Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage

Kate Darian-Smith, Carla Pascoe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415529952
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136168703
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Social History

Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage explores how the everyday experiences of children, and their imaginative and creative worlds, are collected, interpreted and displayed in museums and on monuments, and represented through objects and cultural lore. Young people constitute up to half the population of any given society, but their lives are inescapably influenced by the expectations and decisions of adults. As a result, children's distinct experiences are frequently subsumed within the broader histories and heritage of their families and communities. And while adults inevitably play a prominent role in children's lives, children are also active creators of their own cultures. As this volume so vividly demonstrate, the cultural heritage of children is rich and varied, and highly revealing of past and present attitudes to children and their work, play, creativity, and human rights.

The essays in this book span the experiences of children from classical Rome to the present moment, and examine the diverse social and historical contexts underlying the public representations of childhood in Britain, Europe, North America, Australia, North Africa and Japan. Case studies examine the heritage of schools and domestic spaces; the objects and games of play; the commemoration of child Holocaust survivors; memorials to Indigenous child-removal under colonial regimes; children as collectors of objects and as authors of juvenilia; curatorial practices at museums of childhood; and the role of children as visitors to historical sites.

Until now, the cultural heritage of children and the representations of childhood have been largely absent from scholarly discussions of museology, heritage places and material culture. This volume rectifies that gap, bringing together international experts in children's histories and heritage. Aimed at a wide readership of students, academics, and museum and heritage professionals, Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage authoritatively defines the key issues in this exciting new field.

Chapter 1

Children, childhood and cultural heritage

Mapping the field

Kate Darian-Smith and Carla Pascoe

When Lillian Boyd died, her son Bill journeyed to her small, humble home in an Australian country town to sort through her possessions. One room of the four-room dwelling was crammed to the ceiling with objects. Having lived through the austerity of the 1930s Depression and the Second World War, Lillian was unable to throw anything away (including rubber bands and plastic bags) in case it proved useful.

Lillian’s hoarding proved to be a rare and valuable treasure trove. She had kept every single item that her son had owned, used or played with during his upbringing. The material culture of Bill’s childhood included school exercise books and chewed pencils; clothing such as knitted baby jackets and booties; sporting equipment including a homemade cricket bat; manufactured toys such as tiny plastic spacemen and tin animals; and his own juvenile collections of hand-blown birds’ eggs, ‘swap’ cards and matchboxes. Alongside the mass-produced playthings common to post-war Australian childhoods were several items that spoke poignantly of the straitened circumstances in which the Boyd family lived. Whilst museum collections of children’s material culture have traditionally featured the toys of wealthy or elite children, the objects preserved from Bill’s childhood include a scrapbook of his favourite pictures cut from birthday cards and magazines; a crudely fashioned balsa wood imitation knife emblazoned with the misspelt words ‘Davy Croket’; and a ‘Red Indian’ dress-up costume made from hessian sacks and dyed chicken feathers.

This extraordinary collection of some 700 artefacts highlights the tension between the particular and the general when preserving the heritage of children. To some extent, Bill’s juvenile artefacts are typical of baby boomer childhoods: they depict the growing availability of cheap, manufactured toys; the rising influence of American popular culture; and the polarized gender roles of the 1950s. But other aspects of the collection speak of the unique circumstances of Bill’s story, particularly the predominance of quiet, indoor games which reflect the debilitating kidney problems of his early years.¹

The William Boyd Childhood Collection, now housed in Museum Victoria, is also unusual because it comprises an entire slice of one child’s life. Whilst institutional and private collections have long cherished exquisite or nostalgic artefacts associated with childhood, such indiscriminate and comprehensive collecting is highly uncommon. In other respects, however, the William Boyd Childhood Collection is an excellent entry point into this volume, as it encapsulates many of the recurring themes that characterize the heritage of children and childhood. Clearly on one level it is a collection of material culture of all descriptions. Bill has also related the intangible cultural heritage of his childhood through oral history interviews: the stories, songs and games that characterized his youth. In addition, both the interviews and the objects themselves reveal the prominence of particular places in Bill’s early years, from the intimate domestic spaces of his home to the mullock heaps and waterways around which local children played.²

The cultural heritage of children and childhood is complex and varied, incorporating material objects such as toys, intangible heritage such as songs and games and the spatial heritage of the buildings, environments and landscapes that children inhabit. Yet despite an increasing scholarly and public interest in the past and present experiences of children in a variety of chronological and geographical locations, alongside pressing contemporary concerns about children’s welfare and well-being (for instance, Fass 2003; James and James 2008; Wells 2009), the examination of the cultural heritage of children has been relatively limited. This may be because the circumstances of children are contained within the wider contexts of the adult world: children are, to put it simply, everywhere. Their universal presence in all human societies has often obscured, or even rendered invisible, the specificity of children’s lives and cultures.

