Reliving Childhood? The Temporality of Childhood and Narratives of Reincarnation

Reliving Childhood? 1 Reliving Childhood? The Temporality of Childhood and Narratives of Reincarnation Akhil Gupta Stanford University, USA abstract Although less well known than the Tibetan search for high lamas, cases of reincarnation reported from other parts of the world frequently involve very young children. What does this imply for our understanding of childhood? Reincarnated children are inhabited by their (adult) thoughts and gestures, and clearly have to be conceptualized as more complex beings than is allowed by the standard narrative of child-hood which posits a new being who slowly finds his or her way in the world. This paper raises questions about the challenges posed by reincarnation to dominant conceptions of childhood in the West, surveying subjects such as the separation of children into age grades and of ‘life’ into stages, the relatively recent historical trend of recasting childhood into a nostalgic mold, the investment of a life trajectory with an historicity, and the equating of children with savages, as peoples who antecede the ‘adult’ civilizations of the West. keywords Childhood, reincarnation, life cycle, historicity, nostalgia, Tibet n September 1936, a small search party headed by a senior lama and three attendants headed to the Amdo Province of Northeast Tibet.1 Their mission was to locate the next incarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama, who had died in 1933. They were looking for a place which had a three-storied temple with a turquoise roof and cupolas of gold and copper. A small path led from the temple east towards a small mountain, and on that path was to be found a one-storied blue house. These details had been revealed when the Regent who had been appointed to oversee Tibetan affairs had journeyed to a lake near Lhasa and seen a vision on the water.2 Other premonitions led the search for the reincarnation eastward: the body of the previous Dalai Lama had been laid to rest facing south but miraculously turned itself to the east; the chief ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 I 2 akhil gupta oracles consulted by the government pointed to the same direction and there were other signs as well.3 Three search parties were dispatched eastward, one traveling to the southeast, the other due east, and the third to Amdo in the northeast. When this last search party saw the Kumbum Monastery, its members felt certain that they had found the building described in the vision. Accordingly, they broke up into smaller groups, and went around the countryside looking for a house that matched the one seen in the vision and inquiring about children who displayed promising signs of being reincarnations of high lamas. They obtained the names of eleven children who showed promise, of which three in particular had been mentioned by the Panchen Lama. One of the three boys had already died by the time the search party reached the area. So the search party proceeded to test the remaining two boys in secret. The lama in charge, Ketsang Rimpoché, wearing the rosary of the late Dalai Lama, adopted the disguise of a servant in a sheep-skin cloak whereas a junior monastic official who was his attendant pretended to be the leader, and they went to visit a family who lived in a turquoise-tiled house on the side of a road leading east from the monastery. The hosts invited the leader of the party to stay in the main house and asked his two companions to lodge in the family living quarters in the back. The baby of the house came to Ketsang Rimpoché, sat in his lap, and touching the rosary that he was wearing around his neck, said, ‘I want this rosary’ (Wangdu 1975:24). The lama promised to give it to him if the child could guess who he was. ‘You are an Aka (lama) of Sera,’ said the child. The lama asked him who the ‘master’ was, and the child correctly identified him by name (Lobsang Tshewang). Then he went on to identify the other two companions as Akas of Sera Monastery. (Sera is one of the major monasteries in Central Tibet, far from Amdo province). When the visitors were leaving the next day, the child got out of bed and insisted on going with them and wept profusely when he was prevented from doing so. From that day on, the little boy kept waiting for that group of visitors to return. Every day, he instructed his mother, ‘When they do come, you must give them some good food and a place to rest for they have traveled from a very distant place’ (Goodman 1986:13). He would gather various household objects on the kitchen table and announce matter-of-factly that he was going to Lhasa (Goodman 1986:13). The second boy who had been identified as a promising candidate was rejected by the search party after an examination, and after a few weeks, the search party came back unexpectedly to the little blue house in Taktser. This ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 Reliving Childhood? 3 time the visitors brought a number of objects that belonged to the late Dalai Lama with them. They laid out the items belonging to the late Dalai Lama on a table paired with very similar objects that had not been his. The child was then asked to approach the table where the four examiners, two on each side, were standing. First, he was shown two identical black rosaries. Without any hesitation, he took the rosary that belonged to the previous Dalai Lama, and put it around his neck. He did the same when presented two yellow rosaries. Then he was presented with two walking sticks, one that had a bronze handle and the other of iron. He hesitated for a while, put his hand on the wrong one, then abruptly changed his mind, and grasped the correct one and placed it in his left hand with its tip resting on the ground. It later turned out that the other walking stick too had once belonged to the previous Dalai Lama, who had given it to an abbot, who in turn had given it to the search party. Finally, there was the choice of a little drum, one of which was much more brightly ornamented than the other. Without hesitation, the child picked up the unadorned drum which had belonged to the previous Dalai Lama, and beat it with his right hand in the manner employed during prayers.4 The search party was now convinced that they had found the true reincarnation of the late Dalai Lama. However, they wanted to make sure that they were not mistaken. Hence, they called the other twelve children who were potential candidates, and subjected them to the same tests. None of the children selected more than two items of the four correctly. It should be emphasized that a single wrong choice would have placed any candidate’s position in jeopardy, including the boy from Taktser who was eventually recognized as the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. There is nothing extraordinary about the process by which the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was chosen. Major and minor lamas, called tulkus, are routinely discovered in this manner. However strange such a process of choosing religious and political leaders might appear from a western perspective, it has to be acknowledged that this process has yielded a great many people of extraordinary ability. The Significance of Childhood Tibetan Buddhism provides us with one of the most well-known examples of the role played by children in the phenomenon of reincarnation. Young children are thrust into the role of leaders with spiritual and temporal authority over their subjects from the age of two, almost as soon as they are able to speak and be identified as reincarnations of previous lamas. (In actual ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 4 akhil gupta practice, of course, a ‘regent’ rules before the child achieves his majority). In no other cultural context that I am aware of has the search for a reincarnated