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Knowledge of childhood: materiality, text, and the history of science – an interdisciplinary round table discussion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2017

FELIX RIETMANN ,
MAREIKE SCHILDMANN ,
CAROLINE ARNI ,
DANIEL THOMAS COOK ,
DAVIDE GIURIATO ,
NOVINA GÖHLSDORF  and
WANGUI MUIGAI
FELIX RIETMANN
Affiliation:
Program in the History of Science, Princeton University, 129 Dickinson Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544-1017, USA. Email: [email protected].
MAREIKE SCHILDMANN
Affiliation:
Deutsches Seminar, Universität Zürich, Schönberggasse 9, CH–8001 Zurich, Switzerland. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

This round table discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and allude to historiographical and methodological questions through a range of examples. Topics include the emergence of children's rooms in US consumer magazines, research on the unborn in nineteenth-century sciences of development, the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry, German literary discourses about the child's initiation into writing, and the sociopolitics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particularly amenable to interdisciplinary perspectives that take the history of science as part of a broader history of knowledge.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 111 - 141
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Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2017 

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References

1 There is a considerable body of scholarship on various aspects of this transformation, although few works explicitly engage with histories of knowledge about childhood. On the child study movements in the USA and Europe see von Oertzen, Christine, ‘Science in the cradle: Milicent Shinn and her home-based network of baby observers, 1890–1910’, Centaurus (2013) 55, pp. 175–195 Google Scholar; Shuttleworth, Sally, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010 Google Scholar; Smuts, A.B., Science in the Service of Children, 1893–1935, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006 Google Scholar; Daepe, Marc, Zum Wohl des Kindes? Pädologie, pädagogische Psychologie und experimentelle Pädagogik in Europa und den USA, 1890–1940, Weinheim: Leuven University Press, 1993 Google Scholar. On drawings and toy usage see Wittmann, Barbara, ‘Bedeutungsvolle Kritzeleien: Die Kinderzeichnung als Instrument der Humanwissenschaften, 1880–1950’, unpublished Habilitation, Bauhaus University, 2012 Google Scholar; Douglas, Mao, Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature, 1860–1960, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008 Google Scholar; Brown, Marilyn R. (ed.), Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood between Rousseau and Freud, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002 Google Scholar. On ergonomics, physiology and (reform) pedagogics see Whittaker, Gwendolyn, Überbürdung – Subversion – Ermächtigung: Die Schule und die literarische Moderne 1880–1918, Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2013 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hopf, Caroline, Die experimentelle Pädagogik: Empirische Erziehungswissenschaft in Deutschland am Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts, Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhart, 2004 Google Scholar; Oelkers, Jürgen, ‘Physiologie, Pädagogik und Schulreform im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Sarasin, Philipp and Tanner, Jakob (eds.), Physiologie und industrielle Gesellschaft: Studien zur Verwissenschaftlichung des Körpers im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998, pp. 245–285 Google Scholar; Meumann, Ernst, Vorlesungen zur Einführungen in die experimentelle Pädagogik und ihre psychologischen Grundlagen, Leipzig: Engelmann, 1907 Google Scholar. For a sociologically informed perspective see Gutman, Marta and de Coninck-Smith, Ning (eds.), Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space and the Material Culture of Childhood, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008 Google Scholar.

2 Foerster, Friedrich Wilhelm, Staatsbürgerliche Erziehung: Prinzipienfragen politischer Ethik und politischer Pädagogik, Leipzig: Teubner, 1914 Google Scholar. See e.g. Giuriato, Davide, ‘Tintenbuben: Kindheit und Literatur um 1900 (Rilke, R. Walser, Benjamin)’, Poetica (2010) 42, pp. 325–351 Google Scholar; Bernstein, Robin, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, New York: New York University Press, 2011 Google Scholar; Wittmann, op. cit. (1).

