Children's Culture, Children's Studies, and the EthnographicImaginary

Kenneth Kidd

Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 27, Number3, Fall 2002, pp. 146-155 (Article)

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Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 3, 2002

Children's Culture, Children's Studies, and theEthnographic Imaginaryby Kenneth Kidd

Within the last decade, and particularly in the lastseveral years, scholars of children's literature have seenexciting new work on "children's culture." New YorkUniversity Press alone has put out three representativeanthologies: The Children's Culture Reader, Generations ofYouth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-CenturyAmerica (both 1998), and Childhood in America (2000). Ob-viously the term "culture" means many things to manypeople. Like "discourse" and "ideology," "culture" is atonce a problematic and useful term. On the one hand, theculture idea is so generic or universal that it threatens tomean nothing at all, as some scholars have pointed out.Yet that is exactly why we like it. We rely on its vagueness.Its wide range of designation (alongside more specificmeanings) allows for the greatest possible expansion ofour critical efforts, such that "children's culture," as weare now imagining it, refers to music, film, television, toys,and other material goods, as well as to literature proper.Articles in the above volumes address (among other top-ics) the history of childhood, child-rearing practices, foodand nutrition, interactive technology and cyberspace,sports and athleticism, fan clubs, and beauty pageants. Theidea of children's culture allows us to claim greaterinterdisciplinarity and intellectual freedom.

"Children's studies" is usually articulated along thesame lines, appealing directly or indirectly to the conceit ofchildren's culture. The debate about children's studies andits alternate terms—among them "child studies" and "child-hood studies"—attests to the very success of an interdisci-plinary Zeitgeist. We would not be having this conversationwere there not already some consensus about the impor-tance of interdisciplinary, or at least extra-literary, scholar-ship. Of course, both children's culture (as a domain) andchildren's studies (as a practice) raise interesting questionsfor literary scholars. How are we to think about our workthese days? To what extent are we, as teachers and stu-dents of children's literature, already identifying as some-thing else? How will our relationship to a long-devalued,now revalued form of literature shift in the wake of a moregeneral appreciation of objects and practices long dis-dained by the defenders of legitimate culture? For so longchildren's literature wasn't taken seriously, and just as it'sbeing granted greater respect, the academy is turning tocultural and area studies, theory, and "everyday life."1 Willour emergent interest in children's culture be indulged atthe expense of the literary tradition we have worked sohard to champion?

No doubt scholars will continue to explore such ques-tions, and I want to make clear my enthusiasm about theshift away from a narrow vision of literature, criticism,and academic life. This is an exciting period, and children'sculture and children's studies make possible new projectsand perspectives. Even so, I'd like to suggest that aschildren's culture and children's studies gain popularity,we are not so much venturing into uncharted territory aswe are reshaping the academic field to meet current needs.The nomenclature may be different, but our practices arelargely the same, not despite differences in the materialwe study but indeed as is evidenced by those differences.That is, the very shift in focus from literature to cultureattests to the staying power and adaptability of analysisas a vocation, and of "culture" as an organizing field. Cul-ture may be a new thematic interest, but it has been thereall along in more diffuse form, securing the very place ofliterature.

I want to sound a cautionary note, not about the de-cline of literature, but about our current faith in culture,often too Utopian and ahistorical. To begin with, the cul-ture idea has been around for a while. And however muchwe benefit from its fungibility, the culture idea has an in-tellectual history that we can trace in and around anthro-pology, cultural studies, and the historiography of Englishstudies. Current formulations of children's studies appealto the culture idea ideologically and rhetorically but usu-ally without acknowledging that history. At least two di-mensions of the culture idea underwrite current criticalefforts. The first is the classic anthropological understand-ing of culture as, in E. B. Tylor's words, "that complexwhole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired byman as a member of society." That expansive definitionopens Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871), setting the stage notonly for anthropology but also for the humanities and so-cial sciences more generally. Culture was a positive termfor Tylor, the so-called father of anthropology; it meantsomething comprehensive, if not entirely comprehensible.By the 1920s, however, this sense of culture had yielded tothe cultural or comparative anthropology of Franz Boas,Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Central to culturalanthropology is ethnographic fieldwork, the close obser-vation of local cultures, often conducted to debunk claimsof universality. To this day, the holistic, more archetypalidea of culture persists alongside a variable, pluralistic,ethnographic sense of culture.2

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At the risk of gross oversimplification, I would ar-gue that these two anthropological modes of culture-thinkare residual in children's studies. This essay historicizesthe ever-morphing yet weirdly familiar idea of culture tosuggest that "children's culture" doesn't automaticallymean something new or progressive. A deeper under-standing of the culture idea will also help shed light onchildren's studies and debates about how that field shouldbe formed. Some scholars have been harshly critical ofpoststructuralist approaches to children's forms, arguingfor interdisciplinarity, practicality, and realism in the fa-miliar name of culture. In his introduction to The Children sCulture Reader, for instance, Henry Jenkins appeals to anunreconstructed idea of culture in order to indict wildtheory. Jenkins appeals repeatedly to "real children" toauthorize children's culture against an otherwise emptypoststructuralist mode of analysis. (Here I think ofWednesday's query in one of the Addams Family films:"[D]o your Girl Scout cookies have real Girl Scouts inthem?") In such declarations of new (inter)disciplinarity,culture gets no treatment as an evolving idea or cluster ofideas.3

