Action, personhood and the gift economy among so-called street children in Mexico City

Abstract

In this article, I contribute to recent efforts to correct aid organizations' ethnocentric representations of so-called street children. These organizations tend to impose a modern Western notion of childhood that portrays young people from around the world as passive objects of adult subjectivity. Using ethnographic data collected among two bandas (gangs) of so-called street children in Mexico City, I argue that the alternative is not necessarily to portray them in the image of the modern Western adult – as subjects or agents capable of authoring their own actions – but instead to recognize the specificity of the relationship among personhood, action, and sociality in a particular cultural context. Marilyn Strathern's writings on the gift economy help conceptualize this relationship among those of the bandas, who, rather than authoring their own actions, are caused to act by others.

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