The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings

Citation

Lancy, D. F. (2022). The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Chapter Summary

The third edition has ten numbered chapters, a preface, a long reference list (pages 419–545 of about 584), and topic, society and author indexes. Cambridge University Press describes the book as reviewing and cataloguing more than a century of anthropological scholarship on childhood and adolescence, organised developmentally from infancy to adolescence and early adulthood, and enriched with anecdotes from ethnography and the daily media. The title's three figures are the cherub (the cherished child), the chattel (the child as property or labour) and the changeling (the unwanted child).

Chapter 1: Where Do Children Come from?

Sets up the field. Childhood research has been dominated by psychology, but a long anthropological tradition shows how culture-bound many psychological claims are: Mead's work on adolescence, Malinowski's critique of Freud, cross-cultural challenges to Piaget's universal stages, and work questioning the primacy of mother–infant attachment. The chapter introduces the concepts of gerontocracy and neontocracy, the book's two "value pyramids", and the method of child study, and outlines the volume.

Chapter 2: The Value of Children

Contrasts the common assumption that obligations flow one way from parent to child with evidence from other societies, such as West African people for whom inheritance can flow from sons to fathers as readily as the reverse. Topics include delayed personhood, children as chattel, child circulation, child labour and the "priceless" child.

Chapter 3: To Make a Child

Looks at the beginning of life in the more common gerontocracy, where "child" is a social status below one's elders. Topics are family conflict, parental perspectives on childbearing, gender preference, child illness and treatment, mortuary treatment and mourning, and fertility rates; a Tonga example shows a stillborn child buried without ceremony and a surviving child rising through a ladder of value.

Chapter 4: It Takes a Village

Opens with the author's 1973 fieldwork in the polygynous household of a chief in a Liberian village. The next chapter describes it as looking at childhood through the lens of dependency, the long period in which children's brains are large and growing but they cannot fend for themselves.

Chapter 5: Making Sense

The other side of dependency: how children make sense of their surroundings and strive to fit in. Keywords include infant cognition, learning through observation and participation, discovering tools, make-believe, learning from peers, training in etiquette, gender socialization and cultural transmission. The publisher lists cultural transmission across generations as new to this edition.

Chapter 6: Of Marbles and Morals

On play. Children's absorption in playthings and playmates frees caregivers, and the chapter goes on to other benefits: unsupervised play, making toys, playgroups, moral development, social skill, and how culture and adults shape play.

Chapter 7: The Chore Curriculum

Starts from the "Six Cultures" survey of the late 1960s and treats work as the issue on which gerontocratic and neontocratic views are furthest apart. Keywords include errands, learning chores, gathering, farming, herding, craftsmanship and apprenticeship. New material covers child helpers and hinderers and children learning crafts.

Chapter 8: Living in Limbo

Covers middle childhood, a newer area of study and a topic new to this edition, and adolescence: puberty, initiation rites, warriors, sexuality and marriage, and the effects of social change.

Chapter 9: Taming the Autonomous Learner

Contrasts children's self-directed learning in their environments with schooling, drawing on a study of Matses children in the Peruvian Amazon, and discusses the origins of village schools, parents as teachers and the effect of schooling on the mind.

Chapter 10: Elastic Childhood

Looks at how global forces strain societies' adaptations and affect children: curtailed childhood, the child as breadwinner, street children and child labour. The cherub–chattel–changeling distinction is shown to persist into the present.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–4

• Gerontocracy and neontocracy: two social arrangements, one placing children at the bottom and the other at the apex of value.
• WEIRD society: shorthand for Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic settings, whose childhood patterns mainstream developmental psychology has often treated as universal.
• Delayed personhood: the practice of treating infants as not yet full persons.

Chapters 5–7

• Learning by observation and participation: how children acquire skills and manners without formal lessons.
• Cultural transmission: the passing of culture between generations, new in this edition.
• Chore curriculum: the sequence of errands and tasks through which children learn adult work.

Chapters 8–10

• Middle childhood: the period between childhood and adolescence.
• Autonomous learner: the child who learns from the environment, set against classroom teaching.
• Child as breadwinner: the position of children whose work supports their households.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Breadth of evidence. The book draws on a century of ethnographic and historical reports; the edition adds more than 350 sources and 58 summary tables, and its reference list takes up more than a fifth of the book.
• A developmental order that is easy to use. Because chapters follow the life course, individual chapters on play, work, learning or adolescence can be read alone.
• A thread that holds it together. The gerontocracy–neontocracy contrast returns from Chapter 1 through the chapters on value, work and the modern world, and gives the survey a point of view.
• Accessible for non-specialists. The publisher says it introduces theory clearly for readers without anthropological background, and describes it as richly illustrated. Endorsements from Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Heidi Keller and others call it a rich source of evidence.

Limitations

• Very large. About 584 pages is more than a term course will cover, and the density of citation can overwhelm a first-year reader.
• A strong thesis. The book's central claim, that child-centred Western families are unusual, runs throughout; readers should treat the two-pyramid contrast as a framework rather than a fact about each society.
• Evidence of mixed vintage. Some chapters rest on older work, such as the Six Cultures survey of the late 1960s and the author's own 1973 fieldwork in Liberia, so some descriptions may not reflect current conditions; the 350 new sources in this edition are meant to offset this.

Where It Fits in the Course

In the kinship, religion and ritual list, Lancy's book is the only one centred on childhood. It connects to kinship through its chapters on family, the value of children and child circulation, and to ritual through its treatments of mortuary practice and initiation rites. Janet Carsten's After Kinship is the theoretical reassessment of kinship as relatedness that a student might read alongside the family chapters.

Victor Turner's The Ritual Process (rites of passage and liminality) pairs naturally with Chapter 8's discussion of initiation and adolescence, and Rebecca Stein and colleagues' textbook covers rites of passage in its chapter on ritual. Lancy is a book to be read for its comparative evidence rather than for theory. It can be read without prior anthropology but gains from a general introduction to cultural anthropology.

How to Use This Book

The book suits undergraduates in anthropology, childhood studies, education and developmental psychology, and anyone who wants a comparative view of how children are raised outside industrialised societies. An introductory anthropology course is helpful but not required.

A practical plan:

• Core: Chapters 1 and 2, which set out the framework and the central contrast.
• By topic: Chapter 5 for learning, Chapter 6 for play, Chapter 7 for work, Chapter 8 for adolescence, Chapter 9 for schooling; each stands alone.
• For psychology students: Chapters 1 and 5, which question universal claims about development.
• For policy and development courses: Chapter 10 on child labour, street children and global change.
• For a term paper: use the summary tables and the extensive references to find ethnographic sources.