Reference no: EM13513221
CHILDREN'S LINGUISTIC AND SOCIAL WORLDS Calling for the study of language as "a mode of social action," Malinowski directed explicit attention to the importance of children's groups: In many communities we find that the child passes through a period of almost complete detachment from home, running around, playing about, and engaging in early activities with his playmates and contemporaries. In such activities strict teaching in tribal law is enforced more directly and poignantly than in the parental home. ["The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Lan guages" (1923), The Meaning of Meaning, C. K. Ogden and 1. A. Richards, eds., 1973, p. 283] Despite Malinowski's early plea for documenta tion of children's life-worlds, few anthropologists have taken as their mission the study of the linguis tic, cultural, and social life of children: children as subjects, actors, and creators of culture. Far more anthropological emphasis has been placed on children's interaction with adults than with other children, partly because socialization is treated as a fundamentally psychological, rather than social, pro cess. Children are believed to gradually internalize adult values and to be in need of "integration into the social world." The child is defined by what she is subsequently going to be rather than what she pres ently is. Because traditional social science views the child's world as a defective version of the more im portant adult world into which she eventually will be socialized, studies of children's life-worlds have been neglected. Remarkably, at a time when the call for moving women and other minorities to the cen ter of social thought is commonplace among femi nists, children have been left at the margins and treated as invisible. British anthropologists neglected the study of children's worlds (apartfrom the study of age-sets and initiation ceremonies) because they associated the study of children with psychological paradigms, which they considered reductionist. In contrast, during the 1970s in the US, edited volumes such as Socialization as Cultural Communication (1976) and From Child to Adult (1970), the Case Studies in Education and Culture series (with 16 ethnographies!) and the work oftheWhitings featured children and adolescence as important domains of anthropological inquiry. I approach the Anthropology Newsletter theme on limits to knowledge in anthropology by focusing on what is known and unknown about children's lin guistic and social worlds. The Known: Diversity Across Cultures One subfield that has devoted insightful analytic attention to children is linguistic anthropology. Lan guage is a defining feature of the human species. Radically different theories have been proposed for how language is acquired. Researchers working within linguistic and psychological frameworks focus most of their research on children's innate knowledge of language structures, an approach that divorces the child from cultural settings and frame works for interaction. In contrast, during the past 20 years linguistic anthropologists have developed a major perspective and focus for the study of language acquisition. E. Ochs and B. B. Schieffelin ("Language Socialization: Three Developmental Stories," Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, R. A. Shweder and R. A. LeVine, eds., 1984) deal with diverse ways children acquire language within the endogenous scenes that compose the life-world of a society and simultaneously become competent social actors using language appropriately. Language and the social self mutually create one another. Recog nizing that the human brain is essential to language, this perspective brings together aspects of the child's social, cultural, and linguistic worlds, realms treated as separate domains of inquiry outside anthropol ogy. Children's use and understanding of grammar is tied to basic practices of interaction within cultur ally specific settings as well as culturally specific understandings about how to think, feel, know, and act in concert with others. Cross-cultural studies show that children's grammatical or communicative competence does not necessarily depend on the way Euro-American middle-class mothers organize their communication with infants and children through simplified con versation (using short sentences, slowing their pace, and exaggerating intonation contours) in intense dyadic exchanges. Among such societies as Western Samoans, the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, K'iche Mayan, rural and urban Javanese, and African American working-class families, children develop linguistic competence without having talk directed explicitly to them. Many societies do not consider infants and very young children intentional beings and do not initially treat them as viable conversa tional partners. Colwyn Trevarthan's studies dem onstrate how infants in middle-class British society can socialize their parents, through their vocaliza tions, looks, and gestures. Such patterns, however, do not constitute a cultural universal. Among the Walpiri and Inuit, for example, children's vocaliza tions are not treated as communicative. Although interpretation of children's babbling through expan sions and clarificahons by caretakers occurs routinely in Japanese and Euro-American middle class