Elise Berman is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has spent more than two years living, teaching, and conducting research in the Marshall Islands, and earned her PhD in the department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. She has published in American Anthropologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Childhood, and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. She is currently working on a project on language, race, and education in the Marshallese diaspora.

Finalist for 2020 AAAL Book Award

"This excellent monograph engages critically with the theoretical literature on language socialization and the study of age through ethnographic exploration of village life in the Marshall Islands. Berman uses precise ethnolinguistic data to make her conceptual points and narrative threads to create coherence within and between chapters." -- Kathleen C. Riley, Rutgers, Pacific Affairs

"Recommended." -- P. Passariello, CHOICE

"This book will be of interest to veteran ethnographers and linguists, especially those working in the area of language socialization and those engages in research related to the Pacific Islands, and it should also be required reading for students preparing to embark on their own ethnographic fieldwork." -- Scott Saft, Pragmatics and Society

"We usually think of age, like race and gender, as biological but Elise Berman shows through this beautifully written book that age is actually produced by the ways elders interact with them. It knocked my theoretical socks off. It will do that to you too as you get to know these vivid individuals inhabiting a sliver of land on an atoll in the endangered Marshall Islands." --Susan D. Blum, Professor of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame

"Berman has written one of the most compelling ethnographies of children's lives since Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin defined the study of language socialization for anthropology. Not only is Berman's ethnography a rich and poignant analysis of Marshallese social life, it is a monumental rethinking of age and its significance for practice and theory in the social sciences."--Barbra Meek, Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Michigan

"This is a remarkable book with a challenging thesis: that children are socialized to be different from adults. In other words, they learn to behave differently from adults through social interaction rather than being 'naturally' more naive. Beautifully written and clearly explained, this is both a neat theoretical intervention and a great book for the classroom."--Tanya Marie Luhrmann, Howard H. and Jessie T. Watkins University Professor of Anthropology and Professor, by courtesy, of Psychology, Stanford University