Master of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Faculty of Social Sciences

Mimesis: emerging morality in children’s play

An essay for the „Anthropology of Children and Youth” course
taught by Prof. Dr. Filip De Boeck

Abstract:
„The current essay explores the way in which agency is achieved by children’ minds with a focus on play related
contexts and the practice of mimesis as being relevant for the development of morality. In order to be able to interpret
children’s behavior from the perspective of morality, it is necessary to understand the tradition of moral
anthropology and to give an account of how agency is experimented by children. These considerations require a
discussion on the relation between psychology and anthropology, combined with philosophical investigations on the
matter. The anthropological perspective should prove useful for this endeavor and by bringing an example from the
pretend play of Huli children I hope to obtain an interpretative framework for understanding agency in child’s
pretence play. Another important issue that this paper addresses is the account of mimesis in regards to children’s
play, contouring the importance of enacting and interpretation of morality in children’s narrative making process.
This being said, children’s play will be treated here not only as leisure activity, but as means for preserving existing
cultural models and producing new ones”

Keywords: exchange, narrative, anthropology, making, morality

Word count: 5028

Student
Liviu Popa

2016
Introduction

In a course taught by professor Filip De Boeck1 at KU Leuven I was familiarized with a view
of the young ones in a much more complex way than the traditional Western perspective. Similar
to a rubik cube, depending on the facet of the cube which you look at you get a different pattern,
thus finding a single pattern sufficient for describing children or youth implies having a
unidimensional limited view which neglects other aspects of their status and identity. In addition,
ethnographic data invites the anthropologist to discuss children’s status within the parameters of
the ‘made’ and the ‘destroyed’, but also on their capability of becoming ‘makers’ and ‘breakers’.
In an extensive ethnographic research on African youth, to which professor De Boeck
contributed2, the view of the vulnerable and passive image of the children that various NGOs and
policy makers deal with is being challenged, authorizing a discourse on children and youth agency.
As a result of these efforts, in a review of the book already mentioned we find the following
appreciation:
“Most of the contributions call for a focus (…) on the agency of children and youth,
a by-now familiar and still valid point in studies of young people.
The book provides revealing cases of agency, but cannot hide the fact that,
overall, things are not going well for young people..” (Abbink 2009)
Any discussion on agency has multiple implications in fields like politics, law and morality
among others. In this essay the main focus will be on children’s agency in relation with morality,
treating them as makers of their own narrative-space of emerging morality. I talk here about
emerging morality and not morality per se, as I am interested in those aspects 3 that influence
children’s behavior in games and later life views on morality or other rule based human relations.
Not only, is it hard to operate with a definition of morality that universally explains the young
individual’s actions concerned with good-doing and the harm avoidance principle, but such a
definition might force the interpretation into keeping the unilateral, passive view of children intact.

1
Filip De Boeck is a Professor of Anthropology of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the KU Leuven and he is
conducting research at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa .
2
Alcinda, Honwana, and Fillip De Boeck. "Makers and breakers: Children and youth in postcolonial Africa." (2005).
3
It is mainly about these values or judgments with a prescribing function in social contexts. Two such aspects will be
treated in this essay concerning gender-roles and aesthetic judgments of children;

1
In this case we could perhaps only say what moral behaviour and not to presuppose existing
principles that children deliberately have and act upon. Finding an adequate way to deal with the
issue will unfold here, by taking into consideration these concepts of morality relevant for
anthropology and, of course, for the anthropology of morality and children.
In the first part of this essay I will try to summarize these positions from moral anthropology
that seem fruitful for the analysis of mimesis in children’s play by looking at virtues and feelings
in the field of human morality. From here on I will look at the way ethnographies shape their
focus on children in general, only to introduce the last part of this essay which is meant to show
how pretence play could be analyzed from an anthropological perspective. Considering that play,
and more specifically pretend-play, is considered within psychology a necessary feature in the
moral development of children, I focus on ethnographic data on the Huli children in order to
develop an interpretative model that treats them as makers of morality, rather than being made by
it. Although the research mentioned does not have this aim as primary focus, I think that there is
sufficient reason to undertake this effort, given the parameters of experienced morality provided
by the moral anthropology discourse. Although the way morality is shaped through play might not
be universal, this analysis on the Huli children’s pretend play would provide a model of
interpretation for further case studies.
Play is probably the first space where children get to experience agency, and therefore
autonomy. It follows that if play is a space of social narrative making, the children’s narratives
would depend not only on the capacity of the self to make a narrative, but also on the competence
to share and construct in relation with the other. Hence, collaborative narrative making becomes
an issue of emerging morality or moral sentiments. The relevance of cultural and social settings in
shaping practices and beliefs is important here, engaging the subjects in a double relation: 1)
common myths and practices are taken onto4 children, and 2) by being taken onto they get shaped
or prolonged, and therefore made by children.