As poststructuralist theory makes clear, appeals toreal children and the real world themselves derive fromanthropological and sociological methods of observationand research, and from the texts that such work gener-ates: case studies, field reports, statistical analyses, and soforth. Realism is never self-evident: it must be produced.While the holistic idea of culture apparently migrated toliterary study in the 1930s, ethnography did not really takeroot in the field of English until the advent of cultural stud-ies, beginning, perhaps, with the Birmingham Centre forContemporary Cultural Studies in the 1960s. With vary-ing degrees of emphasis, the ethnographic approach toculture also informs children's studies, for better and forworse. What I am calling the "ethnographic imaginary" isa descriptive rather than a prescriptive term. It refers tofield research with children and their materials, as well asthe symbolic repertoire of classic ethnography—the famil-iar language of observer and observed, the practices ofethnographic writing that estrange as much as bring closetheir subjects. Although allied with comparative anthro-pology, ethnographic work can also support essentialistor centrist understandings of culture.

I have in mind as a model Michèle Le Doeuff's term

"the philosophical imaginary." By this, she means not onlyphilosophy's repertoire of images and conceits, but alsoits claim to objectivity, its disavowal of literariness or sub-jectivity. An intellectual discipline's imaginary, she pro-poses, works to cope with—often to mask or disguise—problems posed by the theoretical enterprise. I'm similarlyinterested in the ethnographic imaginary of children'sstudies, as it claims objectivity, generates and recyclesimages and metaphors, and collaborates as well as

conflicts with a more holistic sense of culture.4 Some of

the fiercest critics of poststructuralist excess in children'sstudies put their faith not only in the idea of culture as "acomplex whole" but also in the ethnographic imaginary.Even so, it's unfair to imply that poststructuralist thinkersaren't also inspired by the ethnographic imaginary, par-ticularly since poststructuralism emphasizes the relativ-ity of culture(s). I thus address also the compatibilities ofpoststructuralism and the ethnographic imaginary.

My goal is to trace the origins and effects of the cul-ture idea in children's studies, not so that we can correctall our biases—that might not be possible or even desir-able—but so that we may better understand the currententhusiasm for culture as representing continuity as wellas innovation. Although this essay is deconstructive to anextent, I hope that a stronger sense of history anddisciplinarity will help alleviate the tension between post-structuralist and more traditionally humanist assessmentsof culture.

Literature and/as Culture

Children's literature, of course, has long been moreeclectic and interdisciplinary than other academic special-ties, perhaps necessarily so. Children's literature has of-ten meant children's culture, embracing not only a diversegroup of written texts but also oral narrative. Scholars inthe field have been writing about film and television forquite a while, even if film and media theory is a more re-cent arrival. Scholars of children's literature already knowquite a bit about children's work and children's play, draw-ing from both representation and direct personal experi-ence. Still, we've not paid much attention to the cultureidea's influence on our discipline.

Literature used to mean something similar to cul-ture. It did not signal, as it often does now, a limited bodyof texts, often traditional ones (a canon), but rather a set ofvalues, ideals, and traditions. There are different explana-tions for the resemblances between literature and culture,which are really variations on a larger theme of mutualinfluence. Scholars have persuasively shown that advo-cates of literature borrowed the anthropological idea ofculture in the early twentieth century, recognizing the ad-vantages of linking literature to that "complex whole" ofTylor's vision. At the same time, as other scholars haveemphasized, the late nineteenth-century anthropologicalidea of culture derives from a belletristic vision of litera-ture as holistic and ennobling. Belletristic criticism, a weirdmix of aesthetic appreciations and moral analyses of lit-erature, preceded and helped clarify the anthropologicalproject. So familiar was the language of culture to men ofletters that Frederic Harrison, Matthew Arnold's frequentantagonist, called the talk of culture "the silliest cant ofthe day," noting that such talk "sits well on a possessor of

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belles lettres" (qtd. in Guillory, "Literary Study" 26). JohnGuillory notes that culture and literature alike were ex-pected to be ambiguous and non-utilitarian, and that lit-erature especially "has been made to play a kind ofallegorical role in the development of the disciplines, asthe name of the principle antithetical to the veryscientificity governing discipline formation in the mod-ern university" ("Literary Study" 37).

English departments were founded in the last quar-ter of the nineteenth century, although most came intobeing later on. Previously, professors of oratory or rheto-ric or even classics had taught Shakespeare and sometimesthe British Romantic poets. The earliest literary scholarswere philologists, many of them trained in Germany. As anumber of scholars have shown working from differentangles, English studies has always been a nationalisticproject, inspired by European romanticism and nineteenth-century interest in native language and culture (recall herePerrault, the Brothers Grimm, and the great civilizingproject of folklore as traced by Jack Zipes). A comprehen-sive story of the rise of English has yet to be told, one thatbrings together domestic histories of the field with Marx-ist and post-colonial accounts of English abroad. In anycase, the study of literature has long been coterminous withthe study of culture.

