This book is based on almost five years of fieldwork with street-related communities in the city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, between 2001 and 2015. The author inquires into children's and adolescents' coming of age on the streets and their remarkable social and emotional competences, instead of resorting to a dreadful discourse of pity and despair. The ethnography's multi-vocal narrative couples vivid accounts of ethnographic case studies and life stories with current theory on affect, emotion, empathy, structural violence or social interaction in the context of marginality, stigma and chronic illness.

Thomas Stodulka is a social anthropologist with a focus on Psychological Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin.