Planning to Play Cricket

Abstract

This article presents the data of an ethnographic case study of a non-governmental organisation’s development project in northern India, the creation of Children’s Committees for Village Development (CCVDs). Through this case study, we can examine how children are crafted into a child public that is constituted by global development ideologies and moulded by local social structures. CCVD tasks can be recognised as a form of ‘work’, with specific activities related to citizenship practices. A focus on the tasks in which the children are engaged illustrates the specific practices through which transnational development organisations contribute to expectations about national citizenship in India. While these practices are informed by transnational ideologies, local social relations shape the children’s implementation and adult reception of these ideologies. Understanding citizenship activities as work practices, highlights the role that the ascription of value to children’s work plays in this development process.

Keywords

Children children’s rights citizenship India labour

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso .

Baptiste, E. 2002. A Nation Deferred: Language, Ethnicity and the Reproduction of Social Inequalities in Mauritian Primary Schools. PhD thesis, Johns Hopkins University .

Dewey, J. 1902. The School as Social Center , The Elementary School Teacher, 3(2): 73–86 .

Dunn, E. 2004. Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press .

Durkheim, E. 1973. Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education. New York: Free Press .

Fernandes, L. 1997. Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press .

Fewkes, J.H. , and M.S. Bhat . 2001. Our Voices, Are You Listening? Children’s Committees for Village Development. New Delhi: Save the Children, UK .

Fisher, W.F. 1997. Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices , Annual Review of Anthropology, 26: 439–64 .

Government of India. 2001. Census of India, 2001. New Delhi: Office of the Registrar General, Government of India .

10.

Hall, K. 2004. The ethnography of Imagined Communities: The Cultural Production of Sikh Ethnicity in Britain , Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 595: 108–21 .

11.

International Labour Organization (ILO). 2008. Report III, Child Labour Statistics. Geneva: International Labour Organization International Conference of Labour Statisticians .

12.

International Labour Organization (ILO). 2009. Assessing the Gender Gap: Evidence from SIMPOC Surveys. Geneva: International Labour Organization, International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) .

13.

Kaplan, D. 2000. The Darker Side of the “Original Affluent Society” , Journal of Anthropological Research, 56(3): 301–24 .

14.

Kurian, R. 1998. Tamil Women on Sri Lankan Plantations: Labour Control and Patriarchy, in S. Jain and R. Reddock (eds) Women Plantation Workers, New York: Berg , pp. 67–89.

15.

LeCompte, M. 1978. Learning to Work: The Hidden Curriculum of the Classroom , Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 9(1): 22–37 .

16.

Lee, R.B. 1984. The Dobe!Kung. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc .

17.

Majumdar, S. 2002. Children for Change, India Together, available at http://www.indiatogether.org, accessed June 2007.

18.

McDuie-Ra, D. 2008. Between National Security and Ethno-Nationalism: The Regional Politics of Development in Northeast India , Journal of South Asian Development, 3(2): 185–210 .

19.

Nieuwenhuys, O. 1996. The Paradox of Child Labor and Anthropology , Annual Review of Anthropology, 25: 237–51 .

20.

O’Kane, C. 2002. Marginalized Children as Social Actors for Social Justice in South Asia , British Journal of Social Work, 32: 697–710 .

21.

Ortiz, S. 2002. Laboring in the Factories and in the Fields , Annual Review of Anthropology, 31: 395–417 .

22.

Reed-Danahay, D. 1987. Farm Children at School: Educational Strategies in Rural France , Anthropological Quarterly, 60(2): 83–9 .

23.

Rosen, D. 2005. Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press .

24.

UN General Assembly. 1995. United Nations Convention on Rights of the Child, available at http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/crc.htm, accessed March 2010.

25.

UNICEF. 2007. Life Skills: United Nation’s Children’s Fund .

26.

Weissner, P. 1982. Reciprocity and Social Influences on !Kung San Economics, in E. Leacock and R. Lee (eds), Politics and History in Band Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , pp. 61–84.

27.

Wong, Yuk-Lin Renita . 2004. When East Meets West: Nation, Colony, and Hong Kong Women’s subjectivities in gender and China development , Modern China, 30(2): 259–92 .