The Rite of Running Away: Street Children's Experiences in North India

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Anthropologist Dr. Jonah Steinberg, University of Vermont, will undertake research on the experience of childhood across cultures, and children's capacity for autonomy, resistance, and agency. The research will be carried out in India, where he will focus on the process by which village children in India become "street children." There are some rural regions of India in which it is common for village youth to run away to the city. In such regions running away appears to be a widely-accepted life option. In this three-year project Dr. Steinberg seeks to ascertain why it is the case that this is occurring with such frequency.Narratives of arrival on the street will initially be elicited from a sample group of street children in Delhi. The street children also will be surveyed to identify the villages and regions that produce the greatest numbers of runaways. A selection of those villages will be chosen for ethnographic research about the practice of running away in rural areas, as well as to investigate how the practice is culturally framed and the degree to which it is understood by both adults and children as an ordinary and routine element of the life course. This will also contribute to insights about which villages and households produce the greatest numbers of runaways.This research has the potential to shed light on the relationship between large-scale historical processes of urbanization and the small-scale emotional lives in individual homes. The research also will broaden understandings about why street children become street children to begin with, no matter where they live, and will generate advice on the expansion of rural or semirural services that might protect them from ever having to face the risk they face once on the streets.