My Point of Entry for this Inquiry
My interest in drawing together a rather disparate body of literature on parenthood, childhood, and the state, in this course, originated out of a nagging sense that policymakers and social workers ought to pay more attention to anthropology and history. Social work courses at the master's level often take as a given social constructions that we consider an object of inquiry at the doctoral level, and the treatment of childhood and the relationship between the state and the child in particular were two areas that had troubled me in my MSW courses. "What are the goals of childhood?" asked one instructor at the beginning of a course on Child and Infant development, yielding a series of student responses such as "learning language", "learning to walk," "play," "going to school," "learning to read and write," "learning math," and so on. The implication that this was a scientific question being presented to the class, one that could be answered in a way that could apply to all settings, concerned me deeply. The very framing of childhood as a context where goals ought to be made, striven toward, and accomplished seemed odd to me. With regular social contact with communicative adults, every child without specific limitations comes to be able to communicate through language and walk without assistance. The concept that these processes require specific parental (or social work) intervention is one that is patently untrue, and one that promotes an ethnocentric view of families where childhood is not a "project" to succeed or fail in and of cultures where work, rather than play, is the emphasis for children.
After all, setting aside our own enculturation as Americans and emotional cues to the contrary, there is nothing that makes our categorization of a menstruating twelve-year-old female as a child any more appropriate or natural than that of another culture that may view her as ready for marriage. Such arguments, when they arise in international media, frequently yield cries from international experts who cite apparently harmful physiological effects of early child birth, economic and social effects of curtailing her enrollment in formal public education, and human rights established and agreed upon in some international forum. I do not mean to dispute any such claims in this instance, but merely to point out the remarkable variation that has existed across time and space in (1) what we consider a child, (2) what roles we consider appropriate and inappropriate for someone in that category, (3) what modes of interaction we consider appropriate between parents or other caregivers and children, and (4) how and when we believe we ought to intervene in these interactions as a public (whether as a state representing the people, or as other authority figures or neighbors in a shared community).
There is no doubt that there are trends and even universals in human development across the life course, and I don't contest that these features are important for future social work practitioners to learn. But it is my contention that the ahistoricism and ethnocentrism that plague many practice-oriented social work courses do a profound disservice to both practitioner and client in the long term. Why? Because it robs the social worker of an education in critical theory that could aid her or him in contextualizing — and challenging — the normative, and ultimately could shape a profoundly more radical version of social work than currently appears to be inculcated in schools of social work.
In order for real social change to occur, a systematic and thorough understanding of the current situation is necessary, and such an understanding is impossible without knowledge of what has preceded. In the words of Robert van Krieken, a "lack of historical understanding" . . .
encourages the tendency to see promising novelty where there is often recycling of old ideas and old recipes, and disables us from perceiving long-term trends. As David Thompson puts it, to neglect history "means that we often fail to appreciate that the options facing us now are very familiar to those considered, tried and discarded by previous generations which also had to decide how to care for the lonely elderly, the husbandless mother, the parentless child or the unemployed family man (Thompson 1986:357)" (van Krieken 1991:2).
Furthermore, I would add, as globalization continues to reshape our social world in quite profound ways, and social workers are more and more likely to come into contact with clients socialized in environments dramatically different from those they grew up in themselves, the lessons of anthropology become increasingly important to integrate into the training of social work practitioners. The application of a tried-and-true method in a culturally inappropriate setting is arguably no less foolhardy than the application of a method that was "tried and discarded by previous generations". However, without placing a greater value on the contributions of both anthropology and history to the education of those conceptualizing interventions, these are both inevitably mistakes they will make.
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Debates for or against a particular change in policy often draw on the public's emotions by rhetorically establishing a frame of normalcy, then placing a certain belief or practice outside that frame by invoking what is natural or what is universal. These constructs, however, almost never are used with the basis of scientific evidence that informs of what was practiced by our ancestors, or how practices vary across human populations. In the area of the family, this type of rhetoric is particularly popular for attempts to discredit such far-ranging practices as polygamy, homosexuality, various approaches to parenting, and the list goes on.
In just one of the more recent of such debates, calling for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, President Bush made the following statement:
The union of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution, honoring, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith. Ages of experience have taught humanity that the commitment of a husband and wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society.
Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society. Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all.
Within two days, the American Anthropological Association stepped forward to dispute the claim President Bush had made, stating that:
The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.
Anthropology and history provide powerful tools for challenging commonsense understandings of the natural by countering assumptions about what is universal with empirical evidence of how human social structures have varied over time and space.
Works Cited
AAA statement on Marriage and the Family, issued February 26, 2004, available at: http://www.aaanet.org/press/ma_stmt_marriage.htm
Bush, President George W., Statement of February 24, 2004, "President Calls for Constitutional Amendment Protecting Marriage," available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/02/20040224-2.html
Van Krieken, Robert (1991). Children and the State: Social Control and the formation of Australian Child Welfare.
