Welcome to the official website of the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group. Check out our latest blog, catch up on announcements, peruse our various resources, and become a member!
Welcome!
John Bock Memorial
I share the news of John Bock’s passing with great sadness. He served the discipline of anthropology with distinction. He earned his Masters and Doctoral degrees in the lauded Evolutionary Anthropology program at the University of New Mexico. After a post-doc, he took a position at California State University Fullerton in 2000 where he rapidly rose to the rank of Professor on the basis of his original work on children in Botswana. He took advantage of the unique demography where, within a fairly small region, there are foraging, fishing, pastoralist and farming communities. He looked at how these distinct ecologies affected the lives of children. One question among many that he pursued was the relationship between children’s play and subsequent work assignments. Although widely taken as gospel, Bock (partnered with his spouse, anthropologist Sara Johnson) was the first to show an explicit connection between play activity and skill development such as playing at pounding in a mortar with pestle and doing it in earnest to husk the grain. Their findings from Botswana would fill many highly-cited articles.
I met John in 1999 in Santa Fe at the annual The Anthropological Study of Play meeting where he gave a paper entitled “Children’s work and play among the Okvango Delta peoples of Botswana.” After the session I buttonholed John to seek his collaboration and guidance. He did much to reduce my woeful ignorance of the role of evolution in shaping life history, especially childhood. and continued to field evolution questions from me with great care and consideration. Our principal joint work was co-editing (with Suzanne Gaskins) a comprehensive survey of learning in culture— The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood— published by AltaMira in 2010.
Much as he would have liked to return to Africa, John already at our initial meeting confessed to suffering from serious illness. Over a course of almost 25 years, John ‘s life was repeatedly threatened then saved by miracle treatments just out of the pharma lab. Despite these continual setbacks and the daily challenges, he remained devoted to his family Sara, Nea and Alex and to the university community.
Placebound, he reinvented himself as an institution builder and created substantial new programs in Evolutionary Anthropology, Environmental Studies, and the Center for Sustainability for which he was the director. For each of the programs, he developed numerous new courses and was known as an outstanding teacher and mentor. These many accomplishments led the University to name John their Outstanding Professor in 2012.
John Bock’s passing leaves a void for me, individually and professionally, but his remarkable life should be an inspiration to us all.
David Lancy
July 17th, 2024
Newest issue of NEOS: Building Blocks of Knowledge: Investigating Education, Learning and Knowing in Children and Youth
We are pleased to announce that the Spring 2024 Issue (Volume 16, Issue 1) of NEOS, edited by Manya Kagan and Chelsea Cutright, is here! You can check out this exciting issue, entitled “Building Blocks of Knowledge: Investigating Education, Learning and Knowing in Children and Youth,” here:
https://acyig.americananthro.org/neosvol16iss1spring24/
Announcing ACYIG’s Inaugural book prize winner…
The Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group (ACYIG) is delighted to announce our inaugural prize for best new book representing the anthropology of childhood or youth goes to… Camilla Morelli, for her book Children of the Rainforest: Shaping the Future in Amazonia (Rutgers 2023).
Morelli’s remarkable ethnography traces how Indigenous Matses children are actively driving cultural change in their communities in a globalising world, addressing old questions about children’s agentive roles in generational cultural shifts and suggesting provocative new questions about what anthropology may have been overlooking about the cultural and global significance of children’s imaginings, affective attachments, and aspirations. The prize committee agreed that Morelli’s monograph exemplified the criteria of originality, relevance to the anthropology of childhood and/or youth, potential for significant impact on the field, and readability. In addition, Morelli’s book is rich with ethnographic detail, children’s drawings and photographs, making this an engaging and accessible text for a wide readership. Morelli’s clear and compelling storytelling makes it appear as though ethnographic research with children in a remote forest setting is easy. To so effectively trace the processes of cultural change from local to global levels from children’s perspectives takes an ethnographer of impressive skill and demands tremendous emotional and physical labour. Congratulations, Camilla on your achievement.
Latest Spotlight on Scholarship: Funk et al. on how sweet potatoes can replace teddy bears in child development
We are a team of six authors from Germany, the US, and India with backgrounds in socio-cultural anthropology and cultural psychology. Our book explores multifaceted linkages between culturally specific feeding practices and human bonding based on ethnographic case studies from Morocco, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Costa Rica.
A comparative analysis of our ethnographic research demonstrates that there are many culturally valued ways of feeding children, contradicting the idea of a single, universally best feeding standard. We show that in many parts of the world feeding plays a central role in human bonding and relationship formation, something largely overlooked by attachment theory and related approaches. Our analysis further demonstrates that feeding contributes to relationship formation through different socio-emotional dimensions, which we label proximal, transactional, and distal. Each of these relates to a specific aspect of the feeding relationship (e.g., physical intimacy, food as a life-sustaining gift, conviviality) and is experienced by qualitatively distinct emotions. Finally, we argue that feeding practices can lead to different forms of relationships. Through feeding and eating together, caregivers express core values about how different generations should relate to each other. In our research sites, intergenerational feeding relationships are either hierarchically organized, or characterized by a mix of egalitarian and hierarchical orientations.
Latest Spotlight on Scholarship: Francesca Meloni’s Way’s of Belonging
In Canada, as in many other countries around the world, undocumented young people are struggling to access social rights such as education and healthcare. Their lives are shaped by chronic uncertainty and invisibility due to restrictive anti-migration policies, leaving thousands of young people caught between the movements of hiding and running for fear of being deported. How do these young people navigate everyday interactions when they have to hide themselves and their legal status? How do they relate to their social environment when they might be deported and separated from their friends at any moment?
Latest Spotlight on Scholarship: Camilla Morelli on Imagination and Children Changing Cultures in Amazonia
Latest Spotlight on Scholarship: Guilherme Fians, “Are they just kidding? Taking children seriously as research participants”
Two PhD positions in social anthropology/anthropology of childhood
Applications are invited for two PhD positions at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich. The positions are part of the SNSF Starting Grant “Saving Brains? Applying Ethnography to Early Childhood Interventions in the Global South.” The first position entails research in an East African setting, the second in a Latin American setting.
Please apply if you are interested in one of these regions, childhood studies, international development, global health, and in doing ethnographic research.