ABSTRACT
It is often taken for granted that, at least with respect to cognition, to their grasp of particular concepts, children simply become-with perhaps some minor variations-what their elders already are. So we may study children to find out how they are ‘socialised’, but our efforts will have little or no bearing on an analysis of relations between adults. Perhaps socialisation theories were never quite as crude as this, but anthropologists tend still to assume that the endpoint of socialisation is known. This assumption is at the root of contemporary anthropologists’ general lack of interest in children.
