Suchergebnisse

Anthropologists researching children's lives have incredible stories to tell. How might we best tell them in readable ways that will appeal to "ordinary readers" beyond our colleagues and students? In this article, I explore the possibilities of "alternative" ways to write ethnography in general, and the ethnography of children in particular. Given children's nature, I argue that creative approaches to writing children's lives are especially appropriate and powerful. In the first section, I consider a variety of adventurous ethnographic writing on assorted topics; in the second section, I discuss some creative approaches to ethnographic writing focused, specifically, on children.

The Female Circumcision Controversy: An Anthropological Perspective. Ellen Gruenbaum. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. 242 pp.

In much anthropological literature infants are frequently neglected as outside the scope of both the concept of culture and disciplinary methods. This article proposes six reasons for this exclusion of infants from anthropological discussse include the fieldworker's own memories and parental status, the problematic question of agency in infants and their presumed dependence on others, their routine attachment to women, their seeming inability to communicate, their inconvenient propensity to leak from a variety of orifices, and their apparently low quotient of rationality. Yet investigation of how infants are conceived of beyond the industrialized West can lead us to envision them far differently from how they are conceived in the West (including by anthropologists). Confronting such comparative data suggests the desirability of considering infants as both relevant and beneficial to the anthropological endeavor.

Anthropologists have neglected a significant dimension to religion by ignoring the spiritual lives of a society's youngest members. In Cote d'lvoire, Beng infants are said to lead a profoundly spiritual existence. Indeed, until the age of five or so, Beng children are said to live at least part of the time in the spiritual other world (wrugbe) they inhabited before being reincarnated. Exploring both ideology and praxis, the author probes the consequences for the daily experiences and care of Bang babies, including umbilical cord care, enemas, crying, adornment, naming, personality development, and infant disease and death. The author concludes by considering the implications of a full‐blown treatment of infants for the practice of anthropology.

Anthropology and Africa: Changing Perspectives on. Changing Scene. Sally Falk Moore. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994. 165 pp.