Child Space: An Anthropological Exploration of Young People's Use of Space
Malone, Karen (ed.) (2007).
New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company; 271 pages. $Rs.750. ISBN 818069433X.
Child Space is an edited volume of ten essays that explore the meaning and use of space through the lives of children and youth. The collection of papers takes the reader to war torn Sri Lanka (Margaret Trawick); the streets of Rio de Janeiro (Lucia Rabello De Castro); neighborhoods in English towns (Virginia Morrow) and Portland (Matthew Atencio); a squatter camp in Johannesburg (Jill Kruger); the holy Indian town of Benaras (Nita Kumar); residential school environments for tribal children in the Indian state of Orissa (Deepak Kumar Behera); villages in the Indian state of Rajasthan (Ann Grodzins Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar); islands of Papua New Guinea and Cook Islands (Karen Malone) and the ultimate postmodern destination of chatrooms in cyberspace (Chris Pawson, Eike Adams and Ralph Tanner). This is an impressive range and the authors and editor must be congratulated for sharing these stories of children’s lives from such diverse corners of the world, real and virtual. I know I will use this volume, more specifically certain papers of this collection, in future references.
Having said that, the book has not been able to overcome the curse of most edited volumes: it too suffers from uneven quality of its chapters. Malone rightly points out in the introduction to this volume that the richness, diversity and contrasts of these stories will not lead to “any grandiose generalizations” (10). However, the volume could have attempted to compile a more integrated set of anthropological contributions that share a common conceptualization of space and a common analytic thread.
The book’s emergent discourses of place frame space as an opportunity and place as the understood reality (Harrison and Dourish 1996), and accept a more or less baseline definition of place being a setting within which people live or act (Childress 1994). A strong position paper that elaborated on the notion of space and its relationship with the construct of place, perhaps from the perspective of children’s environments literature, would have really helped set the tone for this volume and provided a strong theoretical grounding for the papers. Its lack is felt throughout. The conflict of space versus place plays out in the volume. For example, the editor’s introduction elaborates on the concept of place, derived primarily from environment-behavior literature, as shared spaces, lived spaces. However, the chapter “Contested Space” (Kruger), following De Certeau, sees space as “practiced place” or place being transformed into space through human presence and activities.
Most chapters adopt one of two broad methodological approaches. Some chapter authors (e.g., Trawick, Atencio, Pawson et al., Gold and Gujar) show us the world of children through a narrative mode. Others (e.g., Castro, Kumar and Behera) tell us about children, privileging a conceptual mode that is more theoretically driven. Trawick, for example, brings Menan in Sri Lanka alive for her readers by taking us along on her bike trip with Menan through the Sri Lankan countryside. We saw and heard what she saw and heard. Places, people, events that were meaningful to Menan’s life were effortlessly introduced to us through a lucid, narrative format. We were invited to interpret for ourselves the life, hopes and struggles of a child growing up in the shadow of war. In contrast, Kumar tells us in detail about Zeenat, the weaver’s daughter in Benaras. Kumar’s strong scholarship connects socialization processes to disciplining the body and soul. She discusses the location of the child in the nation, the neighborhood as a site for common experiences, and the gendered nature of child space. However, in this telling, we never see Zeenat or the other children for ourselves. We are not placed in their existential space.
There is also a third position taken by some papers. Kruger and Malone were both contributors to the Growing Up in Cities (GUIC) study from South Africa and Australia respectively in the 1990s. Both these authors, in keeping with GUIC strategies, adopt a rich environmental approach to studying children in their local environments using multiple participatory methods. These are the only two papers that construct a more visually rich child space by presenting us with mental maps and drawings by children in addition to interview and observational data. Morrow too adopts a similar approach (even though the maps made by her respondents were not part of the paper) in studying middle-school children’s perceptions about neighborhood and town in English towns. Many other papers included photographs of settings meaningful to children as well as paintings by children. However, the print quality of the graphic materials in this volume is very poor.
All the three broad approaches outlined above are valid and accepted modes for anthropological explorations, particularly within interdisciplinary studies of children’s environments. Acknowledging their differences and thematically organizing these diverse papers would have made the volume more coherent and rich.
In some papers the researchers discuss the research process in great detail, including their “consequential presence” (Clark 1975) in the setting by engaging in a dialogue of discovery of Self and the Other. Authors Ann Grodzins Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar, for example, acknowledge their own cultural differences and question each other’s practices on and off the field while working with animal-herding children in rural Rajasthan. This dynamic reflective process not only allows researchers to understand another person and culture but also simultaneously helps in understanding themselves (Sarris 1993). In contrast, in some other papers, not only is the researcher’s position in the field not clear, even the year and circumstances of fieldwork are not mentioned.
This volume deserves praise for its attempt to address multiple childhoods. Most notably it fills a vital gap by including four childhood ethnographies from South Asia that are not focused only on child labor or poverty. In getting away from these common normative categories, the authors have charted new territories, highlighting the everyday lives, struggles and negotiations of non-western childhoods in contexts as diverse as the home, neighborhood, village, city and schools—including residential schools. In going beyond the universal referent of normative childhood (which, however, was outlined in the introduction as a moral yardstick), the authors in this volume have added sociological richness to the discourse of multiple childhoods in different societies.
Moreover, the inclusion of Pawson, Adams and Tanner’s paper on cyberspace as a contemporary social space and a possible developmental space for children pushes the boundaries of the place-space debate to the virtual world, which provides new opportunities for social interactions beyond the restrictions of traditional living in the physical world, as well as new challenges of physical and psychological risks posed by anonymity and distance in virtual space. However, as suggested by the authors, this new space for children is not only gaining currency in the Western world. In the non-Western world, chatrooms and cyberclubs provide a much-needed level playing ground where children grappling with issues of class, caste, and poverty in the real world can reach out to new possibilities and thereby forge new identities. This clearly is an important new direction in anthropological inquiry for enhancing our understanding of meaning and use of new spaces for children as legitimate places in children’s everyday environments.
While Child Space is an interdisciplinary volume, it broadly will find audiences in social sciences and more specifically in childhood studies, children’s environments and geographies, environmental psychology, environment-behavior and even planning and design research. Even though it struggled with finding a unifying theme for place and space, will interest a broad interdisciplinary audience and should encourage others to discursively engage in charting new territories of multiple childhoods and children’s experiences and use of their environments in different contexts.
Childress, H. (1994). “The Narrative Form of Place and Place Relationships.” Paper presented at the Banking on Design: Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Environmental Design Research Association, Oklahoma City.
Clark, M. (1975). “Survival in the Field: Implications of Personal Experience in Field Work.” Theory and Society 2: 95-123.
Sarris, G. (1993). Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Reviewer Information
Sudeshna Chatterjee has a Ph.D. in Community and Environmental Design from North Carolina State University. Sudeshna is a principal at the architecture, urban design and design research practice of Kaimal Chatterjee & Associates, New Delhi. She is a visiting faculty in the graduate departments of Urban Design and Urban Planning in the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. Sudeshna also serves as the News Archive Editor for the Children, Youth and Environments journal and is a research affiliate of the Children, Youth and Environments Center for Research and Design at the University of Colorado.