society, this is not the case in such societies as the Kaluli or the Western Samoa, where it is believed that one party cannot know another's intentions. Unlike linguists and psychologists, linguistic anthro pologists treat the acquisition of language as embed ded within a social matrix. Recognizing that a child's language acquisition is shaped by a particularly human biological endowment and universal features of talk-in-interaction, linguistic anthropologists study the culturally situated scenes of social practice that produce competent language users and social actors. The Unknown: Children's Language Socialization Although psychologists have theorized that child to child interaction provides the most appropriate set ting to investigate the fullest elaboration of social processes among children, children's interaction with other children has not been a focus in child language studies. Cross-culturally, 4-to-9-year-old children par ticipate widely in nurturant, caretaking interactions. Despite the fact that sibling caretaking characterizes many societies worldwide, we know very little about the interaction because the focus has been on adult caretaker/ child roles. Psychologists and psycholinguists believe that the preschool period is the most important transi tional period for various aspects of cognitive devel opment. Thus children over the age of 4 usually are ignored. Anthropological research on children above this age has focused on the school, documenting lan guage practices in the classroom, studying class and ethnic conflicts, and addressing how schools make it possible for children to fail. Moving beyond the classroom, we have virtually no ethnographic stud ies of peer interaction in the neighborhood or on the playground. When children's peer groups or lan guage practices have been studied, the focus has usually been on urban, Western males, often in groups treated as deviant and marginal, such as gangs. With respect to the study of African Ameri can Vernacular English, a focus on unemployed males' street talk as the authentic language variety for African Americans has reified a dangerously in accurate stereotype: "young men, with nothing to do, doing nothing, talking trash, going nowhere," effectively marginalizing other African American groups, and especially females (M. Morgan, "No Woman No Cry: The Linguistic Representation of African American Women," Cultural Performances: Proceedings ofthe Third Berkeley Women and Language Conference, M. Bucholtz et al., eds., 1995, p. 527). Thanks to careful work of the Opies and numer ous folklorists, we have collections of the verbal art of children-their jump rope and "counting out" rhymes, hand-clap songs, jokes, riddles, and chants and their games. These folklore traditions are passed by children to other children, usually outside adult awareness. Unfortunately, we know very little about how children interact in the midst of actual play ac tivities, subverting the rules for their own strategic interests. This is a very serious gap. Perpetuating Piaget's argument that the "legal sense" is less developed in girls' games than those of boys, social scientists characterize girls' games as cooperative, passive, and lacking in complex social structure. In my own studies of girls playing such games as hop scotch and jump rope, however, I find moves are fiercely challenged as violations. Games provide a locus for intense political debate and orientation to the complexity of rule use. Such embodied practices constitute a locus for the acquisition of stances and argumentative moves that make political actors. At Work and Play Research during the 1970s on women's language pro liferated stereotypes, positing deficit views of female interaction patterns and supporting the notion that the"essential nature" of females is apolitical. Research I have done over the past 20 years with preadolescentAfrican American and Latina girls con tradicts such a position. First, rather than having a single essential nature, females speak with many dif ferent voices. Here anthropology has a distinct con tribution to make by investigating ethnographically the diverse settings in which girls and women live their lives. Models of female interaction based on an "innately pacifist" cooperative female personality fall apart when the full spectrum of girls' language prac tices is observed. Girls' language choices build dif ferent social organizations, adapted in detail to the social situations that constitute their life-world. Sec ond, females are capable of intricate and powerful forms of political activity. Indeed, among the Afri can American children with whom I have worked, the girls' he-said-she-said dispute processes were far more elaborate, complex, consequentiat and endur ing than anything I have found among the boys. Although we have begun to investigate children's interaction during play, we know far less about interaction during their work activities. We know that children's work is significant in many countries for family survival and national economy. A 1996 UNICEF report estimates that there are 250 million child workers, between 5 and 14, with the majority of 10-to-14-year-old children working 6 days a week for at least 9 hours a day. Cross-culturally, children between 5 and 7 are expected to assist with caretaking and domestic