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

逃跑的仪式：北印度街头儿童的经历

• 批准号: 0924506
• 负责人: Jonah Steinberg
• 金额: $ 23.37万
• 依托单位: University of Vermont & State Agricultural College
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-09-15 至 2013-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0924506&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Rite; Running; Away; Street; Children

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.

佛蒙特大学的人类学家乔纳·斯坦伯格博士将研究跨文化的童年经历，以及儿童的自主、抵抗和代理能力。这项研究将在印度进行，他将重点研究印度乡村儿童变成“街头儿童”的过程。在印度的一些农村地区，农村青年逃往城市的现象很常见。在这些地区，离家出走似乎是一种被广泛接受的生活选择。在这个为期三年的项目中，斯坦伯格博士试图查明为什么这种情况如此频繁地发生。最初将从德里的一组街头儿童样本中引出关于到达街头的叙述。还将对街头儿童进行调查，以确定产生最多逃亡者的村庄和地区。将选择这些村庄进行有关农村地区离家出走习俗的人种学研究，并调查这种习俗的文化框架，以及成年人和儿童在多大程度上将其理解为生命历程中的普通和例行元素。这也将有助于了解哪些村庄和家庭产生了最多的离家出走者。这项研究有可能揭示大规模的城市化历史进程与个人家庭的小规模情感生活之间的关系。该研究还将加深对为什么街头儿童成为街头儿童的理解，无论他们生活在哪里，并将就扩大农村或半农村服务提出建议，以保护他们免受一旦流落街头所面临的风险。