Margaret Mead: Early childhood and local expertise in Indonesia

Abstract

Margaret Mead shaped the field of childhood studies in anthropology in the early 20th century. One of her concerns was the challenge posed to the continuity of childcare from rapid social change in the 1940s and 1960s in the United States. Her interest in the contrast between slowly changing homogenous cultures and those undergoing rapid change developed into a one between independent and interdependent training of children. Yet, Mead was much more concerned with the social institutions that support continuity in enculturation than a binary contrast. Mead’s own expertise and her attention to the local expertise of women and mothers is juxtaposed with recent scholarly work on the production of expertise as a form of knowledge. Interest in local forms of women’s knowledge associated with ethnomethodology and feminist standpoint theory seems to have gone missing. Dramatic social change in Indonesia since the late 1990s has corresponded with a realignment of expertise in the era of democratic reform, highlighting the tension between local and globalized forms of knowledge around early childhood education and care (ECEC). Based on long-term ethnographic research in central Java, I argue that existing forms of governmentality offer the possibility for recognizing and redistributing the local expertise of neighborhood women and mothers as a balance to globalized programs for ECEC.

The Trouble with expertise

I last conducted active fieldwork research in Indonesia more than a decade ago. My goal then had been to understand contemporary family and kinship relations as an extension of my earlier work on the role of women in lower-class kampung communities in Yogyakarta, Central Java (2006; 2013). This new project had been shaped by several momentous changes in Indonesia. The destabilizing effects of the Asian financial crisis and the end of Suharto’s 32-year rule in 1997 as the country shifted to democracy were metaphors of earthshaking change. But then in 2004, actual tectonic shifts produced a tsunami of record-breaking strength in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Aceh, only to be followed in 2006 by an enormously destructive earthquake in central Java that devastated large parts of Yogyakarta city and the kampung neighborhood where my work had been focused originally.

In this landscape that was being reshaped physically, economically, politically, and socially, there were competing forms of expert opinion on what should happen next. In the context of my own research, expert opinion on child welfare and child development demonstrated the reworking of an old tension between local and globalized approaches. These contests were part of a larger realignment of the infrastructure for social welfare and education taking place in Indonesia. As I have described elsewhere (2017), this period saw the voicing of dissident and anti-colonial forms of local knowledge and expertise by Indonesian activists and educators even as the force of global disaster governance and privatized neoliberal reforms flowed across the country like the surge of tsunami waters that swept across Aceh. Educators, administrators, child advocates, and educational entrepreneurs offered programs, some shaped by the for-profit early childhood industry and some shaped by a desire for a turn to locally relevant forms of cultural knowledge.

As it happens, the infrastructural remains of the New Order’s forms of governmentality and governance were not entirely swept away. Indeed, in many cases the remaining skeletons of these structures were re-purposed again for the delivery of social welfare, much of it community-based and staffed by women (see Newberry, 2018). Even so, a space had been opened for reform and reformism in this period of tumult and realignment that offered the chance to reconsider what counted as expert knowledge.

Expert, authoritative knowledge is central to studies of the child, childhood, and early childhood education. Such knowledge has not only functioned to establish these disciplines, but it still constitutes the goal of much of the research conducted in these areas of study. Within anthropology, there has been sustained critique of the making and use of expert knowledge (Holmes and Marcus, 2005; Ong and Collier, 2005; Riles, 2004; Strathern, 2018) underpinned by the discipline’s foundational attention to local knowledge (Geertz, 1983). In Indonesia in the early 2000s, the mutually constituting tension between local cultural expertise and global forms of knowledge was being recapitulated through the organization of early childhood education and care (ECEC) programming. The effects of this organizing reached not just to for-profit and government programs for early childhood education and care. It included the development of university training programs as well, along with the development of professional organizations and the proliferation of guidelines on child development and appropriate educational practices. There is also a growing literature by Indonesian scholars on these programs (e.g., Adriany, 2022; Formen et al., 2021; Pangastuti, 2023; Yulindrasari and Adriany, 2023).

