Households as Historical Ethnography: People in Motion and Roads to School

With heartfelt appreciation, the author recognizes the editors of this special issue for generously welcoming her into these evocative, multisided conversations devoted to a field (or fields) of timely, indeed fraught, importance.This volume not only rides cresting waves of research into, and thinking about, children, those deemed young, but also channels our imaginative energies into uncharted territory.There we witness or glimpse how cumulative, small movements redefined notions of childhood and youth, often recognized only belatedly.What follows is a fragment of a larger work in progress that weds the notion of "internal migration," in many senses of the term, with children's schooling in colonial North Africa. 1 This research note argues that familial displacements across multiple registers, times, and spaces were often driven, in part, by educational aspirations for the next generation.As spaces of sustained, yet diverse, networks, households worked out strategies for children's learning that gestated physical movements. 2Attention to domestic or internal migratory pulses, often small and transient, momentarily redirects the scholarly gaze away from the state, although this perspective never denies the power of colonial regimes, through border controls, to grant, forbid, or restrict opportunities for knowledge acquisition and accreditation.In addition to households and extended kin, individuals of disparate backgrounds operated as beacons for education or rendered future schooling a dead end.At the same time, school buildings moved about; their new spatial locations might offer unanticipated learning possibilities.My principal narrative frames and draws from life stories, memoirs, interviews, archival records, and documents in the genres of historical ethnography.Childhood stories and experiences intersect with many others, but the schooling-displacement nexus bids us pause to probe fugitive social forces.