Organizer: Nita Kumar, Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
Chair: Laurie J. Sears, University of Washington
Discussant: Ronald Inden, University of Chicago
This panel consists of scholars working on emerging identities among young people within certain axes suggested in the title, the interrogation sign of which points to the search for more exchange on this little-researched subject. Class and culture are central dimensions for Gold, Hall, Frederiksen, and Kumar. To be middle-class ‘British’ means, for the Sikh youth studied by Hall, a rejection of ‘Asian’ ethnicity and tradition, and in both cases these are images of ‘culture’ being accepted or rejected. For Gold, to be educated and modern in rural Rajasthan means a loss of a holistic relationship to the environment and a new sense of the self. The choices between the youth of Nairobi vary with family occupation and education. And the very comparison between Connecticut and North India reveals that constructions of age rely on the comparative affluence and ideology of modernity.
Gender is perhaps the most basic differentiation for all the authors, but where all the categories, class, culture, and gender, can be understood in all their significance is when a historical depth is provided to the subject. Then we see that we must extend our gaze to, respectively, the workings of the Indian nation state; the convolutions of the British empire’s history; the intersection of a global cultural politics with a local African one; and the questioning of the naturalness of ‘youth’ itself in the contrasting cases of India and the USA.
The papers combine new empirical data with theory, and stress dialogue.
Youth and Youth Cultures in Nairobi
Bodil F. Frederiksen, Roskilde UniversityThis paper forms part of my larger research on the subject of how young people in urban areas of Africa incorporate, resist, and transform global, regional and local popular culture and what role it plays in their lives. It is clear that given the influence undoubtedly wielded by global genres and transnational stars, there is still a central place held by older structures of social organization and historically validated social ideals.
I look here particularly at the case of young women and the problem of pre-marital fertility. There is a range of factors responsible for the prevalence of early child birth and it is important to see this both as, and more than, ‘a crisis of youth’ (a perspective I share with Cruise O’Brien and Paul Richards). Kenyan women have always had the primary responsibility for children, and to continue this seems not extraordinary. Fertility has always been highly valued and child bearing seen as a marriage strategy. The lack of socializing agents from the older generations has cast men in the role of responsible elders. Youth may not exist as a well defined and legitimate life stage for women as it does for men. The poverty and violence of certain neighborhoods, the influence of foreign media, and the overall marginalization of youth in relation to civil society, all go towards encouraging the creation of a ‘nation’ or ‘republic’ of the young with their own values and investments.
This paper considers how a problem that seems to act against the interests of young people may in fact, if seen from their own perspectives, be favorable to their interests.
Children and Trees in Rajasthan
Ann Grodzins Gold, Syracuse UniversityRecent books on The Social Life of Trees (edited by Laura Rival) and The Social Construction of Indian Forests (edited by Roger Jeffery) have argued, respectively, that trees have a particular grip on the human imagination; and that forests and human societies are conceptually and poetically, as well as politically and economically, intertwined. Both these sets of observations are relevant to my topic; an exploration of Rajasthani children’s multiple perceptions of trees, and the ways children think about themselves in relation to trees. All rural children have utilitarian interactions with trees on a daily basis—as they help their families gathering fuel and fodder. Goat herding children especially rely on foliage to keep their charges fed. Children’s play frequently involves tree-climbing games, and their oral traditions use evocative tree imagery; many respect certain trees as divinely inhabited. In this area, which has undergone severe deforestation witnessed by the senior generation, some children learn from their grandparents oral histories of a landscape once dense with tree species now nearly vanished. Schools today, attended by less than fifty percent of the village children, teach that human life depends on trees, and promote children’s participation in tree-planting schemes. Following leads from both Rival’s and Jeffery’s volumes, this paper explores how rural Rajasthani children from different communities imaginatively identify with trees as they envision their lives and selves within changing landscapes.
Race, Class, and Nationalism: Social Mobility Among Sikh Teenagers in England
Kathleen Hall, University of PennsylvaniaOn the front page of the New York Times Magazine (February 21, 1999) a classic image of Queen Victoria, a tear etched onto her cheek, gazed onto a caption reading, "The End of Britain." The imperial legacy of Britain is fading in the face of political-economic and social transformations and a consequent crisis of national identity. Globalization, Americanization, and European unification are challenging British sovereignty and an imagined national cultural purity. In the midst of these changes, Britain is struggling to come to terms with being a racially mixed, multicultural society while its citizens of color fight the battle to truly belong.
The paper considers how these historical dynamics influence identity formation among second generation British Sikh adolescents whose parents came to England from Punjab, India and East Africa. Through their educational achievements, second generation Sikhs are challenging a central paradox of modernity: the contradiction between the liberal ideology of meritocracy and the collective boundaries of race, nationality, gender, and class. Working-class Sikhs are successfully crossing the boundaries of belonging to become middle-class and British. These processes of identity formation are resulting in multiple forms of ethnic identification and are giving new significance to what it means to be Sikh, "Asian," and British in England.
Childhood and Youth in Connecticut and Banaras
Nita Kumar, Center for Studies in Social Sciences, CalcuttaIn all the crafts industries of Banaras, young people are expected to learn the technical as well as the ethical aspects of their families’ occupations at home. They simultaneously engage in many pursuits that characterize ‘young’ people such as listening to popular music or playing cricket. Many are recipients of a formal liberal curricula in state or private schools as well. This paper problematizes the changing nature of ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ in Banaras given the ill-defined pulls of economic security, modernity, and citizenship, and seeks to go beyond the definitions of working children as ‘child labor.’
The prototypical model of ‘modernity’ that many industrializing countries like India are perhaps following is one resembling that of the USA. I look at data on select aspects of youth activities in Trumbull, a suburban town in Connecticut, where every stage of childhood and adolescence is clearly demarcated with rituals, consumption patterns, and lifestyle. Though this is only a preliminary exercise, I use it to highlight the problem for children: to be located within an over-determined category, whether of child, teenager, or (quasi-adult) worker.
The contrast between the two cases lies not only in class and culture, and associated constructions of gender. It opens up interesting spaces for new questions to be asked, such as how to best use the multivocality of conceptual areas which we often designate with neat shorthand terms, such as ‘freedom,’ ‘discipline,’ work,’ ‘learning,’ authority,’ and most of all, in our case, ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ itself.