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!
Latest Spotlight on Scholarship: Chris Chapman’s “A Life in State Care: Yusuke’s Story”
The ACYIG is delighted to present our latest Spotlight on Scholarship:
A Life in State Care: Yusuke’s Story
Chapman, C. (2025). Yusuke’s story: Journey, precarity, and coming of age in care. Ethnography, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381251317819
In principle, child protection services aim to safeguard children’s health and well-being. Yet, interventions may often involve a paradoxical practice: child-family separation. Removing a child from an unsafe environment makes sense in the eyes of authorities, but in a relational sense, it is children whose social lives are displaced and remade. Children are blameless, yet they are the ones to be separated from their home and community. This context offers an insightful space to learn about and appreciate personhood, care, and welfare state politics.
In Japan, the use of residential care institutions is relatively high and a staple of the child protection system. In Yusuke’s Story, I chart my encounters with a young person living in group care, Yusuke, and how their journey through the social protection system indexes how displacement, resocialization, and normativity come together to create a complicated political subjectivity. [Read more]
Latest Spotlight on Scholarship: Jing Xu’s “Unruly” Children
The ACYIG is delighted to present our latest Spotlight on Scholarship:
April 2025
“Unruly” Children: Learning Morality and Making Ethnography
Xu, Jing. 2024. ‘Unruly’ Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009416269.
How do humans become moral persons? While we tend to emphasize how parents shape the moral personhood of youngsters, what about children’s active learning, especially learning with and from peers? What can children teach us about the nature of ethnography, and about learning and knowledge-making more broadly? My book examines these questions through a unique re-interpretation of historical fieldnotes from the first-ever anthropological study of ethnic Han children, using an innovative human-machine hybrid approach that combines ethnographic interpretation, behavioral coding, SNA (social-network-analysis), and NLP (natural-language-processing) techniques including large-language-models (LLMs). [Read more]
Latest Spotlight on Scholarship: Meghanne Barker’s “Throw your Voice”
The ACYIG is delighted to present our latest Spotlight on Scholarship:
Cuties: Exploring Blurred Boundaries Between Puppets and Children in Kazakhstani Culture
Barker, Meghanne. 2024. Throw Your Voice: Suspended Animations in Kazakhstani Childhoods. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
A dog named Kashtanka finds herself lost and alone. Her master, a carpenter, has taken her out but wandered off. A new master takes her in, feeds her, and teaches her to perform. She is well-fed but becomes bored in this new life, restricted to a single room and an endless routine. Then, one night, the gander who lives with her dies suddenly. She replaces him in the master’s act in the circus. At her debut, her first master is in the audience. He calls out to her, and she jumps back into his arms. She returns to her first home. [read more]
Latest Spotlight on Scholarship: Susan Blum’s “Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning”
The ACYIG is delighted to present our latest Spotlight on Scholarship:
Has schooling killed learning?
Blum, Susan. 2024. Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning. NY: Cornell University Press.
In Schoolishness I ask all the ways—I analyze 10—conventional institutional education leads to alienation, and then all the ways it could be better, more authentic, more joyful, more meaningful. The book is deeply anthropological, drawing on what we know about how humans learn “in the wild,” and comparing this to the ineffective and often harmful schoolish ways that increasingly all humans are expected to experience in the contemporary world [see more]
https://acyig.americananthro.org/spotlight-on-scholarship/
Latest Spotlight on Scholarship: Junehui Ahn’s “Between Self and Community: Children’s Personhood in a Globalized South Korea”
The ACYIG is delighted to present our latest Spotlight on Scholarship:
Dilemmas of raising a global child in rapidly transforming South Korea
Ahn, Junehui. 2024. Between Self and Community: Children’s Personhood in a Globalized South Korea. Rutgers NJ: Rutgers University Press.
The Rainbow Room in Somang Preschool (Seoul) looked like the classroom I previously studied at a midwestern U.S. preschool. Walls were decorated with children’s artwork and [see more]
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.