being achieved the level of codification and ritual elaboration as the Tibetan one. However, as I shall show below, the features that help identify reincarnated personalities in the Tibetan case are commonly found in other examples of reincarnation from different parts of the world. Since children are most often at the center of narratives of reincarnation, we need to think about the implications of reincarnation for the notion of childhood itself. Such children are inhabited by their (adult) thoughts and gestures, and clearly have to be conceptualized as more complex beings than is allowed by the standard narrative of childhood which posits a new being who slowly finds his or her way in the world. In this paper, I will raise questions about the challenges posed by reincarnation to dominant conceptions of childhood. Although my project proceeds from the importance of reincarnation as a social fact in the South Asian subcontinent, it is not an empirical project. I did not do fieldwork on cases of reincarnation. My purpose is rather different: I wish to conduct a thought experiment. Using an already existing archive on cases of reincarnation, I ask whether, and how, taking the ideas and beliefs of reincarnation seriously may raise fundamental questions about western cultural, social, and political theory. In other words, How does reincarnation trouble canonical and critical social theory in the West by forcing to the surface the hidden folk or religious underpinnings of secular social theory? Why should childhood matter? Is there something inherently interesting about childhood? There are many possible reasons why childhood should matter to us. First, there are public policy concerns in education, health care, and labor, reflected in everything from the debates over the best educational policies in the u.s. presidential debates to the role of child labor in making carpets in South Asia. Different ideas about the life course have potentially very profound implications for the perception of social problems. Second, there are historical concerns, reflected in this statement by Chris Jenks: ‘Within the child humanity sees its immediate past but also contemplates the immortality of its immanent future’ (1996:6). In the figure of the child, therefore, is a representation of the reincarnation of the social order, reflected best in statements that ask what a society will look like to the generations yet to come. Third, there are theoretical concerns about the impossibility of constructing models of adult society without formulating a notion of the child (Jenks 1996:3). And once a distinction between the adult and the child has been posited, social theory has to face up to the problem of how the child ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 Reliving Childhood? 5 becomes the adult, which turns out to be a particularly thorny issue. Fourth, there are moral concerns with the safety and well-being of the child, concerns that have been magnified by a fairly recent historical development in Western societies whereby adults project on to and identify and empathize with children (Steedman 1995:x), an attitude that has led Jordanova to exclaim, ‘Our capacity to sentimentalize, identify with, project onto, and reify children is almost infinite’ (quoted in Steedman 1995:6). Childhood is socially significant not just to the lives of children. What we think we know about childhood is normalized into the practices of institutions such as day care centers, hospitals, and particularly schools; incorporated into social policy and the legal system; disseminated as ‘expert advice’ to families, particularly mothers through television, books, magazines, and newspapers; and represented in fiction, movies, and advertisements that circulate globally. In the last decade in particular, there has emerged a field that I will term ‘critical childhood studies’ that has attempted to re-envision childhood in the fields of history, sociology, and, to a lesser extent, developmental psychology. In scarcely twenty years, the concept of childhood went from Philippe Ariès’ (1962) revolutionary claim that it was an idea invented in modern times to Neil Postman’s (1994) alarm at its disappearance. Historians, Postman warns us, come ‘not to praise but to bury...they find autopsies easier to do than progress reports’ (1994:5). Thus, the very fact that historians have started debating childhood makes him wonder if it is not more appropriate to pen its elegy rather than filing a missing person’s report. Provocative, inventive, and insightful as this body of work has proven to be, its engagement with culturally different ideas and insights about children and childhood is rather slight, except insofar as the ‘European’ past is itself considered to be another country. Despite its critical position vis-à-vis dominant Euro-American ideas of children and childhood, does the recent reconceptualization of childhood depend on some unexamined ontological assumptions about children and about the time of childhood. Using reincarnation as a critical lens allows us to introduce searching new questions into the debate about childhood, questions that open up the topic anew by searching for the limits and possibilities of critical social theory. Some General Features of Cases of Reincarnation Before launching into such an investigation, however, it might be useful to sketch some of the recurrent features found in cases of reincarnation. Are ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 6 akhil gupta there some features that are found consistently in different cases from different parts of the world and some features that are relatively rare? One person who has systematically collected data on such cases is a psychologist, a medical doctor at the University of Virginia named Ian Stevenson. At last count, Stevenson had 3000 cases of reincarnation recorded in his files, a small fraction of which he has published in a series of thick volumes, and it is on this work that I shall draw for much of what follows. The majority of cases of reincarnation that Stevenson has collected come from a few places in the world: India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, West Africa, and northwest native North America. These are all places where beliefs in reincarnation are common, although sometimes prohibited by religion, as in the case of Christians in Lebanon and Sri Lanka, and Sunni Muslims in India (1987:93–94). Not all societies where reincarnation is accepted are included in this list. For example, Stevenson did not collect data on Tibetan cases although we know that reincarnation beliefs are commonplace among Tibetans: this was due to the difficulty he claimed to experience in ‘verifying’ cases in an expatriate community where people are spread out all over the world.5 According to Stevenson, a fully developed case of reincarnation displays five major features. First, a person, typically an elderly person, predicts that he or she will be reborn, often indicating the place or the parents to whom he or she will return. After this person dies, either someone close to the dead person, or the parents, close friends, or relatives of the reincarnated has a dream in which the dead person announces his or her return. Such announcing dreams are quite common, but their patterning varies across cultures. When the baby is born, he or she often has birthmarks that correspond to wounds or scars on the body of the deceased person. Soon after the child begins to speak, he or she makes statements about the previous incarnation’s life, and as the child’s vocabulary and capacity to verbalize increases, these statements become more detailed. Finally, the child displays behaviors and attitudes that may be unusual in his or her family, but correspond quite closely to what is known or subsequently learned about the previous incarnation. Except for the first feature, where an elderly person actually locates the place or people where he or she will be reborn, which is found chiefly among Tibetans and Tlingit, the rest of the attributes are fairly common to cases of reincarnation but not always found together. For example, the case of the Dalai Lama had all these traits except the birthmarks. Invariably, from this list of attributes, it is children’s statements and acethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 Reliving Childhood? 