It was the 1930s, claims Susan Hegeman, that wit-nessed the incorporation of the culture idea into literarystudies. Hegeman's book Patterns for America documentsthe rich exchanges between anthropology and literatureduring this period, alongside problematic assertions ofaesthetic superiority and the national psyche. AnthonyEasthope confirms that the study of literature, as advo-cated in the 1930s, demanded a separation of literaturefrom everything else. Culture was at once denigrated inthe form of the popular or the mass, and redeemed/re-written in the idiom of literature's organism, wholeness,and transformative power. F. R. Leavis, for instance, hatedpopular culture but tried to preserve the culture idea bydistinguishing between culture—known best as literature,art, and music—and civilization, the repository of every-thing trashy. For Leavis, civilization was the enemy, andculture the savior. "This golden time," writes Hegeman,"was the moment of high modernism, when the intellec-tual was seen to have operated as a critically distanced,but engaged, commentator on society" (170).

Raymond Williams effectively turned the tables onLeavis in his Culture and Society (1958). Taking a longerhistorical view, Williams also argues for culture's whole-ness, but a wholeness spanning industry and labor andclass formations, the whole sorry underbelly of capital-ism. Williams strategically appealed to the classic Anglo-American formulation of culture á la Tylor precisely tochallenge the Leavisite assumption that culture means onlyhigh culture. Culture and Society shows how the fantasy of

cultural wholeness was highly selective and served as adefense against modern industrial life.

Accompanying the disenchantment with holisticviews of literature and culture, though, was the sense thatcritical practice itself might be suspect, no matter its meth-odology or objects. Cultural studies calls into question allforms of symbolic activity, including its own claims to so-cial relevance. As Bruce Robbins points out, Williams' in-tervention in the scene of culture also showed how

"criticism" in the narrow disciplinary sense—the study of literary texts—could base its as-cent on the grandiose claim to be a kind ofself-appointed conscience of modern society.And it explains how this rise in the pretensionsof literary criticism could have taken place dur-ing a period when literature itself was beingrelegated to an increasingly marginal rolewithin the cultures of Britain and the U.S. Howcould literary criticism become the stagingground for social critique when literature itselfwas losing its social influence? It was preciselybecause literature was not central to society orrepresentative of its dominant trends that itcould serve as a condensation and epitome ofculture. (60-61)

Thus, cultural studies has had to acknowledge itsdebt to literary study and that strategy of estrangement,and to urge relevance along different lines. Cultural stud-ies has tried to bridge the gap between society and art, tochallenge academic elitism. But as critics point out, cul-tural studies has its own formalist and estranging tenden-cies. How can it not, as a mode of analysis that demandsat least some remove from the everyday?

It is not that literature is only lately losing its rel-evance, as opposed to cultural studies or children's stud-ies; rather, literature's relevance or cultural power has long(if not always) depended upon its remove from the publicsphere. If this is true, then we might think differently aboutthe current "crisis" of the humanities. Literature's estrange-ment from society is simply becoming more problematic,as competing forms of cultural capital—internet knowl-edge, for one—promise both cultural and economic legiti-macy. If students are now less invested in the humanities,it's probably because they know that the humanities aren'tas profitable as business or engineering, and that the cul-tural (compensatory) capital of literature is on the wane.

In Cultural Capital (1993), a brilliant account of lit-erature and its discontents across the centuries, JohnGuillory proposes that critical theory has become a supple-ment to literature, a form of cultural and linguistic capitalin its own right. He contends further that theory effects a"transference of transference," transforming the student's

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love for the teacher into the love of the teacher's subject ordiscourse (181-207). Theory thus becomes both a middle-class form of cultural capital and a mode of cultural trans-mission. For Guillory, whose debt to French sociologistPierre Bordieu is clear, theory is less a bold new intellec-tual adventure than another form of what Bordieu calls"distinction." Guillory does not address the culture ideaper se, but clearly culture is a sustaining link between lit-erature and theory (perhaps even a compromise of sortsbetween them). For Guillory, "cultural" is an adjectiverather than a noun, but we could easily reverse the terms:if literature is a form of cultural capital, as he holds, thenculture is also a form of literary capital, perhaps now morethan ever.

There is nothing especially natural about a career inEnglish. And disciplinary and methodological shifts arethe very stuff of intellectual life. Given these realities, it issurprising how many literary critics bemoan the declineof literature at the hands of culture. In his recent book TheFateful Question of Culture (1997), for example, Geoffrey H.Hartman argues that the adoption in anthropology of whatClifford Geertz called the "text analogy" has weakenedrather than refined our understanding of literature. "Af-ter a heady period," Hartman writes, "during which thesemiotic theory of culture drew every human activity intoits net, students and scholars of literature are no longersure what they profess" (2). But Hartman's own book quiteclearly illustrates how literary criticism profits by the "textanalogy." Not being sure of what we profess has its perks.How else could Hartman, an English professor (not ananthropologist), explore the fateful question of culture, andthrough such loving attention to Wordsworth? DenisDonoghue assures us in a blurb that Hartman is uniquelyqualified for that project in part because "he has read ev-erything," establishing a baseline for cultural knowledgethat echoes Tylor's faith in totality. Culture, it seems, hasgone literary, even if literature has vanished into culture.Hartman is not shy about playing anthropologist and so-cial critic, postulating that the culture idea keeps the hopeof embodiment alive, against the ghostliness of daily liv-ing. Given such assessments, it is odd that Hartman seeksas he does to recuperate literature, since clearly literature'sdisciplinary expansion made "fateful" the question(s) ofculture.

