PANEL ORGAN - KIIT University

Out of an estimated number of 11,000 -13, 000 Jaina monks and nuns 5 to 20 per cent of
ordinations involve persons between the age of 8 and 18. In order to push their spiritual
progress, the child ascetics as well as their adult counterparts are in a constant wandering
condition, consume a strictly vegetarian diet and are focused on studying sacred
scriptures, meditation, and performing liturgical rituals. Alerted by the strictness of the
ascetic discipline, the traditional practice of child ordination was recently put into
question by Indian child protection as according to their opinion, the life of an ascetic
infringes the rights of children, which are listed in the Juvenile Justice Act of 2000. On the
other hand, proponents of child ordination claim it to be a fundamental religious right,
granted in article 25 of the Indian Constitution. According to them, the inner urge to
renounce the world (vairagya) is not age dependant and completely uncontrollable by
legal procedures. Based on ethnographic data as well as on historical and contemporary
sources the presentation will deal with the following questions: What does it actually
mean for the affected children to be an ascetic
CHENEY, Kristen, International Institute of Social Studies, of Erasmus University
Rotterdam, P.O. Box-29776, 2502 LT, The Hague, Netherlands, E-mail:
Children as Ethnographers: Reflections on the Importance of Participatory Research in
Assessing Orphans’ Needs
Critiques of child participation within aid programming suggest that it is superficial and in
substantive for the fulfillment of children’s rights. By employing former child research
participants as youth research assistants, the collaborative research design developed for
my research project on the survival strategies of African orphans and vulnerable children
(OVC) has yielded insights with implications for policy and practice that could not be
gained without the extended ethnographic inclusion of children, as both participants and
researchers. In this article, I share my reflections on doing participatory ethnography with
children and youth to demonstrate that ethnographic research is appropriate to the tasks
of increasing both children’s participation and the effectiveness of children’s rights —
especially when it models children’s participation in its own research design. Further, I
argue that involving young people in research can yield greater ownership of
organizational practice and become transformative of young people and their relationships
with their communities.
SUREMAIN (DE), Charles-Edouard, Institute of Research for Development (IRD), UMR 208
PaLoC - 57, rue Cuvier 75005 Paris, France, E-mail:
Ethics in Practice With, For and By Children: Ethnographic Figures from Latin America
In a growing context of media coverage and legislation on children, the particularity of
fieldwork with children in developing countries implies some kind of proximity which
requires particular precautions. How do anthropologists who work with, for and amongst
children concretely face the situation In this paper, I will lean on four different
“ethnographic scenario” in which complicity, wait-and-see attitude and interventionism
are mobilized. The paper concludes on the necessity to lead some critical reflection based
on grounded research.
RANJAN, Geetika, Department of Anthropology, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong-
793022, Meghalaya, India, Email: /
Research Ethics in Studying Children: Fieldwork Experience amongst the Bhoksa
Tribals