Studying Inequality through the Lifeworlds of Infants

托拜厄斯·赫克特（Tobias Hecht）博士将对婴儿的生活世界进行人种学研究的第一个探索性阶段，将出生在中产阶级家庭的婴儿与出生在贫困家庭的婴儿进行比较。最终，该项目旨在研究社会和经济不平等最初是如何表现和经历的：换句话说，人们是如何开始过着不平等的生活的。实地调查将在巴西的Florianópolis进行，在这个城市，许多人享受着第一世界的生活水平，但其他人却忍受着极端的贫困。尽管存在大量关于不平等的文献，包括巴西的不平等，但这些文献几乎完全忽视了婴儿的生活。大多数关于不平等的数据仍然来自收入调查，这些调查没有评估收入是如何在家庭中使用和分配的，更不用说它如何影响婴儿了。婴儿无疑是社会中代表性最不足的部分，也是发展心理学领域之外研究最少的人类受试者。尽管关于照顾婴儿的规范性著作比比皆是，但对他们的日常生活却知之甚少。这个项目关注的不是应该对婴儿做些什么，也不是他们具体是如何发展的，而是婴儿从出生起是如何陷入不平等的更大的社会和经济问题的。该项目的目标之一是为以婴儿为中心的民族志研究这一新兴领域开发新的研究方法。研究人员将关注孩子们的日常生活——他们在哪里睡觉，他们醒着的时候做什么，他们吃什么，他们怎么穿衣服，和他们说话，和他们玩，他们周围的社会和物质文化，他们的医疗需求是如何得到照顾的。这项研究很重要，因为它有可能改变社会科学对不平等的理解，以及从一开始人们在日常生活中是如何经历不平等的。经济学家首先用家庭收入来衡量不平等。社会学家研究了阶级、种族和性别方面的不平等。这里的目标是提出一种理解不平等的新方法，一种考虑到研究最少的群体，那些不可能对其社会和经济状况负责的群体。

Dr. Tobias Hecht will undertake the first, exploratory stage of an ethnographic study of the lifeworlds of infants, comparing those born to middle-class families, on the one hand, with those born into poverty, on the other. Ultimately, the project aims to examine how social and economic inequality is initially manifest and experienced: how, in other words, people first come to lead unequal lives. The fieldwork will be carried out in Florianópolis, Brazil, a city where many enjoy a first-world standard of living but where others endure extreme poverty. Despite the existence of a vast literature on inequality, including inequality in Brazil, that body of writings almost wholly ignores the lives of infants. Most data on inequality still derive from income surveys that do not assess how income is used and distributed within the household, much less how it affects babies. Infants are surely the most underrepresented segment in society and the least studied human subjects outside of the field of developmental psychology. Though prescriptive writings on caring for babies abound, remarkably little is known about their everyday lives. This project concerns not what should be done with infants nor specifically how they develop but rather how infants are from birth enmeshed in the larger social and economic problems of inequality. One of the goals of the project is to develop new research methods for the fledgling field of infant-centered ethnographic research. The researcher will focus on the children's everyday lives -- where they sleep, what they do when awake, what they are fed, how they are dressed, spoken to and played with, the social and material culture that surrounds them, how their medical needs are attended to.This research is important because it has the potential to transform social scientific understanding of what inequality means and how it is experienced in everyday lives from their very beginning. Economists measure inequality above all in terms of household income. Sociologists have studied inequality in its class, racial and sexual dimensions. Here the objective is to suggest a new way of understanding inequality, one that takes into account the least studied group, the ones that cannot possibly be held accountable for their social and economic condition.