Youth, already shape-shifting across space and time, persists as a confounding social category even or perhaps more, when it is heavily observed, diagnosed, documented, policed, institutionalized, medicated, consumed, and mediated. It is the flexible and innovative ligature connecting a host of differences with the dominant category of biological and social adult who hold sway at the centers of familial, economic, educational, and political power.  Philippe Ariès famously intervened in the modern Western belief in childhood as a naturalized state, arguing that in the Middle Ages, people simply did not have sentiment de l’enfance—both a feeling and awareness of childhood (Ariès 1962, 125). While the realization that children might be socially produced was long overdue, it hinged on Ariès’ own speculative deductions about a singular class of humans “focusing on adult ideas of childhood rather the experience of actual children” (Rowland 2012, 8).  Coming in 1962, Ariès’ work seems fashionably late in argument and method, given Margaret Mead’s pioneering research with Samoan young people in the 1920s. Through a careful and engaged anthropological project, Mead articulated clearly how culture gave shape to young people as social subjects and provided the symbolic tools for them to make meaning of their changing roles and bodies. Mead’s research challenges the Western position of “childhood” as a universal human experience at the very moment this idea was being encoded as a legal feature of modernity by the League of Nations. In September, 1924, the General Assembly ratified the Declaration of Children’s Rights, the result of a long campaign by Eglantyne Jebb, founder of the Save the Children fund (Hart 2006,1).

Jebb’s success in securing the ratification of the Declaration precipitated a grand new universalist narrative of childhood—and with it, a humanist imperative to preserve life and to discover the means of its preservation along with the eradication of all threats to its unblemished, idealized course. This gospel began an ideological crusade emanating from the war-ravaged metropoles of Europe, carried forward by missionaries, medical professionals, and philanthropists. Mead’s project, by contrast, emphasized cultural difference in producing the practices, ritual, and discipline socializing young people into full members of their communities. The project was not without its ideological flaws: Mead speaks of the short time it takes to “master the structure of a primitive society” (Mead 1968, 21).  While positing her work in a feminist framework—studying girls in Samoa as a way to increase the knowledge of women in general in light of a “paucity” of such knowledge—and towards a reevaluation of the capitalist, patriarchal space inhabited by adolescent women in the U.S., Mead replicates an older discourse of “brown” bodies serving as the site of knowledge production for “white” benefit.  Or to restate it, the outside continues to be the (re)source of knowledge for the inside, the telling sign of an imperial project. While Jebb worked to refine and legitimate a civilizing mandate to institute the terms of childhood—flattening cultural experience under the steamroller of Western ideals, Mead conflated “the primitive” with the adolescent, ultimately mobilizing cultural difference as a comparative analytic to repair the civilizing apparatus producing American teenagers and their associated delinquencies/disorders (Remigio 2008, 165).

In the conclusion of Coming of Age in Samoa Mead gives a solemn soliloquy on what we must pay for the progress of modernity, and pay heavily: crime and delinquency, conflicts of youth, neuroses, and lack of a coherent tradition (Mead 1968, 178). She proposes the realm of choice available in Western culture is the prize, but it must be accompanied by an acceptance of diversity necessary to the zenith of culture, the heterogeneous one in which many life paths proliferate. The high-minded rhetoric aside, it is Mead’s tally sheet that interests me, with its steep pricing set to gauge the ordinary public of any society and force them to the factory or the sanatorium.  She carried out her research in the aftermath of modernity’s violent assault upon its masters, as the battlefields of Europe soaked up the last drops of blood shed by a lost generation of boys. New crises were still to befall the capitalist West, unfurling new dark flags of inequality, new modern plagues of poverty and state repression yet to be conjured. Among the Samoan girls, even the most deviant is brought into social harmony.  Through shared expectations and standards they become “a picture of orderly, regular development in a flexible, but strictly delimited, environment” (Ibid., 137). The prescriptive recipe is discovered among “the primitives” and the stormy adolescence of the complex societies is a tempest borne of rapid changes and the clouds of choices that lay before them.

