TROWEL PLAY
IN TANDEM WITH HER ACADEMIC work, Hassett, along with three colleagues, runs trowelblazers.com, a site devoted to highlighting the contributions of women in the ‘digging’ sciences (archaeology, geology and palaeontology), and to activities aimed at encouraging participation, especially from under-represented minorities.
“We are women who got together on the internet, sniping about how women’s contributions are never recognised,” says Hassett. “We all had stories about women in our fields who’d done amazing things, so we started collecting them. We expected to go for about four weeks, and that was about 10 years ago.”
Here you will learn about the likes of Miss Etheldred Benett, born in 1776 and probably the first female geologist, or Pornnatcha “Jo” Sankhaprasit, who made history by becoming Thailand’s first female underwater archaeologist.
“They may or may not have contributed exactly in the way that we think is appropriate, because they weren’t allowed to do university degrees or anything like that.”
One aim of the site is to counter “stereotype threat”, which, Hassett says, “is applied to a lot of people in situations where they’re not explicitly made to feel uncomfortable or unwelcome but they can see that they are not represented in the main group.
“Stereotype threat is an insidious block to people of colour, women, LGBTQ. If they don’t see themselves represented in science, it becomes that much harder.”
Submissions are welcome. “We usually get friends and family of various women who were doing pioneering things going, ‘Oh, well, you know, actually, my Aunty Joan went and did this.’”
She speculates this could be socially determined and free and easy adults are a real possibility.
Extended childhoods allow more time for play, which is crucial for learning and social development. This fact can be extrapolated out to an argument around the importance of ongoing education.
Historically, childhood would often finish at 10, at which point you were off down the mine. Today it can finish at 30, when people complete their degrees and stop learning and forming the social bonds that might last longer than the lessons they got from lectures.
Hassett is all for a later end point. If long childhoods are good, maybe longer childhoods would be even better.
“We always look for the economic
“Other primates have lots of interesting options, and we’ve gone for this really weird one, which is monogamy.”
output and the measurable outcome. ‘Oh you’ve got a degree; now you can go off and get that well-paid job.’ But we don’t prioritise all of that social time [at university, for example], which is when people are figuring out who they are, who their friends are going to be, the networks that are going to see them through the next couple of years of their life.”
The long-term view that Hassett’s work requires her to take informs her thinking about the world she lives in.
“I think we have a real problem with short-term thinking. Our political cycles reward this. It’s always been strange to me, as someone who considers time in the millennia.
“I think if people had more of an anthropological understanding of our species – why we do the things we do – there’d be a lot less anxiety about things like parenting and there’d be a lot more thought about the kind of investment we make in the future.”
SOCIAL BENEFITS
We used to say the kind of training you got if you weren’t on duty down the mine was needed by some children, but not others. “If you were poor, you didn’t go to school; if you were a girl, you didn’t go to school. It’s still true in parts of the world,” notes Hassett.
A century ago, childhood effectively ended at the age of 12.
“My grandma finished school at 16, and that was a real achievement for her generation, her class and her background. I finished at 31 – that’s 18 years of society, and particularly the [UK’s] Student Loans Company, investing in me. But if you aren’t going to go into higher education, why don’t we have a social option for investing in children?”
In other words, one of the conclusions Hassett’s research has led her to is that the extended “play” period of learning could take the form of something other than tertiary education. You should not need to be, say, a trainee rocket scientist in order to have those advantages.
“Kids need to learn to socialise and build networks. What we’re doing with this extended childhood is making these social connections and setting our children up so they’re going to be able to succeed.”
It doesn’t have to mean university “but we either have to find a way to do that for all children or accept that we don’t want to”.
Hassett wrote Growing Up Human when she was pregnant with her first child, who is now 2. She is giving this interview five days before the scheduled delivery of her second. “So I’m about to find out why it is that humans normally space babies four years apart.”
And, yes, personal experience affected the book, which is a great read and definitely does not hew to standard academic publishing guidelines.
HOW TO BE A PARENT
Hassett wrote the book “because I’m a scientist, and I study humans. And I wanted very much to know why this whole process [of raising children] was such a faff. I wanted to know what actual experts said about raising children around the globe and in different ethnographic practices. And I wanted to know what to expect. So for me, it was almost aimed at parents more than my future undergraduates.”
She hoped that in the process she would find out everything she needed to know about parenting: “All this stuff like, what should I be feeding them? Do I have to breastfeed? I thought that was all going to be really super interesting and it turns out the whole pregnancy thing is like: Oh, God, it’s tedious. And it’s long. It’s not the
slap-in-the-face event that it is at the end.”
Conceiving through IVF added another layer of complication. “I was very interested in the research about why human pregnancies are so difficult. What factors affect how you even get a baby in the first place.
“And then, of course, once I got pregnant, it was very much about: how do you get through this? What’s going on? For me, it was trying to explain my own condition.”
She’s done that and, in the process, she’s helped to explain the most common condition of all – the human condition. ▮
Growing Up Human: The evolution of childhood by Brenna Hassett, Bloomsbury, $49.50.