▪ Abstract  In relating the child labor debate to the observed variety of children's work patterns, this review reveals the limits of current notions such as labor, gender, and exploitation in the analysis of this work. Particularly in the developing world, most work undertaken by children has for a long time been explained away as socialization, education, training, and play. Anthropology has helped disclose that age is used with gender as the justification for the value accorded to work. The low valuation of children's work translates not only in children's vulnerability in the labor market but, more importantly, in their exclusion from remunerated employment. I argue that current child labor policies, because they fail to address the exclusion of children from the production of value, reinforce paradoxically children's vulnerability to exploitation.

This special issue brings together contributions from researchers concerned with how children's rights impact on their lifeworlds in developing countries. Taking an anthropological approach that focuses on the lives of vulnerable children in a variety of contexts across the globe, the authors tease out the complex ways in which rights-based policies mesh with the practice of doing development and in the process can become entangled, welded together or clash with children's ideas of right and wrong.Beyond lofty intentions of protecting children worldwide against all sorts of abuse and granting them a wide range of material and immaterial rights, applying a children's rights perspective in development work has sparked intense debate. Much of this debate is about the paradox that taking

Theorizing childhood(s): Why we need postcolonial perspectivesOne of the notions that have recently started appearing in the pages of this journal is 'postcolonial'. Though employed sporadically to designate the newly independent states that gained sovereignty after the Second World War, the notion's first theoretical use in this journal dates back to 2009. In '"I'm just me!" Children talking beyond ethnic and religious identities ' Farzaneh Moinian (2009) explores how five children born in Sweden whose parents were born in Iran talk about their own cultural and ethnic backgrounds and the role these play in their lives. The author argues that children resist oversimplification, reductionism and categorization based on their cultural or ethnic backgrounds and refers to postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha's notion of 'the third space'. This notion is seminal for understanding the dynamics of identity negotiation in minority communities. For Bhabha the third space is a temporary area of contingency where hybrid identities can be performed by giving new meanings to existing cultural symbols, including language (Bhabha, 1994). Also Irina Schmitt (2010) hints at postcolonial theory when discussing young people's competences in creating and criticizing belonging in Germany and Canada. She writes that her work is 'inscribed on discussions of the role of gender in the understanding of national belonging, as reflected in the discourses of "traditional" vs "modern" femininities and masculinities that are used to explicitly and implicitly exclude non-western conceptualizations from participation in western societies' (2010: 165). One year later, in the special issue on Indian childhood, Sircar and Dutta explicitly find inspiration in feminist postcolonial theory to critically discuss the relationship between Kolkata's sex workers' children and their self-appointed western saviours. In criticizing the latter's drive to save the children by taking them out of their 'hell holes' the authors seek to uncover how children practise resilience through tacit negotiations between transgression and conformity. Rather than finding a definition that will make sex workers' children's lives easily understood to 'mainstream' society, the authors use postcolonial theory to attempt to represent these children's vision of themselves and of their struggles to eke out a place in society (Sircar and Dutta, 2011: 335). An overkill of images and narratives of and about child soldiers in Africa produced in the North are also what enjoins Catarina Martins to use postcolonial theory. The images, she claims, are ideological constructs essentializing a hierarchically superior northern Self and a civilizationally inferior South for the purpose of legitimizing political and military intervention, as well as economic exploitation (2011: 437). This is also the case, she claims, when former child soldiers testify to the legitimacy of such representations in documentary film, for their 'unconstrained behaviour and speech ... [make such testimonies] an 465534C ...

When in 19784 first came to the coastal village of Poomkara in Kerala, India, to carry out an anthropological inquiry into the. work of children as part of a research project on poverty and survival strategies of poor households,l I witnessed, not surprisingly, a fair degree of indigence and heavy involvement of children in their families' daily hardships. About half of the village children did not get three meals a day, were scantily dressed, and suffered from a range of poverty-related ailments. Most of the three hundred or so households lived in thatched huts, without piped water or bathrooms; only a handful had electricity or radios, and telephones and TV sets were unknown. Lifestyles were very much imbued by an orthodox interpretation of Islam that justified resistance against both Marxist-inspired militantism and Western ideas and values.Revisiting the village several times, I was able to observe gradual changes in the lives of children under the impact of a massive migration of young men to the Gulf countries that had begun in the early 1980s. About 150 of these young men have regularly been transmitting money to their relatives, introducing them not only to an array of consumer items but also to the symbols and rituals of the type of modernity that has developed in the Gulf. Some have built multistory houses, fitted them with piped water, telephones, TVs and VCRs, and bathrooms and modern kitchens; they have bought lorries, cars, and motorcycles, and opened shops that sell a clioice of processed food and consumer goods unknown in the locality until then. The migrants have also introduced the local Muslim population to a modernized version of Islam that seems better equipped to reconcile orthodoxy with the search for individual advancement and economic gain.

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