Anthropologist Dr. Jonah Steinberg, University of Vermont, will undertake research on the experience of childhood across cultures, and children's capacity for autonomy, resistance, and agency. The research will be carried out in India, where he will focus on the process by which village children in India become "street children." There are some rural regions of India in which it is common for village youth to run away to the city. In such regions running away appears to be a widely-accepted life option. In this three-year project Dr. Steinberg seeks to ascertain why it is the case that this is occurring with such frequency.
Narratives of arrival on the street will initially be elicited from a sample group of street children in Delhi. The street children also will be surveyed to identify the villages and regions that produce the greatest numbers of runaways. A selection of those villages will be chosen for ethnographic research about the practice of running away in rural areas, as well as to investigate how the practice is culturally framed and the degree to which it is understood by both adults and children as an ordinary and routine element of the life course. This will also contribute to insights about which villages and households produce the greatest numbers of runaways.
This research has the potential to shed light on the relationship between large-scale historical processes of urbanization and the small-scale emotional lives in individual homes. The research also will broaden understandings about why street children become street children to begin with, no matter where they live, and will generate advice on the expansion of rural or semirural services that might protect them from ever having to face the risk they face once on the streets.
" was awarded a supplement and thus concluded after four years of intensive research. The study encompassed hundreds of hours of recorded data from dozens of villages, organizations, and urban sites across the entire breadth of the Indian Subcontinent, including in particular--and most extensively--rural settlements in the states of Bihar, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, and Jharkhand, and the cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Lucknow, Chennai, and Bangalore, among other regions and conurbations. The fundamental goal was to determine factors contributing to highly concentrated trends of autonomously-driven childhood migration from rural areas to large cities, especially in light of preliminary findings that (1) a significant proportion of "street children" come not for economic reasons but as runaways and (2) that the villages they leave tend not to be the poorest of poor settlements. No single structural causal factor could be isolated, though many were explored, including flood and famine, the presence of railways, and changing agricultural relationships; it appears, rather, from initial data analysis that the initial hypothesis on the primacy of peer-to-peer transmission of cultural knowledge of pathways, methods, and practices of running away, as a replicable form, and inflected by historical transformations in kinship structures, manifest in particular as domestic crisis--is the most likely engine of solo child departure from home in North India. In other words, the particular intellectual merit of this project is to be found in what it illuminates about the intersection of the personal and the historical: the primary finding is that running away avails itself as an available, well-established, and timeworn response to emotional stress at home. Emotional stress at home, in turn, seems patterned by large-scale historical forces. Urban research focused on well-known street-children's gathering points, including railway stations and religious shrines with charitable provisions. Rural research focused on the situations of villages with high numbers of childhood departures, and narratives of running away among the families of the runaways. Methods combined interview data, ethnographic observation and immersion, participatory place-based approaches, and archival research. Historical archives at the India-related holdings of the British Library shed light on the time depth of the phenomenon. Products include multiple article manuscripts, one recently published in Ethnos, a book prospectus and a manuscript-in-progress, and several funding applications in development for further research and analysis. Broader impacts are constituted in particular by dialogues with a wide range of advocacy, policy, and welfare organizations, advice for and information-sharing with legal efforts on behalf of street children's safety, and general success in disseminating to the public in India and the US little-known information about child runaways' lives.
