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Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group
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Anthropology of Childhood and Youth Special Interest Group of the American Anthropological Association

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And if you have published or seen something great in the anthropology of childhood or youth, it could be our next Spotlight feature! Author guidelines here acyig.americananthro.org/spotlight-on...
Spotlight on Scholarship Author Guidelines | Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group
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July 22, 2025 at 12:52 PM
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See Soares' full Spotlight here: acyig.americananthro.org/spotlight-on...
In 1877, two Indigenous girls, Angela and Benedicta, were kidnapped. Taken from the countryside of Amazonas province, the girls were brought to Manaus, probably to work as domestic servants in slave-like conditions. The girls had living parents who were legally married and, although humble, had the means to raise and educate them. However, this did not protect the kidnap victims from being considered orphans and having their guardianship rights passed to strangers. How did this happen? In “Child Separation and the Stolen Generation of Brazil: Indigenous Peoples’ (Un)Freedom in Amazonia,” Ana Luiza Soares examines the systemic removal of Indigenous children in 19th-century Brazil. This article reveals how legal ambiguities and racialized definitions of orphanhood facilitated the exploitation of Indigenous, Black, and mixed-race children as unpaid domestic laborers, known as criadas de casa.​ Soares delves into the complexities of citizenship and guardianship laws, illustrating how these frameworks were manipulated to legitimize child separation and perpetuate colonial hierarchies. Orphanhood emerges as a key category in these separations—a racialized concept used to justify the kidnapping of children who had living and capable parents. Through a compelling case study of the 1877 abduction of sisters Angela and Benedicta, the article highlights the resilience of Indigenous families who navigated and contested these oppressive systems. The work traces how relational power, exercised through networks of paternalism and patrimonialism, enabled the profitable circulation of Indigenous children as domestic laborers in the households of Manaus’s elite. The narrative underscores the enduring legacy of these practices, linking historical injustices to contemporary issues of structural racism and labor exploitation in Brazil.
July 22, 2025 at 12:52 PM
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Chapman says:
In principle, child protection services aim to safeguard children’s health and well-being. Yet, interventions may often involve a paradoxical practice: child-family separation. Removing a child from an unsafe environment makes sense in the eyes of authorities, but in a relational sense, it is children whose social lives are displaced and remade. Children are blameless, yet they are the ones to be separated from their home and community. This context offers an insightful space to learn about and appreciate personhood, care, and welfare state politics. In Japan, the use of residential care institutions is relatively high and a staple of the child protection system. In Yusuke’s Story, I chart my encounters with a young person living in group care, Yusuke, and how their journey through the social protection system indexes how displacement, resocialization, and normativity come together to create a complicated political subjectivity. Yusuke took me on a virtual tour of his childhood in urban Tokyo through Google Maps, illustrated in the above picture. I learned about his old friends, vivid memories of 3/11, and his family. He also introduced me to his secret hobby: writing short stories. He wrote one for me—a slice-of-life tale about a young person living in state care. It was in little moments of listening and being there, side by side, that I came to understand how being in state care was more than place. Being in care was about making new relationships, making sense of complex feelings, facing inequality, reframing old memories, and losing one’s sense of belonging. These insights, in turn, reshaped my ethnographic methods and writing. Yusuke’s Story is a collection of multiple, non-linear narratives on subjectivity: Yusuke’s commentary on everyday life in care, the short story as text, Yusuke’s biography, and my attempt to portray these accounts for you. All in all, this story is a partial one that speaks to a particular moment while shedding light on the nuanced …
May 13, 2025 at 9:27 AM
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And if you have recently published (or seen something great!) in the anthropology of childhood or youth and would like to have your work featured in ACYIG's Spotlight on Scholarship find our author guidelines here: acyig.americananthro.org/spotlight-on...
Spotlight on Scholarship Author Guidelines | Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group
acyig.americananthro.org
May 13, 2025 at 9:24 AM
acyig.bsky.social
And if you have recently published (or seen something great!) in the anthropology of childhood or youth and would like to have your work featured in ACYIG's Spotlight on Scholarship find our author guidelines here: acyig.americananthro.org/spotlight-on...
Spotlight on Scholarship Author Guidelines | Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group
acyig.americananthro.org
April 7, 2025 at 1:37 PM
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The title “‘Unruly’ Children” captures the main message of the book: Integrating interviews, naturalistic observations, and psychological tests from this rare archive, I tell stories of disobedient children defying parental commands, negotiating with siblings and peers and creating their own rules through moral dramas and games. These findings challenge the tropes of “obedience” and “innocence” prevalent in scholarly and public discourses about Asian children. Moreover, writing through and about fieldnotes, I connect the book’s two themes, learning morality and making ethnography, in light of children’s social cognition, and urge anthropologists (or perhaps all adults) to take children seriously. This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of re-interpreting a rare archive of fieldnotes brought me magical encounters with time and temporality, when “the ethnographic past comes to the ethnographic present via technologies of the future,” to quote a poetic comment I received from a kind colleague.
April 7, 2025 at 1:37 PM
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Xu says:
How do humans become moral persons? While we tend to emphasize how parents shape the moral personhood of youngsters, what about children’s active learning, especially learning with and from peers? What can children teach us about the nature of ethnography, and about learning and knowledge-making more broadly? My book examines these questions through a unique re-interpretation of historical fieldnotes from the first-ever anthropological study of ethnic Han children, using an innovative human-machine hybrid approach that combines ethnographic interpretation, behavioral coding, SNA (social-network-analysis), and NLP (natural-language-processing) techniques including large-language-models (LLMs). These unpublished fieldnotes were collected by the late anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf in Taiwan from 1958-1960, at the height of the Martial-Law era. Their original research was intended as an improved replication of the Six Cultures Study of Child Socialization, a landmark project in the history of anthropology of childhood.
April 7, 2025 at 1:37 PM
Reposted by Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Time for my regular gripe about how “traditional” gender ideologies are not really traditional at all 👆 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
The male breadwinner nuclear family is not the ‘traditional’ human family, and promotion of this myth may have adverse health consequences | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biologic...
The importance of social support for parental and child health and wellbeing is not yet sufficiently widely recognized. The widespread myth in Western contexts that the male breadwinner–female homemak...
royalsocietypublishing.org
December 14, 2024 at 9:56 AM