 Thailand 15, 141–53 passim, 159–60
as site for research 9–10, 13, 14, 33–4, Thorne, Barrie 9–10, 172
50, 60, 63–4, 68, 75, 78, 83–5, 93–6,
97, 117, 119, 172 Uganda 168, 171
teachers at 34, 36, 38, 63, 66, 78, 84–5, undocumented children 5, 31, 37, 42
96, 107 United States 2, 4, 159, 161, 166–7,
see also education 169–70
Shepler, Susan 168
Sierra Leone 168 Vietnam 163, 164–5, 173
socialization 3, 4, 47 see also language violence 20, 24, 35–6, 104, 145, 161, 166,
socialization 167–9
social status 4, 8, 12–13, 62, 128, 138
sociology Willis, Paul 165–6
of education 165–6