Anthropology meets morality

There is not a long tradition of studying morality from within anthropology. If the subject is
intensively treated within philosophy and psychology departments, only recently has there been a

4
In the form of enacting or simulating already observed behavior, speech, roles and so on .

2
focus on the topic of morality within anthropology. The causes for this are to be found in the
epistemology and history of anthropology (Fassin 2008). The epistemological obstacle could be
tracked down to Franz Boas’ cultural relativism which did not allow any value-based comparisons
of cultures. This train of thought made sense in the 19th century when evolutionism was implying
the existence of hierarchies between different stages of development, assuming a universal
process of development for the whole humanity. In the tradition set out by Boas, by avoiding
universalist pretences in anthropology and criticizing ethnocentrism, the anthropologist should be
able to give account of those he is studying without implying their inferiority or marginal
character for humanity. Within this anthropological tradition “cultures were ethically
incommensurable, the analysis of their values would risk surreptitiously reintroducing value
judgments and moral hierarchies” (Fassin 2008). What Boas doesn’t see and Fassin is implying in
his work is that the anthropologist could give an account of morality, just as she/ he does in
regards to other social issues, that is by providing a culturally situated account of a particular
dimension of social reality, and when it comes to morality, in shaping the local sense of right and
wrong (Fassin 2008). The second cause for the lack of discussing morality within anthropology,
Fassin suggests, would reside in the historical morally dubitable relations that anthropologists had
with colonial administration and spying agencies. Both of these problems could be avoided if the
anthropologist is not to be thought of as a moralist, but rather as a scientist of morals.
Despite these obstacles, there have also been incentives from both Weber and Durkheim to
treat value-based judgments as objects of anthropological enquiry. What would these objects look
like for the researcher of social science? It is about moral sentiments, judgments and practices
(Fassin 2012). Semantically, moral anthropology as a study field should set the researcher apart
from the study object, calling for reflexivity on her or his behalf. Between the tension of the
already formed moral conceptions of the researcher and the views, judgments or practices found
in the field these imbalances should be reconciled by a deep understanding of one’s own
background and the local context the researcher is confronted with. This already tells us
something about the methodology a moral anthropologist is to assume: to consider the limits of
his value-based judgments to not take the moral facts for granted (Fassin 2012). Of course, the
interplay with other aspects of human life should not be neglected as if we could treat morality as
an independent sphere, the skillful anthropologist being able to reflect on how “moral questions
are embedded in the substance of the social” (Fassin 2012).

