Spotlight on Scholarship: Are they just kidding? Taking children seriously as research participants

Description

In the late nineteenth century, as the early anthropologists sought ways to justify their novel venture of scientifically describing non-Western populations, what better way to situate the relevance of ‘primitive’ thought if not through a comparison with Western children? From James Frazer and Edward Tylor to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, anthropologists approached the ‘primitives’ as the infancy of humankind, deploying Western children’s intellectual progress as a metaphor for human progress.