Because of my research on changes in early childhood and its care in this period, I am now called upon to speak as an expert on ECEC in Indonesia. I am tempted to refuse these requests to act as a culture expert. Not only has it been a long time since I was engaged in ethnographic research there, I am not Indonesian. Ethnographic refusals and their implications for research have been taken up in recent years (McGranahan, 2016; Simpson, 2017; Tuck and Yang, 2014). In my own recent work in Blackfoot Territory, I have considered the effects of the refusal to act as culture experts by young Indigenous people (Newberry in press). My argument is that refusals to act as expert can redistribute the making of such knowledge in ways that can be consistent with decolonizing methodologies that emphasize relationality (Ahenakew, 2016; Cisneros, 2018; Kovach, 2021; Smith, 1999). Even so, I am recognized as an “expert,” and frankly, by Indonesian scholars themselves, many of whom are young, and many of whom are women. My own “expertise” supports their own it seems. Here, I use this uncomfortable position to consider a much more recognized anthropologist: Margaret Mead, perhaps the most famous anthropologist to speak as a culture expert on childhood (Margaret, 2017).

In the following, I develop a set of ideas originally presented at SEAMEO-CCEP (Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization, Regional Centre for Early Childhood Care Education and Parenting, https://www.seameo.ceccep.org/) in Bandung, Indonesia. This talk was meant to draw upon my expertise to help local ECEC educators with the ongoing work of balancing global, national, and provincial standards for ECEC with the difficulties of engaging local parents effectively in these changes. It was the delighted response to my depiction of a particular Javanese child rearing value that was so striking. Ultimately, I found myself, the outside expert, exhorting them to acknowledge their own expertise—and surprisingly, the forms of governmentality that have been built upon it.

The response to the talk encouraged me to return here to a contrast I had highlighted in the talk between forms of enculturation and child rearing that foster interdependence and those that encourage independence. I associated this with Margaret Mead and early work on culture and personality within anthropology. This contrast is one that has been elaborated in the psychological and medical anthropology literatures and in their overlap with child development (Ahn, 2010; Harb and Smith, 2008; Kusserow, 1999; Leis and Hollos, 1995; Lindholm, 1997; Markus and Kitayama, 1994), although such binaries have fallen out of favor because of their overly generalized and universalizing effects. Yet, Mead had little hesitation in offering descriptions of differing patterns based on cross-cultural research, including in her public anthropology. Despite contemporary concern with such over-reach, perhaps especially considering the current attention to a decolonizing and anti-colonial anthropology, Mead’s contrast resonated with my audience in Bandung. I think there are two reasons for this, reasons that warrant a look again at Mead’s work.

First, Mead acknowledged the importance of culturally relevant differences in child rearing. Like the others in the Boasian tradition, Mead focused on enculturation as a psychosocial process by which children become not just adults but culturally competent humans (Mead, 1963). This distinction goes beyond developmentally appropriate practices to recognize the effects for the social reproduction of cultural groups through their child rearing practices. That is to say, culturally relevant forms of child rearing reproduce cultural groups. Although a commonplace within anthropology, the assertion of the value and importance of these cultural differences takes on more significance in the face of globalizing discourses on universal values in child development (Burman, 2007; Cannella and Viruru, 2004; Viruru, 2001), including those that have entered Indonesia so forcefully since the turn of the 20th century. Second, and equally important, Mead acknowledged and endorsed local knowledge as expertise, perhaps especially that of women as mothers. In Mead’s public anthropology, particularly her attention to changing values in the US in the 1960s, she consistently foregrounded the importance of speaking to women about parenting and family life.

Following a brief consideration of Mead’s work as a culture expert on childhood and childrearing, I turn to the example of childrearing practice in Indonesia, specifically Java, that resonated strongly with the Bandung audience to contemplate the contributions of ethnomethodology and feminist standpoint theory in understanding and challenging expertise. Drawing this consideration of expertise in ECEC in Indonesia to a close, I suggest that the longstanding forms of governmentality for the delivery of social welfare offer productive possibilities for recognizing and redistributing local expertise. The realignment and redistribution of expertise at this time in Indonesia underscores Mead’s attention to changing forms of expertise and the importance of supports for enculturation in the negotiation between local and global forms of ECEC.

