Summary Of Why Don T Anthropologists Like Children

Lawrence Hirschfeld’s article entitled Why Don’t Anthropologists Like Children? focuses on anthropologists and their lack of concern in regards to child-focused scholarship (612). Throughout the paper, there are various references respecting the arguments as to why children face constant neglect as subjects of study. Firstly, Hirschfeld outlines a perspective that children fail to contribute significantly to cultural reproduction, asserting a notion of power to adults who are given utter superiority in anthropological inquiry (Hirschfeld 612). Ultimately, there is a marginalization of children’s culture, as anthropologists undermine its abilities, claiming that study of such practices is ordinary and mediocre (Hirschfeld 612). There is an ethnographic study conducted with children in the 2nd and 4th grade, which works to investigate the practices and beliefs of North American children on the idea of
“Anthropologists view of children as culturally incompetent creatures, who are, at their most interesting, simply “appendages to adult society” (Hirschfeld 613). Seeing children as such, robes them of their agency as competent beings, able to function as active member of society. Upon reading this article, a reoccurring connection between its views and that of Tisdale and Punch’s comes to mind. Tisdale and Punch’s article Not so ‘new’? Looking critically at childhood studies, reinforces the social construction that all children are human becoming’s, rather than human beings (Tisdale and Punch 253). Labelling children as “appendages to adult society” conceptualizes them as inferior to their adult counterparts. This theory supports a biological interpretation of childhood, one that anthropologists and individuals in society must object in order to research children more