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201 Notes Introduction 1. Research was conducted between 2004 and 2006. I became a Peace Corps volunteer after having completed my doctorate in anthropology with a focus on youth violence in Latin America. I approached my service in the Peace Corps with the intent of using my academic knowledge and experience toward human services. I also aimed to use my time as a volunteer to gather data and research for a future project, the result of which is this book. See the December 2011 issue of the Anthropology News (www.aaanet.org) for more on the long-standing relationship between anthropologists and the Peace Corps. 2. Agency is the ability to react, plan, and carry out plans of action on a moment-tomoment basis. It is a fundamental quality of human existence, much akin to will, determination , or desire. However, one’s agency is shaped by the choices a given situation presents, the opportunities one can finesse, and the material and social resources one can marshal. Limitations such as personal identity (one’s age, race, class, and gender) and material conditions can limit the type of agency one can exercise. 3. This distinction is, in many ways, an oversimplification, as many authors utilize a combination of the two approaches in their analyses of the lives of children. However, it does offer a broad characterization of research perspectives and the methodological and ethical considerations they entail. 4. See, for instance, Farmer 2004. 5. Huggins and Mesquita (2000) link scapegoating street youth for crime with moral exclusion and civic invisibility in Brazil. 6. See, for instance, Vigil 1988a, 1988b, 2002, 2003, and 2007. 7. Sharon Stephens’s groundbreaking 1995 volume, The Cultural Politics of Childhood, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent’s 1998 Small Wars both set the agenda for subsequent research about children at the interface of cultural and political debates. The chapters in both collections explore issues as diverse as state policies concerning demographic population shifts, pronatalist ideologies, cultural fears about uncontrolled children, and the macrolevel forces of economic and political policies that cause pain and suffering in the lives of children. As Liisa Malkki and Emily Martin (2003) point out, Stephens’s contribution was in aligning ethnographic research with the investigation of the political lives of children. Despite their calls for child-centered research, both collections focused more on ideologies of childhood than the perspective of children. See also Wolseth and Babb 2008. 8. See, for example, Michel Foucault’s 1980 discussion of the creation of the “schoolboy ” in Western European education systems in volume 1 of the History of Sexuality. 9. In Latin America this is most clearly seen in studies of family structure and productive labor. Lewis Aptekar (1988) highlights the cultural kinship patterns of Colombian 202 Notes working poor households, demonstrating that children working and living on the streets are part of an adaptive strategy for household survival. More recent work by Mary Kenny (2007) and Thomas Offit (2010) provide a stark picture of the necessity of child labor for household survival. Kenny’s work illustrates that attitudes of children and parents vary, with some parents forcing kids to work and appropriating their earnings for their own consumption, and some children seeking out the opportunity to earn in order to be productive members of the household. 10. See the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour’s (IPEC) campaign to end forms of child labor, a part of the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Decent Work Agenda. Find out more by accessing www.ilo.org/ipec/lang--en/index.htm. 11. See, for example, Hecht 1998, Huggins and Mesquita 2000, Inciardi and Surrat 1998, Kovats-Bernat 2006, Marquez 1999, and Salazar 2008, and Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman 1998, among others. 12. As was the case of the massacre of a group of street children sleeping on the steps of the Candelaria Cathedral of Rio de Janeiro in 1993. For the testimony of one of the survivors of the massacre, Wagner dos Santos, see the preface to Jones and Rodgers (2009). 13. This distinction has much resonance in the work on street children in Brazil (see Hecht 1998 and Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman 1998). J. Christopher Kovats-Bernat (2006), however, skillfully demonstrates that in Port-au-Prince, at least, such stark distinctions between home and street do not apply. 14. This is most evident in historic and contemporary circulation of children in Latin America within kin and fictive kin networks and to orphanages and other...