3
 Universal pretensions of how one should act, feel or think in certain situation are not adequate,
which is why many philosophical considerations do not prove useful on the field. More than this,
in a globalizing world the clashing of different moralities makes totalizing moralities a hard thing
to maintain a single evaluation framework for judging what is morally good or bad does not seem
enough. As is the case with what a good child means in different societies there are multiple
tensions between the Western mindset and other social, political or spiritual backgrounds from
other parts of the world5 (Fechter 2014).
The different conceptions of morality from philosophy are usually too broad to say anything
about how one should act in bound local contexts. What is perhaps better to analyze is the role of
affect in human reasoning and morally imbued action. From the Kantian tradition in which the
moral is deemed separate from one’s own liking or interest, to Hume who speaks of passions
which determine action and moral judgments that guide it or Nietzche’s instinct of conscience, the
importance of moral sentiments calls for thorough consideration (Throop 2012). The sentiments
are not mere epiphenomena of a process of moral cultivation, but rather “active modes of attuning
attention to moral salient aspects of our own and other’s way of being” (Throop 2012). What this
means is that we can look at everyday situations and how certain feelings are seen as morally
desirable instead of looking for morally challenging cases in order to understand morality within a
particular group or society. One example for this is the ritual of lament among the Alevi
community in Turkey, in which by being able to cry during Muharram one is considered morally
cultivated and redempted (Tambar 2011). Another example is that of the Yapese people for which
two moral sentiments are implying the acknowledging of the other (relevant for social belonging)
and development of moral character: suffering for others and compassion towards others’
suffering. As Throop nicely addresses this issue:
“Returning to my own moment of moral breakdown and the sentiments and sensibilities that were
associated with it, it was precisely in those moments where I was made to existentially question my own
very presence as a witness, to confront my own interests and plans that I was faced with the true
integrity of Tinag’s being- (…) I was in that moment uniquely human, vulnerable and unassumable in
my own right.” (Throop 2012)

Whenever we speak of morality, another important aspect is that of reciprocity. In its popular
form of the Gold Rule6, the moral reciprocity of an action is implied bringing upon a discussion

5
Like the views on child labour in Northeast Brazil, the influence of Confucian principles on child behavior in
Vietnam and so on;
6
Usually found in the form “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

4
on exchange. The anthropological investigations have focused a lot on the importance of the
exchange practices, but lacked in showing how moral goods are being traded. Ethnographies seem
to suggest that there is a need for distinguishing between two types of practices that individuals
get involved in: exchanging and sharing, without being able to reduce one to the other. There are
cultural conditions that apply in the case of each of these practices, but there is no institution that
sets out what is right and wrong in terms of action, rather a “complex systems of habitual practice”
(Widlock 2012). If exchange often leads to obligations and has a ceremonial character, and is
formally reglemented and surrounded by taboo, sharing is unceremonial and makes no distinction
between givers or receivers. In the case of sharing, what is at stake is the mutual enjoyment of that
which is being shared and it means that it is done for its own sake. Unlike in the case of exchange
which seems to have only instrumental value because it aims at something else, sharing is a way
of giving back and maintaining the social connections. What this leads us to is a conception of
virtue as social skill of how one negotiates his place within the group-narrative while also
constituting her/his own narrative and not as a result of impersonal set of norms that guide an
individual’s behavior. From this view, virtue is a “human quality observable in the practice of
sharing in contradistinction to systems of exchange” (Widlock 2012).
All these considerations on morality from within anthropology will be taken into
consideration in later part of this paper where the focus will be on the practice of mimesis in the
pretend play of Huli children.

Focal points in the ethnography of children

Considering the extensive efforts that Didier Fassin7 did in order to set out a tradition moral
anthropology as a discipline of study and research, I contacted him in order to find out his views
in regards to the morality of children. As a result, I was directed to two of his students who did
their research on children, I mention here Ann Sarcinelli and Camille Salgues who not only were
they willing to answer my questions, but gave me insight into how the issue is to be dealt with.
The main message would be this: chidren’s morality is not to be treated out of a particular context.
Social realities call for an empirical answer and any presupposing of its nature is not a good
approach in anthropology. As an example, in her study of transnational minorities in Milan, the

7
Didier Fassin is the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton University;

5
young play an important role in the development of transnational minority communities by
appropriating adult’s culture and transforming it (Granata& Sarcinelli 2012). Even if the practice
of intergenerational transmission of identity exists also in the case of majorities, in the case of
minorities the scope or function it serves differs from one group to another, and subsequently,
there is notable difference between the practice of transmission in different groups depending on
the social, historical or cultural context found there8.
Historically speaking, after a tradition set out by Margaret Mead and Bronislaw Malinowski,
ethnography of children had contributed for and against what was going on in developmental
studies (LeVine 2007). The relation between the two became quite complicated as often
ethnography of children would infirm hypothesis from psychology by bringing into discussion the
cultural relativism of certain social phenomena. Then, a question should arise from this: What
should be the scope and methods used by an ethnographer of children? Levine gives guidance for
this by paraphrasing N. Quinn and L. Hirschfield:
“But ethnographic documentation by itself, however
excellent, cannot create an anthropology of childhood
of more than marginal significance to anthropologists ,
or for that matter to other social scientists,
without further theory building and cross-cultural comparison” (LeVine 2007)