Children and teenagers can constitute up to, or even more than, 50 per cent of any given society, and the range of their experiences are as determined by the spectrum of social, economic, legal and environmental factors as those of adults. But it is rare for children to be accorded the same powers, privileges and responsibilities as ‘grownups’, and their lives are always influenced by the expectations of the adult world about how ‘children’ and the period of ‘childhood’ may be defined and understood.

There has been too little interrogation of the cultural heritage of children, and the representations of childhood, in discussions of museology, heritage sites and material culture. This volume thus constitutes the first scholarly attempt to map key issues in the complex and emerging field of the cultural heritage of children and childhood. Establishing a coherent body of knowledge about such cultural heritage requires bringing together a range of disciplinary approaches across the humanities and social sciences, and the contributors to this volume speak from a range of scholarly and professional perspectives. Through case studies drawn from across the globe, stretching from ancient times to the present day, we explore how children’s cultural heritage may be recognized, represented and received in such forms as museum exhibitions and built heritage and landscapes, and through memorials and children’s own creative production.

Cultural heritage

But what do we mean when we speak of the cultural heritage of children and childhood?

David Lowenthal has famously claimed that from the late twentieth century, heritage has become a ‘new religion’. He argues that people incorporate selective elements of the past into their own sense of individual and collective identity, sometimes staking ownership over tangible traces of history to ward off other claimants (Lowenthal 2010). This may be true for certain cultural, national or ethnic groups, but the case of children is different. Children rarely agitate for the preservation of their own heritage. Instead, the conservation, display or study of the heritage of children and childhood is generally undertaken by adults – purportedly on behalf of children, but perhaps also on behalf of their own childhood selves.

Heritage is closely aligned to history, but there is an important distinction between the two. Historians increasingly recognize that the values and conditions of the past may be very different from our present times, whereas a key ideological underpinning of heritage is that the past is closely aligned to our own circumstances. In the formulation of Brian Graham and Peter Howard, heritage refers to ‘the ways in which very selective past material artefacts, natural landscapes, mythologies, memories and traditions become cultural, political and economic resources for the present’ (Graham and Howard 2008: 2). Indeed as R.S. Peckham points out, cultural heritage is always present-centred (2003). As a form of collective memory about historical events, the values and politics of heritage may be created to serve contemporary needs, and are thus subject to change if these priorities are revised. The social and cultural values ascribed to heritage sites, customs and objects are often conflicted as different groups or nations may contest the ownership or the meaning attached to particular elements of the past. The constructed political and cultural meanings of children’s heritage are firmly embedded in the heritage of the families, communities and nations where children are located. However, the ways that we acknowledge the heritage and cultures of children are constantly evolving in dialogue with the changing status of children in today’s society.

Children’s heritage, like that of adults, is protected by UNESCO conventions including the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage and the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Bill Logan’s chapter in this volume explains the ways in which UNESCO is seeking to involve young people in identifying and managing their own heritage, in a field which has largely been governed by the views of adults. But whilst the heritage of children and childhood is to some extent protected by international frameworks, examples of such heritage need to be recognized as such before they can even begin to enjoy protection. Many manifestations of children’s heritage are not necessarily acknowledged if they do not fit easily with prevailing understandings of childhood.

Contemporary representations of children

Given that heritage serves the purposes of the present, contemporary definitions of childhood have a profound influence on our understandings of that heritage. In the early twenty-first-century Western world, children are commonly represented as innocent and vulnerable. The figure of the child becomes the container for a number of adult anxieties and concerns. Popular media, for example, worries that children enjoy less spontaneous play than they once did; are more pressured by parents and teachers to perform; experience less unmediated contact with natural environments; are subject to a greater number of physical dangers including violent crimes; and are more overtly sexualized and commercialized. Whether such claims are objectively accurate is not our concern here. Rather, the point is that the notion of the vulnerable child, coupled with adult attempts to protect that child from risk, dominate contemporary representations of children (see, for example, Stearns 2009).