7 tions about their previous lives that receive the most attention. Most children begin to speak of their previous lives almost as soon as they can talk, and almost always before the age of five. When they are able to articulate this, they report that their memories are of the form of very clear images. This leads to the speculation that such imaged memories may in fact precede verbal abilities, and may be one of the reasons why reincarnated children sometimes feel that they are still living their previous lives. Such memories reach their peak between the ages of five and eight, and most children appear to forget their previous lives by the age of eight. What kinds of things do such children remember? The amount of detail varies from case to case; in the strongest cases, the level of recall is reported to be quite astonishing. Children frequently remember their names in a previous life, as well as the names of relatives, friends, and acquaintances. They often name the town or village where they lived, and can sketch the layout of the town and the location of their home. Apart from naming people and places, children with the most detailed memories display an extraordinary recollection of the minutiae of everyday life. Where a cupboard was placed in a room, what color the walls were, where the doorway to a house stood, how the room of the previous incarnation was organized, what kind of food he or she liked, how many cows the family owned — the remembrance of these trivial details of everyday life is the most striking aspect of these cases. The intensity with which memories of a past life inhabit the present of these children varies. On one extreme are children who talk in the present tense of their past lives, and may not even realize that they have died. It is quite common for children to say something like, ‘My house is much bigger than this one’ (Stevenson 1987:104). Some children appear to be surprised to find themselves in a tiny body. One such case is that of Celal Kapan, a Turkish child, whose first words were almost: ‘What am I doing here? I was at the port.’ He went on to describe the life of a dock worker who had fallen asleep in the hold of a ship that was being loaded. Not knowing that anyone was there, a crane operator had dropped a heavy oil drum on him, killing him instantly. Celal woke up from his sleep to find himself in the body of a twoyear-old child, hence his confusion (1987:105). On the other extreme are children who talk matter-of-factly of their previous life, and can clearly distinguish between the present and ‘when they were big.’ It is almost always the case that children who remember loved ones in their previous life show strong emotions when describing that life. It is not unusual for them to weep when they recall the names of loved ones, or to ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 8 akhil gupta angrily denounce people who may have wronged them or killed them in their previous life. Current relatives, in an effort to test or tease these children, might tell them of the death or illness of the previous incarnation’s spouse or children, invariably bringing them to tears and a state of profound sorrow. In those cases where, following the child’s memories, the family of the previous incarnation is located, the reunion of the child with his or her previous family is often traumatic and deeply emotional. Contrary to what one may assume, children are not always happy to meet loved ones from their previous life: their reaction to people they identify varies according to how the previous incarnation felt about that person. For example, a Sinhalese girl displayed great affection for the previous incarnation’s sisters but was distinctly cool towards the brother, who ill-treated the previous incarnation during his lifetime (Stevenson 1987:114). In all cases, it appears that contact with the relatives and circumstances of the previous incarnation appears to stimulate new memories in children, who then come forth with spontaneous remarks about those circumstances. Meeting his previous incarnation’s family for the first time, Jasbir Singh greeted a person who walked into the room by saying, ‘Come in, Gandhiji.’ Someone corrected him, saying that the new arrival’s name was Birbal Singh. Jasbir replied, patiently explaining, ‘We call him ‘Gandhiji’’ That was in fact the nickname with which Birbal Singh was commonly hailed because he distantly resembled Mahatma Gandhi (Stevenson 1987:113). Can any pattern be detected regarding which memories are clearer than others? Most memories appear to cluster around events in the time closest to the death of the previous incarnation. A surprisingly large number of children, for instance, remembered how they had died, and of the events close to the time of death of the previous incarnation. When the death was violent, sudden, or unexpected, the circumstances of death were more likely to be remembered than otherwise. In almost all cases, the subjects have nothing to say about events between the death of the previous incarnation and their own births. In fact, like the Turkish dock worker, they appear not to be aware that any time has actually passed between the death of the previous incarnation and their present condition. The period between the previous incarnation’s death and subject’s birth is usually less than three years, with a median interval of fifteen months (Stevenson 1987:117). Other behavioral features relate to phobias surrounding the cause of death of the previous incarnation. For example, Ravi Shankar Gupta, who remembered being murdered by a barber, showed a phobia of all barbers. A boy in Sri Lanka, Lal Jayasooriya displayed great fear of policemen and often hid ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 Reliving Childhood? 9 from them before he had even learnt to speak. When he was able to, he recounted his previous life as an insurgent who had been murdered by the police (Stevenson 1987:115). Food cravings, aversions and phobias are common as well among reincarnated children. Swaran Lata, an Indian child born into a Brahmin family, remembered her previous life as an untouchable, and horrified her strictly vegetarian family by demanding to be served pork (Stevenson 1987:116). The clearest signs that reincarnated subjects still inhabit the adult life of their previous incarnation is displayed in the adoption of adult demeanor. These children invariably appear mature for their age, and display an air of condescension toward other children, and sometimes toward ‘socially inferior’ adults as well. Many children reject their parents on the ground that they are not their ‘real’ parents; this leads to severely strained relations, and often invites physical punishment. In general, it appears that memories that are embodied into gestures, desires, and phobias persist even after imaged memories of a previous life have disappeared. In rare instances, children have displayed xenoglossy, the ability to speak a language completely different from any language that is spoken in their family or area. For instance, an Indian girl, Swarnlata Mishra, performed unfamiliar dances and sang songs in a language that was incomprehensible to her Hindi-speaking parents. It turned out that the songs were in Bengali; the Mishras had no Bengali-speaking friends at whose house Swarnlata could have learnt the songs, nor was she exposed