‘Those Who Are Good to Us, We Call Them Friends’: Social Support and Social Networks for Children Growing up in Poverty in Rural Andhra Pradesh, India

Abstract

Ideas about‘social capital’ (variously derived from Bourdieu 1986, Coleman 1988 and Putnam 2000¹) continue to circulate in research literature across a spectrum of disciplines, including sociology and development studies, despite numerous critiques (see Fine 2010 for a summary). It is broadly accepted that social networks and social resources, and social support (social capital), in the form of personal, familial and community-level relationships are crucially important to children as they grow up (Morrow 1999, 2001). Yet this is an under-researched topic in developing countries, where the unprecedented pace of change puts pressure on children to pursue particular trajectories through formal schooling, while traditional values simultaneously insist that they follow pathways constrained by norms that are patterned by gender, class, caste and ethnicity and intergenerational norms of reciprocity and responsibility. Drawing on qualitative data gathered from children from the ‘Young Lives’ study² in Andhra Pradesh, India, we analyse children’s descriptions of sources of support, whom they turn to when in difficulty, and why. This chapter is a preliminary attempt to use Bourdieu’s distinctive theoretical ideas about social capital as relational, interconnected and underpinned by economic capital, to explore patterns of inequality in developing countries in the twenty-first Century.