With instead of about: Toward an anthropology that is critically integrated into Global Early Childhood Development interventions

Abstract

This comment posits questions and opens debates around the recent article by Scheidecker et al. based in the author's experience in anthropological research and applied work in child development in the Global South. The article advocates for a critical review of how anthropologists in the Global South carry out and disseminate their research, in order to broaden audiences beyond the academy. Finally, it is argued that for anthropological evidence to hold a place at the table on Global Early Childhood Development (ECD), anthropologists must engage in practices, methodologies, and forms of collaboration that make our findings and perspectives hearable. For this to happen, anthropologists should take an active part in institutions and fields of work they tend to avoid. Only in this way can we positively impact children and families by incorporating the inherent diversity of ECD beyond the parameters and values of normalcy that predominate in the so-called minority world.