Talking Like Children

Talking Like Children PDF Author: Elise Berman
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190876972
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Children in the Marshall Islands do many things that adults do not. They walk around half naked. They carry and eat food in public without offering it to others. They talk about things they see rather than hiding uncomfortable truths. They explicitly refuse to give. Why do they do these things? Many think these behaviors are a natural result of children's innate immaturity. But Elise Berman argues that children are actually taught to do things that adults avoid: to be rude, inappropriate, and immature. Before children learn to be adults, they learn to be different from them. Berman's main theoretical claim therefore is also a novel one: age emerges through interaction and is a social production. In Talking Like Children, Berman analyzes a variety of interactions in the Marshall Islands, all broadly based around exchange: adoption negotiations, efforts to ask for or avoid giving away food, contentious debates about supposed child abuse. In these dramas both large and small, age differences emerge through the decisions people make, the emotions they feel, and the power they gain. Berman's research includes a range of methods -- participant observation, video and audio recordings, interviews, children's drawings -- that yield a significant corpus of data including over 80 hours of recorded naturalistic social interaction. Presented as a series of captivating stories, Talking Like Children is an intimate analysis of speech and interaction that shows what age means. Like gender and race, age differences are both culturally produced and socially important. The differences between Marshallese children and adults give both groups the ability to manipulate social life in distinct but often complementary ways. These differences produce culture itself. Talking Like Children establishes age as a foundational social variable and a central concern of anthropological and linguistic research.

Talking Like Children

Talking Like Children PDF Author: Elise Berman
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190876972
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
Children in the Marshall Islands do many things that adults do not. They walk around half naked. They carry and eat food in public without offering it to others. They talk about things they see rather than hiding uncomfortable truths. They explicitly refuse to give. Why do they do these things? Many think these behaviors are a natural result of children's innate immaturity. But Elise Berman argues that children are actually taught to do things that adults avoid: to be rude, inappropriate, and immature. Before children learn to be adults, they learn to be different from them. Berman's main theoretical claim therefore is also a novel one: age emerges through interaction and is a social production. In Talking Like Children, Berman analyzes a variety of interactions in the Marshall Islands, all broadly based around exchange: adoption negotiations, efforts to ask for or avoid giving away food, contentious debates about supposed child abuse. In these dramas both large and small, age differences emerge through the decisions people make, the emotions they feel, and the power they gain. Berman's research includes a range of methods -- participant observation, video and audio recordings, interviews, children's drawings -- that yield a significant corpus of data including over 80 hours of recorded naturalistic social interaction. Presented as a series of captivating stories, Talking Like Children is an intimate analysis of speech and interaction that shows what age means. Like gender and race, age differences are both culturally produced and socially important. The differences between Marshallese children and adults give both groups the ability to manipulate social life in distinct but often complementary ways. These differences produce culture itself. Talking Like Children establishes age as a foundational social variable and a central concern of anthropological and linguistic research.

The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood

The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood PDF Author: David F. Lancy
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 075911322X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood offers a portrait of childhood across time, culture, species, and environment. Anthropological research on learning in childhood has been scarce, but this book will change that. It demonstrates that anthropologists studying childhood can offer a description and theoretically sophisticated account of children's learning and its role in their development, socialization, and enculturation. Further, it shows the particular contribution that children's learning makes to the construction of society and culture as well as the role that culture-acquiring children play in human evolution. Book jacket.