Again and again, critics concentrate on the failuresof culture as a concept rather than appreciating culture'sgenerative power (which depends on that "failure"). WhileHartman questions the excesses of cultural studies in or-der to redeem literature, Terry Eagleton, one of our sharp-est and most socially progressive critics, contends in hisown recent monograph The Idea of Culture (2000) that "weare trapped at the moment between disablingly wide anddiscomfortingly rigid notions of culture," that we need tomove beyond both (32). Is moving beyond either possible

or desirable, I wonder? "It is hard," writes Eagleton, "toresist the conclusion that the word 'culture' is both toobroad and too narrow to be greatly useful" (32). He is tak-ing his cue in part from anthropologists themselves, who havequestioned the viability of the culture idea. Adam Kuper, forinstance, concludes that "the more one considers the bestmodern work on culture by anthropologists, the more ad-visable it must appear to avoid the hyper-referential wordaltogether, and to talk more precisely of knowledge, or be-lief, or art, or technology, or tradition, or even of ideology"(x). In The Faded Mosaic, English professor ChristopherClausen likens the culture idea to a cult.5 But what most schol-

ars downplay is that literary criticism has always authorizeditself through/as culture-writing, even if (precisely as) theterms of culture have changed.6

Disciplining Children's Studies

What does all this mean for children's studies? Itmeans, first of all, that we ought to study the dialecticalrelationship of English and anthropology. We should alsopay more attention to the history of English studies. Thesefields show that culture is far from a new idea in our dis-cipline. I am not arguing that we should not aspire to ide-als of wholeness or interdisciplinarity; rather, we need toremember that the idea of culture has long enabled theprofessing of literature.

In his recent essay "The Future of the Profession,"Jerry Griswold urges scholars of children's literature topublish and network outside our field, so that we do notwind up "only talking to ourselves and our protégés" (237).He cites Jack Zipes's recent book Sticks and Stones: TheTroublesome Success of Children's Literature from SlovenlyPeter to Harry Potter, remarking that Zipes, too, is wor-ried about the profession's narcissism, if from a differentangle. At first glance, then, Griswold seems to urge a widervision, at least within the field of English. Griswold offersfive measured recommendations for sustaining the enter-prise of children's literature. His final suggestion, whichhe knows will be controversial, is that we make more care-ful distinctions between children's literature and"children's reading." Quick to acknowledge how easilysuch distinctions might seem reactionary, he nonethelessfeels that children's literature should not be confused with

just any children's texts. He hopes that future generationsof scholars will manage to weave "their way between theScylla of a needed openmindedness and the Charybdis ofworries about becoming reactionary" (241). "It seems tome," he remarks further, 'that when we are able to talkabout Children's Literature as literature, we will be ableto address others outside our discipline with genuine con-fidence and authority" (241).

Put another way, literary expertise is still the key toour success as professionals. Here Griswold sounds much

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like Hartman. If we write only about comic books or theTeletubbies, he implies, we'll forget The Odyssey and losescholarly face. Too broad or popular a sense of culturemight lead to disciplinary disaster, whereas retaining a lit-erary sensibility will safeguard our cultural voice.Griswold's concern about professional insularity, then,actually comes out of a fairly traditional commitment toliterature. Griswold does take an unusual approach to theproblem of cultural studies. Rather than argue, as manydo, that cultural studies is troubling because it diminishesthe value of literature (end of story), Griswold worries thatcultural studies will prevent us from talking about litera-ture, which will in turn prevent us from participating fullyin the academy. It seems to me, however, that children'sliterature scholars now benefit from their knowledge aboutpopular culture, even when it displaces literary knowl-edge. A firm command of Toy Story in tandem with someknowledge of Baudrillard makes better career sense thesedays than a firm command of Dickens. Why police theborder between literature and reading, since that borderis mythical anyway, and since culture has again become adominant term?

