Introduction
In 1906, Dudley Kidd published his Savage Childhood , an ethnographic account of Kafir (black South African) children. The following two excerpts come from the preface of the book:
We cannot fully understand the structure of an animal until we study the development of the embryo; zoology and morphology are bound to start with embryology; we cannot understand the mind of the adult until we study the development of the mind of the child; psychology is bound to start with child-study: we cannot understand the social or religious life of civilised races until we study the development of the social and religious life of savage tribes; sociology and theology are bound to start with ethnography ; finally, we cannot understand the life of the savage until we study the childhood of the savage. (vii)
It is safe to say that in a hundred yearsâ time people will be wondering why we, with all our boasted love, for knowledge and with all our professed sympathy for our subject races, allowed our priceless opportunity to slip by unheeded. I have, therefore, been more anxious to record the facts than to indicate their bearing on current anthropological theory . (ixâx)
In the bookâs first chapter, Kidd proceeds to describe Kafir children as animal-like:
No one can look at a number of little naked Kafir children sprawling on the ground, playing games, setting bird-traps, tumbling over one another like so many little puppies, without laughing and saying beneath his breath, âWhat delightful little animals.â
Yet, these animal-like children, as he continues to tell us, appear to be cunning: âThe children do not âshow offâ before Europeans, and so it is as necessary to stalk them at play as it is to stalk wild animals in order to discover their habits.â When he asks the children if they know how to play the string game âCatâs Cradleâ, they deny ever hearing about it. But, after showing them the first move in the game and walking away, Kidd is surprised to find out from his hiding place that the children knew, after all, how to play the game all too well.
In the following two pages of the book, Kidd goes on to paint the picture of the Kafir adultâwhat these children will eventually come to be: âfull of animal spiritsâ; âunpleasantâ; âunreflectiveâ; âwithout the least forethoughtâ. The gulf between the Kafir world that he comes to see and understand and his ownâas a civilized Europeanâappears to be vast and Kidd is not shy about letting his readers know.
If this brief description from Savage Childhood sounds prejudiced, racist, and imperialist it is because it is. Of course, we see Kiddâs writing as biased and racist from our contemporary vantage point and the luxury of historical distance afforded to us by more than a century of social change. At the time of the bookâs publication, Kiddâs intended audience would not, very likely, see his words as anything but an ethnographic accountâand an objective one for that matterâwhich aimed to depict the life and worlds of âsavage childrenâ. Kiddâs account would make sense in the larger ideological context of colonization, imperialism and the prevailing racial ideologies. But, there is much more to untangle in these brief passages than simply recognizing their underlying racist character.
In the first excerpt, Kidd is putting forth a clear exposition of the overall theoretical framework which guides his work as an ethnographer: to understand adults, we need to study children; to understand adult savages we need to study savage children; and to understand the civilized we need to study the savages. Kiddâs theoretical assumptions are so common sense for his time that he sees his whole effort as simply one of recording facts. Yet, Savage Childhood is clearly guided, as his opening words indicate, by the prevailing social/cultural evolutionist understanding of anthropology about human developmental which posited that societies go through different stages of development; studying Kafir children, then, was a means to unravelling these processes, from savage child, to savage adult, to civilized man. Recapitulation theory (borrowed from biology and applied to the study of cultures), provided Kidd and his contemporary anthropologists with answers to their ontological questions which could then be used to inform and justify a racist, colonial worldview. In that sense, it was certainly not a concern with children themselves that guided Kiddâs ethnographic study but rather an interest in figuring out human social development at large. And, though he goes on to acknowledge that Kafir children were well-aware of his positionality and the influence his presence had on them, he proceeds to describe Kafir adults as âunpleasantâ and âunreflectiveâ, characteristics which juxtapose those which any civilized European of his time was expected to have. His decision to observe the children in hiding might also raise objections today about the ethics of doing research, a concern however which would not have raised any eyebrows among ethnographers at the time.
Granted, these brief excerpts are only glimpses into the representation about Kafir children that Kidd produces through his writing. A reading of the entire ethnography would reveal much more about his role in producing this particular representation ; it would also reveal much more about what he says (and what he does not) about these children and how the particular representation he offers us is highly selective and ideological.
Nevertheless, these short passages offer us a good starting point for reflecting on the role of research in producing knowledge about children and childhood. The ease with which we can identify Kiddâs racist representations of Kafir children is unremarkable. Much has changed since then including the way we study and write about children. It is easy to spot Kiddâs situatedness in the ethnography as a white man whose account of Kafir children is clearly framed by the theoretical , epistemological and ethical parameters of his time not to mention the historical, cultural and social context in which he carried out research and the racial dynamics which played out in the particular context at the time.
Kiddâs expert and authoritative ethnographic gaze at the beginning of the twentieth century when he published Savage Childhood is from todayâs vantage point easily deconstructed. We are able to see through the representations of these children, to identify exclusions and biases, and to situate them in the realm of ideology rather than âfactâ as Kidd himself hoped his account would be. The larger problematicâknowledge production âto which this brief analysis of Savage Childhood points to, is of course always current and consequential.
For contemporary scholarship in childhood studies , the challenge is to develop an ongoing reflexive outlook towards its own knowledge practices , an attitude which will allow it to produce knowledge which recognizes its own situatedness and limits but is, at the same time, committed to a critical and ethical understanding of children and childhood. To the extent that this is possible for the field as a whole, it can lead, I argue, to a more mindful, critical , and responsible childhood studies . This book hopes to contribute towards this direction.
Disclosing Childhoods
Disclosing Childhoods is a critical reflection on knowledge production in childhood studies . It has grown out of my own emerging understandings of childhood studies as a field with its own agendas, frustrations, and promises. What came out of the 1980s as a result of the discomfort with the earlier paradigms has been highly productive, stimulating a significant amount of research which has contributed a great deal to our understandings of children and childhood. More than three decades of scholarly production has helped us rethink children and childhood by bringing forth new ways of seeing. Yet, at the same time, the field as a whole has failed to engage fully with theoretical and methodological developments beyond its own territory and risks becoming marginalized and self-contained (s...