Anthropology of Childhood and Youth: International and Historical Perspectives is a sweeping study of childhood across time and space. Geoffrey Vitale, while being attentive to scholarly discussions about the historicity of categories of childhood and youth, manages to provide a comprehensive look at how notions of childhood have transformed children's lives from pre-modern times through our own contemporary moment. The volume will be indispensable to any course on the history of global childhood.

In Anthropology of Childhood and Youth, author Geoffrey Vitale shows the ways in which people understand, raise, and educate children and youth differently from century to century and from country to country according to the culture, lifestyle, politics, and economics of their place of origin. He also introduces the reader to the manner in which professionals relate to these matters, with a focus on an anthropological perspective. Vitale discusses similar problems and matters for inquiry a thousand years apart, and separated by oceans. The adoption or abandonment of children, for instance, created problems of inheritance, sexual relationship, and family support and integration in Ancient Greece, just as it does today in contemporary Japan. The author therefore, proposes a flexible tour of human society, intended essentially to introduce the reader to points of view, strategies, and approaches that go beyond the purely domestic, both in place and time which may introduce new ideas and present new theories and diverse understandings. Anthropology of Childhood and Youth establishes the work of a wide range of specialists and familiarizes readers both with their skills and their writings."