Child Well-Being: Anthropological Perspectives

Anthropology commonly is regarded as the study of human origins or exotic cultures, but in fact, its remit embraces all aspects of humanity. It is distinguished from other social sciences, conceptually, by its attention to both culture and biology and their interaction on the timescales of evolution, history, and the individual lifespan, and methodologically, by a tradition of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among diverse populations. Anthropological study of children occupies a special place in the discipline, as it engages with issues from the evolution of the life course to how culture is acquired during the earliest years. A lapse in attention to children and childhood by mainstream anthropology in recent decades has been balanced by a current surge of interest in the place of children in society and appreciation of the value of anthropological studies for understanding child well-being (BluebondLangner and Korbin 2007; Lancy 2008). Unfortunately, major recent reviews of threats to child welfare and how to ameliorate them (Grantham-McGregor et al. 2007; Engle et al. 2007; Walker et al. 2007, 2011) have largely overlooked anthropological contributions – and particularly the importance of culture as a determinant of both socioeconomic conditions and local definitions of wellbeing. In this chapter, we discuss anthropological perspectives that advance