A Death in the Rainforest

A Death in the Rainforest PDF Author: Don Kulick
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616209046
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
“Perhaps the finest and most profound account of ethnographic fieldwork and discovery that has ever entered the anthropological literature.” —The Wall Street Journal “If you want to experience a profoundly different culture without the exhausting travel (to say nothing of the cost), this is an excellent choice.” —The Washington Post As a young anthropologist, Don Kulick went to the tiny village of Gapun in New Guinea to document the death of the native language, Tayap. He arrived knowing that you can’t study a language without understanding the daily lives of the people who speak it: how they talk to their children, how they argue, how they gossip, how they joke. Over the course of thirty years, he returned again and again to document Tayap before it disappeared entirely, and he found himself inexorably drawn into their world, and implicated in their destiny. Kulick wanted to tell the story of Gapuners—one that went beyond the particulars and uses of their language—that took full stock of their vanishing culture. This book takes us inside the village as he came to know it, revealing what it is like to live in a difficult-to-get-to village of two hundred people, carved out like a cleft in the middle of a tropical rainforest. But A Death in the Rainforest is also an illuminating look at the impact of Western culture on the farthest reaches of the globe and the story of why this anthropologist realized finally that he had to give up his study of this language and this village. An engaging, deeply perceptive, and brilliant interrogation of what it means to study a culture, A Death in the Rainforest takes readers into a world that endures in the face of massive changes, one that is on the verge of disappearing forever.

Media Anthropology for the Digital Age

Media Anthropology for the Digital Age PDF Author: Anna Cristina Pertierra
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9781509508464
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
The field of anthropology took a long time to discover the significance of media in modern culture. In this important new book, Anna Pertierra tells the story of how a field - once firmly associated with the study of esoteric cultures - became a central part of the global study of media and communication. She recounts the rise of anthropological studies of media, the discovery of digital cultures, and the embrace of ethnographic methods by media scholars around the world. Bringing together longstanding debates in sociocultural anthropology with recent innovations in digital cultural research, this book explains how anthropology fits into the story and study of media in the contemporary world. It charts the mutual disinterest and subsequent love affair that has taken place between the fields of anthropology and media studies in order to understand how and why such a transformation has taken place. Moreover, the book shows how the theories and methods of anthropology offer valuable ways to study media from a ground-level perspective and to understand the human experience of media in the digital age. Media Anthropology for the Digital Age will be of interest to students and scholars of media and communication, anthropology, and cultural studies, as well as anyone wanting to understand the use of anthropology across wider cultural debates.

The Trans Generation

The Trans Generation PDF Author: Travers
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479840416
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Winner, 2019 PROSE Award for Anthropology, Criminology and Sociology, presented by the Association of American Publishers A groundbreaking look at the lives of transgender children and their families Some “boys” will only wear dresses; some “girls” refuse to wear dresses; in both cases, as Ann Travers shows in this fascinating account of the lives of transgender kids, these are often more than just wardrobe choices. Travers shows that from very early ages, some at two and three years old, these kids find themselves to be different from the sex category that was assigned to them at birth. How they make their voices heard—to their parents and friends, in schools, in public spaces, and through the courts—is the focus of this remarkable and groundbreaking book. Based on interviews with transgender kids, ranging in age from 4 to 20, and their parents, and over five years of research in the US and Canada, The Trans Generation offers a rare look into what it is like to grow up as a trans child. From daycare to birthday parties and from the playground to the school bathroom, Travers takes the reader inside the day-to-day realities of trans kids who regularly experience crisis as a result of the restrictive ways in which sex categories regulate their lives and put pressure on them to deny their internal sense of who they are in gendered terms. As a transgender activist and as an advocate for trans kids, Travers is able to document from first-hand experience the difficulties of growing up trans and the challenges that parents can face. The book shows the incredible time, energy, and love that these parents give to their children, even in the face of, at times, unsupportive communities, schools, courts, health systems, and government laws. Keeping in mind that all trans kids are among the most vulnerable to bullying, violent attacks, self-harm, and suicide, and that those who struggle with poverty, racism, lack of parental support, learning differences, etc, are extremely at risk, Travers offers ways to support all trans kids through policy recommendations and activist interventions. Ultimately, the book is meant to open up options for kids’ own gender self-determination, to question the need for the sex binary, and to highlight ways that cultural and material resources can be redistributed more equitably. The Trans Generation offers an essential and important new understanding of childhood.