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6 To mention one example, the Journal for the History of Childhood and Youth contains a separate section, called ‘Object lessons’, dedicated to the study of ‘material culture’. According to the editors, the section was meant to ‘foster discussion of the objects and experiences in children's lives’. See Lovett, Laura L., ‘Introduction’, Journal for the History of Childhood and Youth (2010) 3, pp. 1–3, 1Google Scholar. See also Calvert, Karin, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood 1600–1900, Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1992 Google Scholar; Gutman and Coninck-Smith, op. cit. (1).

7 Downing, Andrew Jackson, The Architecture of Country Houses, New York: Dover Publications, 1850 Google Scholar; first published 1969, opposite pp. 146, 164.

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13 Funeral photographs are also part of a long and rich history of African American funeral practices, dating back to slave night-time ceremonies and burial aid societies. See Holloway, Karla F.C., Passed On: African American Mourning Stories: A Memorial, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002 Google Scholar; Brown, Vincent, The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008 Google Scholar.

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16 See the analysis of photographs of African American children during the Civil War and through Reconstruction in Mitchell, Mary Niall, Raising Freedom's Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery, New York: New York University Press, 2008 Google Scholar; also see Bernstein, op. cit. (2).

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21 Cf. Arni, Caroline, ‘The prenatal: contingencies of procreation and transmission in the nineteenth and early twentieth century’, in Brandt, Christina and Müller-Wille, Staffan (eds.), Heredity Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850–1930, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016, pp. 285–309 Google Scholar.

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24 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Routledge, 1974, p. 219 Google Scholar; Koselleck, Reinhart, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 Google Scholar. For how this concept of time played out in concepts of ontogeny and phylogeny respectively see Owsei, Temkin, ‘German concepts of ontogeny and history around 1800’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1950) 24, pp. 227–246 Google Scholar; Bowler, Peter J., Life's a Splendid Drama: Evolutionary Biology and the Reconstruction of Life's Ancestry 1860–1940, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996 Google Scholar. For a critical discussion of the temporalization of the living see von Wülfingen, Bettina Bock, Brandt, Christina, Lettow, Susanne and Vienne, Florence (eds.), Temporalities of Reproduction, special issue, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (2015) 1 Google Scholar.

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35 Kanner, Leo, ‘Autistic disturbances of affective contact’, Nervous Child (1943) 2, pp. 217–50, 249Google Scholar. Asperger and Kanner appropriated and reframed the term ‘autism’ that Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler had used for a symptom of schizophrenia: the extreme withdrawal of patients, involving the predominance of their inner world. See Bleuler, Eugen, ‘Dementia Praecox oder Gruppe der Schizophrenien’, in Aschaffenburg, Gustav (ed.), Handbuch der Psychiatrie, Vienna: Deuticke, 1911, pp. 52–56 Google Scholar.

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39 Ursula Klein introduced the term ‘paper tools’ to describe the function of chemical formulas in European organic chemistry: Klein, Ursula, ‘Paper tools in experimental cultures: the case of Berzelian formulas’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2001) 32, pp. 265–312 Google Scholar. For an introduction on recent approaches to the epistemic role of inscription practices see Hoffmann, Christoph, ‘Festhalten, Bereitstellen: Verfahren der Aufzeichnung’, in Hoffmann, Christoph (ed.), Daten sichern: Schreiben und Zeichnen als Verfahren der Aufzeichnung, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2008, pp. 7–20 Google Scholar. Other examples include Wittmann, Barbara (ed.), Spuren erzeugen: Zeichnen und Schreiben als Verfahren der Selbstaufzeichnung, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2009 Google Scholar; Krauthausen, Karin and Nasim, Omar W. (eds.), Notieren, Skizzieren: Schreiben und Zeichnen als Verfahren des Entwurfs, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2010 Google Scholar.

