Children who carry stones in their pockets: on autotelic material practices in everyday life

Abstract

This paper is based on an ongoing empirical journey into the materiality of children's everyday life environments. The theoretical framework relies on post-humanism relational/new materialism as influenced by Deleuze and Guattari. An inherently rewarding practice, often undertaken by children as if by default – the carrying of stones – is discussed as blurring the unfortunate and artificially produced nature-culture divide.

Keywords:

• children's everyday life
• new materialism
• posthumanism
• autotelic practices

Notes

1. See, e.g. Bosco (2010) on children's everyday life actions as the kind of political activism and political agency that is not granted to them by adults.

2. Actor-network theory or ANT has, since its introduction by Latour, been reworked to strands and new sociomaterial theories applied in multiple disciplines (Law and Hassard 2009). ANT has to do with material entities and the connections through which they form nets of action. Recent ANT studies in a variety of fields (see, e.g. Fenwick and Edwards 2011; Holifield 2009; Law and Singleton 2005; Mol 2002; Sørensen 2009) share an objective of understanding how matter comes together and forms associations in order to produce effects. Relational-material theories (such as Barad 2007; LenzTaguchi 2011) build on ANT to emphasize the relations between people and things that form as if the junctions of a network.

3. Again, I do not wish to claim that all of children's doings are free from cultural dichotomies and thus somehow authentic. Some practices, however, can be understood as at least blurring and confusing this distinction, and as such worthy of further discussion and research.