Managing Risks: Ethnographic Insights into Self-Care in Maasai Children’s Daily Lives

Abstract (English)

In anthropological studies of children in small-scale societies, it is widely recognized that children acquire vital knowledge through empirical engagement in everyday activities. This learning process fundamentally involves the body as an active agent. Yet such embodied dimensions of learning are often overlooked in cognition- or mind-centered discourses. This presentation addresses that gap by adopting a body-focused approach to childhood learning, drawing on ethnographic research with Maasai children in southern Kenya. It explores how children come to know, experience, and manage physical injury and bodily care through their daily routines.
The Maasai are one of the most well-known pastoralist communities in East Africa, whose livelihood continues to revolve around livestock with both economic and sociocultural significance. From an early age, even while attending formal school, children engage in labor-intensive and mobile routines. Boys herd animals across long distances; girls collect firewood or water; all children navigate rugged terrain, play vigorously, and travel on foot across vast landscapes without adult supervision (Tian, 2024). These everyday bodily engagements expose them to physical risks—bites from insects, burns, twisted joints, and fatigue—but also create a context in which injury prevention and self-care are learned through peer collaboration and the utilization of local knowledge (Tian, 2021). In this presentation, I draw on several episodes observed in children’s daily routines to illustrate these practices.
Whereas mainstream health education tends to emphasize biomedical and school-based approaches to injury prevention, this study highlights how children in non-Western, rural contexts develop situated strategies of care through observation, imitation, and peer interaction. By foregrounding the body as both a site and medium of learning, this research contributes to the anthropology of childhood, the study of embodied learning, and broader conversations in global health about localized forms of care and resilience.