Contributors to the recent special issue of The Lion andthe Unicorn on children's studies (April 2001) also urge aprofessional vision that is less novel than it seems at first.In her introductory essay, sociologist Gertrud Lenzer pleadsfor an integrated, multi-disciplinary approach to childhoodand children, commenting that "we cannot arrive at a com-prehensive understanding of children by simply accumu-lating, aggregating, or adding up segmented findings froma far-flung variety of inquiries in the various disciplines"(183). That a "comprehensive picture" is even possible anddesirable is assumed from the start. Co-founder and Direc-tor of the Children's Studies Program and the Children'sStudies Center at Brooklyn College, Lenzer aspires to a hu-manistic, holistic understanding of child and culture alike.She is not invested in literature, or rather, her vision of cul-ture does not privilege literature. Children's studies, shewrites, "makes the ontological claim that children must beviewed in their fullness as human beings. The various child-focused disciplinary endeavors must contribute to such aholistic understanding of children rather than reducingthem to specialized abstract fragments" (183). Lenzer doesa little reducing of her own, dismissing poststructuralism.She wants to cultivate "enlightened knowledge among ourstudents," to be sure that children are viewed "not merelyas objects of specialized scholarly research or of social poli-cies and social action" (185). Lenzer hopes to reconstitute atthe disciplinary level the wholeness of childhood not real-ized elsewhere, because it is not otherwise achievable. Suchwholeness, in my view, is sheer fantasy; the point is that itis not a new fantasy.

Lenzer 's scheme finds a close counterpart in MaryGalbraith's "Hear My Cry: A Manifesto for an Emancipatory

Childhood Studies Approach to Children's Literature," thenext essay in the special issue. Galbraith, a psychologist,is even more dismissive of poststructuralist theory, al-though she's quite happy to embrace Habermas' Utopianfaith in the public sphere. A proponent of "emancipatory"theory, she identifies as useful the work of Alice Millerand Lloyd de Mause (both problematic in my book, espe-cially de Mause). I could not be happier to hear of effortsto empower children and assure their rights, but I doubtthat the academy's "postmodern skeptics" are blockingthe way, as Galbraith holds. Is emancipatory criticism sig-nificantly different—institutionally, rhetorically,disciplinarily—from the skeptical work that Galbraith doesnot like? Isn't she advocating a different critical canon asmuch as anything else? Galbraith's passion is admirable,deriving (as she acknowledges) from an Enlightenmentfaith in humanistic rationality. But to accept uncriticallythe culture idea seems just as presumptuous as to interro-gate dubious assumptions about identity, representation,and power.

The children's culture wars (of which my essay isobviously a part) turn on the issue of what constitutes agood-faith scholarly enterprise, and/or what our real sub-jects should be (so much so, in fact, that these questionsseem foundational to the enterprise). Do we write aboutbooks or about real kids? Is writing even worthwhile?Galbraith and others seem to believe that writing does notmatter as much as other kinds of care and feeding of chil-dren, and they may be right. But aren't we always (al-ready?) writing, and in professional contexts, for eachother? Is writing really incompatible with and less impor-tant than parenting, teaching, and other kinds of field-work?

Richard Flynn makes the same point in his critiqueof Peter Hunt's distinction between "book people" and"child people." Both Flynn and Karen Coats defend theimportance of "books" in children's studies, by which theymean literature and criticism alike. In her essay assessingthe shape and fortunes of children's studies, Coats sug-gests that we keep children's studies plural, meaning thatwe try to respect as much as bridge disciplinary differ-ences, and strike a balance between the study ofrepresentation(s) as informed by critical theory and thestudy of actual children. Proposing an "alternative mani-festo," she points out that even the most emancipatoryproject presumes that "wholeness is possible" and that lackis de facto traumatic, presumptions that she challengesfrom a Lacanian perspective (144).

Clearly, theoretical differences underscore these dis-cussions, and I don't mean to sound disrespectful. Still, itis troubling that some advocates of children's studies ide-alize culture while objecting to poststructuralist insight.In his introduction to The Children's Culture Reader, HenryJenkins at once embraces and criticizes poststructuralism,

Children's Culture, Children's Studies, and the Ethnographic Imaginary 151

in order to recuperate the holistic culture idea in a con-temporary theoretical vein. Jenkins avers that the displace-ment of the child from children's culture (studies) was a"necessary first step for critiquing the mythology of child-hood innocence" (23). Now, he says, it is time to bring thechild back into culture, and here the discussion gets weird.Jenkins suggests that if we do not study real children, thechild exists "purely as a figment of pedophilic desire" (23).The implication is that children's studies without actualchildren amounts not merely to narcissism or insularity,as Griswold worries, but indeed to pedophilia.

In their introduction to Disciplinarity at the Fin deSiècle, Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente point outthat we usually associate interdisciplinarity with freedomand disciplinarity with constraint, forgetting that "the dia-lectic of agency of determinism, currently distributedacross the disciplinary/interdisciplinary divide, was at theheart of disciplinary formation itself" (2). It is as if disci-pline and disciplinarity are dirty words, connoting—likedidacticism or sentimentality—narrative and/or moralinflexibility.

The Ethnographic Imaginary

Like the culture concept, ethnography has come un-der fire in anthropological circles. Although he affirms eth-nography as a practice, Martyn Hammersley, in hismonograph on the subject, remarks, "I no longer believe'ethnography' to be a useful category with which to thinkabout social research methodology" (203). Ethnography,of course, has long been the heart of anthropology, first asa method of participant observation of and reportage fromthe field, as codified by Bronislaw Malinowski in Argo-nauts of the Western Pacific (1922), and later as a recon-structed, more self-conscious and experimental practiceof writing about cultural others, and about the othernessof self. Thanks largely to the textualization of fieldwork,anthropology often treats culture as a series of texts to beinterpreted, so it is not surprising that Margaret Mead andother early practitioners emphasized the hermeneu tic andaesthetic powers of the anthropologist.