Mead advocates for an open recognition of the radical transformations confronting young people in mid-century America. Framed in the aspirational logic of individual choice, the young person is presented as an unsteady protagonist amidst the upheavals of an ever-advancing civilization. There is no deficit here, only surplus of energy and direction and in seizing from amongst these choices “this child of the future must have an open mind” (Ibid., 178). The future, it seems, belongs only to this child of America and modernity. Time is frozen for the Samoan girls whom Mead studied, and for whom there exists no such plentitude of potential becomings, but only “one pattern of behavior” (Ibid., 174). As the Samoan girl is enclosed in a word that appears static (Ibid., 151), journeying down her destined path and freed from the chaos of choice and cultural change, so the American teenager is enclosed in the anthropological prescription of a world disordered, a subject brought into sharp and complex relief by the careful ethnography of Samoan youth who themselves pay the price of that single pattern of behaviour” with its lack of complication: “less involvement with life” (Mead, preface to 1973 edition, cited in Remigio). The “primitive” experience becomes the rendering agent able to demystify the state of the modern adolescent and in turn, this process of demystification produces an object of knowledge available for more techniques of power.

Mead is hardly alone in her instrumentalization of her anthropological subjects and her comparative, culturally relativist approach traces itself to an anti-racist orientation within the social sciences (Newman 1996, 233). Mead’s (proto)feminist research among adolescent girls growing up in the South Pacific on the edges of modernity and cusp of momentous change brought “the primitive” into a shared human proximity with the then-radical notion that there could even exist the idea of girlhood outside of the West. What is significant here, however, is not the radical presentation of alternate, legitimate human cultures but how the young people are packaged up for the analytic pleasure of adult consumers. Mead’s intended audience are summoned as the caretakers of the fraught future embodied in children, especially teachers, parents, and we might imagine, social workers and the multitude of agents produced in the panicked advent of the “teenager,” delinquent sign of the modern/nuclear age.

Between Mead and Jebb, the figure of the child is articulated in its modern, Janus-faced contortions: risk and at risk. In either instance, the child is poised for failure either actively or passively, but in both forms through the weakness of some universal nature they are imagined to possess to their detriment. Through the analytic construction of cultural and biological threats, the morphology of the child comes into being always already vulnerable to failure, whether in warding off social or physiological contamination. The contemporary figure of the child comes materializes most clearly in its proximity to failure articulated by some form of “risk.” Failure is given its supple morphology by a pliant, expansive assemblage of folk panics, morality, and techniques intended to demarcate a class of individual and then harness or domesticate their biopolitial energy into “correct” forms of being/becoming, whether at the frontline, the factory line or the dismal homefront. Society confronts the “native” powers embodied by the as-yet unformed child of modernity and should society fail it thoroughly disciplining and domesticating the child into a modern subject, it will be threatened by the corrupt and stunted inheritor of Mead’s simple, “one pattern” savage communities.

