ABSTRACT
This book takes a particular theoretical stand on how best to understand the processes of acculturation-how children become students, adults, workers, citizens, and so on. The problem here is that we all take it that we know what children are and what growing up entails. All cultures have strong ideas about the nature of children, and their members act on the basis of those ideas in the particular material and social circumstances in which they live. These ideas are part of what people know in common as members of culturespart of what makes them cultures and not just people who happen to live near one another. The problem therefore is this: these ideas about Childhood, and the practices to which they relate, are all matters to be studied. They are not the analytic starting points from which to study acculturation; they are topics rather than resources for analysis and theorizing.