Given this heritage, what James Clifford calls the post-19505 "dispersion of ethnographic authority" is also/insteada redistribution of that authority along familiar, if nowpostmodern and poststructuralist, lines that authorize theliterary critic to hold forth on culture (24). Clifford's book istitled The Predicament of Culture (1988), but we might thinkalso about the culture of predicament and how we sustainit. Analysis of culture and its ills, after all, has been one ofculture's centripetal forces. Furthermore, in some of the criti-cal literature the deconstruction of culture seems little morethan a plea for the restoration of literature; there is little ineither Hartman or Eagleton about anthropology or ethnog-raphy, residual in children's culture work.

Near the end of his review of The Children's CultureReader, Richard Flynn asks this question: "After Rose, af-ter Aries, after Kincaid, what are the cultural and histori-cal effects of the persistence of developmental models ofchildhood? Where are the descriptive ethnographies of thechild at the end of the twentieth century?" (473). It is worthasking (with Flynn) what kind of ethnographies of child-hood we want to write and why. What methods oftextualization and collection/display are strategic? Howmight we deal productively with ethnography's rhetoricof realism, its reputation as a mimetic mode of mappingand description? Might not a seemingly innocuous titlelike Children's Culture tend to establish authority, much inthe manner of classic texts named "simply" after the peoplethey describe: The Andaman Islanders, Street Corner Society,The Mountain People? Until the twentieth century, the eth-nographer and the anthropologist were separate creatures,with different tasks; do we now expect the scholar ofchildren's culture to gather data, translate customs, inter-pret and theorize, all of the above? What happens to themodel of participant observation in the field when weobserve our own children, or when we remember our ownchildhoods? Jenkins argues that we should give kids theright "tools" with which they can "realize their own po-litical agendas or to participate in the production of theirown culture" (30). I agree, but isn't this language famil-iar? What are the pros and cons of imagining children asprimitive people with a distinct culture, along the lines ofearly comparative anthropology? Should we cheer on the"dispersion" of ethnographic authority when children talkback?

These are difficult questions, and here I can onlyemphasize that, for better and for worse, the ethnographicimaginary takes different narrative forms in children'sstudies, among them pop-journalistic exposés of youthculture as well as more academic and theoretical treatmentsof childhood. If children's studies is to encompass non-academic as well as academic work, then we might wantto pay more attention to discussions of youth in the popu-lar press. We can see ethnographic language and methodsmost obviously in some recent books about American ado-lescence. Consider, for instance, A Tribe Apart: A JourneyInto the Heart of American Adolescence (1998). The synopsison the dusk jacket makes even clearer than the title thebook's ethnographic spirit:

For three fascinating, disturbing years, writerPatricia Hersch journeyed inside a world thatis as familiar as our own children and yet asalien as some exotic culture—the world of ado-lescence. As a silent, attentive partner, she fol-lowed eight teenagers in the typically Americantown of Reston, Virginia, listening to their sto-ries, observing their rituals, watching them

152 Children's Literature Association Quarterly

fulfill their dreams and enact their tragedies.What she found was that America's teenshave fashioned a fully defined culture thatadults neither see nor imagine—a culture ofunprecedented freedom and baffling com-plexity, a culture with rules but no structure,values but no clear morality, codes but noconsistency.

Here the language of culture is comparativist rather thansingular, in keeping with ethnography. The ethnographicimaginary can accommodate both the traditional holisticsense of culture, as codified by Tylor, and the comparativeidea of culture as introduced by Boas. Another examplewould be Elinor Burkett's recent ethnography AnotherPlanet: A Year in the Life of a Suburban High School (2001),whose cover looks like a field notebook and/or a diary (asif Margaret Mead and Harriet the Spy were collaborating).

Also invoking adolescence as the undiscovered coun-try is Thomas Hine's The Rise and Fall of the American Teen-ager (1999). In chapter 3, "Coming of Age in UtterConfusion," Hine appeals to Mead's work as a model fordefamiliarizing and illuminating the culture of Americanadolescence, which (like Mead before him) he alternatelysees as stable and as vanishing. "Strange stories from ex-otic locales," he writes, "can provide perspectives on ourown culture and its weird and painful practices" (44). Hispenultimate chapter, "Goths in Tomorrowland," surveystoday's "tribes of youth," whom he regards largely as"modern primitives," fond of tattoos, piercing, and otherenigmatic practices (277). These books on adolescence re-semble most contemporary studies of boyhood, girlhood,and the family, which make frequent appeals to anthro-pological knowledge and the ethnographic imaginary.

