An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological Perspectives on Children’s Lives (review)

If the twentieth century can be characterized as the “children’s century,” Heather Montgomery’s An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological Perspectives on Children’s Lives is a critical reexamination and recentering of childhood in the history of the anthropological research for the twenty-first century. Her desire to construct a “book aimed at a mid-range undergraduate audience which wanted an overview of the specific ways that anthropologists have studied children’s lives and their ideas about childhood” is achieved masterfully (p. 2). Montgomery weaves ethnographic findings and theories concerning children into thematic chapters, creating a veritable textbook for childhood studies embedded in the history of cultural anthropology in the process. This book rectifies the underrepresentation of children in cultural anthropology while remaining clear and accessible to its “mid-range undergraduate audience” (p. 2).

Montgomery’s discussion of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) helps to frame some methodological issues in anthropology with respect to childhood studies. According to the UNCRC, childhood requires “a separate space, protected from adulthood, in which children are entitled to special protection, provision and rights of participation” (p. 6). These notions are based primarily in modern Western industrial notions of childhood and quite often come into conflict with the traditions and mores of many cultures. A tradition recounted by Montgomery as outlined by researcher L. L. Langness underscores the ambiguities that arise when comparing cultures. In New Guinea, a mourning ritual involves the removal of a young girl’s first joint on her little finger with a stone axe. This appears cruel and horrific abuse to the Western observer and tests the tenets of Boasian cultural relativism to their limits. Ideas of what constitutes abuse, along with what the definition of a common childhood truly is seem just out of reach throughout Montgomery’s book, but that is the point. Montgomery continually affirms that cultures (and by extension children in those cultures) must be understood in their own terms and, most importantly, that there is no such thing as a “common childhood.”

Studying children in anthropology first took shape as the study of a child’s progress to adulthood being a replication of the primitive savage’s journey to becoming civilized. As anthropology abandoned using tropes like “savage” to describe peoples and cultures, these child savage studies were summarily buried and forgotten. With the rise of Franz Boas and the theory of cultural relativism, researchers like Margaret Mead in her Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) sought to refute famous psychologist G. Stanley Hall’s assertion of a shared cross-cultural adolescence typified by stress and tumult due to biological changes. Mead proclaimed that her studies showed that her Samoan subjects’ relaxed views toward sex made the transition to womanhood easier for Samoan girls. While Mead’s study has been widely debated, most famously by Derek Freeman, Montgomery acknowledges it as an invaluable study of children (as children) in the field of anthropology. As time progressed and theories changed, children were viewed as a blank slate, imbued with and exhibiting the personality of a particular culture. This cultural personality theory was reflected in Beatrice and John Whiting’s study of toilet training across cultures, as well as in LeVine’s pedagogic versus pediatric child care theories when he studied the Gusii of Kenya comparatively with the United States. Time progressed and theories changed, but children perennially stayed in the forefront of cutting edge ethnographic study and the creation of new and exciting anthropological theory. Montgomery’s book continues to traverse the globe, time, and theoretical space when searching for children, continually finding them at the core of important anthropological studies, yet receiving short shrift in the descriptions of important ethnographies and momentous theories in the canon of anthropology. Thankfully, Montgomery effectively rescues children as an important focal point of research, correcting the gap in the anthropological historical perspective and giving as much attention and care...