The Newly Independent World of Children: A Study of the Anthropology of Children's Literature

Distinction as the most important component of modernity has been emphasized by a wide range of scholars from Emil Durkheim to Pierre Bourdieu. From a theoretical perspective the children’s world is one of the distinctive social worlds, but other worlds such as adult’s world have colonized it. Recognizing its main rules and guidelines will help to avoid such colonization. Anthropology of childhood is one of the scientific disciplines which try to study these guidelines and rules. These rules make the different logic of children’s behavior understandable. Probably indistinctiveness is the most important rule of this field represented as sexual, class, ethnic, national and even aesthetic indistinctiveness. But the process of socialization reproduces distinctions because children do not have any ideas about them before being taught; we do not notice them them when children are playing freely. Children’s literature is an important tool to socialize children. Unfortunately children have been colonized by this literature because adult writers do not have enough knowledge about the main rules of children’s world. This article intends to show the distinctive foundations of three selected children’s stories. The first one is The Ugly Duckling by Anderson; the second one is The Little Black Fish by Behrangy and the third one is The Sock Suicide by María Asun Landa. The results of this study show that children do not read stories like their authors and do not get the same meaning.