EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Agency and structure in the life-world of Aboriginal children in Central Australia

Ute Eickelkamp

Children and Youth Services Review, 2011, vol. 33, issue 4, 502-508

Abstract: This paper offers ethnographic observations on the place of "agency" in the lives of Aboriginal children in Central Australia. The focus is on children's play and adult-child interaction in the remote community of Ernabella, the oldest settlement in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, northern South Australia. The circumstance of Aboriginal children in remote areas is introduced as a contrasting picture: on the one hand, the life of Aboriginal families is shaped by their marginalised socio-economic position and dependency on the state, which has become especially evident in the recently intensified efforts by the government to "mainstream" Aboriginal communities deemed in "social chaos" in order to regulate and thereby improve children's lives; on the other there is the social fact that children enjoy a comparatively high level of autonomy within the Aboriginal domain. The much-observed "freedom" from parental discipline, however, does not simply mean that children assert their will without regard for certain social rules. Rather, it is suggested that it is precisely the relatively low level of direct instruction and reprimand by adults that fosters children's ability to pattern their behaviour in relation to one another and to structure their social world and understandings according to the meanings that they co-create. Agency of this kind often occurs through imaginative play and spontaneously. This paper does not address policy issues directly. However, it is relevant as a background paper on Aboriginal children's lives that contributes to the understanding and recognition of existing social capacities outside institutional settings.

Keywords: Central; Australia; Aboriginal; children; State; interventions; Structure; of; social; space; Competencies; Play (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190-7409(10)00158-1
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:33:y:2011:i:4:p:502-508

Access Statistics for this article

Children and Youth Services Review is currently edited by Duncan Lindsey

More articles in Children and Youth Services Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:33:y:2011:i:4:p:502-508