Editorial Keep asking: Why childhood? Why children? Why global?

When I first became a mother in the early 1980s I had already done a few years of anthropological research on children in South India. The circumstances were quite exceptional for those times, so I hope the readers will forgive me if I start on a personal note. The thing is that I had done exactly what my male professor had warned me a woman was not to do in the field: getting personally involved with a ‘local ’ man. In fact this man became, to my professor’s great confusion and dismay, my husband and the father of my children. Two years after completing my fieldwork I came back with my baby child to the area of research and found myself in the enviable position – or so I thought then – of being able to observe from within a phenomenon that I had until then only been able to approach as an outsider. I made a few discoveries resulting in a discon-certing awareness that my previous anthropological gaze had been all too keen to look for difference, and that in the endeavour I had been essentializing childhood, both my own ideas about it and what I thought was the ‘otherness ’ of those I had researched. Perhaps the most confusing experience was the discovery, after a few weeks of interac-tion with one of my Indian sister-in-laws who had a child of about three months, of a copy in the local language of ‘Dr Spock ’ – the then unquestioned American authority on childrearing and a book that I had myself, during sleepless nights, all too often consulted. Now Dr Spock is no longer, I believe, the bible of young mothers, for ideas about chil-drearing have changed again. But in those years young women the world over used the book to challenge what they believed were antiquated, authoritarian ways of upbringing embodied in their own mother’s attitudes and beliefs – I should add that paradoxically both my mother and my mother-in-law embodied rather the opposite! Nevertheless, using Dr Spock was in a way a statement about many young women’s desire to reinvent childhood – and change the world for the better. Could it be that my young Indian rela