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Books > History > Australasian & Pacific history
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Talking Like Children - Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,505
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Talking Like Children - Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands (Hardcover)
Series: Oxf Studies in Anthropology of Language
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Children in the Marshall Islands do many things that adults do not.
They walk around half naked. They carry and eat food in public
without offering it to others. They talk about things they see
rather than hiding uncomfortable truths. They explicitly refuse to
give. Why do they do these things? Many think these behaviors are a
natural result of children's innate immaturity. But Elise Berman
argues that children are actually taught to do things that adults
avoid: to be rude, inappropriate, and immature. Before children
learn to be adults, they learn to be different from them. Berman's
main theoretical claim therefore is also a novel one: age emerges
through interaction and is a social production. In Talking Like
Children, Berman analyzes a variety of interactions in the Marshall
Islands, all broadly based around exchange: adoption negotiations,
efforts to ask for or avoid giving away food, contentious debates
about supposed child abuse. In these dramas both large and small,
age differences emerge through the decisions people make, the
emotions they feel, and the power they gain. Berman's research
includes a range of methods - participant observation, video and
audio recordings, interviews, children's drawings - that yield a
significant corpus of data including over 80 hours of recorded
naturalistic social interaction. Presented as a series of
captivating stories, Talking Like Children is an intimate analysis
of speech and interaction that shows what age means. Like gender
and race, age differences are both culturally produced and socially
important. The differences between Marshallese children and adults
give both groups the ability to manipulate social life in distinct
but often complementary ways. These differences produce culture
itself. Talking Like Children establishes age as a foundational
social variable and a central concern of anthropological and
linguistic research.
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