Pain with Punishment and The Negotiation of Childhood: An Ethnographic Analysis of Children's Rights Processes in Maasailand

Abstract

Children's rights activists contend that corporal punishment in schools is a form of child abuse which hinders children's learning. Yet most parents and teachers in Maasailand, Kenya consider corporal punishment, if properly employed, to be one of the most effective ways to instil the discipline necessary for children to learn and grow well. Responding to calls for a more empirical anthropology of rights, this article provides an ethnographic analysis of the practice of corporal punishment in domestic and primary school settings, exploring its pedagogical, developmental and social significance, and illuminating its role in the production and negotiation of identities and personhood.

Force Signs: Ideologies of Corporal Discipline in Academia and the Marshall Islands

“…, 243); or “fourteen percent of young children were physically abused” (May‐Chahal and Cawson , 979). Rydstrom (, 329) claims to analyze “men's use of punishment” but actually analyzes reports; Archambault (, 282–283) investigates the “practices and meanings of corporal punishment in Maasai homes and schools” but then only ever cites words as data. In these sentences scholars erase the reports themselves, extracting only the perceived referential content of the interview and treating the meaning of that content as stable as opposed to produced in interviews as communicative events.…”

Care or Neglect?: Corporal Discipline Reform in a Rural Moroccan Classroom

“…In this article I draw upon and aim to contribute to the anthropological literature on the globalization of education and pedagogy. This literature has examined how “Western” beliefs about the child, learning, and mental health, often rooted in the psychological sciences, are incorporated into non‐Western classroom practices according to the larger socio‐economic and cultural dynamics of specific contexts (Ahn ; Archambault ; Grinker and Cho ; Tobin et al ; Woronov ). Much of this literature has emphasized the way in which modernizing trends in pedagogy are unevenly adapted and transformed in local contexts—and sometimes categorically rejected.…”

“…In engaging with both transnational discourses about corporal punishment and local villagers' reactions to these ideas, I draw upon a Foucaudian notion of biopower , which highlights the ways in which the state (and in this case transnational governing bodies) uses bodily practices and disciplinary mechanisms to try to create and manage specific types of citizen‐subjects (Foucault ). In my case, the Moroccan state, exerting its influence through the Ministry of Education, is promoting medical and legal discourses rooted in a liberal tradition of human rights that characterize threats of physical coercion and the infliction of pain and injury sustained during acts of corporal punishment to be forms of child abuse, with the potential to cause a great deal of long‐lasting physical and psychological harm to the child (Archambault ; Hart ; UNICEF ).…”

Tackling the Physical Punishment of Children in Resource Poor Contexts

“…Ensuring that children grow up into the adults their communities wish them to become is a key reason behind the persistence of this practice (see also Frankenberg et al, 2010;Twum-Danso Imoh, 2012, 2013. Therefore, in the majority of societies where physical punishment is administered, it is seen as a tool for socializing children (Korbin, 1981(Korbin, , 2002Langness, 1981;Levine and Levine, 1981;Levinson, 1989;Kavapalu, 1993;Yousseff, Attia and Kamel, 1998;Archambault, 2009;Frankenberg et al, 2010;Lansford et al, 2010). According to Montgomery (2009:161), in such societies, physical punishment is not perceived simply as a method of punishment, but rather, it is linked to 'wider philosophies of socialization and ideas about the correct relationship between people'.…”

“…For example, in their research on child rearing in Tanzania, Frankenberg, Holmqvist and Rubenson (2010:463) make distinctions between what they call the 'non-care of non-beating' which indicates the lack of care associated with the lack of physical punishment by caregivers, and 'as if beating a snake' which represents child abuse for communities as it is seen as too harsh and may directly harm the child's well-being (see also Korbin, 1981;Langness, 1981;Archambault, 2009). These limitations community members impose on each other also influence how they perceive those who they believe have gone beyond the 'norm'.…”