Pamela Reynolds

Refractions of Children's Rights in Development Practice: A view from anthropology – Introduction

with how children’s rights impact on their lifeworlds in developing countries. Taking an anthropological approach that focuses on the lives of vulnerable children in a variety of contexts across the globe, the authors tease out the complex ways in which rights-based policies mesh with the practice of doing development and in the process can become entangled, welded together or clash with children’s ideas of right and wrong. Beyond lofty intentions of protecting children worldwide against all sorts of abuse and granting them a wide range of material and immaterial rights, applying a children’s rights perspective in development work has sparked intense debate. Much of this debate is about the paradox that taking

‘Not known because not looked for’: Ethnographers listening to the young in southern Africa

The article is centred on a concern with limitations in our knowledge of youths life experiences. I pose questions about the nature and implications of accounts of childhood by tracing ideas in early ethnographies and comparing these with my own attempts to frame youth differently. Using ideas of heroism and narrative, I examine the life histories of two young activists in order to comment on methodological approaches to exploring the world of youths, to ask how far we have come in catching their voices and experiences, and to comment on how far we have still to go.

'A bit of this and a bit of that': an obituary for Elizabeth Colson

In describing her research among the Tonga of the Zambezi Valley, Elizabeth Colson said in an interview conducted on 11 April 2006 by Alan Macfarlane: ‘Well, if you ask me about my own work, I have done a bit of this and a bit of that.’1 The description must stand as the greatest understatement (if that is not a contradiction in itself) of an anthropologist’s ethnographic scope and achievement. It contrasts with BronislawMalinowski’s early confident reach for academic domination (1967) – but then she did not admire him or his theories. Elizabeth worked among the Tonga people of Zambia over a period of seventy years (1946 to 2016), initially with the Plateau Tonga and then among the Gwembe (or Valley) Tonga of the Zambezi Valley, almost entirely on the Zambian side of the river. Her magisterial ethnographic work encompassed almost every aspect of Gwembe Tonga society and traced the changes from settled agricultural life on the rich soils of the riverbanks to the despair of dislocation and the establishment of a new pattern of existence. The change was wrought by the drowning of their land and the loss for some 57,000 people of their homes, fields and resources when Kariba Dam was filled. In 1956, she set out to trace the effects of the construction of the damming of the Zambezi River on them and, in 1971, she concluded: