Vulnerable Bodies

The ideas that "age" can be defined in a number of ways:

• chronological
• biological development
• social development

Vulnerability of the body is based on our conception of "stages of life" and the qualities and conditions associated with these stages in culture

When I look back on my own childhood in the 1970s and 80s and compare it with children today, it reminds me of that famous sentence ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ (from L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between). Even in a relatively short period of time, I can see the enormous transformations that have taken place in children’s lives and in the ways they are thought about and treated.

• Today, children have few responsibilities, their lives are characterized by play not work, school not paid labor, family rather than public life and consumption instead of production.

• Yet this is all relatively recent. A hundred years ago, a twelve-year-old working in a factory would have been perfectly acceptable. Now, it would cause social services' intervention and the prosecution of both parents and factory owner.

American colonial families: Industrious girls treated with respect

The differences between the expectations placed on children today and those placed on them in the past are neatly summed up by two American writers, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English. Comparing childhoods in America today with those of the American Colonial period (1600-1775), they have written:

‘Today, a four year-old who can tie his or her shoes is impressive. In colonial times, four-year-old girls knitted stockings and mittens and could produce intricate embroidery: at age six they spun wool. A good, industrious little girl was called 'Mrs.' instead of 'Miss' in appreciation of her contribution to the family economy: she was not, strictly speaking, a child’.

Childhood: A social construction?

These changing ideas about children have led many social scientists to claim that childhood is a ‘social construction’. Social anthropologists have shown this in their studies of peoples with very different understandings of the world to Western ones.

• Canadian Arctic: Acquiring understanding

• Jean Briggs has worked with the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic and has described how, within these communities, growing up is largely seen as a process of acquiring thought, reason and understanding (known in Inuit as ihuma).
• Young children don’t possess these qualities and are easily angered, cry frequently and are incapable of understanding the external difficulties facing the community, such as shortages of food.
• Because they can’t be reasoned with, and don’t understand, parents treat them with a great deal of tolerance and leniency. It’s only when they are older and begin to acquire thought that parents attempt to teach them or discipline them.

• Tonga: Closer to insanity than adulthood

 
Royal New Zealand Navy Petty Officer Richard Boyd dances with school children during a Pacific Partnership 2009 community service project at Faleloa Primary School, Tonga. But some chilldren have a tougher time of it on the island.

• In contrast, children on the Pacific island of Tonga, studied by Helen Morton, are regularly beaten by their parents and older siblings.
• They are seen as being closer to 'mad' people than adults because they lack the highly prized quality of social competence (or poto as the Tongans call it).
• They are regularly told off for being clumsy and a child who falls over may be laughed at, shouted at, or beaten. Children are thought of as mischievous; they cry or want to feed simply because they are naughty, and beatings are at their most severe between the ages of three and five when children are seen as particularly wilful.
• Parents believe that social competence can only be achieved through discipline and physical punishment, and treat their children in ways that have seemed very harsh to outsiders.

• The Beng: Arrivals from a spirit world

• In other cases, ideas about children are radically different. For example, the Beng, a small ethnic group in West Africa, assume that very young children know and understand everything that is said to them, in whatever language they are addressed.
• The Beng, who’ve been extensively studied by another anthropologist, Alma Gottleib, believe in a spirit world where children live before they are born and where they know all human languages and understand all cultures.
• Life in the spirit world is very pleasant and the children have many friends there and are often very reluctant to leave it for an earthly family (a fictional account of a spirit child’s journey between the spirit and the earthly world is given in Ben Okri’s novel, The Famished Road).
• When they are born, they remain in contact with this other world for several years, and may decide to return there if they are not properly looked after. So parents treat young children with great care so that they’re not tempted to return, and also with some reverence, because they’re in contact with the spirit world in a way that adults aren’t.

• The West: Dependency

• There’s a tendency to view children in the West, and in the Western world in general, as incompetent and dependent. But this isn’t the case throughout the world. In many societies children work and contribute to the family in whatever way that can from a very early age.
• A good example of this is child care. In the West, it is illegal for a child under the age of fourteen to look after another child unsupervised, because they’re deemed incompetent and irresponsible.