 The failures preying on youth can be cross-referenced with other deviancies of the bourgeois, Western world and collated with the colonial discourse on the “primitive.” With Foucault’s critical analysis of European bourgeoisie sexuality in hand, Ann Stoler advances into the imperial territory which informed the very construction of “civilized” subjects and their sexuality—a territory that haunts Foucault’s work with its absence. Stoler recites Foucault’s careful tally of four deviant targets/objects of knowledge around which technologies of power circulated and expanded: “the masturbating child of the bourgeois family, the “hysterical woman,” the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult” (Stoler 1995, 6). Would this collection of discursive figures have been produced, Stoler asks, “without reference to the libidinal energies of the savage, the primitive, the colonized—reference points of difference, critique, and desire” (Ibid.)?  Through the contrasting disorientations and disorder of the primitive Other as outside-of-modernity (or bourgeois Europe), disciplined by colonial practice, a biopolitical state can be seen in relief; relieved of any disruptive and de-modernizing confusions over bodies and their trajectories, European societies used discourses of sexual morality to “redraw the ‘interior frontiers’ of national communities” thus marking out certain individuals as dangerous and desirable as objects of knowledge all at once, often along the “boundaries of race” (Ibid., 7). Mead’s research, while pioneering in many ways, represents the discursive, diagnostic, and therapeutic uses the “primitive,” particularly its children, have been put to in reinforcing the “interior frontiers” of modern societies. Her instrumentalization of Samoan girlhood as a microscopic lens, gazing back in time, through which to examine the intensifying stresses of modernity on young people illustrates two of Stoler’s points and concepts critical to thinking of any anthropology of, around, and on children. First, children, as typified by Foucault’s “masturbating child,” are already “savage,” undomesticated with their “libidinal energies” an omnipresent threat to the good order of society. As such, they are demarcated by the “interior frontiers” of the nation, admitted personhood and identity only insofar as they relinquish, much as Paul recalls his own passage into the body of Christ, their “childish things:” their secret speech, their irrational thinking, their impulsive and immature actions. Second, young people are objects of knowledge and inhabitants of a savage state. In modern discourse children are fleshy sites to work on, subjected to an orthopedics of ideology and bodily discipline until they can be cooped-up and recuperated into productive social postures. Children are not a being, but a relation. Childhood in turn is not a state of this being, but a globalizing figure of ideology and commodification. To draw this out further, childhood and its more agile twin, “youth,” are the same global figure of incredible discursive, imaginative power working with various intensities and effects on the assemblages of politics, international aid, education, pop culture, medicine and health, policing, entertainment, and technology. Across all these strata childhood operates in what Felix Guattari refers to as an “abstract machine”—a transversal operation cutting across everything else (material, cognitive, affective, and social) (Guattari 1995, 35). This idea of the abstract machine gives us a way to account for how childhood can become so many things, be so uneven across time and space and yet recognizable for both its utopic promise and its abject failures to become its idealized form (the nostalgic childhood that all people have a right to) and fulfill its critical social task of transforming young human animals into new, orderly social beings. Rather than reducing and disciplining the various cultural strata it operates across, the abstract machine of childhood enhances and pushes their differences, their heterogeneity.  This process takes all the various and variable energies of the child—expressed cognitively, affectively, semiotically, politically, and ethically in these various strata—and links them above any unifying trait (despite the claim to biological fact of the “child”), bringing them into operation through the force of their difference. The figure of youth connects and penetrates into such varied aspects of cultural life with so much sinister whimsy and perverse idyll animating its life, soundtracked to the eternal loop of this droning epitaph: “Children are the future.” This feature of child/youth as endless chronotope is something I will return to, but for the moment I want to reiterate: childhood is a universalizing membrane by which human experience can be essentialized to Jebb’s crusading ideal of a blissful, natural metamorphosis into (modern) adulthood. Simultaneously, the child-as-figure is the universal membrane providing the pathways for massive global play through commodified puppeteering of its rich possibilities of becoming something-other.

For any ethnographic study of young people it is of paramount importance to recognize the elusive and unstable formations/shapes of the abstract machine of childhood. As with any other discursive knowledge object such as “woman” or “queer” the child appears through the intersections of cultural practice and biopolitical power enacted in private and public spaces whether domestic, educational, consumptive, or those shifting fields of play. Stoler’s work explicitly draws out the relation between anthropological work such as Mead’s and social panics around the “interior frontiers” upon which society’s hegemonic defense relies. Childhood, or youth, and the people ensnared in its definition at any given moment, is a vulnerable and volatile instant in society’s reproduction and is therefore always at risk of breaking down, becoming contaminated, in short, becoming delinquent. While childhood is full of the utopic promise I alluded to earlier as an imaginary state of eternally unfolding completeness, it is also saturated with its savage Otherness, diagnosed by its delinquency, that juvenile disorder of ever-present threat from below, quite literally. The metaphor of disease infecting youthful populations appears in the American literature around the teenager of the post-war period. In The Shook-up Generation, the author claims:

“Delinquency is a symptom, not a disease, and the disease knows no geographical and no social boundaries. Youngsters caught by delinquency think there is no cure for it…The disease which produces delinquency can be cured…The way to begin the attack, of course, is to take a close and careful look at the shook-up generation and how it behaves” (Salisbury 1969, 17).

With this injunction, let us consider the idea of failure.

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