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The ethnography of children

More than half the population of Iran is under the age of seventeen, but despite these more than 30 million children and adolescents, social scientists know little about their experiences, culture, or history. This ignorance is a reflection of what social scientists deem important. The dismissive attitude toward research with children is similar to earlier attitudes toward research with women: at best women were quantified and described. Most social scientists were male, seeing women from a male point of view. Out of the innocent arrogance that a male-dominated science breeds in its practitioners, women's own culture was largely ignored; "culture" was male culture. This changed only when women social scientists started to look at women through their own eyes. By substituting "children" and "adults" for "women" and "men" in the preceding sentences, today's circumstances of research with children are quite adequately described. Children are so thoroughly dominated by adults that they continue to be dealt with as objects in the social sciences. The few pioneers in child-ethnography mostly look at how children are organized by adults (in schools, health care, law); at how they are fed, cared for, and socialized; at how they play and acquire language. Hardly anybody is looking at children as makers of culture, as creators of beliefs, as sharing experiences, as evaluators of their surroundings, as making sense of what they experience. We tend to leave such child-centered work to psychologists, but psychologists don't "do" culture; they reduce children's productions to signs of individuals' psychodynamic processes. Psychological methodologies, however, are accessible to anthropologists the bulk of ethnological accounts of children have come out of the school of psychological anthropology. Unable to count on children to speak for themselves as adults do, social scientists have to find ways to access and to represent children. So far, every anthropologist working with children whom I asked about methodology gave me a different answer. It seems that we all have to invent our own modes of dealing with a similar task for lack of tried-and-true methodologies. Our old standby ethnographic methods won't do. What does "participant observation" mean when one studies a playgroup? How can an adult ever participate in children's activities without assuming the role of a quiet observer, a controlling adult, a nuisance?