Transfer of Knowledge and Children's Agency: Reconstructing the Paradigm of Socialization

As knowledge is transmitted to new generations it changes constantly, being reinterpreted and reinvented by children and youth. It can be studied only through its circulation and deployment, not as an object in itself. The need to know is universal, but knowledge is always framed by tenets particular to each culture, and it must be studied transculturally.

Transfer of Knowledge and Children's Agency: Reconstructing the Paradigm of Socialization is a transcultural study of knowledge transmission. The essays deal with a wide variety of socialization contexts —schools and youth culture, apprenticeship, ideals of youth and childhood—from India, China, South-East Asia and Europe. They include examples from indigenous peoples, from particular occupational groups in ‘traditional’ societies as well as youth in ‘modern’ society. The knowledge transmitted spans from dance, painting or weaving to astrology, traditional medicine and business acumen, but these skills are everywhere framed by culturally specific conceptions of the person as differentiated by age, gender and ethnic identity—or indeed of the ageing process itself. Throughout the book, transmission of knowledge is shown to be a complex process where children and young people take an active part in reshaping and reformulating the cultural content of the society in which they live. Yet this agency of children and youth remains linked to what is handed down from their elders. The book should interest scholars in the fields of education, youth culture, and childhood as well as anthropologists and social scientists in general.

Marine Carrin is Director of Research Emeritus (CNRS) at LISST-Centre d'Anthropologie Sociale, EHESS, Toulouse. She has also worked on castes and cults incoastal Karnataka and published books on Santal ritual and oral literature and on Adivasi identities. Her recent publications include Voices from the Periphery (co-edited with Lidia Guzy, 2012) and The Politics of Ethnicity in India, Nepal and China (with Pralay Kanungo and GErard Toffin, 2013).

Harald Tambs-Lyche is Professor Emeritus of Ethnology at the University of Picardie, Amiens and associate member of CASLISST, Toulouse. He has worked on Indian immigrants in Britain and Scandinavia, and on historical and contemporary aspects of religion and society in Saurashtra, Gujarat. His most recent publication is Business Brahmins (2011).

Dominique Blanc is a social anthropologist at the EHESS, CAS-LISST, Toulouse. During many years, he has focused his research on the study of education, literacy and identity in South Europe. He has also published extensively, in French and Spanish, on oral traditions in Catalonia and south-western France.