Reuniting Body, Mind, and Environment: An Anthropological Take on Children’s Total Health

Abstract (English)

Children’s health in the Global South is increasingly gaining attention from the mind-focused and the body-focused academic groups, both recognizing unique developmental trajectories that differ significantly from those in industrialized world. Among the mind-focused group, a non-WEIRD paradigm on childhood learning through comparative approaches has gained traction, revealing how children sensorily embody knowledge and emotions through everyday social life and spatial experiences. Taking a different approach, recent body-focused studies also began to critique the generalization of health indicators derived from the minority world, emphasizing the diverse yet underexplored, physical developmental patterns of children in the majority world, and the roles of ethnography in these discussions (Gibson & Atkinson, 2018).
Anthropological knowledge on children and parenting in the majority world offers crucial insights into developmental patterns at individual, interpersonal, and eco-societal levels (e.g., Lancy, 2022). However, these insights remain insufficiently integrated or are often misinterpreted in both academic groups (e.g., Scheidecker et al., 2024), hindering a holistic understanding of childhood health and wellbeing.
This panel invites anthropologists and researchers in relevant disciplines to share knowledge on children’s everyday developmental realities, emphasizing how mind-body integrated and intimately connected to the biota, the land, and local environment. By prioritizing local perspectives on childhood wellbeing, we aim to address the following questions.
1. How do children and their parents define health and childhood wellbeing?
2. What are the roles of body in psychological development and the mind in physical development? How do people of the majority world consider the correlations between body and mind, and their roles in childhood health and wellbeing? How do children exercise local concepts of health and wellbeing in their daily life?
3. Who and what sociocultural factors are crucial for childhood health and wellbeing? How do adults and other social beings, including the non-human beings, become involved in the process of childhood health and wellbeing construction?