This is why it might be fruitful that before any ethnographic research is conducted to consult
competing theories and to build on them and not to go on paths that no one has walked on before
in this quest for knowledge of human undertakings. In this respect, theories from psychology and
economy could be integrated in one’s work as starting point of questioning and forming a research
question. At this point, I would like to mention two competing models for how children issues are
treated within anthropology regarding methodology and the relation with other fields of study.
The first one is a classical critique which by considering the local context of Chinese youth builds
against Kohlberg’s developmental theory (Dien 1982), while the second one takes from the
psychological theories and combines those with elements of culture in order to give a universal
image of the child-rearing practices (Quinn 2005). The difference between the two resides in the
way comparison is made. If in the case of Kohlberg’s critique the Chinese are already seen as
different because of the Confucian doctrine that sets themselves apart from the “linear” West,
Quinn’s article investigates universality with the ambition to explain how difference is possible.

8
Also between transnational migrants and other migrant minorities, not only between transnational minorities and
the majority;

6
Probably the cause for the difference between the two resides in the way culture is conceived: i. as
monolithic and unchanging or ii. As result of shared cognitive schemas that arise from shared
experience (Quinn 2005). When Dien speaks of morality in Chinese culture it presupposes a difference
from the rest, calling for a treatment of the culture in its own uniqueness:
“Moral maturity in such a society may well mean an ability to make a judgment
based upon an insight into the intricate system of cultural norms of reciprocity,
rules of exchange, various available resources,
and the complex network of relationships in a given situation.” (Dien 1982)
And in contrast, Quinn seeks to reduce all cultures to a single mechanism that meets different
functions:
“That is all that ‘culture’ is: shared schemas, along with, of course,
the shared world of acts and artifacts that people holding common schemas collectively produce.
One common kind of cultural schema is a cultural solution to a task that members of a group must
routinely perform, and that, once invented,
is transmitted from person to person and from generation to generation.” (Quinn 2005)
In my opinion what both lack is the capacity to explain how children undergo the rite of
passage at certain ages that permits one to distinguish herself/himself from a past self, and thus
attain maturity. It is true that Quinn’s efforts give a broad image on how different practices of
child rearing construct the cultural self which is passive to some extent and dependent on the
degree of approval they receive from adults. Can we infer that when one ceases to act based on the
fear enacted by the elderly and when they succeed in becoming rearers, they are not to be seen as
children anymore? Even if this is the case, we would still not have an image of how the child
undergoes the change in the context of the others and why is it for the young desirable to do so
from their perspective. This is the point in which I consider the practice of mimesis in pretend
play as being fruitful. Having at stake the mutual enjoyment implied by play, one would seek to
preserve and promote his pleasant experience by collaborating with others in order to make sense
out of that which is external for them.
The act of imitation, unlike techniques of approval and disapproval, as a habitual practice, is
not directed unilaterally towards the mature other, but also towards children’s equals and their
past selves. The rearing then would imply greater agency and responsibility on behalf of the
children, enabling us to see them as being active in the process. The many factors that influence
mimetic practice (the techniques portrayed by Quinn of praising and punishing, approval or
disapproval being some of them) have to be recognized, but one should not underestimate the
ability to deliberately act upon these influence when it comes to children. If one fails to do so,

