ABSTRACT
Anthropology has a long history of neglecting children, both ethnographically and theoretically. Only a few anthropologists have made the study of children central to their work (AbadiaBarrero 2011; Gottlieb 2004; Hirschfeld 2002), and in general, perhaps unwittingly, we have taken on an understanding-from our own settings and from the people with whom we have worked-of children as not yet ‘human,’ that is, as not yet enculturated or socialized (Geertz 1960; Herdt 1981). Such understandings of what children are, and what they can do, are informed by ideas about age, cognitive development and ideation. Accordingly, children are the subjects of patterns of socialization, formal and informal learning, and ritual occasions that ‘make’ them human (Gould and Glowacka 2004), but they are rarely represented as social actors who might contribute to our knowledge of social processes, structures and institutions or to our imagination of social life. In this chapter, we concentrate on children and adolescents, and their experiences of sickness, discomfort, disability, vulnerability and marginality, so to gain insight into how they experience disease and distress, and how these unfold in different family and cultural contexts. In the case studies, we highlight children’s points of view to the extent that we have access to it. Children have their own perspectives on health, disease and agency. Those who work with children argue cogently that adults need to listen to them and grant them power to care for themselves. Children participate in their illnesses, acute, curable, chronic and fatal, with insight and fear, humor and anger, and, ultimately, quite often, with grace.
