How to explain the current increasing interest in this little being, which has for a long time been underestimated? For Elodie Razy, it is first of all intimately connected to the history of sciences, whose thread is progressively unwound. ‘We were interested in men, then in women. Today we are interested in children, animals and things. Next it will certainly be the turn of aging and very old people to push back the limits of knowledge.’ And she continues with other explanatory hypotheses: ‘there is also an aspect of ‘looking for forgotten actors and themes’ currently at work in academic research which could explain the phenomenon – even if it should not be forgotten that everything to do with research is linked to politics, funding, etc.’ And finally she cites the work of historians: ‘the child also occupies a paramount place in society, it is also becoming a rare breed, and subsequently the subject of total attention due to the socio-demographic evolutions which progressively occurred over the course of the nineteenth century to culminate at the end of the twentieth century with the problematic of children’s rights and child law. All these interlocking reasons have meant that we are progressively taking a great interest in the child and childhood, whilst previously they were left to psychology and psychoanalysis. This resurgence of the child and childhood is also affecting other disciplines such as history and archaeology.’

Whilst studies in ‘childish cultures’ and the social role of the child are booming, the anthropological field of childhood as struggled to make a place for itself worthy of the name. It has insufficient academic recognition to become united and have weight both in the scientific and academic arena as well as the public arena. The questions linked to the child are in effect, and above all, the subject of interdisciplinary teaching – in francophone Belgium, for example, only the University of Liège offers specific teaching in the anthropology of childhood, in this case in the Masters, which was moreover given impetus by Elodie Razy when she arrived at the Institution in 2008. ‘In addition,’ continues the researcher who has over fifteen years experience in this specific field, ‘the anthropology of childhood is in reality represented at multi and interdisciplinary events; let me be clear, it is not a question of bringing into question the importance and value of such events, but one cannot but notice that there do not exist events dedicated to the anthropology of childhood even though there exist numerous childhood anthropologists. You can indeed find associations and networks here and there, but their borders remain pretty blurred.’ No space either specifically dedicated to publications in the anthropology of childhood: the articles find themselves inexorably dispersed hither and thither in general and multidisciplinary journals.

Genesis, positioning

The idea of a journal, ‘supplementary to general and multidisciplinary journals,’ which would fill this visibly unoccupied space in the landscape of academic research publications was in the corner of Elodie Razy’s mind a good while before she arrived at the ULg. In the mean time the project wound its way forward. It took a decisive step when in March 2011, the LASC, Social and Cultural Anthropology Research Laboratory, founded at the ULg in 2008, managed to set up an international conference – given the title Towards an Anthropology of Childhood and Children. Ethnographic Fieldwork Diversity and Construction of a Field – which had the ambition of bringing together researchers around the anthropology of childhood in order to think through the conceptual existence of the discipline, its contours, and the special characteristics of the terrain it explores.