Cultural sentiment and the development of social category knowledge and identity in early childhood.

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the role of sentiment in how children come to participate in adult social categories such as race, class, and gender. Ethnographic research in a multi-ethnic nursery and primary school in northeast London suggests that young children (including preschoolers) not only have an understanding of the meanings of prevailing adult social categories, they actively negotiate these categories with respect to their own and other identities, creating social landscapes with peers and adults. How do people come to occupy the social positions they do, particularly social positions in systems of hierarchy and differential advantage? Culture, many contend, plays a critical role in this, not simply by contributing to the way people are assigned roles of advantage and disadvantage, but by shaping the way people interpret and experience the world---in short, by securing their consent about the world. A central part of an individual's interpretation and experience of social existence turns on enduring, often diffuse feelings or sentiments. This dissertation examines how cultural sentiments (as well as more cognitive knowledge) structure the meanings and feelings individuals attach to a particular complex of social categories, namely race, class, and gender. This research explores the relationship between states of diffuse sentiment that promote social consent and the sorts of bounded emotional states triggered by specific situations. Specifically, how do children come to hold such sentiments? What is the relationship between these sentiments and children's engagement with and participation in particular social worlds? Clearly children must understand the constituent elements of the relevant community, the social categories and the relations of subordination, superordination, power, and disadvantage; they must have some understanding of the logic of exclusion and inclusion that underlie these communities. However, they also must understand the <italic>relational</italic> processes implicated, the processes that structure how to feel about and relate to self and others.