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42 My analysis of the patient files is based on samples from Kanner's patient records at the Mason Chesney Medical Archives (Johns Hopkins Institutions). Kanner's patients’ medical records from the Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children are located at the Health Information Management Division of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. I was able to find copies of the files of four of the eleven patients who are portrayed in Kanner's first publication on autistic disturbances. For a more detailed study of the patient files and on the significance of notation systems for early conceptions of autism and the formation of child psychiatry see Göhlsdorf, op. cit. (4).

43 Meyer to Leo Kanner, undated, Adolf Meyer Papers, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Unit I/2001/2.

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57 On the coinage of the ‘internal other’ in the theoretical framework of an anthropological turn to ‘ontologies’ see Candea, Matei and Alcayna-Stevens, Lys, ‘Internal others: ethnographies of naturalism’, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology (2012) 30(2), pp. 36–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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59 Kanner, op. cit. (35), p. 249.

60 Camus, Albert, The Stranger, New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946 Google Scholar; Simmel, Georg, ‘The stranger’, in Levine, Donald N. (ed.), On Individuality and Social Forms, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971, pp. 143–149 Google Scholar. See also Schütz, Alfred, ‘The stranger: an essay in social psychology’, American Journal of Sociology (1944) 49(6), pp. 499–507 Google Scholar.

61 Simmel described the object of his métier as the ‘reciprocal influencing’ of humans. Simmel, Georg, ‘The problem of sociology’, American Journal of Sociology (1909) 15(3), pp. 289–320, 297Google Scholar. Discussions in philosophy and anthropology explored how humans connected, or the ‘limits of community’, as implied in the title of the 1924 book by German anthropologist Plessner, Helmuth, The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism, New York: Humanity Books, 1999 Google Scholar.

62 Asperger, ‘Autistischen Psychopathen’, op. cit. (34), p. 91, my translation.

63 The roots of the cybernetic movement go back to the early 1940s but the project was officially founded with the Macy Conferences from 1946 to 1953. Citations in Vogl, Joseph, ‘Regierung und Regelkreis: Ein historisches Vorspiel’, in Pias, Claus (ed.), CYBERNETICS/KYBERNETIK: The Macy-Conferences 1946–1953, 2 vols., Berlin: Diaphanes, 2004, vol. 2, p. 67 Google Scholar, my translation; and Ruesch, Jurgen and Bateson, Gregory, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. viii Google Scholar. The book was originally published in 1951, and Bateson and Ruesch wrote the quoted passage in the preface to the 1968 edition.

64 Ruesch and Bateson, op. cit. (63), p. x.

65 Arguably the distinction between popular and scientific/pedagogical sources is not clear-cut. In fact, recent conceptualizations of science as ‘a form of communicative action’ (James Secord) can be read as explicit challenges to this distinction. However, the methodological question raised above still remains. See Secord, James A., ‘Knowledge in transit’, Isis (2004) 95(4), pp. 654–72Google Scholar; and Topham, Jonathan R., ‘Introduction’, Isis (2009) 100(2), pp. 310–318 Google Scholar.

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67 Clark, John T., ‘The migrant in Pittsburgh’, Opportunity (1923) 1, pp. 303–307 Google Scholar.

68 Clark, op. cit. (67). Also Gaines, Kevin K., Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996 Google Scholar.

69 W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘Opinion of W.E.B. Du Bois’, Crisis, September 1924, p. 199; Smith, Katharine Capshaw, Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004, p. 52 Google Scholar.

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71 On childhood in the Middle Ages see Shahar, Shulamith (ed.), Childhood in the Middle Ages, London: Routledge, 1990 Google Scholar; Schultz, James A., The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 1100–1350, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995 Google Scholar; and more recently Classen, Albrecht (ed.), Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005 Google Scholar.

