Studying Inequality through the Lifeworlds of Infants

Hecht Tobias, Claremont CA

Investigators

Abstract

Dr. Tobias Hecht will undertake the first, exploratory stage of an ethnographic study of the lifeworlds of infants, comparing those born to middle-class families, on the one hand, with those born into poverty, on the other. Ultimately, the project aims to examine how social and economic inequality is initially manifest and experienced: how, in other words, people first come to lead unequal lives. The fieldwork will be carried out in Florianópolis, Brazil, a city where many enjoy a first-world standard of living but where others endure extreme poverty. Despite the existence of a vast literature on inequality, including inequality in Brazil, that body of writings almost wholly ignores the lives of infants. Most data on inequality still derive from income surveys that do not assess how income is used and distributed within the household, much less how it affects babies. Infants are surely the most underrepresented segment in society and the least studied human subjects outside of the field of developmental psychology. Though prescriptive writings on caring for babies abound, remarkably little is known about their everyday lives. This project concerns not what should be done with infants nor specifically how they develop but rather how infants are from birth enmeshed in the larger social and economic problems of inequality. One of the goals of the project is to develop new research methods for the fledgling field of infant-centered ethnographic research. The researcher will focus on the children's everyday lives -- where they sleep, what they do when awake, what they are fed, how they are dressed, spoken to and played with, the social and material culture that surrounds them, how their medical needs are attended to. This research is important because it has the potential to transform social scientific understanding of what inequality means and how it is experienced in everyday lives from their very beginning. Economists measure inequality above all in terms of household income. Sociologists have studied inequality in its class, racial and sexual dimensions. Here the objective is to suggest a new way of understanding inequality, one that takes into account the least studied group, the ones that cannot possibly be held accountable for their social and economic condition.