Abstract
The reference to culture in studies of childhood and children’s lives is a significant one, implying in the very context of culture, who one means by children, how childhood is problematized and so on. The study of childhood as an extended Bildungsmoratorium is essentially a study of protected childhoods, where temporally and spatially children’s lives are bounded off from some aspects of adult life.
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Notes
- 1.
The increasing age at the time of birth. among men and women, as well as the increasing age of marriage among women from. the 19508, accounts for the gap between the parental and grand parenta1 cohort. Though not all the adult respondents were necessarily parents or grandparents of children interviewed - the age limits were decided upon based on the ages of the parents and grandparents of children who were interviewed.
- 2.
Kingston (2001) in The Unfulfilled Promise of Cultural Capital Theory reflects on the usage of cultural capital in theory, particularly in the works of Lamont & Lareau and challenges the notion that possession of cultural capital is essentially privileging. Although his critique is directed more against contemporary interpretations of Bourdieu in .American Sociology than against Bourdieu, one of the arguments he makes is that familiarity with some aspects of bighbrow’ culture, such as knowing different kinds of wine, or knowing certain musicians might be skills or marks of greater familiarity with some aspects of culture, but cannot be seen as ‘resources’ which necessarily lead to success or upward mobility. Though the present study is not as such concerned with the privileging ‘results’ of cultural capital, Kingston’ discussion is significant and of interest as it is one of the fewer studies of cultural capital and cultural practices which do not make a direct connection with educational achievements.
- 3.
In Projekt: Kindheit Im Siegerland(1991) the word Verhiiuslichung has been used which literally translated, means domestication. One of the central themes in the studies of modernization of childhood in the German context was that of the domesticization of childhood. Though the word conveys little to the reader in the English language, it refers to • shift from children spending time outdoors. especially on the streets, to a childhood, noticeably in the bigger cities where the home or school or closed spaces were increasingly the locus of childhood. In the context of West Bengal. the distinction between street-childhoods and non-street childhoods have a strong connotation of social and economic inequalities. In the absence of any detailed historical research on a ‘non-domestic’ childhood existing among the middle classes in Bengal. the implications of the word used by Behnken et al. Have been incorporated to understand protected spatial aspects of childhood
- 4.
The interviews for the most part. both with children and the two older cohorts were in Bengali, although the respondents freely mixed words in English during the interviews, as is common in colloquial Bengali. The translations are the author’s own. It has been specified where the interviews are in English
- 5.
The Bengali word for ‘elder sister’.
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Sen, H. (2014). Talking to Children, and Talking about Childhoods. In: ‘Time-Out’ in the Land of Apu. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-02223-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-02223-5_4
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