Talking Like Children: Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands

ISBN-13: 9780190876982 / Angielski / Miękka / 2019 / 224 str.

Elise Berman

Opis

Talking Like Children is a series of captivating stories that show how age comes to be. Elise Berman analyzes adoption negotiations, efforts to keep food, and debates about supposed child abuse. In these situations, age differences emerge through the decisions people make, the emotions they feel, and the power they gain.

Recenzje

Want to have your comfortable understanding of age shaken up? Read Elisa Berman's book! It challenges the ubiquitous idea of age being biologically determined. She shows how and why it's different elsewhere — in this case on a tiny atoll in the Marshall Islands. You'll never again read social science that takes chronological age as an independent variable the same way. These are rather ideologies dressed as objective neutral facts about the world, and about human nature. Commonsense but unexamined assumptions about the naturalness of precise chronological age are actually ethnographically rare and historically recent.

O autorze

Elise Berman is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has spent more than two years living, teaching, and conducting research in the Marshall Islands, and earned her PhD in the department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. She has published in American Anthropologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Childhood, and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. She is currently working on a project on language, race, and education in the Marshallese diaspora.