Talking Like Children: Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands

Awards:   Winner of Finalist for 2020 AAAL Book Award.
Author:   Elise Berman (Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
ISBN:  

9780190876982


Pages:   224
Publication Date:   21 March 2019
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
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Talking Like Children: Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands


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Awards

  • Winner of Finalist for 2020 AAAL Book Award.

Overview

Full Product Details

Author:   Elise Berman (Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint:   Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:   Width: 15.50cm , Height: 1.50cm , Length: 23.10cm
Weight:   0.544kg
ISBN:  

9780190876982


ISBN 10:   0190876980
Pages:   224
Publication Date:   21 March 2019
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

"Acknowledgements List of Figures and Tables Note on Marshallese Language and Orthography Introduction: Becoming different Chapter 1: ""Give Me My Child"": An ethnographic introduction to the power of age in Marshallese social life Chapter 2: What is Age and Where Does It Come From? A theoretical analysis of age and language socialization Chapter 3: On the Road: How to get out of giving to adults Chapter 4: ""Give Me My Food"": How to avoid giving to another child and produce relative age Chapter 5: Aged Agency: What children can do that adults cannot (and vice versa) Chapter 6: Socializing Age Differences Conclusion: Toward an Anthropology of Age Appendix: Transcripts Notes References Index"

Reviews

Want to have your comfortable understanding of age shaken up? Read Elisa Berman's book! It challenges the ubiquitous idea of age being biologically determined. She shows how and why it's different elsewhere - in this case on a tiny atoll in the Marshall Islands. You'll never again read social science that takes chronological age as an independent variable the same way. These are rather ideologies dressed as objective neutral facts about the world, and about human nature. Commonsense but unexamined assumptions about the naturalness of precise chronological age are actually ethnographically rare and historically recent. * Susan Blum, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, UNC Charlotte * This is a remarkable book with a challenging thesis: that children are socialized to be different from adults. In other words, they learn to behave differently from adults through social interaction rather than being 'naturally' more naive. Beautifully written and clearly explained, this is both a neat theoretical intervention and a great book for the classroom. * Tanya Marie Luhrmann, Howard H. and Jessie T. Watkins University Professor of Anthropology and Professor, by courtesy, of Psychology, Stanford University * Berman has written one of the most compelling ethnographies of children's lives since Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin defined the study of language socialization for anthropology. Not only is Berman's ethnography a rich and poignant analysis of Marshallese social life, it is a monumental rethinking of age and its significance for practice and theory in the social sciences. * Barbra Meek, Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Michigan *


Author Information

Elise Berman is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has spent more than two years living, teaching, and conducting research in the Marshall Islands, and earned her PhD in the department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. She has published in American Anthropologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Childhood, and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. She is currently working on a project on language, race, and education in the Marshallese diaspora.

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