‘Take up the Man and lay down the Boy’: Defining Rural Childhood in Northern Scotland during the Enlightenment

Despite the theorising of Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers, no crystallised notion of childhood was particularly widespread or applied in the rural north. However, the evidence does suggest gradual phases, contingent on class, gender and circumstance, which tended to commence between the ages of five and eight and were distinguished by formal education or starting to assist in the family economy in a meaningful way. At the other end of childhood, taking up full-time employment or leaving home to work, study or marry therefore tended to be the rite of passage through which youngsters entered either adolescence or adulthood, but the ages at which this happened were highly circumstantial. The evidence suggests that there was no widespread dominant notion of childhood as a distinct life stage requiring specialised care and attention in rural communities during the period in which it was becoming established among theorists and the urban middle classes. For most the daily realities of labour, challenging economic circumstances, densely populated households, let alone the upheavals of clearance and emigration that affected so many, meant there was little time, energy or mental and emotional space to absorb and implement new philosophies. Rather, the needs of families meant that continuing older practices of gradually increasing responsibilities and responding to circumstances made most sense among the thatched longhouses and blackhouses of Scotland's rural north.

Fourth Study

The fourth chapter stays within this older tradition. Saratchandra Chatterjee’s Srikanta is to many the canonical Indian novel—it too is a bildung, following the protagonist from a wayward rural childhood into adulthood via many quests for livelihood and love. The protagonist Srikanta is far removed from a typical bourgeois clerical life. His life is often made via several fascinating female protagonists who educate him into the joys of non-conformity and courage. The chapter also includes a discussion of Rabindranath Tagore’s Garden—though less appreciated, the Garden is a fine meditation on illness and love. Unlike the infinitely mobile characters in Srikanta (male and female), here the ill female protagonist watches the world unfold in front of her (including her husband’s interest in another woman) even as she lies pinned to a bed.

Second Study

The second chapter takes off from the first in using the affect of humiliation. Humiliation has already been discussed widely in scholarship with relation to caste—see for example Humiliation: Claims and Context (OUP, 2011). This chapter discusses one of the most influential Dalit memoirs—Urmila Pawar’s Aaydan: The Weave of My Life, A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs (2008). Pawar’s powerful work recounts her life from a rural childhood, through education, marriage, and social prominence in the Dalit movement. The book thus demonstrates the evolving subjectivity of the protagonist as she outgrows intense negative affect (such as caste humiliation) to emerge as a full-fledged and respected writer and activist.

Comparison of Rural Childhood BMI Percentiles: Prevalence and Trends in a Midwest County, 2008–2016

The number of children who are obese and overweight continues as a public health challenge despite decades of research. The purpose of this article is to describe trends in body mass index (BMI) percentile data collected from 11- to 14-year-old school children in 2008–2009 and 2015–2016 in rural Wisconsin. The BMI percentiles from 1,347 students were compared using time, gender, age, and school (public vs. parochial) as predictors. The trend over time indicated a decrease in students of healthy weight and an increase in those overweight or obese. Also noted was a significantly higher proportion of children who were overweight or obese in parochial compared to public schools. Discussed are the observed trends, community-wide initiatives implemented, as well as how schools can employ a more comprehensive approach to childhood obesity that first ensures community readiness and involves school, home, and community.