Talking Like Children

Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands

Elise Berman

Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language

Argues that age is produced through language and interaction, presenting the first analysis of how age comes to be
Offers a new theory of language socialization, arguing against the typical view of socialization as an interaction between novices and experts and instead seeing it as the continuous production of age differences
Research from the Marshall Islands includes a range of methods -- participant observation, video and audio recordings, interviews, and children's drawings
Transforms transcripts into narrative dialogue through innovative ethnographic writing
Criticizes traditional anthropological theories of exchange for neglecting the role of age and childhood

Talking Like Children

Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands

Elise Berman

Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language

Description

Children in the Marshall Islands do many things that adults do not. They walk around half naked. They carry and eat food in public without offering it to others. They talk about things they see rather than hiding uncomfortable truths. They explicitly refuse to give. Why do they do these things?

Many think these behaviors are a natural result of children's innate immaturity. But Elise Berman argues that children are actually taught to do things that adults avoid: to be rude, inappropriate, and immature. Before children learn to be adults, they learn to be different from them. Berman's main theoretical claim therefore is also a novel one: age emerges through interaction and is a social production.

In Talking Like Children, Berman analyzes a variety of interactions in the Marshall Islands, all broadly based around exchange: adoption negotiations, efforts to ask for or avoid giving away food, contentious debates about supposed child abuse. In these dramas both large and small, age differences emerge through the decisions people make, the emotions they feel, and the power they gain. Berman's research includes a range of methods -- participant observation, video and audio recordings, interviews, children's drawings -- that yield a significant corpus of data including over 80 hours of recorded naturalistic social interaction.

Presented as a series of captivating stories, Talking Like Children is an intimate analysis of speech and interaction that shows what age means. Like gender and race, age differences are both culturally produced and socially important. The differences between Marshallese children and adults give both groups the ability to manipulate social life in distinct but often complementary ways. These differences produce culture itself. Talking Like Children establishes age as a foundational social variable and a central concern of anthropological and linguistic research.

Talking Like Children

Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands

Elise Berman

Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language

Acknowledgements
List of Figures and Tables
Note on Marshallese Language and Orthography

Introduction: Becoming different
Chapter 1: "Give Me My Child": An ethnographic introduction to the power of age in Marshallese social life
Chapter 2: What is Age and Where Does It Come From? A theoretical analysis of age and language socialization
Chapter 3: On the Road: How to get out of giving to adults
Chapter 4: "Give Me My Food": How to avoid giving to another child and produce relative age
Chapter 5: Aged Agency: What children can do that adults cannot (and vice versa)
Chapter 6: Socializing Age Differences
Conclusion: Toward an Anthropology of Age
Appendix: Transcripts
Notes
References
Index

Talking Like Children

Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands

Elise Berman

Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language

Author Information

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.

Talking Like Children

Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands

Elise Berman

Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language

Reviews and Awards

Finalist for 2020 AAAL Book Award

"Recommended." -- P. Passariello, CHOICE

"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