tasks. How children orga nize their interaction in the midst of work activities, such as running errands, trading for their mothers, or collecting and processing food, has not been investigated. Power of the Peers Sociolinguists have argued since the 1970s that children's peer groups provide far more powerful influences on their language structure than parents; although we know little about the development of children's language variation patterns, we do know that adolescents lead all other age groups in sound change and use of vernacular. Youths are innovators in many forms of experimentation with identity in today's multiethnic, multicultural cities. Adolescents, through their selection of semiotic resources, such as hair style, clothing, dance style, movement pattern, music, gestures, eyeliner and lipstick color, space use, demeanor, and language varieties, affirm, contest, and play with ethnic roles and class affilia tion during leisure time. Youths also have had an important political voice in society: during literacy campaigns in revolution ary Cuba and Nicaragua; in dramatic public demon strations demanding equal education and the right to organize in South Africa in the mid-1970s and 1980s; as part of the First National Street Children's Congress in Brasilia (1986), where children de manded an end to institutional and police violence and full citizenship; and in 12-year-old children's rights activist Iqbal Masih's bold public exposures of bonded labor in Pakistan, which eventually led to his death. We know little about the speech registers youths use during their political activity or across a range of situations. Although we might know about the phonologicat prosodic, and lexical features of the language variety youths select, we know little about these speakers' language ideologies of speech activi ties. We don't know much about how ethnicity, class, age, and gender become relevant in interaction or consequential for the deployment of alternative lan guage choices by bilinguat multilinguat or multidialectal speakers. We know little about the nature of multiethnic communication during mun dane interactions between new immigrants and established residents in important mediating insti tutional settings (such as schools) where they come together. We know almost nothing about how autis tic, physically challenged, blind, or deaf children acquire language and become members of discourse communities (although the Nicaraguan sign language project constitutes an important exception). Without a longitudinal study we cannot know how individuals of any social group change their language variety, ethnic, class, or gender identification of interactive strategies across developmental time. Making the Unknown Knowable To study children as social actors, we need detailed longitudinal ethnography study oftheir activities and language practices in a variety of consequential set tings. Linguistic anthropology has provided a rigor ous methodology for documenting such practices. Ethnographic recordings of extended interactions can be examined again and again with new research ques tions. These records constitute more than informant narratives told to (and elicited by) the anthropolo gist. Through them we can hear the voices of people we study in the midst of their everyday conduct articulating for each other what constitute important events of their lives. Usually viewed as a symbolic medium, language constitutes a core form of social organization. Chil dren acquire what it means to be human in their society through participating in diverse culturally situated social practices and linguistic routines. Through language, children of diverse ethnicities, social classes, ages, abilities, and genders orchestrate their social organization and socialize one another across a range of activities. Without longitudinal ethnographic studies of children from different ethnic backgrounds in diverse structural settings, we cannot know how children's lives are shaped by their encounters with family, peers, adults, and others ex pressing various language ideologies, in neighbor hoods, schools, and after school, or how children change developmentally over time. We need to move children from the margins to the center of anthropological inquiry. Today, more than 40 percent of the world's urban population are children 15 and younger, many of whom are espe cially vulnerable. More than 15 million children in refugee camps face the special dangers of high infant mortality, exposure to violence, separation from families, sexual violence, and militarization. In societies undergoing rapid social, economic, or political change-whether due to urbanization, colonialism, apartheid, or war-children create groups apart from adult supervision for emotional support and physical survival, as they experience the world differently from their parents and grandpar ents. It is time we take children seriously and use the distinctive practices of anthropology to give voice to their social worlds and concerns. 1) According to Goodwin, how has contemporary social science tended to view the world of children? 2) How do different cultures impart grammatical and communicative competence to children? 3) What influences do socialization practices and peer interactions have on a child's linguistic develop ment and abilities?