Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- A Note To Readers
- Introduction
- 1 Speaking Of The Street
- 2 Being in the Street
- 3 “Home Children”: Nurtured Childhood and Nurturing Childhood
- 4 Betraying Motherdom: Maloqueiros and “That Life” in the Street
- 5 When Life is Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Violence and Street Children
- 6 Curing Street Children, Rescuing Childhood
- 7 Street Children and Their “Clients”
- Conclusion: The Ephemeral Lives of Street Children
- Appendix: The Setting: Recife, Olinda, and Northeast Brazil
- Glossary
- Notes
- References
- Index
3 - “Home Children”: Nurtured Childhood and Nurturing Childhood
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- A Note To Readers
- Introduction
- 1 Speaking Of The Street
- 2 Being in the Street
- 3 “Home Children”: Nurtured Childhood and Nurturing Childhood
- 4 Betraying Motherdom: Maloqueiros and “That Life” in the Street
- 5 When Life is Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Violence and Street Children
- 6 Curing Street Children, Rescuing Childhood
- 7 Street Children and Their “Clients”
- Conclusion: The Ephemeral Lives of Street Children
- Appendix: The Setting: Recife, Olinda, and Northeast Brazil
- Glossary
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
The culture of childhood shares many of the attributes of primitive cultures. It is handed down by word of mouth, it includes many rituals and magical formulas whose original meanings have been lost, it is hidebound and resistant to alien influence and to change.
(Stone and Church 1973: 354)There is nothing natural or inevitable about childhood. Childhood is culturally defined and created; it, too, is a matter of human choice.
(Nandy 1992: 56)We are faced with two competing ways of viewing childhood. On the one hand, childhood is seen as a sort of unchanging, universal social order experienced in a similar fashion by children around the world and over time. On the other hand, social anthropologists, historians, and others have increasingly come to accept that childhood is socially constructed and hence variable according to the context in which it is lived. This chapter considers, first, competing ways of viewing childhood and children. It then presents an ethnographic account of what I argue are the two dominant ways of experiencing childhood in Northeast Brazil: nurtured childhood and nurturing childhood, as I call them.
The British journalist Anthony Swift wrote a booklet for UNICEF entitled Brazil: The Fight for Childhood in the City (1991a). In it one reads not about the struggles of millions of children in the favelas and rural settlements across Brazil, but about the plight of the comparatively tiny number living in the street.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- At Home in the StreetStreet Children of Northeast Brazil, pp. 70 - 92Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998