Abstract

SZULC, Andrea. Beyond children’s agency and cultures: Insights from an ethnographic research with mapuche children. Runa [online]. 2019, vol.40, n.1, pp.53-64. ISSN 1851-9628.  http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.34096/runa.v40i1.4992.

The field of social studies on childhood has clearly developed and broaden in the last decades, through a reconceptualization of childhood as a sociocultural construction, with an emphasis on children’s active participation in social life, especially among scholars from the core countries who have spread the concept of "childhood agency" and "children’s cultures". In this paper I analyze the assumptions and risks implied in the ways such categories are being used, drawing from my research with Mapuche indigenous children in the province of Neuquén, carried out since 2001. By contrasting this two powerfull concepts for marginalizaed theoretical and indigenous perspectives, I will argue for an approach that contextualices children’s agency and children’s cultural production in sociohistorical and cultural terms, within intergenerational and interethnic power relations, and those of class and gender.

Keywords : Children’s agency; Children’s cultures; Childhood; Mapuche people; Ethnography.

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