David F. Lancy - The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings

How are children raised in different cultures? What is the role of children in society? How are families and communities structured around them? Now available in a revised edition, The Anthropology of Childhood sets out to answer these questions, and argues that our common understandings about children are narrowly culture-bound.

Marshaling evidence from several lines of research, David Lancy shows that, while the dominant society views children as precious, innocent, and preternaturally cute cherubs, there are other societies where they are regarded as unwanted, inconvenient changelings, or as desired but pragmatically commoditized chattel. Enriched with anecdotes from ethnography and the daily media, the book examines family structure and reproduction, profiles of childrens caretakers within family or community, childrens treatment at different ages, their play, work, schooling, and transition to adulthood. The result is a nuanced and credible picture of childhood in different cultures, past and present.

Organized developmentally, moving from infancy through to adolescence and early adulthood, this new edition reviews and catalogs the findings of over 100 years of anthropological scholarship dealing with childhood and adolescence, drawing on over 750 newly added sources, and engaging with newly emerging issues relevant to the world of childhood today.

DAVID F. LANCY is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Utah State University. He is author/editor of several books on childhood and culture, including Cross-Cultural Studies in Cognition and Mathematics (1983), Studying Children and Schools (2001), Playing on the Mother Ground: Cultural Routines for Childrens Learning (1996), and The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood (2010).

If I were to assign just one book as required reading for students of child psychology, this would be it. It opens our all-too-parochial eyes to childhood's possibilities.