Practices of habitus identification in early childhood

Discover the twelfth session of the seminar “Regards croisés sur la petite enfance” 2024-2025: "Practices of habitus identification in early childhood”.

The seminar looks at early childhood as a social, historical and cultural construct. Theories and knowledge relating to the conception, birth and development of children are analyzed in terms of their interactions with their environment and gender norms. Against this backdrop, the seminar will explore the boundaries of this age category and address the question of its temporality according to medical, international, anthropological or historical standards.

Despite the impression sometimes left by developmental science, the birth of a child, and then the first years of a young human's existence, are not purely objective, material processes. From the outset, these processes are caught up in a more or less local symbolic economy, and are therefore potentially informed by it. In particular, adults identify what children are supposed to “be”, i.e., the kind of person they specifically embody, in implicit opposition to other kinds of person (other possible kinds of children). Drawing on material from a three-year longitudinal survey of young children, the aim is to examine the relationship between these identification practices (e.g., calling a baby “dynamic” or “shy”, etc.) and the actual formation of the habitus. Do these practices vary according to position and social configuration? To what extent are they the result of observations, and to what extent, on the contrary, do they operate in the mode of performative a priori? How, moreover, are we to think about the links between habitus, which in theoretical terms refers precisely to the idea of a singular kind of person (or at least a particular class of person), and these profane identifications of a supposedly first “personality”?

• Wilfried Lignier: CNRS Research Director, member of the Centre européen de sociologie et science politique (CESSP, EHESS-CNRS-Univ. Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
• Discussant: Michel Christian is an historien at Geneve University