The agency of children work and social change in the

The Agency of Children, Work, and Social Change in the South Pare Mountains,
Tanzania. Anthropology of Work Review 17:8-19.
The author describes the agricultural work of children in South Pare Mountains,
Tanzania, and argues that the work of children is not only determined or conditioned by
households, gender, or kinship, but, also by the market, cultural meanings and social
agencies embedded in work roles. Children increase their agency and cultivate their
market strategies as they position themselves in the market economy. Porter suggests that
policy makers and planners should be more aware of broad processes of economic
transformation that affect the children.
Tanzania, South Pare
Child labor
Cultural anthropology
Policy relevance
Post, David. 2002.
Children’s Work, Schooling, and Welfare in Latin America. Colorado: Westview Press.
This book is a comparative case study of child labor (age 12-17 years),
schooling, and family welfare within and between Mexico, Chile, and Peru. Post, an
educationalist, presents his original analysis of household survey and school enrollment
data, and interprets the trends in the children’s time and energy allocation for home,
family, school, and work.
Comparative
Mexico
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Chile
Peru
Child labor
Schooling
Family welfare
Social science
Rende Taylor, Lisa. 2005.
Dangerous Trade-offs: The Behavioral Ecology of Child Labor and Prostitution in Rural
Northern Thailand. Current Anthropology 46:411-431.
Rende Taylor, a regional counter-trafficking coordinator for the Asia Foundation,
describes her findings about the relations between child labor, trafficking, prostitution
and parental wealth, based on her field research in two northern villages in Thailand. For
instance while first-born daughters may seen as vulnerable to exploitation and hazardous
forms of work, they are often protected because of the recognition of their important roles
at home, especially taking care of younger siblings.
Thailand
Child labor
Child prostitutes
Child trafficking
Kinship and family
Sociobiological anthropology
Rigi, Jakob. 2003.
The Conditions of Post-Soviet Dispossessed Youth and Work in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Critique of Anthropology 23:35-49.
The author analyzes the condition of youth and their attitudes to work in post-
Soviet Kazakhstan. The neo-liberal reform created a large number of dispossessed youth.
The government and markets saw the dispossessed youth as lacking knowledge and skills
required in market values due to lack of formal qualification such as education. Rigi
argues that those dispossessed youth actually have more sophisticated practical
knowledge and more complex social survival skills than elite youth, due to their
independent street life at an earlier age.
Kazakhstan
Youth unemployment
Social marginalization
Post-Soviet change
Cultural anthropology
Salazar, M.C. 1991.