Can anthropology be for children? Should anthropology be for children? In this installment of Illustrated Man we turn our attention to two picture books from the juvenile stacks of my local public library.

Books for children can, on occasion, offer a clarity into underlying issues that belies their apparent simplicity. In the introduction to the revised edition of Enjoy Your Symptom, Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek seizes on this:

Whatever the vicissitudes and deformations of Lacan in cultural studies, one should focus on what happens with children in their early age, following the wise Jesuit motto, “Give me a child till he is seven, and afterward you can do with him whatever you want.” So I am tempted to claim that there is hope for us Lacanians as long as American children are massively exposed to Shel Silverstein’s two classic books, The Missing Piece and The Missing Piece Meets the Big O; one is almost embarrassed by the direct way these two books render in naked form the basic matrix of the Lacanian opposition of desire and drive.

I too have felt the profound touch of picture books like Leo Lionni’s treatise on epistemology and the non-translatability of experience, Fish is Fish, or Jon Muth’s tranquil and enlightening, Zen Shorts. Kids’ books are big business and tenure track positions are getting harder to find. Maybe there are some anthropologists out there who want to get in on this genre?

With the AAA’s push for a more “public anthropology” we might consider too the role our discipline can play in K-12 education. I’m not talking about the anthropology of education or an anthropology of children like the work being done by the good people at the CAE, which is in itself fascinating and, of course, vitally important given the politicization of ed discourse in the public sphere. But, imagine instead an anthropology for children. Maybe there’s a CAE person reading this now who can add to our discussion, are there anthropologists out there right now writing to children?

There are a number of kids’ books that brush up against anthropology or that invite one to interject an anthropological spin on things. At my house we have a slew of these “people around the world” type books (all of them gifts), including ones on bread, shoes, houses, and families. The DK Eyewitness series offers beautiful picture books on archaeology, mythology, Indians, classical ancient societies – Egypt, Greece, Rome, the biggies – even evolution and early humans (or as my kids call them “Monkey People”). The archaeologists already got Indiana Jones and Laura Croft. With cool how-to books like this one they need someone to move into Bill Nye territory.

Granted works like the DK series are commercial productions for the kiddie book market. They’ve no doubt got academics serving as consultants or fact checkers, but most of the creative work is done by graphic designers and copy writers who know how to make books that kids want and that parents will buy. That’s why I find the two works I’d like to discuss today so interesting. They are artistic works of scholarship and experience, creatively rendered and engaging to young people. For any anthros wanting to write for children, here are some role models

Journey to Cahokia: A Boy’s Visit to the Great Mound City by Albert Lorenz with Joy Schleh is a production of The Art Institute of Chicago. The book opens with a map and a note emphasizing the interconnectedness of long distance American Indian trade routes. This sets an academic tone and situates our story around 1300 CE. The story follows the family of a boy named Little Hawk as they journey from their small village by Lake Erie on a trading mission to the great city of Cahokia far to the west along the eastern shore of the Mississippi.

The first scene opens on a tableau, the illustration done in watercolor over ink lines with some colored pencil mixed in. We see a village of wigwams surrounded by a stockade, one hut is shown in cut away so that we can see women tending to children inside. Along the shores of the river men smoke fish, build canoes, and prepare to disembark. In the next page our gaze zooms in closer and we can inspect more carefully the gendered division of labor. The whole process of pot making is shown: one woman crafts the pot, another is ready to paint, a girl carries firewood, a fire is being built with finished pots inside. Men have returned from the hunt carrying rabbits and turkeys.

As Little Hawk embarks on the trading mission to Cahokia a crew of about twenty join his family in five canoes. They row past raised mounds, stop to share a story of Red Horn, survive a raiding party, and are awed at their first sight of Cahokia – a city of 20,000 dominated by a huge mound. Here Little Hawk witnesses a game of stickball. The men notice that the Cahokians dwell in houses made of wattle and daub, and the women see them tilling their gardens with hoes and ask to trade for the tool. In the marketplace there are a great many wares to see from masks and sea shells to woven belts and pottery.

