Gerd Spittler Book order

Most children in Africa start working from a very early age - helping the family or earning wages. Should this work be abolished, tolerated, or encouraged? Such questions are the subject of much debate: international and national organizations, employers, parents, and children often have diverse opinions and put pressure in different directions. The authors of this book contribute to the discussion through intensive fieldwork and careful analysis of children's activities. They consider childhood and family, work and play, work in rural and urban contexts, paths to learning, work and school, and children's rights.

1 Work is vital for most individuals and for every society. Yet it leads a Cinderella-like existence within social anthropology. Even today we can learn from older social scientists like Karl Marx, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Karl Bücher, Eduard Hahn, Wilhelm Ostwald, and Max Weber. Comparing industrial and non-industrial work, they were interested in the character of work as performance, play or ethical deed, and as rational action. Due to a lack of ethnographic studies, the empirical basis of their analysis remained weak. A serious ethnography of work was started by Karl Weule, Richard Thurnwald, and Bronislaw Malinowski. Having close links to the older social scientists they introduced new perspectives based on fieldwork in Africa and Melanesia.