• The Fulani: Working by the age of four

• In other cultures, this is not the case. Michelle Johnson has written about the Fulani of West Africa describing how by the age of four, girls are expected to be able to care for their younger siblings, fetch water and firewood and by the age of six will be pounding grain, producing milk and butter and selling these alongside their mothers in the market.

• The Yanamamö: Girls marry earlier than boys

 
Yanomami children

• Across the world, among the Yanamamö of the Amazonian rainforest, another anthropologist, Napoleon Chagnon, has shown how different these children’s childhoods are from Western ones, and also how differently boys and girls grow up in comparison with other parts of the world.
• He has written how a Yanamamö girl is expected to help her mother from a young age and by the age of ten will be running a house. By the age of twelve or thirteen she is probably married and will have started to have babies.
• Boys on the other hand, have far fewer responsibilities. They don’t marry until later than girls and are allowed to play well into their teens. Western notions of childhood simply do not ‘fit’ in these cases, where children’s competence and responsibilities are understood very differently.

• Studying very different communities

• Social anthropologists ask questions about how childhood, and the role of children, is seen within the communities they study, rather than how it fits into Western ideas about childhood.
• By doing this they seek to avoid imposing outside ideas onto people with very different understandings of the world or of making value judgments on other people’s ways of raising their children.
• While Westerners might take exception to eight-year-old girls working or to twelve-year-old girls marrying, within their own communities such activities are seen as a normal and positive part of childhood. Indeed, seen through the eyes of non-Westerners, many ‘normal’ Western childcare practices are seen as extremely bizarre and possibly harmful to children.
• Placing children in rooms of their own, refusing to feed them on demand, or letting them cry rather than immediately tending to them, are viewed very negatively in many societies and lead some to think that Westerners don’t know how to look after children properly.

• A changing phenomenon

• Childhood is a changing social phenomenon, of continual fascination and concern. Looking at it from a cross-cultural perspective shows the wide variety of childhoods that exist across the world and warns against interfering in or criticizing people whose lives, and understandings of the world, are very different to our own.
• All societies recognize that children are different to adults and have particular qualities and needs; what anthropologists and other social scientists are interested in are the ideas that each society has about the nature of childhood and the impact these views have on children’s lives.

The Middle Ages & Europe

• During the five hundred years between the Norman Conquest of 1066 and the dawn of the Reformation, there were many different emphases in thinking about childhood. But there was one dominant and enduring institution, the Catholic Church, which set the tone for all such thinking. In the ceremony of baptism a child was received into the Church and freed from the burden of original sin. Babies, said one preacher, "are symple, withowt gyle, innocent, wythout harme, and all pure wythowt corruption."

• The Church had inherited from Greek and Roman authorities ideas of the stages of life. Infancy lasted up to the age of seven, pueritia or childhood up to fourteen, to be succeeded by adolescence.

• These ages were in some senses building blocks to enable you to reach the peak of life which came with young adulthood: childhood was not thought to be as important as we now consider it in the formation of personality and character. That said, there was nevertheless room for debate as to how best to bring up a child.

Creative commons image
St Anslem depicted in stained glass at Our Lady and the English Martyrs, Cambridge.

• "Spare the rod and spoil the child" echoes through most centuries of Western history.

• But whatever else this debate about child-rearing shows, it puts paid to the idea, frequently cited, that in the Middle Ages, and beyond them, children were seen simply as ‘little adults’. They were not. Childhood was clearly recognized as a distinct time of life.

The Protestant Reformation

• The Reformation of the sixteenth century replaced the Catholic Church and its rituals with a sterner faith. Children and their parents no longer had the comfort of knowing that, once baptized, they would be spared the pains of hell should they die – an all too frequent occurrence. Godly parents, urged on by their preachers, tried to bring their children to an awareness of their sins and of the need for salvation.
• Parents, if not children, lived in a state of anxiety unparalleled until our own time.

James Janeway

• Janeway was a Protestant minister in London. He’d experienced the terrible plague of 1665, children most vulnerable to its ravages. "Did you never hear of a little Child that died?" he asked. "And if other Children die, why may not you be sick and die? And what will you do then, Child, if you should have no grace in your heart, and be found like other naughty Children?"
• On the positive side, parents were told not to resort too easily to corporal punishment, and to aim at a happy medium, in the words of one advice book, ‘so as I neither make my child to despise me through too-much lenity, nor to hate me through too-much severity’.