Then the story breaks. Across a two page spread the story yields to photos of artifacts – arrowheads, a ceremonial drinking cup, a dancer’s mask, and a pair of earspools – set beside detailed descriptions and illustrations of people using them. The story resumes on the next page as the villagers join a massive crowd at the base of the principle mound. A “coronation” is taking place, with a religious official bestowing a symbol of authority upon a political official at the top of the pyramid. Finally the travelers bid Cahokia farewell. They load the canoes to depart.

Journey to Cahokia is rather sophisticated for a kids’ book. One can imagine it shelved with non-fiction though it’s entirely narrative in its structure. The sentences are long and the vocabulary is advanced. It has a clear purpose to educate its readership about the people of North American Midwest prior to the arrival of Europeans.

I wasn’t thrilled about the way it represented the political structure of Little Hawk’s village or the “coronation” of the leader of Cahokia, both of which projected a centralized authority where one may not have existed. But these are minor quibbles. The book does a great job of imagining what everyday life was like among the people of the Ohio River valley, even showing a diversity of lifeways from village to city.

The Indian people in it are exquisitely illustrated. I recall a Nez Perce costume designer I interviewed for my dissertation on a major theatrical production staged on an Indian reservation. He vehemently dismissed the primitivist look of buckskin costumes as they are frequently seen in movies. “I refuse to believe that my people couldn’t cut a straight line,” he said. The characters in Journey to Cahokia, by contrast, are well dressed. The women modest, the men fabulously tattooed. They cut a straight line.

I read this to my three year old and, much to my surprise, she was really drawn into the story despite its slow pace. “I see the people!” she exclaimed. The artwork is quite beautiful and each scene is a panorama with a single illustration spread out over two full pages. My seven year-olds were able to read it independently and the more enthusiastic reader of the two went through it three times. She remarked to me, “I didn’t know Indians built pyramids.”

…

Jingle Dancer is by Cynthia Leitich Smith, with illustrations by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu. This is much more a conventional story-time type children’s book with the rhythmic repetition of actions and phrases. The language has a gentle, poetic quality. It’s not in verse per se, but rich in metaphor and sensorial description. Our story follows a Muscogee girl named Jenna, maybe ten years of age, who aspires to be a jingle dancer at the next powwow but doesn’t have a dress. She practices her bounce steps, talks to her Grandma, and visits other female relatives and neighbors. From each woman she asks to borrow a row of jingles until she has enough for her dress and can dance Girls at the powwow in their honor.

The art work in Jingle Dancer is stunning. Bold and rich watercolor over the faintest charcoal lines. I have not seen finer watercolor in a children’s book. My guess is that the creative process began with the illustrator working from photographs of actors, a common technique for producing cinematic realism in comics.

What makes Jingle Dancer stand out is its consciously contemporary setting. When Jenna practices her bounce-steps she does so by watching a video in the family living room. When she begins her quest for jingles for her dress, she embarks wearing blue jeans, a t-shirt and sneakers. As she walks down her suburban street the houses are clean and modern. The women she meets along the way are independent, successful and live in fine homes.

By virtue of its contemporary-ness, this is a story you could share with a non-Indian girl who is “into” Indians and have her come away with sense of living Indian people. It is also a story that a modern Indian girl could read and find something relevant and recognizable from her own life reflected back to her. What a lacuna to fill! Kudos to the author and her team for producing such a unique and positive book.

Like the best family-oriented children’s stories, Jingle Dancer has a sweet heart that features loving relationships among children and adults. It’s hard not to get a little weepy reading it. The three year-old liked it okay, but the seven year-olds were totally fascinated by it. I often remind them when they learn about Indians in their social studies class (which always cast tribal people in the past) that they once lived on a reservation. These memories from when they were two and three lie just outside their grasp. Now they’re asking me to take them to powwow and buy them a frybread so they can see the girls dance jingle.