Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The anthropology of childhood and adolescence documents and accounts for the marvelous variety of childhoods found around the world. The psychocultural anthropology of childhood asks how children and adolescents around the world acquire, transform, share, integrate, and transmit cultural knowledge. This scientific project is central to the study of globalization and its impacts on children, adolescents, and youth. Globalization processes impact all parts of the world through immigration, market economics, and politics, and it changes the roles of children and youth as well. Hence, globalization demands a pluralistic, cross-cultural view of childhood and adolescence. Psychological anthropology and the cross-cultural study of childhood have always had such a view. Since the psychological anthropology of human development specializes in the intensive study of the developing person and family life in local contexts and populations, psychological anthropology is uniquely able to understand those varying local forms of, and responses to, globalization. The field is especially suited to provide empirical, evidence-based research and policy recommendations regarding children, families, and globalization in the twenty-first century.Strong as psychological anthropology is, it is fair to say that there is not a consensus theory of how local and global cultural communities socialize children ... log in or subscribe to read full text