Palgrave Studies on the Anthropology of Childhood and Youth – serie

Anthropological Perspectives on Children as Helpers, Workers, Artisans, and Laborers aims to rectify that omission by surveying and synthesizing a robust corpus of material, with particular emphasis on two prominent themes: the processes involved in learning to work and the interaction between ontogeny and children’s roles as workers.

While studies of San children have attained the peculiar status of having delineated the prototype for hunter-gatherer childhood, relatively few serious ethnographic studies of San children have been conducted since an initial flurry of research in the 1960s and 1970s.

While studies of San children have attained the peculiar status of having delineated the prototype for hunter-gatherer childhood, relatively few serious ethnographic studies of San children have been conducted since an initial flurry of research in the 1960s and 1970s.

This book aims to provide comprehensive ethnographic documentation of pastoralist childhood and child learning, based on the author’s long-term fieldwork in pastoralist Maasai society in southern Kenya.

This book aims to provide comprehensive ethnographic documentation of pastoralist childhood and child learning, based on the author’s long-term fieldwork in pastoralist Maasai society in southern Kenya. It conveys a timely account of the developmental niche in contemporary Maasai society, in children’s lives, social roles, work, play, and learning in family routines. Pastoralism is an important livelihood system that has allowed humans to live in arid and semi-arid lands for centuries. Children in pastoralist societies are expected to, and indeed do, actively and independently participate in and contribute to local subsistence from an early age. Compared to studies of other forms of livelihood, anthropological investigations into pastoralist children remain limited, particularly in light of critical social changes pastoralists have undergone in the last three decades. Less is known about their local parenting ethnotheories, childhood play, and children’s practices of self-reliance in making positive changes in their families and local communities. Having a better understanding of pastoral childhood in concurrent natural and social complexities is vital for further investigation of human development in general and the pastoralist culture in particular.