Margaret Mead as a culture expert

Margaret Mead was at one time the most famous cultural anthropologist in the world, and her career was defined by the sharing of her expertise as a public anthropologist. The character of her expertise and how she used it is what I attend to here, with a focus on her early contributions to the development of an anthropology of childhood and her later move to share her expertise with American women at a time when motherhood, parenting, and childhood were undergoing profound change.

Margaret Mead is known not only for her groundbreaking book Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928 and for the controversies around it, but as an example of the possibilities of a public anthropology. Her contributions to the development of the anthropology of children and childhood receive less attention. In the renaissance of interest in the study of childhood in anthropology, the work of Scheper-Hughes and Sargent (1999) and Stephens (1995) serve as markers of a rising concern for the rights and lives of children in the period between the International Year of the Child in 1979 and the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990. While Mead receives a passing nod in Scheper-Hughes and Sargent’s introduction to Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood, she is not mentioned at all in Stephen’s introduction to Children and the Politics of Culture. Perhaps this is not surprising as the return to childhood in anthropology in 1990s was marked by more contemporary concerns with power, discourse, and the globalizing effects of capitalism in the late twentieth century. Still, it is noteworthy that in 1954 Mead proclaimed that “children are newcomers as a subject of literature, newcomers in the study of human physiology and anatomy, newcomers in the social sciences” (1955: 3).

Children, childhood, and family were central to Mead’s work in New Guinea (Growing up in New Guinea, Mead, 1930) and in Bali (Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis, Bateson and Mead, 1942). These publications were the precursors to the 1955 volume Childhood in Contemporary Cultures she co-edited with Martha Wolfenstein in which she heralded children as newcomers in scholarship. Her work at this time drew on the disciplinary confluence of “three fields: psychology, particularly psychoanalysis, child development research, and cultural anthropology” (1955: 4). Her grounding in the biological was likely another reason she was neglected in the return to childhood studies in the 1990s as anthropology and other sociological disciplines moved toward constructivist approaches. Yet it is worth noting that her attention to the interplay of culture and biology now aligns with recent turns to the new feminist materialism (Grosz, 2004). For Mead, the universality of human biology was the basis for her comparative work.

Because of these recurrent biological similarities—of growth, of parent-child relationships, of needs and fears, and resonances—it is possible to compare childhood in one society with childhood in another. The common elements, the uniformities, are the basis of the comparisons (1955: 7).

Out of this root grew Mead’s interest in identifying the contrast between child development and personality in “homogeneous, slowly changing culture[s]” and situations of rapid change, such as the beginning in the early 20th America with its wave of immigration and then the effects of two world wars. As she described in the 1955 volume:

In the present social ferment, when we live in a world in which peoples jostle one another in the news, in the corridors of the United Nations, as students in universities all over the world … it is inevitable that the whole problem of how childhood is to be conceptualized, how studied, how utilized in cultural change, should become a focus of controversy (1955:3).

The contrast to which she was drawing attention was the one identified by Ruth Benedict in a 1938 article reprinted in the co-edited volume (Mead and Wolfenstein, 1955). There Benedict drew out a contrast between the effects of continuity versus discontinuity in the raising of children. Before child and youth scholars started using WEIRD (western, education, industrialized, rich, democratic) societies to contrast the “developed” minority world with the global majority, Mead and Benedict were working on a contrast between slow and rapid change and between continuous and discontinuous patterns of enculturation.

In the early 20th century, Mead and Benedict both were working at the interface of psychology and culture with an interest in understanding the effect of change. Their focus was not just the effects of enculturation and childrearing but also the importance of social institutions that facilitate continuity in some societies and that mediate discontinuity in others (Mead, 1928, 1969, 1983; Benedict, 1955). Mead particularly was interested in the effects of rapid change on such institutions, an interest she continued for some time. Yet, this focus on social institutions and the importance of enculturation seems to have been lost in subsequent work on culture and psychology, where a scholarly thread emerged around the contrast between egocentric and sociocentric selves.

Anthropologists have noted two types of models of the self: the more interdependent, or “sociocentric,” way of experiencing the self (e.g., in terms of one’s social role, the group, community, land, family or tribe, deities, predecessors, or posterity) and the more individualistic, psychologized, independent ego structure of the “West” (also sometimes referred to as the modern, industrial, or Euro-American self) (Kusserow, 1999: 541).

