Throw Your Voice
Suspended Animations in Kazakhstani Childhoods

Meghanne Barker (Author)

9781501776458

Hardback, published 15 August 2024

234 pages, 23 b&w halftones - 23 Halftones, black and white
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.907 kg

Anthropology as a whole has largely focused on adults, so many anthropologists will find the book a refreshing exploration of children's lived experiences, including their play and fantasy worlds. The book's writing style is accessible and at times lyrical, with more technical semiotic analysis and references reserved for the footnotes. Ultimately, Barker's work exemplifies how, even without taking language as its primary object, linguistic anthropology's interpretive approach can illuminate the aesthetic, material, and intimate processes through which social relations are made and sustained.

Throw Your Voice is a story of loss and recovery. It relates how children placed in a temporary care institution make sense of their situations. Moving between a Kazakhstan government children's home, Hope House, and the Almaty State Puppet Theater, Meghanne Barker shows how children, and puppets, as proxies, bring to life ideologies of childhood and visions of a rosy future. Sites and stories run in parallel. Framed by the narrative of Anton Chekhov's "Kashtanka," about a lost dog taken in by a kind stranger, the author follows the story's staging at the puppet theater. At Hope House, children find themselves on a path similar to Kashtanka, dislodged from their first homes to reside in a second.

Introduction
1. Getting Lost
2. Meeting a Strangwer
3. Jumping Through Hoops
4. Getting Comfortable
5. Losing a Friend
6. Going Home Again
Coda