Margaret Mead: Early childhood and local expertise in Indonesia

Abstract

Margaret Mead shaped the field of childhood studies in anthropology in the early 20th century. One of her concerns was the challenge posed to the continuity of childcare from rapid social change in the 1940s and 1960s in the United States. Her interest in the contrast between slowly changing homogenous cultures and those undergoing rapid change developed into a one between independent and interdependent training of children. Yet, Mead was much more concerned with the social institutions that support continuity in enculturation than a binary contrast. Mead’s own expertise and her attention to the local expertise of women and mothers is juxtaposed with recent scholarly work on the production of expertise as a form of knowledge. Interest in local forms of women’s knowledge associated with ethnomethodology and feminist standpoint theory seems to have gone missing. Dramatic social change in Indonesia since the late 1990s has corresponded with a realignment of expertise in the era of democratic reform, highlighting the tension between local and globalized forms of knowledge around early childhood education and care (ECEC). Based on long-term ethnographic research in central Java, I argue that existing forms of governmentality offer the possibility for recognizing and redistributing the local expertise of neighborhood women and mothers as a balance to globalized programs for ECEC.