Kusserow (1999) provides a useful review and critique of this bipolar characterization of the self and the large literature associated with it. The colonizing effects of such dichotomies are clear, as is the erasure of important differences within societies that others have noted (Ahn, 2010; Harb and Smith, 2008; Lindholm, 1997). Yet, this contrast spoke to the audience in Bandung.

Here, I want to mark that the development of this binary does not adequately capture the early work of Mead and Benedict, who did not propose a binary, but rather a continuum of child rearing practices anchored in how and whether a society’s institutions support a process of maturation that emphasizes continuity or that works to tamp down the effects of discontinuity. For Mead, it was rapid cultural change that can upend and redirect such patterns. She described changes in American child rearing practices to deal with the “terrific cultural strain, especially during childhood,” resulting from immigration and generational change in the early 20^th century.

Conspicuous among these socially self-corrective devices are: (1) emphasis on a new type of child rearing which takes “self-demand” (the child’s own individual physiological rhythm) as the framework for habit formation; (2) the progressive education movement with its philosophy of letting the child strike its own pace; and (3) types of social case work and psychiatry which stress the need for helping the individual work out his own problems and achieve a new integration (1947: 645).

Mead was not proposing a bipolar dichotomy between the egocentric and sociocentric self, but rather a move toward child rearing focused on the child as an individual to deal with the strain of change.

A century later in Indonesia, globalized forms of early childhood education and care were reinforcing longstanding worries about the risks of individualism at odds with local values of community (Adriany and Newberry, 2022). Here, I focus on Mead’s attention to culture change not only to challenge the overly dichotomized emphasis on independence training to produce egocentric selves and dependence training to produce interdependent selves that has characterized some approaches, but to foreground how such change can likewise upend and reorganize the tension between global and local childhoods (Hanson et al., 2018). Resisting the re-inscription of a dichotomy between the majority and minority world through a juxtaposition between global and local knowledge and research on childhoods here, we can see instead the negotiation of change as a site for understanding how these boundaries are drawn, reproduced, and refused, as Mead did.

Mead’s attention to the social institutions that support continuity in child rearing was evident in her columns, co-authored with her longtime partner Rhoda Métraux, in the American magazine Redbook between 1962 and 1978. These columns were written to reach a wide public, primarily women, and they were a marker of the public esteem in which Mead was held. Paul Shankman (2018) who has written extensively on Mead takes up her legacy as a public anthropologist through the columns. He describes her as out-of-step with the emerging feminism of the 1960s, with her stance on keeping sex within marriage and the risk of college education to women’s traditional roles as wife and mother. In fact, Betty Friedan in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique specifically takes Mead to task and notes the disconnect between her own life and what she was advocating in the pages of Redbook.

Yet, a different reading of Mead is available if we connect her early concern with the effects of culture change in the 1940s to the changes taking place in North America in 1960s. Her advocacy for the social infrastructure to support continuity of care for children as women entered the work force was apparent. As she writes, “So a basic question is how can we develop institutions that will permit mothers who have to work to establish sufficient continuity of care for their children” (1970: 3). She advocated, not for women to stay away from careers, but instead for businesses to provide nurseries or staggered hours, so they could breastfeed. As Shankman describes, Mead’s opinions changed across the 1970s in tune with changes in work and family life in America. But I argue that Mead’s concerns remained the anthropologist’s: what social institutions are needed to support continuity in care? She proposed the following in a 1970 Manpower article, for example:

We have to encourage the kind of housing and the kind of social expectation that keep grandmothers and grandfathers nearby. We have to emphasize stability of neighborhood association over the appeal of moving the household, with or without a father, to a cheaper place near the mother’s job. Stable residence means a known neighborhood, habitual interchange of baby sitting and baby tending among neighbors (1970: 6).

What is striking here is how this aligns with longstanding progressive hopes in North America, including in urban planning and design (see, for example, Hayden, 1981), but also the lived reality of many Indonesians, perhaps especially those living in lower-class kampung neighborhoods.

Margaret Mead consistently foregrounded the role of social institutions, including family and school, in providing continuity of care, so that in fact, the children develop trust to tolerate and survive change. Such continuity of care, she writes, “can turn a child into a full human being, capable of growth” (1970: 5).