7
discussions about emerging agency, responsibility and morality stop as they have no place in a
mechanicistic view of causal relations where everything is predetermined. The implication of this
is the call for a focus on a learning process which is active and which does not depend on the
passive appropriation of cultural models. By paying attention to the reactionary power of the
subjects and their fashion of working with or making culture, one should be able to find the
individual between the meeting point of the social and the self. I mention here an observation
made by T. Widlock in his paper on Virtue in which he claims that “moral agents can be virtuous
without having access to specialized moral codes, by perfecting their practice” (Widlock
2012:195). It is this about this perfecting of the practice that implies the knowing how to act and
skill of the subject on the matter, which cannot be reduced to particular codes of conduct that
explain social phenomena.
Narrative making and making morality
I am happy to say that while working on current essay I encountered many articles that helped
me understand different cognive and neuronal process that are undergoing in the developmental
stages of a human being (and not only) which I was not familiar with beforehand. I can only hope
that I can bring those to good use here, as I believe in the epistemic authority of complementary
research, taking into account efforts done from other fields of study 9 . Given that my own
ethnographic experience is scarce on the subject of children morality, I limit myself here to the
modest endeavor of developing a prototypical model of interpretation for agency in children.
What I do here is what it’s called “armchair anthropology”, not in a depreciative way, but rather
as a practice of the 19th century in the way Efram Sera-Shriar (2014) portrays it, understood as a
mode of being aware of the local realities while still trying to find one’s own methodology. If I’m
not too poetic here, it seems that nowadays there is a focus within the social sciences on the
universal nature of human beings, making that which is different a motive for celebration for the
whole of humanity10.
Given that empathy is intensively study within developmental psychology, the social sciences
should keep up with their considerations about the embodiment of being with the other. Similarly,

9
Not only because they have more explanatory power, but also because it is a way to consider the tradition and
efforts done by researchers who dealt with the same subject, broadening the spectrum of discussions;
10
It might be the case that discoveries made by the sciences of the brain are also discouraging fields of study like
anthropology and philosophy, making them look for a methodology that makes their findings unaffected by ongoing
research;

8
in what concerns children’s way of being together, pretend play is relevant in psychological
enquiry insofar it is correlated to the Theory of Mind concept, which presupposes the capability of
recognizing other’s will and desires, but also one self’s (James 2013), including here the
Emotional Understanding as a required condition for pro-social behavior and rule following. The
entire discussion on the different developmental stages of morality can be tracked to Piaget and
Kohlberg who presumably gave a universal account of how morality is developed by children
(Selman 1971). As we have seen earlier, this is not unproblematic for those involved in the study
of cultures, as the model transpires as being too individualistic for Eastern cultures. Most of the
researchers within developmental psychology agree on the fact that the social aspect of learning
morality is not to be neglected, whether we speak for the need of an emic understanding in the
interaction with another (Selman 1971), the internalizing of others as models for our own desires
(Severino& Morrison 2012) or the engendered increasing tendency of moral pretend play in girls
(James 2013), it becomes suitable for anthropologist to intervene. Another important point to
stress on is that mimesis is intentional representation very relevant in primary ritual practice and
representational arts, unlike mimicry which is defined as reflex copying and imitation understood
as insightful goal-directed copying (Whitehead 2001).
In his book on mimesis and pretend play of Huli children, when L. R. Goldman (1998) speaks
about the different aims in the chapters, he states that in the third part “players, out of concern for
aesthetic integrity, authenticity and internal consistency in role enactment, may undertake to
repair each other’s mimetic representations”. Indeed, in some of the dialogues, there is this
interplay between verifying one’s identity and the fixing of the other’s way of impersonating. The
aesthetic constitution of these episodes says something about the way reality is being mirrored
through play: when one of the kids starts speaking Pidgin and takes a rough voice tone when
impersonating a doctor, it reflects the image the children have of doctors 11 and they verify it
together, notably enough, the result is not essentially different than the children’s imaginary in
the West on the issue, Goldman says. Another aspect is that the one who controls the flow of the
narrative in conformity with already-established identities12 is usually the player with a power-
role (government official, doctor or mother). Even so, the ‘power role’ is not monopolized by only

11
Based on the dialogues they are often strangers who do not speak Huli and who make injections to those who are
sick;
12
Be it for objects or other players involved in pretend play;

