Childhood in a Sri Lankan Village

BAMBI L. CHAPIN is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

• AcknowledgmentsNote on Translation and Transliteration1. Introduction2. Sri Lanka: Setting the Ethnographic Context3. Socializing Desire: Demanding Toddlers and Self-Restrained Children4. Shaping Attachments: Learning Hierarchy at Home5. Making Sense of Envy: Desire and Relationships in Conflict6. Engaging with Hierarchy outside the Home: Education and Efforts at Change7. Culturing PeopleNotesReferencesIndex

"This is a nuanced and subtle book … I found it enthralling." (Children & Society) "This is a new kind of research on childhood, one that boldly focuses on a few trajectories of enculturation rather than covering a conventional set of contextual categories … Chapin carries this off with remarkable sophistication, skill and humility in a book that should be read by every student in this field." (Ethos) "What makes this book so special is that it does not stop at description, as do most ethnographies. It goes on to explain Sinhalese childhood and child rearing, doing so within a well-considered, smartly-deployed psychoanalytic framework." - Naomi Quinn (professor emerita, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University) "Chapin's work is a significant contribution to the anthropology of childhood. It tackles important questions about the meaning of child care practices and patterns." - Jill E. Korbin (Department of Anthropology and Schubert Center for Child Studies, Case Western Reserve University)