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Abstract
This dissertation explores how preschools in China and the United States are sites for producing children with culturally appropriate bodily practices. By analyzing arrivals, meals, other everyday preschool routines, I examine how children, in each national context, learn to use, think about, and care for their bodies. The methodological orientation is primarily ethnographic, in the sense that the goal is to explicate the emic beliefs, knowledge, and practices concerning the body in preschools in China and the U.S., which I study by using a combination of video-cued interviews with preschool teachers and micro-analyses of video-taped classroom routines. Informed by Marcel Mauss (1973) idea that the body is mans first and most natural instrument (p. 79), I explore how children learn to use their bodies in ways that Mauss called techniques of the body that are characteristic of the larger social groups to which they belong. For example, the analysis of mealtimes suggests that children learn to eat in ways that are characteristic of the Chinese and US contexts, such as appropriate use of utensils, etiquette (i.e., which food can be eaten with hands), posture, and demeanor. Besides learning individual bodily practices, preschools are also places where children learn how to use their bodies in relation to others. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Erving Goffmans theories of the intercorporeal aspects of embodiment are illuminating for understanding the choreography of bodies in a social space like preschools. Merleau-Pontys (1968) conceptualization of intercorporeality and Goffmans (1963) analyses of the coordination of bodies in public spaces in mundane life are informative for understanding how children learn to eat, sit, and walk, not only as individuals, but also in coordination and synchronization with others. These bodily practices and discourses are related to Michel Foucaults (1986) concept of the care of the self and to what Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang (2005), following Foucault, conceptualize as biopolitics, which they define as the role bodily practices play in social cohesion and self-cultivation.