Children: Ethnographic Encounters

✍ Scribed by Catherine Allerton (editor)

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 202
• Series: Encounters: Experience and Anthropological Knowledge
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Conducting ethnographic fieldwork with children presents anthropologists with particular challenges and limitations, as well as rewards and insights. Children: Ethnographic Encounters presents ten vivid accounts of researchers’ experiences of working with children across a variety of cultural contexts. Part of the Ethnographic Encounters series, the book offers honest reflections on successes as well as failures and shows that in all cases – even those that ‘failed’ – anthropologists can learn something about children’s position in their social world. Going beyond the usual focus on North America and Europe, the text offers comparative insights into the nature of childhood in different societies. The chapters provide first-hand accounts of fieldwork with children in diverse geographical places such as Mexico, the Ecuadorian Amazon, Rwanda, central India, Thailand, Malaysia, and China. The book provides hope, encouragement and inspiration to anyone planning to undertake ethnographic fieldwork with children and provides important insights to students and researchers working in the growing field of anthropology of children and childhood, in childhood studies, and related fields.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Different Childhoods, Different Ethnographies: Encounters in Rwanda
2. ‘Difficult’ Children: Ethnographic Chaos and Creativity in Migrant Malaysia
3. Paths to the Unfamiliar: Journeying with Children in Ecuadorian Amazonia
4. The Exemplary Adult: Ethnographic Failure and Lessons from a Chinese School
5. Learning to be a Child in Greater London
6. Questions and Curiosities, Ignorance and Understanding: Ethnographic Encounters with Children in Central India
7. Protectors and Protected: Children, Parents and Infidelities in a Mexican Village
8. Awkward Encounters: Authenticity and Artificiality in Rapport with Young Informants in China
9. Growing Close Where Inequalities Grow Large? A Patron for Qur’anic Students in Nigeria
10. Understanding the Indefensible: Reflections on Fieldwork with Child Prostitutes in Thailand
11. Guide to Further Reading
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index