Working Childhoods
Youth, Agency and the Environment in India

This volume offers a powerful account of youth agency and young people's rich relationship with the natural world.

Jane Dyson (Author)

9781107058385, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 April 2014

186 pages, 19 b/w illus. 1 map 2 tables
23.4 x 15.5 x 1.2 cm, 0.44 kg

'… the broader contribution of this book is to debates about child and youth agency. Yet, unlike other studies of children's agency, which tend to follow individual children through their environments, this study takes the environment as its fixed point through which children live, move, labour and play.' Annie McCarthy, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology

Working Childhoods draws upon research in the Indian Himalayas to provide a theoretically-informed account of children's lives in a remote part of the world. The book shows that children in their pre-teens and teens are lynchpins of the rural economy, spending hours each day herding cattle, collecting leaves, and juggling household tasks with schoolwork. Through documenting in painstaking detail children's stories, songs, friendships, fears and tribulations, the book offers a powerful account of youth agency and young people's rich relationship with the natural world. The 'environment' emerges not only as a crucial economic resource but also as a basis for developing gendered ideas of self. The book should be essential reading for anyone interested in better understanding childhood, youth, the environment, and development within and beyond India - including anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, development studies scholars, and South Asianists.

1. Working with young people in the Himalayas
2. The High Himalayas
3. A delicate dance: young people's work
4. Herding, fun and difference
5. Friendship in practice: collecting leaves in Bemni
6. Harvesting identities: Mukku, gender and development
7. Conclusions.

Subject Areas: Human geography [RGC], Politics & government [JP], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Anthropology [JHM]