to them in school (Stevenson 1974:82-91).6 Time and Temporality Of the questions that adults in the West ask children, often the first following their name is: ‘How old are you?’8 Turned around and asked of other adults, such a question would betray a lack of tact, or perhaps worse, a lack of breeding (James & Prout 1997:234-5). Yet the fact that it seems almost natural a question to ask of children should make us pause to think about the significance accorded to time and temporality in different stages of life. Adults in the West ask children their age because they live in a social world where childhood is structured by age classes. Finding out a child’s age allows one to figure out how to behave toward the child, what one might expect the child to know, what grade in school the child is likely to be, and what might be appropriate entertainment or food for the child. Finer in infancy, these gradations subsequently fall into a yearly cycle marked by annual rituals such as graduation from one grade and promotion to the next, and perhaps most ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 10 akhil gupta importantly, by birthday parties, which are often the high festive points of the child’s ritual calendar. After high school and college, this forced stepmarch through age classes is abruptly halted, and people enter into a period of generic ‘adulthood.’ Laws stipulate minimum ages for driving, drinking, conscription into the armed forces, engaging in consensual sex, voting, or holding elected office, but after those (varying) thresholds are reached, few other prohibitions or regulations exist that have to do with age. The distinction between childhood and adulthood is predicated on the notion that ‘a life’ has a trajectory, and that this trajectory charts a progression from one stage to the next in a whole series. Ariès (1962:15–32) has argued that the idea of ‘the ages of life’ or ‘the ages of man’ found in the Middle Ages, which distinguished between six ages — childhood, puerility, adolescence, youth, senility, and old age (1962:19) — survive with surprisingly little modification in modern western ideas of the stages of life. In this conception, I think it would be fair to say that childhood, adulthood, and old age form the chief divisions, with the liminal periods divided into infancy (between birth and childhood), adolescence (between childhood and adulthood), middle age (between adulthood and old age), and senility (between old age and death). Anthropologists such as Margaret Mead (1928) first pointed out that such a division of the life course, far from being natural, is a very particular cultural construction, one of whose consequences is that adolescence in the West becomes a particularly conflicted age. One has only to contrast the elliptical shape of the life course in the West (with the peak at adulthood) with other cultural constructions, where old age represents the peak, to realize that the particular narrative of decline, infantilization, and dependency that characterizes old age in the West is neither natural nor ubiquitous (James, Jenks, & Prout 1998:71). In pointing to the cultural specificity of constructions of the life course, I do not intend to repeat Ariès’ assertion about childhood being a historically modern concept in another register, one in which an unwitting equivalence is established between the European past and cultural others in the present. Rather, the question that I wish to ask is how a cultural context in which reincarnation is commonly accepted would help us think differently about the construction of the stages of life. To do this, I will draw upon the example of one reincarnated subject, a published case from Stevenson’s archives, the case of Parmod Sharma (1974:109– 127). Parmod, the second son of B.L. Sharma, a sanskrit scholar and professor at an intermediate college in a small town called Bisauli in the north India ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 Reliving Childhood? 11 state of Uttar Pradesh, was born on October 11, 1944. When he was two and a half, he made the first statements about his previous life. He began to tell his mother not to cook because he had a wife in Moradabad, a medium-sized city more than a hundred miles from Bisauli. When he was a little older, that is, between the ages of three and four, he started talking more about his previous life. He said that he owned a large soda and biscuit shop in Moradabad called ‘Mohan Brothers.’ He also related how he had died by falling ill and eating too much yogurt and claimed that he had died in a bathtub. As it happened, there was indeed a shop in Moradabad called ‘Mohan Brothers,’ owned by a family consisting of three brothers and a cousin. They owned two hotels, two shops, and a cinema house in Moradabad and Sahranpur, another fairly large town a hundred miles or so north of Moradabad. They had a brother called Parmanand Mehra who had died on May 9, 1943 in Sahranpur. Apparently, Parmanand Mehra had developed a gastrointestinal illness after gorging on yogurt, and passed away shortly thereafter. Parmanand had started a biscuit and soda water manufacturing business for the family and managed it for several years. Parmod first met the Mehra family when, at the age of five, he was taken to Moradabad by his father and cousin. Parmod had made a number of statements about his previous life, which were verified on that visit by eyewitnesses from both families. What were the nature of the statements? Parmod claimed, for instance, that he had four sons and a daughter in his previous life, that he owned a big shop in Moradabad that sold biscuits and soda water, and that he also owned a shop, a hotel, and a cinema hall in Sahranpur. All these statements were confirmed by the Mehras. The strongest feature of cases such as Parmod’s, revealed also in the example of the Dalai Lama, is that children identify people whom they knew in their previous life on meeting them for the first time. For instance, when Parmod met an older cousin of Parmanand Mehra at the railway station in Moradabad, he said, ‘Hello, Karam Chand. I am Parmanand’ and then threw his arms around his cousin and wept on being reunited with him. He then went on to direct the way from the railway station to ‘his’ shop, and made it there despite attempts to deliberately mislead him. On reaching the shop, he complained that the location of ‘his’ seat in the shop had been changed, inquired into who was looking after the bakery and soda water factory that Parmanand had set up, and proceeded to put into good repair the machine used to make soda water that had been deliberately disconnected to mislead him. He also immediately identified his mother, daughter, and wife from his ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 12 akhil gupta previous life. He asked ‘his’ wife why she had not put on her bindi (the sign of her married state) despite the fact that he had come, and reproached her for wearing the traditional white sari worn by widows. He asked her if she would give him trouble again, a reference to the strained conjugal relations that characterized Parmanand’s life. He later told someone in her presence, ‘This is my wife with whom I always quarreled,’ a fact that was corroborated by Parmanand’s wife. Parmod also immediately recognized his sons. When the sons called him by his current name, he objected, and asked them to call him ‘Father.’ Normally, children would never call their parents by name, so Parmod’s objections were entirely consistent with the behavior one might have expected from Parmanand. Explaining to his sons that he was still their father, Parmod said, ‘I have only become small.’ Parmod also made a number of identifications of minor characters, people who did not play an important role in Parmanand’s life. What is interesting about this case for my purposes is how much many features it shares with other such cases: a young child starts talking about a previous life, providing a fair amount of detail including place names, occupation, descriptions of a previous place of residence or business, etc.; often expresses a yearning for his or her previous life circumstances; then makes a series of recognitions of places, paths, and people when taken to the site of his or her previous life; displays great emotion at being reunited with the loved ones in his previous life, often preferring their company to that of his present family; and finally displays distinct phobias related to the cause of his death. In this case, Parmod, unlike most people around him, strongly disliked yogurt, even advising his own father against eating it, saying it was dangerous. He also feared being submerged in water. I have presented this case because it helps me focus the questions I wish to raise in this essay: what does ‘childhood’ mean as a time of life, as a stage in life, for someone like Parmod? How do we understand the nature of temporality for such children? We only have to take the simple question that adults ask of children, ‘How old are you?’ to see just how complicated it might be to formulate a sensible answer for a child like Parmod. It is precisely such zones of uncertainty that fascinate me. Childhood Memories In her book, Strange Dislocations, Carolyn Steedman argues that the temporal structure of modern western views of childhood is an inevitably nostalgic one. It is nostalgic because ‘the search for the lost realms of the adult’s ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 Reliving Childhood? 13 past, for the far country of dreams and reverie that came to assume the shape of childhood from the end of the eighteenth century onwards’ (Steedman 1995:ix) is an impossible project. That past, Steedman writes, is always already gone; the child that is so desperately sought has already gone away (1995:14). Thus, when Postman writes an elegy to childhood, he is re-iterating a mourning that is a part of the notion of ‘childhood’ itself. I will explain what I mean by this somewhat convoluted formulation presently. ‘Modern children,’ Sharon Stephens has written, ‘are supposed to be segregated from the harsh realities of the adult world and to inhabit a safe, protected world of play, fantasy, and innocence’ (Stephens 1995:14).8 Adults often comment that childhood was the best time of their lives, a time when they were free of cares and worries. Young children are sometimes told that they should make the most of those years since they will never have the time again when they can just play and have fun. In those instances when childhood is not remembered particularly positively, it is because it has somehow failed to measure up to these expectations. One or more of the virtues of safety, protection, creativity, innocence, and segregation from an adult world have been compromised. I cannot here address, nor do I feel competent to do so, the history of the construction of this idyll apart from observing that there was nothing historically inevitable about this notion of childhood. One of its chief consequences, though, is that a remorseless sense of loss inhabits this idea of childhood, a loss that is echoed in the stories that adults often write for children (the implied readers of which might be the child that they remember themselves to have been). For instance, stories that begin with that well-loved phrase, ‘Long, long ago....’ might make little sense to most children (who may not grasp such concepts of time and interval) but it does uncannily echo the structure of loss and longing that childhood represents for adult readers and authors. Steedman argues that what is modern about childhood’s association with this sense of loss is its connection to a new narrative of development or growth. In this narrative, children embody and exemplify a process of growth whose inevitable outcome is death (1995:x). An adult looking back on childhood thus finds reflected in it the intimations of his or her own mortality. This section is titled ‘Childhood Memories’ in order to play on the difference between memories that adults have of their lives as children, and the memories that children who are reincarnated have of their previous lives as adults (or children). Does the structure of temporality of children who remember their previous lives differ fundamentally from that of adults who ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 14 akhil gupta remember their own childhood? 9 How do children who remember their previous lives inhabit their present life as children? Consider the case of Parmod. By the age of four, Parmod was building models of shops with electrical wires running around them. When he played with mud, as other children did, it was to make mud biscuits, which he would serve to others with ‘tea’ (water in a cup). He also liked to drink soda water. Like so many other children who have memories of their past life, he was preoccupied with his life as Parmanand Mehra. He pleaded with his parents to take him to Moradabad, and cried when they refused. What is intriguing in this case, as well as many others like it, is the nature of Parmod’s memory. Ordinarily, when we speak of memory, it is to denote a recollection of an event or a time that has passed, and which we are conscious of as having passed. Reincarnated children like Parmod appear to inhabit their past lives in the present. Their previous life is not just present as a memory in their present lives but often as a state that they occupy in the present. Thus, when Parmod first meets his cousin from his previous life, he says, ‘Hello, Karam Chand. I am Parmanand.’ This is a formulation that repeats itself incessantly in these cases: the child does not say ‘I was such-and-such,’ she says, ‘I am such-and-such.’ On the other hand, such children also display the ability to switch to a consciousness of their present circumstances. For example, when Parmod explains to ‘his’ children: ‘I have only become small’ implying perhaps that nothing else had changed, he was still the same essential self, and that only his body had altered. This indicates not just a dual consciousness of time, but a split in the manner in which time is inhabited. Such a split inhabitation of time, I suggest, may be quite unique to cases of reincarnation, and may differ in essential ways from the nostalgic recollection or recapitulation of the past that Steedman identifies as characteristic of adult constructions of childhood in the West. Perhaps another way to think about this is that one view of time posits a continuity between events within a lifetime, so that it does not appear as a surprise that in adulthood or old age we should be able to recollect events in our childhood, and assumes a radical discontinuity across lifetimes so that it is unreasonable or impossible to recollect events in a previous life.10 By contrast, the time inhabited by reincarnated children presumes a continuity with a previous lifetime and, it so turns out, does not always presuppose that the present lifetime is continuous. For most of these children appear to forget their memories of a previous life after the age of eight; however, a few retain very vivid images and strong feelings well into their adult lives. ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 Reliving Childhood? 