ABSTRACT
Introduction In the last quarter of the twentieth century, and at an ever quickening pace, sociology has, in the manner of Levi-Strauss's primitive cosmologist, sought new reasons and new methods for transforming the natural into the cultural. Our practice, as sociologists, has been dedicated to the systematic desecration of images and realities previously enshrined in the sacred realm of utter naturalness. In contemporary vocabulary, sociology has sought to render the mundane and taken-for-granted problematic - what in the 1960s and early 1970s we would have referred to as demystification. Childhood, previously the private property of families (mothers?), certainly regarded as a natural phenomenon, and approached as an intellectual issue only by medicine and psychology, is a perfect instance of the mundane making such a transformation: childhood has come of age sociologically.
