Personhood and the Body: Norming and Spacing of Children’s Bodies in Two Preschools in Delhi

• In Event: Evaluating education and assessment: rural sites, global myths, and access

Proposal

Rationale
“Space must be normed and raced at the macrolevel (entire countries and continents), the local level (city neighborhoods), and ultimately even the microlevel of the body itself (the contaminated and the contaminating carnal halo of the non-white body)”
- The Racial Contract, Charles W. Mills (p. 44)

At the heart of this paper rests the question of how Early Childhood Education might not simply be a transparent public good, but a site at which young children are being educated in differentiated ways to become “humans” and “Others” (Wynter, 2007). I use Charles Mills’ work, to think about how personhood and subpersonhood is bound up with the development of modern democratic body politics. Mills research initially focused on class and Marxism in particular and then traced its arc to race when he argued that all of us are bound not in a social contract, but a racial contract that continues to uphold white supremacy by categorizing people as persons or subpersons. I, however, complicate the idea of race and class in Mill’s work, especially in the context of India. I read his work through an intersectional lens and understand it as entanglements of class, race, caste, religion, and postcolonialiality that mutually construct each other and result in power and privilege that constitutes all of us. I specifically look at how children’s bodies get entangled in the racial contract negotiated by the colonial nature of class structures in Delhi, India. How children’s bodies get normed and spaced from an early age, re-inscribing them as persons or subpersons. Mills (1997) describes Contract of Association when he talks about Contract of postcoloniality. He says, “The European conqueror brings order, foresight, and security to a human society which, though ardently aspiring for these fundamental values without which no community can make progress, still lacks the aptitude to achieve them from within itself… With these mental and material instruments, which it lacked and now receives, it gains the idea and ambition for a better existence, and the means to achieving it. We will obey you if you can succeed in convincing us of the superiority of that civilization of which you talk so much.” (p. 26)


Mills helps us understand that the power structures that constitute us make us believe the superiority of oppressor and convince us that the closer we are to the oppressor, the closer we are to the colonizer, the closer we are to becoming civilized and therefore closer to becoming a person. These ideas about civilization and superiority exist in material ways through texts and discourses that are pushed by international organizations like The World Bank, UNICEF and the such in the form of early childhood development initiatives, policies, and even test measures that are pushed to countries like India. These then become common sense and give us the language to justify our actions, to justify why civilized bodies need to be created, and why it has to start early on.

I use this framework to examine how children in two different preschool programs in Delhi, India, one catering to high income families and the other catering to low income families from urban slums, were offered different experiences with their bodies. Using ethnographic data, this paper considers how children’s bodies are being positioned as their own or as communal.

This paper draws on the data collected for a larger study that focused on understanding conceptualizations of school readiness in India. It is a multi-sited video-cued ethnographic study. I spent over 6 months in Delhi collecting data in 2 preschools as a participant observer, taking field notes, videos, and photographs. I also filmed 3 full days in each of these classrooms and used that footage to create 20 minute films. The teachers, parents, children, and the administrators in both of these schools then watched these films as cues for focus group discussions. One of the schools is a private preschool that caters to high income families. These are children of parents with professional degrees and high paying jobs that are well respected. The other one is run by a non-profit that caters to children from urban slums in Delhi. These are often families that are urban immigrants and leave behind their homes in villages and small towns to look for a better life in bigger cities like Delhi. They end up living in non-regulated slums and do menial daily wage jobs. These are families that do low status work for families like the ones that go to the private preschool. For instance, mothers of children in non-profit program often work in homes of high income families as household helps. One of the questions that I was looking answers to was what kind of experiences are offered to these children and how they differ depending on which program they go to. In this paper I detail how children in these two spaces were being offered different experiences with their bodies.

For children from upper class homes, their bodies were private spaces that need to be guarded and preserved, and for the children from underprivileged families, their bodies were shared spaces that could be watched and participated in communally. In some cases, shame was associated with nakedness in a way that privileges class and reifies some children as full persons and others as subpersons. This paper reflects on the capabilities that children from low income households must develop to be successful in their worlds, including a way of viewing the body. This often puts them at odds with a more privileged view that children from higher income groups are taught at school, which is to be shameful about nakedness and learn that their bodies are private spaces from a very young age. In this presentation, I plan to share examples of some of these capability-building practices in the context of larger socio-cultural-economic-historical-political factors to think about the tensions that exist for both these groups of children as they are developing towards different versions of personhood. While I also include the cultural nature of child rearing practices in India, where children’s bodies were often communal because everybody pitched in to take care, I am also going to demonstrate how the practice is changing because of neoliberal privileges and a changing relationship to touch and affection. The goal of this paper is to help readers consider that capabilities that children develop can work towards maintaining the status quo.

Author

• Shubhi Sachdeva, University of Texas at Austin