15 What I am suggesting, therefore, is that although what may be common to both adults who look back nostalgically to their childhood and children who are inhabited by their previous lives may be a sense of loss, that sensibility of loss may have very different temporal figurations. Why that should be the case may at least partially be understood by examining the relation between the rise of growth as the dominant narrative of childhood and historical consciousness. The Historicity of Lives There can be little argument that growth is the time machine that runs the clock of childhood in the West. From birth, children grow physically, psychologically, mentally, emotionally, and socially: the task of charting and explaining that growth is left to specialists in developmental psychology, sociology, medicine, and education. Normal patterns of growth are indexed to age, so that one can speak of a child who is ‘small for her age’ or has unusual abilities for ‘someone so young;’ teenagers or adults may be scolded or shamed for ‘acting like a baby.’ Growth and chronological distance from birth have become reflexively intertwined: we have become habituated to use one as a measure of the other. Smallness is associated with immaturity and social incompetence; by the same token, it is assumed that someone young will have abilities less developed than an adult. After childhood, this correlation weakens: some types of growth may stop after a particular age (for example, physical height), and there might even be a decline of certain faculties with age (for example, eyesight, physical strength, memory). This conjugation of growth and age would not have been possible, Carolyn Steedman reminds us, without the rise of an historical consciousness in which the self and the world were narrativized as moving inexorably forward from an origin (1995:92). Once individual lives were seen as having this historicity, then the depths of that history could be plumbed by an attention to one’s childhood. Historical causation when applied to the life cycle meant that the explanation for events and attitudes in later life, neuroses in particular, could be ‘explained’ by attending to what had come before. This has led to the familiar emphasis on the experiences of early infancy: a great deal of the explanatory power for ‘dysfunction’ in adults is routinely traced to their early childhood. Biographies and even autobiographies routinely recount the details of their subject’s childhood: whether it was happy or unhappy (and how does one reduce a whole life stage into such a register?); whether it was marked by specific traumas or experiences, etc. The adult’s lost past, that obscure obethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 16 akhil gupta ject of desire and dread, becomes the key that unlocks the secrets of her present emotional, mental, and psychological condition. So steeped are we in an historical consciousness that it is self-evident that the search for first causes should also be a search for temporal origins. Could it be otherwise? Thus, whatever else may divide the different sides in the greatest debate about the development of human beings (Are human attributes — intelligence, musical ability, sociability, physical ability — to be explained by nature or nurture?) and the tests that have been devised to answer such questions (observing identical twins who have been separated at birth versus a control group who have not), they are at least agreed that one has to look at or near origins to answer the question (genetic theories push the question of origins further back, but do not fundamentally disrupt the logic of developmentalism). As I shall argue presently, this obsession with origins haunts social and cultural life as well. What begins must have an end. The other side of this historical consciousness therefore is a great concern with death, with the cessation of growth, with the end of life. In fact, death is prefigured in the idea of growth itself; this is why, according to Steedman, ‘childhood’ becomes such an important object of nostalgic recollection. I would argue, however, that the paths of development of lives, cultures, and nations are driven not by the logic of growth alone but by narratives that give that growth a stronger impetus, a teleological drive.11 Individual lives, for example, often appear to be scripted with a goal of surviving death. This hankering toward salvation, need not be religious; in fact, it more often takes a secular form even for religious individuals. To do something that survives you — found a company or an industrial empire, write a book, create an artistic work, fund a scholarship or an entire college, have a building named after you, to leave, in other words, a mark upon the world — is to seek for yourself a life after death, an afterlife. For an historical and secular consciousness, this is a quest for salvation because it rescues the individual from oblivion, from the Grim Reaper cloaked in the mantle of Father Time. Is this the reason why, despite the disdain with which ideas of reincarnation are greeted by dominant ideologies in the West, they continue to circulate with such frequency in popular culture? A childhood enframed by teleological narratives, by notions of growth that equate and confuse age with development, would be a poor approximation to the lives of reincarnated children. Attempting to explain the behavior, attitudes or aptitudes of reincarnated children by events in the period immeethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 Reliving Childhood? 17 diately after their birth would significantly miss its mark, precisely because reincarnation places the question of origin in doubt. ‘Looking back’ for these children means remembering their adult lives, at what would be considered not the beginning but the middle of a life cycle.12 What I wish to suggest is that in order to understand the lives of these children, instead of employing an idea of growth, with its corollary of teleological directionality, we need to draw upon a notion of metamorphosis or transformation.13 Metamorphosis emphasizes continuity and survival; it involves not the obliteration or annihilation of the self as its final stage but a transposition of some of its essential qualities.14 In the flow and flux of human properties across bodily inscriptions, reincarnation stresses continuity where ideas of growth could only see discontinuity. For example, like most other children who remembered previous lives, in his cravings, habits, phobias, and bodily orientations, Parmod displayed many of the qualities of Parmanand Mehra. I have already mentioned his phobia of yogurt and baths. Parmod displayed an unusual devoutness which closely paralleled Parmanand’s attitude but was not common in Parmod’s family. He had a great interest in palmistry, as had Parmanand, and once claimed to have read his sister-in-law’s palm accurately. Parmanand’s wife verified that her husband had in fact read his sister-in-law’s palm and correctly predicted the age of her death. Parmod also displayed an extraordinary business acumen. When he was still a small boy, a relative who owned a shop preferred to leave it to Parmod when he was away because the boy did such a good job of managing the business. (A similar logic is at work in the Tibetan selection of lamas: choosing a reincarnate lama makes the job of training a child easier as he already has certain aptitudes and knowledges). The childhood of those who remember their previous lives differs from other children in another way. Very few of them are reported to be childlike in their fondness for the company of other children and for playing games. Instead, they are usually found to be somewhat aloof from other children, more somber, more restrained, more, well, adult-like, and often preoccupied with their previous life. Parmod’s parents reported that his childhood was taken up with his concerns about his life in Moradabad; even his play consisted of duplicating the details of his biscuit shop and soda-water factory, and feeding the other children mud biscuits with ‘tea.’ Similarly, the Dalai Lama’s mother recounts in her book that, ‘He was different from my other children right from the start. He was a somber child who liked to stay indoors by himself.15 He was always packing his clothes and his little belongethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 18 akhil gupta ings. When I would ask what he was doing, he would reply that he was packing to go to Lhasa, and that he would take all of us with him’ (Tsering 2000). The Culture of Childhood and the Childhood of Culture The image of development, with its hierarchy, directionality, purposiveness, and goal-orientation, not only emplots individual lives into different stages but cultures and nations as well into primitive, backward or underdeveloped, developing, and developed or advanced. This would appear to be a mere coincidence until we remember that it is in the same time period, that is, in the late nineteenth century, in the heyday of colonialism, that a crudely evolutionary schema came to be stamped on many a sphere of life where historical narrative was a possibility. The culture of childhood and the childhood of culture, fused through the figure of the savage and the primitive, were the common source whence sprang individual adults and adult civilizations. The histories of civilizations and nations could be narrated with the same tropes and plot devices as the life histories of individuals: as being born, coming of age, passing through periods of adolescent confusion, finally reaching maturity, and then perhaps going into decline with old age. The child was equated with the savage and the primitive because both were seen as intellectually immature, irrational beings who could illuminate the early stages of human development (Burman 1994:10; Jenks 1996:6). It was not uncommon for child psychologists in the late nineteenth century to begin their investigation with some observations about ‘savage life’ since it was widely believed that the child and the savage shared elementary forms of cognition and perception. Nor was such a view confined to those deeply invested in social and cultural evolutionism. A very significant trajectory of thinking on children, traced to Rousseau, sees in the child many of the attributes of the noble savage: innocence; an intuitive wisdom; a keen appreciation of beauty, especially the beauty of Nature; a greater sensitivity to moral values; and a freedom from the contaminating influences of civilization (Burman 1994:53; Boas 1966:8).16 This relationship between the child and the savage only makes sense once childhood itself is indexed to age. Before the modern period, ‘childhood’ denoted not a chronological age, but a relationship of dependence. Thus, the feudal lord or the master of a household referred to his serfs or servants as ‘my child,’ or ‘son.’ In this usage, to be a child was to be dependent on another who was economically and socially superior, to be powerless, to submit to their rule or authority, not much different from the situation of children in nuclear families ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 Reliving Childhood? 19 today.17 In fact, as late as the debates on child labor during the early nineteenth century in England, factory owners were complaining that reformist texts were calling all workers ‘infants of tender years’ or ‘children,’ whatever their chronological age happened to be, deliberately mixing perhaps different ideas of ‘childhood’ in a period when the meaning of that term was itself shifting (Steedman 1994:7). Once this shift occurs and the boundaries of childhood are delineated by chronology, the relationship between the child as forbearer of the adult and primitive man as the forbearer of civilization proves surprisingly resilient.18 Far from being behind us, such a view continues to inform everything from children’s art, which in its movement to museums is sometimes labeled ‘primitive art’ to representations of ‘simple, innocent’ people who inhabit the islands written about in magazines such as Travel and Leisure. Iona and Peter Opie preface their formidable treatise on children’s lore and language in Britain with a statement that explicitly compares the culture of children to that of ‘some dwindling aboriginal tribe’ and argue that, ‘like the savage, [children] are respecters, even venerators, of custom’ (1959:2). Conversely, theories of development consistently portray nations and economies in terms of their movement along a line that mimics the human life cycle. Thus, we have the language of markets being ‘immature,’ or ‘young’ or ‘not fully formed;’ economies as ‘growing,’ ‘having a lot of potential,’ ‘undeveloped,’ etc.: such metaphoric transactions between childhood and the primitive go around with such dizzying speed that it becomes impossible to determine any direction of influence. In the social and historical sciences, the child continues to be ‘the paradigmatic Other’ (Jenks 1996:3; Rapport & Overing 2000:29). Childhood, it is pointed out, is unlike other identities in that it excludes no one: all adults have been children at some point in their lives (Jenks 1996:30), whereas not everyone can inhabit identities formed around class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, or gender. Perhaps it is just this universality of childhood that makes it invisible. Just how invisible becomes clear if you take the words ‘agent,’ ‘actor,’ ‘subject,’ or ‘individual’ in social and historical analysis and substitute ‘child’ in its place. Most such substitutions would render their sentences illegitimate; social and cultural analysis simply does not take seriously the proposition that children, like adults, are social actors who influence the histories of societies and nations. Contrast the theoretical elaboration of ‘childhood’ as an identity against any of the other identities I have mentioned and the point is immediately obvious. ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 20 akhil gupta I began this paper with the story of the search for the reincarnated Dalai Lama because Tibet provides a good example of the centrality of children to social and political life. Children, especially the reincarnates of high lamas, are an inescapable element of the cultural landscape, and have to be accounted for in any social analysis because of their proximity to the seat of political and religious power. In a similar vein, in other places where reincarnation is a common phenomenon, it would be hard to make the association between the child and the primitive, because the child is not necessarily the unformed, incipient version of the adult, but may quite literally turn out to be father of the Man. Societies and cultures in which reincarnation is a common belief disrupt the teleologies of progress and development of individuals and hence put into question the implicit mapping of the individual life cycle onto the times of societies and nations. This does not prevent the worldwide diffusion and normalization of western ideas of childhood through United Nations conventions, commodities and images, development aid programs, etc., which is happening at a furious pace, but it should make us think about alternatives to the modern western myth of childhood. Conclusion In this paper, I have suggested that reincarnation forces us to rethink some of the assumptions about time and temporality that structure our understanding of the child as a social agent, and childhood as a particular stage in life. The age classes that so shape the experience of childhood in the West are neither natural nor universal. There may be other ways of organizing children’s activities and children’s abilities rather than by chronological age that allow for different skills and temperaments to be discovered. The nostalgic recuperation of childhood as a protected, safe, happy, and dependent stage in life might well prevent us from understanding how other childhoods are lived and understood, and lead to the sloppy moralizing that sometimes accompanies the discourse of those unconscious of their own privilege. The rise of historical narratives of the self may lead to an obsession with origins and a fear of death that has serious repercussions, not only for our psychological health, but for practices of child rearing and schooling. The currency between the child as a primitive vision of humankind and the primitive as representing the childhood of man continues to inform and distort the understanding of children’s role as social agents and the third world’s relation to the West. In other words, the implications of a different understanding of time and temporality are potentially enormous. In this paper, I have barely touched ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 Reliving Childhood? 