Recognizing local expertise

Science studies and ethnographies of expertise have, at least since Latour and Woolgar (1986), focused on the culture of elite knowledge production in clinics (Ferzacca, 2000; Mol, 2009), financial firms (Riles, 2004; Rudnyckyj, 2019), and stock exchanges (Zaloom, 2003). Perhaps unsurprisingly, little of this work on knowledge production has attended to historically feminized forms of expertise generated in spaces for education and childcare. Indeed, there appears to be a disconnect between ethnographic approaches to elite knowledge production and older contributions from ethnomethodology and feminist standpoint theory (Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984; Smith, 1992; Newberry in press). Yet, speaking to a room full of early childhood educators and students of ECEC in Bandung, I found myself arguing for acknowledgment of their own standpoint and the expertise generated from it rather than what they had hoped I would offer. To show how moments of change can open the space for this redirection of expertise, I consider here as I did then, a Javanese value that I had observed during ethnographic fieldwork in Yogyakarta, one described by others as well.

Ward Keeler in his 1987 Javanese Shadow Play, Javanese Selves describes the effect of the arrival of a new child on older siblings. Keeler’s ethnography was based on months of ethnographic work in central Java in the 1970s when he was researching Javanese wayang, or shadow puppetry. His work included a focus on the relationships between power, language, and self. In his chapter on family relations, he identified the significance of the meanings of learning ngalah as a child matures. I too had observed this practice in dealing with sibling conflict in my own fieldwork. Keeler noted that the root of ngalah is kalah, “to be defeated,” and he suggested that ngalah suggests a “decision on the part of a stronger or more righteous party to yield voluntarily to another” (Keeler, 1987: 62). He described how in a conflict between an older and younger child, the older child is expected to defer to the young sibling’s wishes without complaint, that is to accept being defeated. While he noted that an American child might expect fairness in the settlement of a dispute with a young child, a Javanese parent “invariably blames the older child if there is a conflict of wills” (62). Hildred Geertz in her earlier work, noted the same expectation that older siblings are “expected to surrender whatever they have to him” (1961: 107).

Keeler’s use of a contrast of egalitarian fairness in the American case with a Javanese emphasis on deferral to the younger and weaker can be mapped onto the contrast between independence and interdependence training and by extension to the enculturation of egocentric versus sociocentric selves. And indeed, this is a contrast I have used both in teaching and in my Bandung lecture. Given what was described in previous sections here, the implication of a dichotomy between the minority and majority worlds in the kinds of selves produced through child rearing should give us pause, as should reading too much into one specific practice without the fuller context. While both Keeler and Geertz do develop this context in their respective works, in my lecture I offered only this example to provide a broad contrast to consider the impact of enculturation in child rearing on the kinds of societies that are reproduced.

And yet, my description of the learning ngalah resonated strongly with a group of Indonesian students and educators. Many in the audience were not in fact Javanese but instead Sundanese, another cultural grouping on the island of Java. Even so, my description of learning to attend to the needs of others as central to local child rearing was recognized. It is worth reiterating that those in the audience included the staff of SEAMO-CECCEP, along with ECEC students and those actively involved in improving the delivery of early childhood programming. They represented the front line of work to enact global dictates on ECEC that come from sources as various as the World Bank, ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), and Indonesian national and provincial governments. They are meant to be the vanguard of change in the implementation of enhanced interventions to improve the education and care of the very young through an infrastructure for programming delivery that is both new and old at once. That is, not only have new programs for early childhood been developed, but older community welfare programs have also been harnessed to do this work (Newberry, 2010; 2017a). The audience was made up of people particularly attuned to the tensions between programs developed globally and the needs of local families and communities.