But what about more properly academic writing?How does the ethnographic imaginary work to cope withproblems posed by the theoretical enterprise known aschildren's culture? My impression is that the ethnographicimaginary has not only survived the poststructuralist revo-lution but has inhabited it rather fully, or, as we might sayafter Michel Foucault, rather productively. Poststruc-turalism has changed the terms of the critical conversa-tion, but it has also appropriated ethnography to its ownnarrative ends, for better and for worse. Foucault's workhas been especially influential in children's literature stud-ies as well as in the emergent field of children's studies.We tend now to think of children as docile bodies, as sub-jects of an institutional and disciplinary surveillance pre-viously affirmed as the positive, necessary experience ofschooling and socialization. Foucault's critique of the re-pressive hypothesis in and around modern subjectivity hasdone much to undermine what I would call the progres-sive hypothesis of children's literature and culture, the taleof ever-expanding autonomy and rationality.

At the same time, despite Foucault's emphasis onreverse discourses and so forth, Foucauldian analysis re-writes the story of children's freedom as the story of disci-pline through discourse and commodification. Simply put,Foucauldian analysis often assumes that children and otherpopulations are subaltern victims of oppressive socialnorms. Foucauldian analysis is organized around key fig-ures of social specification and regulation—among themthe (masturbating) child—and children's culture may like-wise depend upon an estranging sense of childhood at thelevel of rhetoric if not the analysis, per se.

One way to defamiliarize childhood is to suggest asignificant divide between child and adult, and their re-spective cultures, such that the child is always other to theadult (self). But in order for the inquiry to be worthwhile,that otherness must also be manageable: this is the deli-cate economy of poststructuralist ethnographic writing,which appeals less to the wholeness of culture than to theotherness of subjectivity. Along these lines, consider Chris-topher Jenks' Childhood, one of Routledge's "Key Ideas"books, a sociological analysis of construction(s) of child-hood past, present, and future, organized around issuessuch as child innocence, child abuse, and the alleged "dis-appearance" of childhood. Early in the first chapter, Jenksproposes that in developmental psychology and social-ization theory (he singles out the work of Jean Piaget andTalcott Parsons respectively), the project of accounting forthe experiences of childhood "proceed[s] rapidly to anoverattentive elaboration of the compulsive processes ofintegration," or of becoming an adult (4). In his view, wenever really examine what a child is, because we are toopreoccupied with that child's evolution into adulthood.Jenks suggests, in effect, that we do not sufficiently un-derstand the child as other. "Simply stated," he writes, "thechild is familiar to us and yet strange, he or she inhabitsour world and yet seems to answer to another, he or she isessentially of ourselves and yet appears to display a sys-tematically different order of being" (3). This chapter,which ruthlessly questions the idea of development, re-sorts to an ethnographic thematic of otherness. We mightsee this as standard procedure; don't we oftendefamiliarize our subject in order to make it our own, es-pecially in writing?

Maybe so, maybe not. In any case, Jenks specifi-cally invokes anthropology and its language of estrange-ment. Throughout this first chapter, he appeals to theclassic child-savage analogy of evolutionary science andanthropology even as—or alternatively, by—ostensiblydisavowing it. This discussion begins in a section actu-ally titled "The Child as 'Savage,'" in which select quo-tation marks and rhetorical markers identify theassociation as troubling. And yet Jenks consistently lik-ens the work of the child culture theorist to that of theanthropologist, such that the section title winds up a

Children's Culture, Children's Studies, and the Ethnographic Imaginary 153

faithful description of his assumptions. It is as if thechild-savage analogy is so useful that Jenks thinks hecan ditch the equivalence but keep the discursive fieldand protocol.

In fairness, Jenks admits that the child-savage anal-ogy is political and politicized, that the "manner of ourassembling and the character of our distancing are sig-nificant in the constitution of either savage or child" (5).But as that very sentence shows, the analogy persists, notas an example of a practice to be shunned, but as a narra-tive of how childhood analysis has worked up to this point,and as a more politically problematic antecedent of a moreuseful poststructuralist theorization of the child as strange,and of children's culture as distinct, even unknowable. Itis not a good idea to keep the child-savage equivalence incirculation, since that equivalence descends from centu-ries of colonial encounter that gave us much classicchildren's literature and helped authorize English stud-ies. Several times Jenks invokes "our early anthropologist"as the foil-turned-model for the childhood theorist, whois likewise witnessing a sea change. That theorist, in hisview, is "addressing the somewhat more diffuse and vola-tile boundaries that mark off childhood today, and the factthat we are considering such a transition from within themores and folkways of a modern secular society, is noguarantee that that ritualism will be any less present" (7).As compelling as his analysis is, we do not have to accepteither the assumption that childhood is more vulnerabletoday than in days past or the description of the child-hood scholar as interpreter-theorist of modern mores, folk-ways, and ritualism.

I dwell on Jenks' work because it illustrates howpowerfully the ethnographic imaginary persists in eventhe most sophisticated poststructuralist analysis. We'relight years away from A Tribe Apart, and yet much of therhetoric is the same. The ethnographic imaginary, of course,is not exclusive to literature or anthropology. We can see itin psychoanalysis especially, and we shouldn't forget thesignificance of Freud's own fieldwork and ethnographiccase studies. Freud wrote about a host of exotic creatures,adapted from sexology, and classified in typically bour-geois ways: the neurotic, the homosexual, the fetishist, andso on (not entirely unlike Foucault). It's no surprise thatMalinowski sought to debunk the Oedipus Complex inhis anthropological work in the early part of the century;he understood psychoanalysis as a rival discipline to an-thropology, equally ambitious and resilient, another imagi-native refashioning of humanist science that promised todecode culture(s) through contact with real people. Psy-choanalysis and the modern social sciences depend uponthe ethnographic imaginary, as do cultural studies andchildren's studies after them.