The Enlightenment

• In 1693 the great philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) published Some Thoughts Concerning Education, probably the most influential British book on childhood. Its origins hardly suggested this. Locke had been tutor to a number of aristocratic children, and on the basis of this experience wrote some letters to a relative on child rearing. These circulated, and eventually Locke was persuaded to publish them.
• Locke, unlike the Puritans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, does not seem at all concerned about the child’s salvation. His interest, rather, is to suggest ways of instilling good habits into a child that will last a lifetime. 
• (civilizing rather than saving)  
•  The way to do this was not through corporal punishment, not through frightening them, as servants were inclined to with stories of ghosts and hobgoblins, but to take reason as your guide.
• Body of a child is to be protected from HARM

• REASON---(civilizing ingredient) The first thing babies should learn is that they shouldn’t have something because they like it, but because it is thought good for them. Locke is full of sensible advice on clothing and food for children, and on not buying them too many toys.

John Locke

• He also thinks that learning should be made fun, and that children should "be tenderly used … and have Play-things". 
• And he recognizes that each child will have its own ‘natural Genius and Constitution’. 
• Parents fell on Locke’s book in much the same way as they would fall on Dr Spock in the mid-twentieth century: he relieved them of many anxieties, and set them a clear agenda, for, he claimed, nine-tenths of how a child turns out as an adult, "Good or Evil, useful or not", will be the result of its education.(DISCIPLINING)

The Romantics

• For Rousseau (1762 publication), the problem with Locke lay in his obsession with the adult to be, rather than with the child. Rousseau was perhaps the first thinker to be truly child-centered. "Don’t reason with children... Let them learn from things, from nature, not from teachers".
• Child should learn from nature to suggesting that a child might have access to the natural world in a way denied to world-weary adults.(their bodies are more NATURAL)

Jean Jacques Rousseau

• Childhood, for the first time, became the most privileged, enviable, phase of life. 

• Children, were not only innocent, but could also have much to teach adults about truth and beauty. As Charles Dickens was to reiterate, if you let the child in you die, you were in effect dead, like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.

The Victorians

•  For the Austrian-born philosopher RUDOLF STEINER (1861–1925), childhood was a state of physical and spiritual being roughly between the ages of seven and fourteen years, indicated initially by certain physiological changes such as the loss of the milk teeth.
• Some Victorian children were allowed to live out the dream of a romantic childhood. But for all too many, conditions of life in industrializing and urbanizing West made it seem to observers that they were ‘children without childhood’, condemned to long hours of work and far from the nature that the Romantics so prized.
• Reformers set themselves the task of restoring childhood to these children who were missing out on it. 
• Children, it came to be thought, should be protected from the adult world of work and responsibility. 
• They should be dependent on adults, and their time divided between home and school. 
• And ideally they should be happy, a state of happiness coming to be particularly associated with childhood.
• Compulsory schooling, from the 1870s onwards, had to be imposed by force of law.

The Century of the Child

• The twentieth century was loudly proclaimed at its outset to be ‘the century of the child’. 
• the future of any nation was dependent on its children. 
• The health of children began to receive serious attention, as did their education.  
• There was much fear of a ‘degeneration of the race’ and of halting it by discouraging unsuitable parents from breeding. Science seemed to hold the key to the future, and if, as the prominent child psychologist, Cyril Burt, claimed, ‘superintending the growth of human beings is as scientific a business as cultivating plants or training a race horse’, then many parents seemed ill-equipped for the task. In the 1920s and 1930s behaviorism dominated as a mode of child rearing, the emphasis on producing an obedient child.
• By the end of the century children in many families could expect parental support up to their twenties, something unimaginable in previous centuries. 
•  At the same time, from the 1970s onwards, children began to acquire new rights in relation to the state and to their families: 
• the right not to be beaten in school (1982), 
• the right to be consulted in the event of parental divorce, and so on. 
•  Childhood itself had in many ways become prolonged, and children had gained a higher status both within the family and in society at large.

