Jean Lave |
Apprenticeship in critical ethnographic practice |
| Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2011. |
The book is about apprenticeship---that of Vai and Gola tailors in Liberia in the 1970s, my own, and, by extension, yours. (p. 1)
... the term "ethnographic practice," rather than "theory and practice" or "fieldwork and theory," is employed throughout---making it impossible, I hope impossible, to forget the theoretical character of empirical inquiry and the empirical character of theoretical inquiry. (p. 157)
From a relational perspective, I would now say, ..., that we are all apprentices, engaging in learning to do what we are already doing... More interestingly, to learn to do what you are already doing is a contradiction in terms; it implies that there is always more than one relation of knowing and doing in play---knowing and not knowing, doing and undoing, understanding theoretically but not empirically and vice versa, starting from both ends of processes of production and coming together in the middle in (relational, concrete) ways that transform conceptions of the ends. It surely implies that apprenticeship is a process of changing practice. (p. 156)