In this context, their response to my attention to a local cultural practice can be read as frustration with the lack of alignment with their own values in policies and program originating elsewhere. Yet, a series of contradictions arise from their endorsement of my cultural expertise. I was merely repeating back to them their own cultural values. Their deferral to my outside expertise indexes the continuing colonial logic of valuing external expertise over local knowledge. This contradiction was only compounded when I proposed that they make use of the existing forms of governmentality that have characterized the modern Indonesian state since Independence. That is, when audience members asked how to engage with locals about ECEC and the importance of matching it with local values to achieve their goals, I reminded them of the existing organization of local governance in Indonesia, including the infrastructure for using women’s community labor. This infrastructure includes the program known as PKK for Pembinaan Kesejehateraan Keluarga, known as the Family Welfare Movement or Support for the Prosperous Family as I have translated it. The contradiction for me was that I had begun my scholarly career critiquing these very forms of governmentality.

Feminist standpoint theory and the local expertise of the Indonesian Ibu

As suggested earlier, scholarly attention to the production of expertise often neglects attention to ethnomethodology and feminist standpoint theory. These earlier sociological approaches to the accounts people make of their lives (Garfinkel, 1967; Goffman, 1959) were extended and complicated through attention to the limitations and affordances in standpoints shaped by gender and later intersected by race and gender identity (Crenshaw, 2017; King, 1999; Smith, 1992). Clifford Geertz ’s (1983, 1961) contrast of local knowledge with universal knowledge adds another dimension to this set of ideas, making it worthwhile to notice how these various approaches do and do not intersect.

Much of the recent work on the cultural shaping of expert knowledge owes a debt to Latour’s interest in science studies and the interplay between authority and the production of knowledge—scientific, medical, and financial—as a form of power. Ethnomethodological approaches to knowledge recognize that it is not just experts who generate accounts of the world but also that the contingent and positioned knowledge of those without power produce accounts worthy of study. Such local accounts are the particular concern of anthropologists, according to Clifford Geertz (1983). In his attention to the significance of local knowledge, Geertz challenged any clear opposition to universalizing forms of knowledge. As he says:

Thus the opposition if we must have one … is not one between “local” knowledge and “universal,” but between one sort of local knowledge (say, neurology) and another (say, ethnography) (1992: 129).

It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve further into these literatures. And I do not sketch them here to identify -- yet again -- the effects of globalizing forms of expert knowledge through the promotion of ECEC programs and policies on local communities. Instead, it is useful to identify how forms of local knowledge that have been used as forms of governmentality may be directed to other ends.

In my initial research in the 1990s, I considered the role of PKK in the management and delivery of social welfare in lower class, urban kampung neighborhoods in central Java (Newberry, 2006, 2013). The structure of this organization of adult women served to mobilize them in small, local neighborhood groupings to support improved maternal and child health. The goals of PKK echoed many of those emphasized by Gerwani, an Independence-era organization devoted to women. Like others (Wieringa, 1993; Suryakusuma, 1991), I noted the depoliticization involved in changing an activist movement in support of independence to a form of governmentality by the modernizing New Order government. Ferguson (1990) has described the anti-politics of development work, and Tania Li has considered this for parts of Indonesia (2007). At the time of my work, I had drawn from the work of Nico Schulte Nordholt (1987) who described then a move to capture early organizing on behalf of the poor by the New Order government in the mid-20th century. Then in the late 20th century, a surge of governmentalization through non-profits aligned with deepening neoliberalism in Indonesia. Strikingly, in the era of democratic reform in Indonesia some of these forms of governmentality used by the New Order government were redirected toward the needs for democratization (Newberry, 2010).

Like Schulte Nordholt, I am interested in how an organization’s infrastructure can be maintained but redirected to other ends. This happened with programs like PKK which became a modality for new ECEC programs such PKK PAUD, with PAUD or Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini, meaning education of the young child. I return here to the question of the re-use of infrastructural forms of organization (Newberry, 2018) to draw out another implication: PKK as an organization of adult women to support community welfare was designed to draw upon the local knowledge of women as neighbors. Briefly, PKK was organized to mimic local forms of government that begin in very small clusters of neighboring households and scaffold up through the civil service to reach the national level. The use of small-scale neighborhood or village units to deal with local issues cooperatively has been argued to characterize not just Indonesia and Southeast Asia, but in fact greater Asia (Bestor, 1989; J. Sullivan, 1992; Kasza, 1995; Garon, 1997). I have argued that this community form is a potent form of governmentality in service to various state regimes (Newberry, 2010; 2017a; 2017b). Regardless of the origins of this form of neighborly cooperation and mutual support, its infrastructural outlines endure.

