Dr Catherine Allerton, OLD 6.08

Optional for students on MSc Social Anthropology, MSc Anthropology and Development, MSc Anthropology and Development Management, MSc Law, Anthropology and Society. The course is also available as an outside option where regulations permit and with permission of the course tutor.

For much of its history, and with some notable exceptions, anthropology has paid little serious attention to children. However, recent years have seen a growing interest in both 'childhood' as a historical and social construction, and in children's engagement with their own social worlds. This course aims to introduce students to emerging ethnographic work on children and youth, in order to explore both its theoretical and methodological challenges. Ethnographic studies will cover a wide range of societies and regions, including anthropological work on children and childhood in the West.

The course will begin with an investigation of children's place in anthropology, including early anthropological work on 'Culture and Personality' and 'child socialisation'. The course will then move to consider a variety of topics that have been the focus of recent ethnographic study. These may include: children's play, childhood identities and kinship, education and schooling, youth cultures and globalization, children's work, street children and children's competencies in contexts of crisis, including war. The course shall also consider the challenge that children pose to anthropological methodologies and shall investigate some of the ways in which fieldwork has been conducted with children.

10 x 1 hour lectures, 10 x 1 hour seminars, up to 4 hours of film screenings in LT, 1 hour revision session in ST.

In addition to preparing discussion material for seminars, students will normally write one tutorial essay for the course. Students will be supplied with a mock exam paper.

R.A. LeVine and R.S. New (eds) 2008. Anthropology and child development: a cross-cultural reader; N. Scheper-Hughes and C. Sargent (eds) 1998. Small wars: the cultural politics of childhood; A. Goncu (ed) 1999. Children's engagement in the world; D. Durham & J. Cole (eds) 2006. Generations and globalization: youth, age and family in the new world economy; M. Liebel. 2004. A will of their own: cross cultural perspectives on working children; V. Amit-Talai and H. Wulff (eds) 1995. Youth cultures: a cross-cultural perspective; A. James. 1993. Childhood identities: self and social relationships in the experience of the child. A. de Waal and N. Argenti (eds) 2002. Young Africa: Realising the rights of children and youth; J. Boyden and J. de Berry (eds) 2004. Children and youth on the frontline: ethnography, armed conflict and displacement; Levinson, B, D. Foley & D. Holland. (eds) 1996. The cultural production of the educated person: critical ethnographies of schooling and local practice.

One two-hour examination in ST.