IMAGES OF "CHILDHOOD" AND THE BODY

• The concept of "childhood" is new in the West -- there was little differentiation between a child and adult and any markings of their lives through the Medieval period in Europe. Cultures throughout the word all define life stages, but in different ways. Childhood tends to be a short is differentiated at all. Transition from child to adult is seen as a progression rather than a stage change.
• Contemporary images of childhood in the West
• viewed as a time of innocence and joy (Oprah)
• children are dissimilar to adults in biological, psychological and moral terms
• the bodies of children are seen as "unfinished" and the institutions in our culture are designed to complete this transition to adulthood through CIVILIZING the body and regulating "unruly selves"
• learn to control ones body and to and learn important forms of bodily conduct in particular places and contexts
•  Discourses on children's bodies:
• Child labor laws of the late 18th century- children are vulnerable and physically unsuited to labor which is dangerous 

Childhood is generally considered to be either a natural biological stage of development or a modern idea or invention. Theories of childhood are concerned with:

•  what a child is
• the nature of childhood
• the purpose or function of childhood
•  how the notion of the child or childhood is used in society.

• The necessity of formulating a precise legal definition of childhood grew out of demographic, economic, and related social and attitudinal changes in the industrialized world that together forged a new recognition of the significance of childhood at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. 
• Before this time, children had been defined in strict relation to their status as the biological offspring of fathers who also were considered by law to own any of the child's possessions and to whom they were obliged to offer their services. 

• The social historian Viviana Zelizer has described what she terms a "sacralization" (investing objects with religious or sentimental meaning) of childhood that occurred at this time, creating a transition in the way children were regarded, from a position of economic value to one of emotional price-lessness.
• Thus, the notion of the economically useful child began to be replaced by the notion of the incalculable emotional value of each child. 
• The traditional Western notion of childhood, which had held from about the 1850s to the 1950s, was implied in its absence by notions such as "the disappearance of childhood" or David Elkind's "the hurried child."

• Children are now more DEPENDENT on adults and images of childhood and the child's body are more POTENT
• children are now conceptualized as "other", "pre-social", "non-adult"
• learn how to BECOME ADULTS in their bodies which are highly regulated and disciplined in institutions like school.
• schooling has become mandatory and regulated by the state as a way of regulating and managing children's bodies
• laws regulating child labor
• laws regulating child/adult interactions
• contributes to the recognition of BODY DIFFERENCES in terms of GENDER

IMAGES and AGING

• culture provides images of bodies which we measure ourselves against as we age.
• changes in physical appearance are part of this process
• aging bodies are generally imagined in culture as as social problem
• aging bodies are in the process of deterioration and are subject to sickness whcih must be cared for
• welfare and pensions are also an issue for society (how to care for nonproductive bodies)
• aging bodies are not beautiful

Images of the aging body are highly gendered and their abilities and meanings are gendered as well.

• Generally
• loss of productivity
• increased dependence
• increased vulnerability
• loss of status-infantalization
• senility
• liminal
• loss of function that leads to "leaking" and "inability to keep body boundaries" (DOUGLAS)
• lack of privacy and impenetrable boundaries of ones body as it may be:
• incontinent
• subject to probing and observation
• physically assisted
• exposed to nonintimates

• gendered differences
• women
• desexualized
• judged on appearance of beauty (lack of)

• men
• distingusihed
• wise
• Experience of Aging in the Body
• Focus has always been on the experience of LOSS of bodily function and ability over time in recent Western culture
• internalization of stereotypes leads to an internalization of the embodied experience

• New: focus on FITNESS and "aging well" has created a new conception of the aging body and a new standard for embodiment
• consequence to some extent of new technologies 
• hormone replacement
• viagra
• plastic surgery
• etc.

• Sense of Self
• many report that they do not experience themselves as an aging body
• may report tiredness or loss of stamina rather than experience of being in an aging body---how do negative constructions of aging in our culture contribute to the experience of embodiment in aging? (we could ask the same question we did about adolescence or puberty!)

• Importance of TOUCH (direct contact with the body) in Therapies of wellness in aging
• the body is an important focal point for relational networks that allow people to see themselves as whole beings. (Massage, beauty therapies, yoga, etc.)
• Wellness for the aging has to do with the feeling of BEING IN THE BODY

• Death and the Body
• The dead body as contaminating
• dead body as public image
• Power of the state

stoning

hanging

• viewings

Lenin's Tomb

• display as medical curiosity

Mutter Museum (exhibitions link)

• The dead body as dehumanized
• The dead body as a commodity
• body parts
• experimentation