Elizabeth Chin

Children out of bounds in globalising times

In this article I want to focus on childhood itself as a form of globalisation, and one that has proven particularly troublesome for nation-states, which face a growing need to define, implement and protect childhood. Anthropology established early on that childhoods across cultures vary dramatically in content and experience; recent theoretical and ethnographic work has focused squarely on children as serious subjects of research while problematising the ways in which notions of child and childhood have been taken for granted. Childhood is, after all, neither natural nor universal. Like capitalism, it is historically and culturally specific. Like capitalism it is also globally mobile, generating new variations of itself as it moves. With childhood, the foundations of these variations include assumptions about household and family structures (not extended but nuclear), domestic arrangements (children belong in private spaces), the organization of work (children shouldn’t do it) and the institutionalization of schooling (children belong at school during the day). This form of childhood, which I refer to as the dominant form of childhood, is neither universally practised nor universally valued. Even when valued, this form of childhood is particularly costly and nearly unattainable in poor societies with shaky infrastructures. For Haitian peasants, sending children to school is a costly endeavor many families cannot manage. School fees, supplies and uniforms are costly enough; in combination with the loss of child work that schooling also requires, the result is a heavy economic burden many cannot sustain. At its base, globalisation is an economic process, but one with far-reaching social and cultural influence. Since the 1970s, rapid and dramatic changes in the levels of integration of the global economy have transformed not only the economic landscape, but social, political, media and other ‘scapes,’ as Appadurai dubbed them, as well. Globalisation has made borders at once more porous and more problematic: information, people and goods traverse borders of nationstates so fast and so frequently, that some borders at least seem nearly to have melted from the heat. Simultaneously, corporations, themselves comprising economies larger than all but the very largest nation-states, exert important pressures on social and political processes that may threaten to make some borders obsolete. The imperatives of childhood, not surprisingly, mesh neatly with those of globalisation. Children who go to school are children who do not work, or who do not work much. Adults who can secure the cash to provide for their school needs, food, and support must support them. Schooling, for its part, provides children with literacy and technological skills that will aid them in taking on various forms of labour important to global production. Children who

The Consumer Diaries, or, Autoethnography in the Inverted World

Using the form of an ethnographic diary, this article explores the complexity of contemporary consumer life as it is enmeshed with everyday experience. Built around three ethnographic diary entries that track the authors miscarriage, the articles aim is to insist on the humanity of consumption even as it poses profound problems. Scholars and scholarship are not exempt from suffering the very problems we seek to analyze. To further this point, this article also explores aspects of the consumer lives of Karl Marx and his wife Jenny, showing how even for them, negotiating the demands of commodity capitalism was complex, contradictory, and painful.