First Steps. Measuring and Monitoring the Newborn's Entry into the World

Discover the tenth session of the 2025–2026 seminar series "Crossed Perspectives on Early Childhood": "First steps. Measuring and monitoring the newborn's entry into the world".

The seminar will be held in French.

The seminar approaches early childhood as a social, historical, and cultural construct. Knowledge and theories relating to conception, birth, and child development are analysed in terms of the child’s interactions with their surroundings and according to gender norms. The seminar also explores the boundaries of this age category and its temporality, according to medical, international, anthropological, and historical standards.

In this presentation, two prescriptive and comparative approaches—developed in very different historical and cultural contexts, India and the United Kingdom—aim to present the support and control of a baby's first steps. In India, the approach was developed within the framework of Brahmanic astrology and established in Sanskrit almanacs, according to astral configurations. In England, the approach developed in the late 19th century by the founder of eugenics, Francis Galton, promotes the idea of measuring, recording, evaluating, and comparing a child's first steps and progress in order to establish the person's eugenic score.  Despite their conceptual and ideological diversity, these two deterministic and “pseudo-scientific” doctrines systematized and generalized the idea that every newborn, from birth, carries characteristics that will define their future and their relationship to the world.

• Catarina Guenzi:Anthropologue, maître de conférences  à l’Ecole des Hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), membre du Cesah 
• Discussant: Charles-Édouard de Suremain: Anthropologist, IRD