The Osteology of Infants and Children

The Osteology of Infants and Children PDF Author: Brenda J. Baker
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603446184
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Most archaeologists and bioarchaeologists receive little or no training in the recognition of skeletal remains of fetuses, infants, and children. Yet many research sites may contain such materials. Without a framework for identifying the bones or the excavation techniques suited to their recovery, archaeologists may often overlook subadult skeletal remains or even confuse them with animal bones. The Osteology of Infants and Children fills the need for a field and lab manual on this important topic and provides a supplemental textbook for human osteology courses. Focusing on juvenile skeletons, their recovery and identification, and siding in both field and lab settings, the volume provides basic descriptions and careful illustrations of each skeletal element at varying stages of development, along with sections on differentiation from other bones and siding tips. The book offers detailed treatment of the skull and teeth, including the cranial vault and facial bones, and examines the infracranial skeleton: vertebrae, pelvis, chest, shoulders, arms, hands, legs, and feet. A quick reference guide explains age estimation and identification templates. The illustrations are enhanced by photographs from two recent archaeology projects in Egypt, at Abydos and Dakhleh Oasis. The extensive collection of fetal and child remains from these sites provides new reference material unavailable in previous publications, making this manual an unparalleled resource in the field of physical anthropology.

Children of God in the World

Children of God in the World PDF Author: Paul O'Callaghan
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813229006
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description
Children of God in the World is a textbook of theological anthropology structured in four parts. The first attempts to clarify the relationship between theology, philosophy and science in their respective approaches to anthropology, and establishes the fundamental principle of the text, stated in Vatican II's Gaudium et spes, n. 22, "Christ manifests man to man." The second part provides a historical overview of the doctrine of grace: in Scripture (especially the teaching of the book of Genesis on humans 'made in the image of God', as well as Paul and John), among the Fathers (in particular the oriental doctrine of 'divinization' and Augustine), during the Middle Ages (especially Thomas Aquinas) and the Reformation period (centered particularly on Luther and the Council of Trent), right up to modern times. The third part of the text, the central one, provides a systematic understanding of Christian grace in terms of the God's life present in human believers by which they become children of God, disciples, friends and brothers of Christ, temples of the Holy Spirit. This section also provides a reflection on the theological virtues (faith, hope and charity), on the relationship between grace and human freedom, on the role of the Church and Christian apostolate in the communication of grace, and on the need humans have for divine grace. After considering the relationship between the natural and the supernatural order, the fourth and last part deals with different philosophical aspects of the human condition, in the light of Christian faith: the union between body and soul, humans as free, historical, social, sexual and working beings. The last chapter concludes with a consideration of the human person, Christianity's greatest and most enduring contribution to human thought.

From Anthropology to Social Theory

From Anthropology to Social Theory PDF Author: Arpad Szakolczai
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108540171
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Presenting a ground-breaking revitalization of contemporary social theory, this book revisits the rise of the modern world to reopen the dialogue between anthropology and sociology. Using concepts developed by a series of 'maverick' anthropologists who were systematically marginalised as their ideas fell outside the standard academic canon, such as Arnold van Gennep, Marcel Mauss, Paul Radin, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Gregory Bateson, the authors argue that such concepts are necessary for understanding better the rise and dynamics of the modern world, including the development of the social sciences, in particular sociology and anthropology. Concepts discussed include liminality, imitation, schismogenesis and trickster, which provide an anthropological 'toolkit' for readers to develop innovative understandings of the underlying power mechanisms of globalized modernity. Aimed at graduate students and researchers, the book is clearly structured. Part I introduces the 'maverick' anthropologists, while Part II applies the maverick tool-kit to revisit the history of sociological thought and the question of modernity.

The Anthropology of Childhood

The Anthropology of Childhood PDF Author: David F. Lancy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107072662
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 549

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Book Description
Enriched with anecdotes from ethnography and the daily media, this revised edition examines family structure, reproduction, profiles of children's caretakers, their treatment at different ages, their play, work, schooling, and transition to adulthood. The result is a nuanced and credible picture of childhood in different cultures, past and present.

Motel of the Mysteries

Motel of the Mysteries PDF Author: David Macaulay
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547770723
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 97

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Book Description
It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization.