Introduction: Voice, Agency and the Child

Abstract

Over ten years ago, the first volume of Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood appeared. 1 It was one of the first, 2 and remains to date the most multi-and interdisciplinary volume on childhood to be pub-lished, engaging with constructivist approaches to childhood 3 across a range of disciplines, from psychology to film studies, from literature to history. All the chapters in the book took as their starting point the idea that childhood (but also any identity) is a historically and culturally contingent construction, not an essential, transhistorical or transcultural continuity, predetermined by inherent biological or physiological factors. As discussed in the introduction to Children in Culture , 4 the approach that definitions and perceptions of childhood change through time and from place to place, and within times and places, has been widely attributed to the French historian Philippe Aries’s famous, and still controversial, book Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life , where Ariès famously argued that: But have we any right to talk of a history of the family? Is the family a phenomenon any more subject to history than instinct is? It is possible to argue that it is not, and to maintain that the family partakes of the immobility of the species. It is no doubt true that since the beginning of the human race men have built homes and begot children, and it can be argued that within the great family types, monogamous and polygamous, historical differences are of little importance in comparison with the huge mass of what remains unchanged. On the other hand, the great demographic revolution in the West, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, has revealed to us considerable possibilities of change in structures hitherto believed to be invariable because they were biological. … I accordingly looked back into our past, to find out whether the idea of the family had not been born comparatively recently, at a time when the family had freed itself from both biology and law to become a value, a theme of expression, an occasion of emotion. 5 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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