72 There is a considerable body of scholarship about a new view of childhood emerging around 1800 in modern European and American literature. Examples include Steedman, op. cit. (31); Martens, Lorna, The Promise of Memory: Childhood Recollection and Its Objects in Literary Modernism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011 Google Scholar; Ewers, Hans-Heino, Kindheit als poetische Daseinsform: Studien zur Entstehung der romantischen Kindheitsutopie im 18. Jahrhundert. Herder, Jean Paul, Novalis und Tieck, Munich: Fink, 1989 Google Scholar; Lloyd, Rosemary, The Land of Lost Content: Children and Childhood in Nineteenth-Century French Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 Richter, Dieter, Das fremde Kind: Zur Entstehung der Kindheitsbilder des bürgerlichen Zeitalters, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1987, p. 25 Google Scholar.

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76 Cook, op. cit. (4).

77 Cook, Daniel Thomas, The Commodification of Childhood, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004 Google Scholar.

78 Geulen, Eva, ‘Adalbert Stifters Kinder-Kunst: Drei Fallstudien’, Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte (1993) 67, pp. 648–668 Google Scholar.

79 Giuriato, op. cit. (4).

80 Foucault, Michel, Der Wille zum Wissen: Sexualität und Wahrheit I, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983, p. 170 Google Scholar.

81 MacDorman, Marian F., Mathews, T.J., Mohangoo, Ashna D. and Zeitlin, Jennifer, ‘International comparisons of infant mortality and related factors: United States and Europe, 2010’, National Vital Statistics Reports (2014) 63, pp. 1–6 Google Scholar.

82 Du Bois, W.E.B., The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, New York: Schocken Books, 1899 Google Scholar; Patterson, Andrea, ‘Germs and Jim Crow: the impact of microbiology on public health policies in Progressive Era American South’, Journal of the History of Biology (2009) 42, pp. 529–559 Google Scholar.

83 On health programmes see Smith, Susan Lynn, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women's Health Activism in America, 1890–1950, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995 Google Scholar; Hine, Darlene Clark, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–1950, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989 Google Scholar.

84 For example, the memoir of Terrell, Mary Church, A Colored Woman in a White World, Washington, DC: Ransdell Publishing Co., 1940, pp. 106–108 Google Scholar; also Georgia Douglas Johnson's poetry collection Bronze: A Book of Verse (1922), as well as her correspondence regarding the inspiration for writing Bronze: ‘I wrote Bronze – it is entirely racial and one section deals entirely with motherhood – that motherhood that has as its basic note – black children born into the world's displeasure’. Georgia Douglas Johnson to Arna Bontemps, 1941 letter as quoted in McHenry, Elizabeth, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African-American Literary Societies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002, p. 280 Google Scholar.

85 Du Bois, W.E.B., ‘Of the passing of the first-born’, Chapter 11 of The Souls of Black Folk, Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903, pp. 207–214, 213Google Scholar.

86 Larsen, Nella, Quicksand, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928, p. 103 Google Scholar.

87 Partridge, Sarah, Balayla, Jacques, Holcroft, Christina A. and Abenhaim, Haim A., ‘Inadequate prenatal care utilization and risks of infant mortality and poor birth outcome: a retrospective analysis of 28,729,765 U.S. deliveries over 8 years’, American Journal of Perinatology (2012) 29(10), pp. 787–794 Google Scholar.

88 Kagan, Jerome, ‘American longitudinal research on psychological development’, Child Development (1964) 35, pp. 1–32, 2Google Scholar.

89 Adams, Vincanne, Murphy, Michelle and Clarke, Adele E., ‘Anticipation: technoscience, life, affect, temporality’, Subjectivity (2009) 28(1), pp. 246–265, 246Google Scholar.

90 On antenatal care with regard to the emergence of the prenatal see Al-Gailani, op. cit. (22); Herschkorn-Barnu, Paule, ‘Adolphe Pinard et l'enfant à naître: L'invention de la médicine foetale’, Devenir (1996) 3, pp. 77–87 Google Scholar. On optimization see Rose, Nikolas, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007 Google Scholar.