Anthropology of Work Review

Abstract

everyday life, and the growing number of children on their own—call the notion of "development" into question in profound ways. Each of these concerns is dealt with in the articles that follow. In this essay, I will attempt to flesh out these issues and provide somewhat of an overview to the papers through (1) a discussion of children's work in relation tothe various "izations"—urbanization, globalization, commo-ditization, and proletarianization—that inflect the contempo-rary political-economic context; (2) a brief examination of the meaning of children's work for the children, their households, communities, nations, and the social formations within which they live; and (3) an analytic overview of the dynamics of children's work that addresses the nature and significance of the differences between children as workers and in the kinds of work undertaken by them. I will conclude by bringing play back into the discussion, because it highlights the relationship of work and other (potential) aspects of children's lives in a glaringly zero-sum kind of way. In the context of contemporary Africa, thanks to a lethal potpourri of post-colonial imperialism, widespread state crises, the emergence of a truly transnational capitalism that takes with one hand and steals with the other, and the not coincidental collapse of many aspects of local production (agricultural as well as industrial), what passes for development in many places is increasingly achieved on the backs of children. And what passes for child development is equally compromised. If we erase the importance of play in children's lives, we abet this process. The Political Economy of Children's Work Throughout the world children's work has been, and continues to be, fundamental to agricultural production, and Africa is no exception. Children work as assistants, appren-tices, and independent agents from early childhood through adolescence in a range of activities: seed preparation, clearing, sowing, weeding, bird-scaring, and harvesting. They often work unremunerated, with other household members or among their extended families. They also work as agricultural day laborers paid either by individual farmers or through the aegis of corporate or state agricultural enterprises. They are counted on in most parts of the world to assist with domestic chores, including child-minding, and where these chores include such time-consuming routine tasks as fuel and water provision, children's contributions are usually pivotal. These generalizations say nothing of particular cultural, socioeconomic, or political-ecological differences that accentuate the importance of children's work. In my own work in rural Sudan, for example, children were relied upon for such tasks as fetching water and procuring fuel wood, along with other tasks routinely accomplished by women in other parts of Africa, because of the Islamic preference for women to remain within the domestic space of the house yard (Katz 1991; 1993). In areas of high male labor migration, on the other hand, children's work has been found to increase as they assist their mothers (and remaining older men) with a range of tasks previously undertaken by men. As Susan Levine's essay on South Africa makes clear, such