ABSTRACT
One of the conclusions of the conference ‘The child and the young in Latin America’ (‘A criança e o jovem na America Latina’), held in Marilia (Brasil) in November 2001, organized by ISA, was the need to reconceptualise childhood and youth from a Latin American perspective (geographically, academically and culturally), tackling new ways of envisaging and experiencing both of those vital ages according to what the change of millennium is bringing along (Feixa, 2002). Most of the social science literature about the history of childhood and youth has been produced according to the western reality, which has brought an ethnocentric nuance to the concepts. From Ariès’ (1973) classical work, who collected his data from the Medieval and modern France, to the more recent anthology edited by Levi and Schmitt (1996), and other relevant works of childhood and youth social history (Gillis 1981; Kett 1978, Postman 1990; Mitterauer 1986; Griffin 1993), the theories about the historical invention of childhood and youth have been almost exclusively based upon western sources (to be more precise, central European and Anglo-Saxon sources).