— CL-

The potential of children's studies is exciting. But weneed in children's studies and discussions of children'sculture a stronger sense of intellectual and disciplinaryhistory. Identifying and challenging the holistic idea ofculture as it resurfaces in current debates is fairly easy.Ethnography is trickier to deal with, for while the ethno-graphic imaginary is often troublesome, fieldwork withchildren can be responsibly conducted. But so far,children's studies has not demonstrated the kind of criti-cal self-consciousness about ethnography that is now cru-cial to anthropology and sociology, which makes it harderto distinguish between more and less legitimate forms ofchild study.

As Le Doeuff shows with respect to philosophy, anintellectual discipline's imaginary is intimately bound upwith its critical concepts and rhetorical strategies. Perhapswe cannot divest ourselves of culture or its more troublingmetaphors unless we stop thinking of ourselves as aca-demics working in the humanities. I am not sure exactlywhere to go from here, but why not push for a children'sstudies informed by self-reflexive field research andpoststructuralist theory (not just the optimistic stuff) andwhat we might call disciplinary studies—a children's stud-ies that acknowledges to the fullest possible degree itsdebts to anthropology, cultural studies, and so on?

"Culture is a deeply compromised idea I cannot quitedo without," writes James Clifford (qtd. in Buzard 312). Wemay share Clifford's ambivalent attitude, but we shouldknow by now that ambivalence is fundamental (if not nec-essary) to academic work. Clifford's very career attests tothe critical fortunes of the culture idea and to the genera-tive effects of ambivalence. Clifford is not technically ananthropologist, as one might surmise from his writings, butrather, he is a literary theorist and intellectual historianteaching in the History of Consciousness Program at UC-Santa Cruz. He has played deconstructive anthropologistfor some time now, capitalizing on yet another migrationof the culture idea to English studies. As James Buzardshows in "Notes on the Defenestration of Culture," just ascomparative anthropology began to doubt the culture ideaaround the middle of the twentieth century, that idea in-vigorated and authorized cultural studies (in whichpoststructuralist anthropological theory remains a staple).

For all its progressive impulses and self-consciousposturing, cultural studies has one major blind spot:disciplinarity. Buzard argues persuasively that culturalstudies arrogantly positions itself as anthropology'sbrighter and politically promising sibling without admit-ting as much, reclaiming culture as its central concern butrefusing to see itself as a discipline informed by other dis-ciplines. Whether or not children's culture is a deeply com-promised idea we cannot quite do without, children'sstudies must learn from this tendency of cultural studiesto deny its own disciplinary history.

154 Children's Literature Association Quarterly

NOTES

1. The academic discourse on "everyday life" had its heyday in1950s and 1960s France, later inspiring British and Americancultural studies as well as Marxist criticism. We might identifyHenri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life (1947) as the inauguraltext, though Situationist writing was also influential. Interest inthe "everyday" has intensified again in the wake of culturalstudies and a renewed interest in sociology; for more informationon this body of work and its current purchase, see The EverydayLife Reader, edited by Ben Highmore.2. As anthropology became more sophisticated in the twentiethcentury, the twin issues of representation and interpretation werehotly contested, such that anthropology now is an incredibly self-conscious discipline, hyper-aware of (even hyper-apologeticabout) its own procedures. Even so, the holistic idea persists,most often as a fantasy of critical reconstruction. A field study isstill supposed to tell you something important about a culture,as well as legitimate the author.3. As Richard Flynn notes in his review, The Children's CultureReader is useful as an introductory textbook but has little to offerbeyond the standard poststructuralist insight that childhood isn't,well, so natural after all. At the same time, the book appeals toan undertheorized, ahistorical idea of culture, perhaps ascompensation for the deconstruction of "childhood." NYU Press'Generations of Youth, by contrast, makes an effort to engage morelocally with issues such as race and class bias, often against amonolithic culture idea. It is also more successful as an anthology,cohesive while wide-ranging, perhaps because youth culture isalready an established topic of cultural studies.4. Obviously, the ethnographic imaginary, like other suchsweeping concepts—Le Doeuff's philosophical imaginary, or the"political unconscious" of Frederic Jameson—threatens to benearly as totalizing as the culture idea. Even so, I think it will beuseful in this context, as a rhetorical and theoretical counterpartto other discursive conceits, among them the culture idea.5. Thanks to ]. D. Stahl for directing me to this text.6. "A literary education has many values," Eagleton wrylyobserves, "but systematic thought is not one of them" (239). Butas Eagleton also acknowledges, we've benefited from ourresistance to systematic thought; literature is in many waysarticulated against such.

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Kenneth Kidd teaches children's literature and cultural studiesat the University of Florida. His book Boyology and the FeralTale: Cultures of American Boy Work is forthcoming fromthe University of Minnesota Press.