Susan Ridgely Bales. When I Was a Child: Children’s Interpretations of First Communion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Two parts scholarly rigor and one part Kids Say the Darndest Things, Susan Ridgely Bales’ When I Was a Child: Children’s Interpretations of First Communion studies three Catholic churches striking in their ethnic and cultural diversity but rich in parallels. As the title of her monograph suggests, Bales is not interested in official church teachings about what first communion represents, but she is interested in the understandings of children, whose subjective imaginings of the event can hardly be suppressed by the rote memorization of doctrine. Fundamentally, Bales argues for a revaluation of the research on children’s initiation rituals as well as a major amendment to the study of lived religion. By shifting to a “child-centered” orientation, Bales opens a fresh avenue for future research, even if her results are not entirely consistent or successful.
Throughout the book, Bales relies heavily on the now largely ignored anthropological theory of Arnold van Gennep, whose Rites of Passage had a considerable influence on Victor Turner’s own structural analysis of ritual. Bales seems to take the tripartite structure of the rite of initiation for granted, but with a couple important divergences from the cookie-cutter models constructed van Gennep and Turner. For one, Bales shies away from committing hasty generalizations, which gives her ethnography a sense of nuance and subtlety that eluded the old masters like van Gennep and Turner, even if her book, with its constant reminders of the basic dignity and autonomy of human subjects, sometimes threatens to lapse into the other extreme—soft humanism. Another key difference is that Bales takes issue with the “adultist” orientation of scholarship on ritual, which, even when it takes children’s bodies into account, rarely listens to children’s “voices.” Indeed, Bales affirms again and again that children are capable of defining themselves on their own terms and articulating (however crudely) their concerns and interpretations of the outside world. If this claim is true, and not just a necessary precondition for Bales to conduct her research, it is fair to ask why scholars always speak about children and for children, but never to children. Bales suggests that perhaps the exclusion of children’s own interpretations from scholarship on ritual has not been an egregious oversight on the part of “adultist” scholars—perhaps their exclusion has always been a deliberate attempt to preserve a particular understanding of “childhood.”
Bales argues in her introduction that because childhood is a socially constructed category, the way childhood is defined and the language and attitudes used to characterize and identify children have varied over time and across cultures: Piaget’s stages of development is only one of several possible models for considering the cognitive capabilities of children (9). What these theories of childhood have in common, Bales suggests, is that they are all guilty of understanding children in “adultist” terms. This significant and pervasive problem in the literature on children leads to an inevitable but difficult question: how should a scholar working with children theorize the thought processes of children, especially when what children are thinking during a rite of passage is of the utmost concern to the scholar and is an essential component of her argument? Bales starts with the assumption that the structure of a child’s mind is not functionally equivalent to that of an adult, and this allows her to affirm the uniqueness of their insights and interpretations; yet she ultimately regards these children the same way she regards the adults in her book: as autonomous subjects with the ability to define themselves in relation to the outside world, which grants the children’s insights and interpretations the validity normally reserved for adults (11).
With her paradoxical approach, which simultaneously stresses and denies the distinctiveness of her subject, Bales evokes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who in the late 80s famously posed the endlessly debated question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Similarly, Bales spends passages of the book wondering whether it is possible for a child to articulate her own position relative to that of the adults who constructed the rite of first communion, not to mention the language of which the children barely have a working grasp. Though the children in Bales’ book have imaginative and sometimes thought provoking views of complex religious doctrines, the fact remains that no child has yet constructed a substantial theory as to how children think. This admittedly obvious observation makes one thing clear: so long as categories like “childhood” are defined by adults, children will always be spoken for. Bales’ book does not disturb that conclusion but rather reinforces it.
