Abstract
It is clear that children develop into workers from an early age but there’s considerable variability in the age at which they might be expected to make a significant contribution to the cost of their own provisioning. That is, even as workers, they are dependent on others. It is equally clear, however, that children could be more productive—the skills may be there but not the necessity. Under adverse circumstances—migration, death, serious illness, armed conflict, and natural disaster such as drought or the plague—adolescent and adult workers may be removed from the workforce. And, characteristically, children, constituting a “reserve labor force,” step up to fill the vacancy. This may mean increasing their output in the domestic economy such as doing more work in the fields, gathering more tubers, handling more of the care for livestock, or entering the market economy as laborers, street sellers, sex workers, and the like.
This chapter is adapted from David F. Lancy, 2015a, “Children as a Reserve Labor Force.” Current Anthropology. 56:545–568.
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Notes
- 1.
On the day I wrote these words, our local newspaper ran a photo story on a pair of Utah brothers (aged two and four) who are quite capable of herding—on horseback—the family’s cattle and further contributing to the ranch (Kirby 2017).
- 2.
The global transition to farming from foraging that began to occur 12,000 BP was likely facilitated by the opportunity to utilize children’s labor from a much earlier point in the life cycle—compared to foraging societies where natural hazards may handicap the learner (Hames and Draper 2004).
- 3.
Given the normative focus and relatively short period of the ethnography, fieldworkers may well miss the occasional contingent work assignment. So, the relative paucity of cases like these cited may be a gross underestimate.
- 4.
There is a body of research that supports the notion that children are “natural” foragers and do not need to be taught or even shown how it’s done (Chipeniuk 1995; Zarger 2002). The survival of thousands of contemporary “street kids” as young as five also suggests the potential for active foraging and rapid cultural learning in the absence of adult teachers (Lancy 2010).
- 5.
Two hundred years earlier children were swept off the streets of London and “deported to Virginia to provide labor, to sanitize London society, and to infuse the colony with the growth potential that these children embodied” (Barrett 2014, p. 162; see also Honeyman 2013). Virtually all the colonial powers followed this practice.
- 6.
The majority of orphan train passengers were not actually orphans. But impoverished parents with large broods were happy to have one less mouth to feed and believed, with some basis in reality, that their transported children would have a brighter future.
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Lancy, D.F. (2018). Children as a Reserve Labor Force. In: Anthropological Perspectives on Children as Helpers, Workers, Artisans, and Laborers . Palgrave Studies on the Anthropology of Childhood and Youth. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53351-7_6
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