9
one of the children and, as they constantly exchange roles, the result is a total inversion of the
power-roles by the end of the ethnographic episode (Goldman 1998: 153).13
Where could moral agency lie in the previous episode? I argue for two occurrences of moral
agency in the case of Huli children pretend play: i) the participation in joint narrative and ii)
agreement on role assigning. Firstly, In sharing the narrative there is nothing constraining the
children to play and it is a deliberate act. Given that a mind is like a theater in which reality is
represented in those mirror neurons in the brain, in play we encounter a hyperspace (the stage) in
which the actions take place, which is not found in the environment and neither in the individual
(Whitehead 2011), but at the point of interaction between both. Furthermore, the fact that two
individuals get to share this space is not to be treated easily. I would like to come back on the fact
that when T. Widlock spoke of the morality of sharing, a certain skill was implied when talking
about virtue which required a constant effort in order to keep the mutual enjoyment of that which
was being shared. The anthropologist could investigate this issue further by examining children’s
play, giving an understanding of how collaborative models are enacted in particular contexts and
the extent up to which they are similar with habitus of practice in adult social behaviour14.
Secondly, the fact that the children choose to enjoy the fun provided by their pretend play and
not to make out of it a fight over who gets the power-associated role, could tell us something of
why they find it important to collaborate. Considering a previous part of this article on moral
sentiments of C. J. Throop, one could look at what children feel in the context of pretend play and
the different roles they have, when they make choices based on their mimetic identities (for
example when they choose to make injections or become subject to the other player’s will). How
is the monopolizing of the narrative felt of? Is there a duty the child follows to keep the game fun
for both players? These are some of the questions one might consider asking for capturing the
moral sentiment in children’s play.
Another point I would like to address is the aesthetic feature of play. Other reflections of
morality in collaborative pretend play could include the presence of an observant adult who
directly or indirectly influences the way narrative unfolds. Maybe there is an equivalent for saying

13
They go from a. doctor- b. mother; to a. doctor- b. hospital personnel and mother; a. doctor and b. hospital
personnel; a. government official- b. government official; a. anthropologist- b. field assistant and lastly, a. child-b.
mother (where a. and b. are different players).
14
The reason why children might chose to experiment with adult practice is to surpass their passivity and rearing, in
a process of individuation.

10
“play nicely” in non-Western societies as well, but what ‘nicely’ implies is different that in the
West. As is the case with Western countries this determines morally-accepted behavior and it
brings awareness to some of the unacceptable social aspects like taboo or violence, but there is not
enough reason to think that this is the case everywhere. As pretend play seems to open up endless
possibilities for children, one should not be surprised if in some cases the experiencing of the evil
and grotesque characters in the narrative are used for understanding morality.

Conclusion
I have started in this paper by questioning the passive role of the children and came unto the
idea that if children experience agency in their lives, they must do so in a moral context as well.
The consideration of undergoing topics in moral anthropology was meant to give an idea of the
different issues that require particular attention when treating children morality. While other
approaches might suitable as well, I found the discussions on moral sentiments and virtue as being
intellectually challenging and fitting for the current paper’s topic. Furthermore, in trying to
provide an image of ethnography of children, I tried to keep an interdisciplinary approach, taking
into consideration current debates in developmental psychology and neuroscience.
Pretend play is, once again, a place of great potentiality for human development. Being found
in all cultures it could be one of these practices that could help us theoretically grasp difference
and relativity. Children, interpreted as makers of their own morality could make future
ethnographies discover those mechanisms that drive moral thinking to manifest itself in particular
local contexts. Although at the end of this paper we cannot say that we have an image of the
children’s morality, I think that I managed to figure out how agency looks like. It is unsure if
children develop a morality of their own, but the way they experience the responsibility over
interacting with the other in narrative-space could tell us what this morality would look like. The
questions addressed in the last chapter focusing on their capacity to maintain and to enact the
narrative.
One could ask herself/ himself after the reading of this paper: Is pretend play a place of
emerging morality? And the answer should not cease to come immediately that it sure is so, and
even more than that. It might be that mimesis is the first agency-related episode of human learning,
as it leads to an idea of the self as much as it considers the others. The ability to project our minds

11
and the others in the theater of our minds is a human endeavor, but what is projected should often,
if not always, be socially or culturally bound.
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Fechter, A. M. (2014). ‘The good child’: Anthropological perspectives on morality and
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