Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This article takes its point of departure in babies’ engagements with socks and seeks to explore (1) how material culture matters in babies’ everyday lives and (2) how we can understand material culture through attending to babies’ own practices, that is, babies’ culture. The ongoingness, sensoriality and movement of material culture are highlighted, and the article concludes that re-thinking material culture through babies’ engagements with socks means shifting the focus away from objects’ established meaning and towards the materials of those objects.

Keywords

Babies babies’ culture material culture movement sensoriality

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Alderson

(2005) The participation rights of premature babies. International Journal of Children’s Rights 13: 31–50.

Alderson

(2008) Young Children’s Rights: Exploring Beliefs, Principles and Practice. London: Jessica Kingsley.

Bárány

A-S

(2008) Babydrama. Gothenburg: Kabusa Böcker.

Brinch

(2018) Growing Sideways. Stockholm: Stockholm University.

Brownlie

Leith

(2011) Social bundles: Thinking through the infant body. Childhood 18(2): 196–210.

Edvardsson

Street

(2007) Sense or no-sense: The nurse as embodied ethnographer. International Journal of Nursing Practice 13: 24–32.

Gottlieb

(2000) Where have all the babies gone? Toward an anthropology of infants (and their caretakers). Anthropological Quarterly 73(3): 121–132.

Gottlieb

(2004) The Afterlife Is Where We Come from: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Haraway

(2015) Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making kin. Environmental Humanities 6(1): 159–165.

10.

Hecht

(2012) Infancy and Ethnography. Oxford Bibliographies. Available at: http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791231/obo-9780199791231-0020.xml?rskey=El0YKE&result=4&q=babies#firstMatch (accessed 10 September 2015).

11.

Helander

(2014) Introduktion [Introduction] (Special Issue Barnkultur [Child culture]). Locus 1: 3–4.

12.

Horton

Kraftl

(2006) Not just growing up, but going on: Materials, spacings, bodies, situations. Children’s Geographies 4(3): 259–227.

13.

Ingold

(2011a) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge.

14.

Ingold

(2011b) Introduction. In: Ingold

(ed.) Redrawing Anthropology: Materials, Movements, Lines. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 1–20.

15.

Ingold

(2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge.

16.

Landzelius

(2001) Charged artifacts and the detonation of liminality: Teddy-bear diplomacy in the newborn incubator machine. Journal of Material Culture 6(3): 323–344.

17.

Layne

(2000) ‘He was a real baby with baby things’: A material culture analysis of personhood, parenthood and pregnancy loss. Journal of Material Culture 5(3): 321–345.

18.

Lupton

(2012) Configuring maternal, preborn and infant embodiment. Sydney Health & Society Group Working Paper no. 2. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2123/8363.

19.

Lupton

(2013a) Infant embodiment and interembodiment: A review of sociocultural perspectives. Childhood 20(1): 37–50.

20.

Lupton

(2013b) Infants and/as others. In: Relational consumption: Beyond individuals and choices workshop, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, 16 August.

21.

McNamee

Seymore

(2012) Towards a sociology of 10–12 year olds? Emerging methodological issues in the ‘new’ social studies of childhood. Childhood 20(2): 156–168.

22.

MacRae

Hackett

Holmes

, et al. (2018) Vibrancy, repetition and movement: Posthuman theories for reconceptualising young children in museums. Children’s Geographies 16(5): 503–515.

23.

Miller

(2010) Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press.

24.

Molin

(2010) Baby på bibblan. Inspirationsbok för bibliotek och öppen förskola. Lund: BTJ Förlag.

25.

Nadesan

(2002) Engineering the entrepreneurial infant: Brain science, infant development toys, and governmentality. Cultural Studies 16(3): 401–432.

26.

Osten

(2009) Babydrama. Stockholm: Dramatiska Institutet.

27.

Oswell

(2013) The Agency of Children: From Family to Global Human Rights. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

28.

Pink

(2015) Doing Sensory Ethnography, 2nd edn. London: SAGE.

29.

Rautio

(2013) Children who carry stones in their pockets: On autotelic material practices in everyday life. Children’s Geographies 11(4): 394–408.

30.

Schneider

(ed.) (2009) Theatre for Early Years: Research in Performing Arts for Children from Birth to Three. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.

31.

Sparrman

(2011) The social aesthetics of children’s culture. Locus 3: 25–44.

32.

Sparrman

Samuelsson

Lindgren

A-L

, et al. (2016) The ontological practices of child culture. Childhood 23(2): 255–271.

33.

Thorne

(2008) Editorial: What’s an age name? Childhood 15(4): 435–439.

Culture by babies: Imagining everyday material culture through babies’ engagements with socks

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References