The Evolution of Childhood

"A number of reviewers call this book accessible. I suppose it depends what you mean by that but it isn’t popular science. It isn’t meant to bring in the ones who know nothing about the subject and make them feel comfortable. The book requires a certain patience, even with the sometimes mysterious jumps in the author’s train of thought. But it is rewarding. The Evolution of Childhood brings together elements as diverse as those in the author’s background ­– biological anthropology, medicine, neuroscience and behavioural biology, to start with. In its progression the book is at the uneasy meeting of genetics and culture, uneasy because it is often hard to discern where one ends and the other begins. The approach here isn’t the familiar “we are part nature and part nurture” but rather that these parts are not always easy to reconcile, though they do come together. Though not a book dedicated solely to infants, it covers them extensively since it is with them that childhood begins and it is they who first begin to show signs of having or being amenable to culture. Konner writes of the transmission of culture, which is sure to make cultural anthropologists uneasy. The simple socialisation model where culture is seen to be passed along virtually unchanged from one generation to another is no longer entertained, but that is not what Konner is talking about. He is after something far more subtle. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter As part of a long-range Harvard study of the !Kung San [tribe] of northwestern Botswana, Konner carried out a study of infancy. He found that infants were fed on demand and given considerable freedom, within their possibilities. The mother and child were in constant contact with others, in contrast to the isolation of many mothers and children in the West. As the infant grows so too does his attachment to children of different ages. The research I am doing at present concerns how social and economic inequality affects infants. We know that a large divide between rich and poor offends our sense of justice, but we rarely stop to consider how that divide affects infants. Yet for infants, inequality has especially damaging implications. Babies are far more likely to die from poverty and social injustice than are adults, for instance, but they are probably the ones least taken into account. What I have learned from this, or been reminded of, is that infants are actually part of history and politics and social life – often, it is true, as victims. Anthropologists of childhood often try to turn things around, speaking not only of children as victims of war, for instance, but also as combatants in war. With infants we have to throw familiar notions of agency out the window. So I have learned that when it comes to an anthropological understanding of infants, we are also on all fours. This field is wide open. I wish I knew. I don’t think in any case that it will be found in books or on websites. Bringing children up is a broad matter of moral and cultural beliefs, the environment we can offer children, biology, our own experimentation and common sense, and the mind and inclinations of the child."