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

人类学家Jonah Steinberg博士，佛蒙特大学，将进行跨文化的童年经历，以及儿童的自主，抵抗和代理能力的研究。这项研究将在印度进行，他将重点关注印度农村儿童成为“街头儿童”的过程。“在印度的一些农村地区，农村青年逃到城市是很常见的。在这些地区，逃跑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，Steinberg博士试图查明为什么这种情况如此频繁地发生，最初将从德里街头儿童的一个抽样群体中收集关于流落街头的叙述。还将对街头儿童进行调查，以确定离家出走儿童最多的那些村庄和地区。将选择其中一些村庄，对农村地区的离家出走做法进行人种学研究，并调查这种做法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活过程中的一个普通和例行因素。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中小规模情感生活之间的关系。这项研究还将扩大人们对街头儿童无论生活在哪里都成为街头儿童的开始的理解，并将就扩大农村或半农村服务提出建议，这些服务可能会保护他们，使他们永远不必面对一旦流落街头所面临的风险。

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.