That PKK functions within this infrastructure has meant its denigration by some, and its use by others. Described as quasi-public, PKK gathers local women to work on behalf of their community but also to respond to government initiatives, whether they be about health, education, or other public services—and now ECEC. What I want to highlight here is that PKK, like Gerwani before it, depends on the local knowledge of women to be effective. That is, it draws not just on the labor of women but on their knowledge of their families and their communities. In my original work on PKK, I noted how local women in the neighborhood at the center of my research made fun of this government program. And yet, repeatedly they used it to accomplish ends they saw as needful, whether religious observance or support for ailing neighbors. They made practical use of the organization of PKK to be accountable to their neighbors.

The argument I am building here is that PKK, including in its recent use to deliver ECEC programs, has made use of the local expertise of Indonesian women. And for that reason, this structure also offers the possibility to amplify and legitimate the standpoint of local women in the current reform and delivery of global ECEC policies. After all, PKK and other forms of local organization are keyed to the standpoint of those asked to look after their community. This was the answer I gave to those in attendance at the Bandung lecture when they asked how to get locals engaged. I pointed out to them that they had a ready mechanism for just such work. And indeed, others have noted this. My colleague Sri Marpinjun (Newberry and Marpinjun, 2018) has advocated explicitly for the use of PKK in improving access to early childhood programming. The complicated history of PKK accounts in part for the fact that it is not readily recognized as a vehicle for community dialogues about local child rearing values and its relationship to universalizing ECEC mandates.

Who is the Expert Here Anyway?

Margaret Mead was a public anthropologist who used her status and reputation to speak to a variety of audiences, but perhaps especially to women and mothers about the issues of family and child rearing in periods of tremendous social change, first in the 1940s and then in the 1960s. I have proposed here that Mead, along with Benedict, argued less for a dichotomy between societies that emphasize training children to be independent versus interdependent, although their work has supported that interpretation which maps all too easily onto a contrast between developed and under-developed countries. Mead and Benedict instead emphasized the importance of institutional arrangements for raising children in any society that support continuity in development. It is useful to repeat here Mead’s attention to the importance of stability. “Stable residence means a known neighborhood, habitual interchange of baby sitting and baby tending among neighbors” (1970: 6). This kind of neighborly cooperation as in institutional arrangement has been the basis for PKK PAUD programs offered to support ECEC in neighborhoods across Indonesia. PKK PAUD programs reinforce and extend the social institution of neighborly cooperation that has been a powerful form of governmentality in Indonesia across regimes, from colonial occupation through independence, the era of authoritarian modernization, and now in the democratic era.

Drawing again on the work of Mead, the period of social, political, and economic change at the turn of the 20^th century in Indonesia offered the chance for the reorganization of education, including the education of the very young, and the redirection of expertise. Local activists and educators both accepted and challenged the flood of global ECEC programs and priorities. As I’ve described elsewhere, there was a real interest in how to incorporate local cultural values in these programs (Newberry, 2017a). At the same time, PKK was again being used as the infrastructure for program delivery. Here I argue that it is possible to see this infrastructure as one anchored in the local knowledge and expertise of women and caregivers.

Perhaps it is odd that I needed to remind Indonesian educators and activists of this infrastructure, especially given that I am arguing that it was built on recognizing local expertise. Why did an outside expert need to make this point? The capture of local knowledge as a form of governmentality by various Indonesian governments is one reason. There are reasons to be skeptical about the limits of this ready-made, government-endorsed organization. The infrastructure of local governance reflected in PKK is so everyday that it is often overlooked, and the health of its functioning is quite variable. Still, where residents choose to use it, they can direct its organizational capacity to ends that they choose.

My argument here and to the audience in Bandung is that there are already institutional arrangements in place to reinforce the local expertise of women as mothers and neighbors and to support stability and continuity in childcare. Concerns have long been raised about the power of global discourses on childcare and ECEC to swamp local values. In Indonesia, it is possible to respond to that fear by recognizing the existing arrangements already anchored in the knowledge and expertise of locals, especially women as mothers, an approach that Margaret Mead would have endorsed.