21 the surface of this most interesting and complicated topic. But I hope to have given you a glimpse of its enormous potential. Acknowledgment This essay was written when I was a Fellow’s Fellow at the National Humanities Center (nhc) in North Carolina. I am grateful to the nhc for its support for this project. I would also like to thank Nilgun Uygun for her superb research assistance. The paper has been improved immensely by comments from audiences at the nhc, the Vega Day symposium in Stockholm, the London School of Economics, ehess, Paris, and the University of Vienna. Notes 1. My account in this section relies heavily on Wangdu 1975; H.H. the Dalai Lama 1997; Goldstein 1989; and Goodman 1986. 2. The significance of the letters was unclear until the house of the reincarnate personality had been found. It was then surmised that ‘a’ stood for Amdo, ‘Ka’ could have stood for Kumbum monastery and ‘Ka’ and ‘Ma’ together for the monastery of Karmapa Rolpai Dorje, which sat on the mountain above the village (Dalai Lama 1997:10; Goodman 1986:14-–15). 3. These signs included such disparate elements as elephants of different sizes and in various postures that had appeared in the northeastern part of the sky and a star-shaped fungus with arms resembling the horns of a deer that had been found at the base of a wooden column in the northeast side of a temple being constructed for the late Dalai Lama. 4. This scene has been reproduced faithfully in Martin Scorcese’s film Kundun. 5. Similarly, the Buddhist societies of Southeast Asia like Vietnam and Cambodia are not represented because Stevenson did not have a chance to collect data there. In these societies, we do not know with what frequency cases of reincarnation are to be found; the only systematic survey of one district of north India done by researchers indicated that 1.9 percent of the population consisted of people who at some point in their current life remembered a previous one (Stevenson 1987:96). 6. Similarly, the child of a Druse family in Lebanon spoke a strange language, which could not be identified by anyone in his neighborhood. He heard some Japanese tourists talking to each other on the street, ran up to them and started talking to them in Japanese (Shroder 1999:119). 7. Deidre Lynch reminds me that particularly for infants, the first question to the caregiver is as likely to be ‘Is the child a boy or a girl?’ The general point here is that gender and age are closely conjugated constructs, as seen from the ‘color coordination’ of gender categories in the contemporary u.s., where ‘blue’ and ‘pink’ are ascribed to infants virtually from the moment of birth. 8. Western childhood in the twentieth century has been characterized by social dependency, asexuality, the obligation to be happy, with a right to protection and training, but not to personal or social autonomy (Ennew 1986). 9. A strictly parallel comparison would place side by side two categories of adults, one category that (now or as children) remembered their past lives, and another category that did not, and then ask if their constructions of childhood were different. ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 22 akhil gupta 10. It should be noted that this view of ‘Western childhood’ is itself a construct, one that emphasizes dominant conceptions as opposed to heterodox ones. 11. I wonder if this is the reason why the second most frequent question that adults ask children is, ‘What do you want to become when you grow up?’ 12. This point has very interesting methodological implications for the elicitation and interpretation of life narratives. Rather than ‘beginning’ with birth and early childhood, as much life writing tends to do, we clearly need methods to elicit the temporal figurations of life narratives, leaving open the possibility that such narratives might be radically disjointed where they were expected to be continuous, and vice versa. Could methods be devised that allowed for the possibility of eliciting narratives that paid attention to the question that ‘life’ itself had a different meaning in another cultural context? 13. Hindu and Buddhist ideas see the body in this form, as clothes that are shed and replaced by new ones. 14. This idea owes to a quote from Beer cited in Steedman (1995:92). 15. Clearly, such cases raise important questions not only about temporality but about identity as well. What is particularly interesting is that the memories of reincarnated children often seem to be bodily inscribed. Reincarnated children ‘remember’ their past lives not just through words but through their gestures, actions, and bodily hexis which mimics the previous incarnation. The relation between the body, agency and identity forms the basis of another essay and will not be dealt with here. Although reincarnated children were adult-like in some respects, they remained child-like in others. For example, although Parmod pined for his previous (adult) life in Moradabad, he cried when his parents refused to take him there, something that an adult would presumably not do in his place. Adult and child-like traits thus exist in a complicated relationship in the childhood of such children. 16. One can contrast such modern views of childhood with those found in Greek thought, and in medieval Europe. Boas claims ‘In general, the Ancients had a low opinion of children if they appraised them at all’ (1966:12). The middle ages, he asserts, did not see the child as a primitive because most people were poor enough as ‘to be unaware of the degenerative effects of luxury’ (1966:101). 17. It is not uncommon for people in North India to call domestic servants betaa (‘son’), no matter what their chronological age is. 18. The sweeping character of this assertion should not be intended to imply that this was the sole metaphor by which ‘primitive man’ was understood or by which ‘children’ were understood in the West. Clearly, there was a diversity of temporal figurations of the life cycle in the West, with many dissident and heterodox traditions. In emphasizing dominant conceptions of ‘childhood’ and ‘primitives’ in the West in the nineteenth century, I risk presenting as an unitary achievement what was perhaps a fragile, and hard-won hegemony (like the notion of ‘the West’ itself ). I am grateful to André Gingrich for reminding me that religious and even secular life histories in ‘the West’ had quite a wide range of temporal figurations and to Larry Taylor for pointing out that if a dominant conception of childhood can be said to exist, then it arose against other ideas in the West that were quite fundamentally different. ethnos, vol. 67:1, 2002 Reliving Childhood? 23 References Ariès, Philippe. 1962. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Translated by Robert Baldick. New York: Vintage Books. Boas, George. 1966. The Cult of Childhood. London: University of London. Burman, Erica. 1994. Deconstructing Developmental Psychology. New York: Routledge. Ennew, Judith. 1986. The Sexual Exploitation of Children. Oxford: Polity Press. Goldstein, Melvyl C. 1989. A History of Modern Tibet, 1913–1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goodman, Michael Harris. 1986. The Last Dalai Lama: A Biography. Boston: Shambhala. 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