Current sociological thinking draws upon self-reflexive definitions of children and childhood, demonstrating that the views of childhood are both socially constructed and temporally specific. Central to this ‘sociology of childhood’ is the rejection of definitions of the child based purely on biology, with a ‘natural’ set of behaviours and attitudes that are distinctively childish (James and James 2004, 2008; James et al. 1998; James and Prout 1997; Jenks 2005; Prout 2000). Such insights have been invaluable in demonstrating that definitions of childhood must be understood as constructed within particular historical and cultural contexts. John R. Morss takes the argument a step further: he raises the question of whether children should be treated simply as ‘humans’.

The proposal to treat children as humans might not be as banal as it may seem; it seems to imply that there are no children’s rights as such and therefore raises challenging questions concerning the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, not to mention enormously problematic questions about sexuality.

(Morss 2002: 52)

In support of his case, Morss cites Berry Mayall’s suggestion that perhaps children are not different from adults except by virtue of the different ways they are treated (Mayall 1994). The issue of whether there is a substantive ontological difference between children and adults is beyond the scope of this discussion, but it is important to note that if definitions of childhood are recognized as historically and culturally contingent, then many of our taken-for-granted assumptions about the young and the rights of children are also subject to question. There is a vast diversity of experiences of childhood, and while children may be subjected to adult directives, they are also active agents in their own lives. As Nick Lee points out, researchers need ‘to see children as human beings, active in social life, rather than as human becomings, passive recipients of socialisation’ (Lee 2001: 47).

This view that children can be both independent agents and also influenced by adult expectations and behaviour has consequences for our analysis in this volume. An important distinction can be made between examples of cultural heritage constructed by children and those constructed by adults. For example, the chapter by Carla Pascoe distinguishes between objects made by children and by adults, discussing the ramifications of this distinction for museum collecting and exhibiting.

Children are not just producers of cultural heritage but also the audience for heritage displays. A significant body of work has been generated analysing children as visitors to museums or other heritage sites. Indeed, this is how children are most commonly discussed in the museological and heritage literature: as an important segment of the market for heritage in its institutional and educational forms. Research into museum audiences has argued that exhibitions appear to be spaces where children have considerable autonomy within family groups, choosing where to go, what to pay attention to and how much time to spend in different areas (Beaumont and Sterry 2005). Indeed, it appears that children may retain memories of visits to museums and other heritage sites for many years (Hicks 2005). Other research argues that the most effective strategy to ensure that children enjoy visiting museums and engage with their content is to intimately involve them in exhibition development and design (McRainey and Russick 2010).

In this volume Laurajane Smith analyses the experiences and perspectives of children visiting heritage sites, finding that they do not necessarily conform to the expectations of heritage professionals. Rhian Harris details the ways in which the V&A Museum of Childhood has tried to deepen its engagement with juvenile audiences, through strategies such as adapting interpretation panels so they are more child friendly, lowering display cases to improve accessibility for child viewers and introducing a range of interactive displays and activities especially intended for younger children who learn through play. Such methods are increasingly employed by museums around the world in an attempt to heighten their appeal for younger audiences.

Historiography of children and childhood

Part of the recent increase in museum exhibitions and heritage sites relating to children has stemmed from the growing body of scholarship on the histories of children and childhood over the past decades. This emergent interest in children amongst historians can be understood as a consequence of the redress of prior scholarly neglect, the strength of social and personal nostalgia about the state of childhood, and increasingly urgent contemporary concerns about children’s welfare and development. Following scholarly interest in previously marginalized histories of women, the working classes or ethnic minorities, children were one of the last neglected groups to come under the scrutiny of historians. Partially this was due to a lack of sources authored by the subjects themselves, but it was also a consequence of the lack of scholarly and social importance attached to the experiences and pasts of children. Nostalgia has undeniably contributed to this recent surge of historical attention – we were all children once – and has permeated some of the historical research.

Many scholars in this field fail to differentiate histories of children, which concern the actual experiences and practices ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Series general co-editors' foreword
• 1 Children, childhood and cultural heritage: Mapping the field
• Part I Stories, games and memories: The intangible cultural heritage of children
• Part II Sites and places: The spatial heritage and commemoration of children
• Part III Objects and collections: The material culture of children
• Index