Temporal dimensions of childhood, youth, and adolescence experiences: A conceptual discussion

Abstract

This article proposes a theoretical and empirical approach to studies on contemporary childhood, youth, and adolescence, based on the idea that these categories respond to a modern and hegemonic Western expression of classification that accounts for biologically conditioned stages, through which ethnic, class, and gender particularities influence the way these social subjects experience the world. This statement implies establishing a relation between two concepts: “experiences” and “transitions.” I will explore the notion of experience as the way in which children, adolescents, and youth live through and express the world that surrounds them, emphasizing on the individuals going through the early stages of their life as active subjects in a conscious relationship with the world. The transition concept allows questioning the approach of life ages as successive and discrete stages, whether they are defined on the grounds of biology, developmental psychology, or socio-anthropological studies, and understanding ages as an ongoing process, although marked by milestones that define the life stages acknowledged in each institutional, sociocultural, and historical background. I will illustrate my argument by some fragments of my ethnographic fieldwork with children in San Ignacio, a predominantly rural location in the province of Misiones (northeastern Argentina), in the southern part of the Paraná jungle.