Developing Personhood: The discourse, experience, and material culture of children’s play activities in a WWII Japanese American Internment Camp

Summary

Recent studies apply the concept of "personhood" to the archaeological record as part of the continuing attempt to understand the complexities of past societies by moving away from gross categories and instead examining socially constructed roles. This paper explores the application of "personhood" as a way to transcend a broadly defined focus on "children" or "childhood." Such generalizing terms can obscure the impact of gender, age, and other social or economic variables on children’s interactions and appearance in the archaeological record. Research from Amache, a WWII Japanese Internment Camp, is used to look at social expectations of play activities and locations based on age and gender and correlate these to the existing archival and archaeological record. The ability to differentiate gender and age categories from material objects has broad implications for our interpretation of the archaeological record and methods for defining the terms children and childhood.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Historical Archaeology of Childhood: From the Past and into the Present   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 592