•  Lave, Jean and Etienne Wenger Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1991. (Chapters 1, 2, 4)

•  Redfield, Robert The little community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1960 [1956] (Chapters 1, 2, 3)

As McDermott and I wrote:

to improve the fate of children at risk of any labeled failure, "the first and perhaps only step is to turn away from them" (Varenne and McDermott 1998: 217)

1. Analyzing the dance (any interaction between two or more human beings conducted with material produced by other human beings and under the watchful eyes of any number of other human beings) as such is the fundamental question of all social sciences.
   1. Interestingly, the most powerful restatement -- along with Garfinkel's -- is the one sketched by Lave and Wenger when they struggled with her work on apprenticeship and with the broader critique of cognitive theories of knowledge and learning that those who congregated around Michael Cole, in the 1970s, particularly conducted--most systematically through cross-cultural work, including much ethnographic work.
   2. Cole essentially demonstrated that there cannot be systematic ways to separate the (properties of the ) dancer from the (properties of the) dance -- including both local "context" and the context of any experiment: separating a brain from its bodies and that of the other bodies around it -- no matter the organization of the experiment -- is an impossibility of principle (not simply a limitation of a particular operationalization).
   3. But Cole mostly left open the question of how to face the dance as dance without quite returning to theories of social structuring that clearly could not stand as stated (whether in their Marxist, Durkheimian, or Weberian variations -- and variations on these variations).
   4. This is what Lave sketched -- particularly when one ignores her bow to Bourdieu and habitus and focuses instead of processes internal to a "community."
      1. Note the central place of learning in this evolution, and the massive consequences of adopting this perspective for an understanding of actual educational (school and non-school) systems.
   5. But ... "community" as a word, paradigm, tradition of interpretation and use (both political and theoretical) is a very dangerous word.
   6. But let's stay with it briefly
2. Robert Redfield and the "little community"
   1. the move from "society" to "community" -- a gloss for the settings where human beings interact directly and that single observers can apprehend without resorting to sampling and aggregation
      1. Chicago sociology
      2. anthropological fieldwork in large scale societies (e.g. Mexico, Ireland, France, the United States)
         1. Arensberg and Kimball
         2. Lloyd Warner
      3. ethnography as the "graphos" (description, transcription, representation, ...) of an "ethnos" by an observer who participates in such a way as not to disturb what is to be a "naturalistic" take on the activities of the concerned human beings.
   2. the problem: is the "ethnos" (community) that is the object of a "graphos" a unit of some theoretical interest? And, if so, of what order?
      1. Redfield's answer after a half-century of work
      2. the critique easily summarized by a quip by Clifford Geertz:
         Anthropologists do not study villages. They study in villages. (1973: 22)

         For all intent and purposes this closed the theoretical conversations about "community" in anthropology, until Lave started a new conversation that she did not quite cross-reference with the earlier ones

      3. Redfield's recognition of the complexity of what anthropologists had found out they must pay attention to when looking "naturalistically" as small groups of human beings who are direct consociates of each other. These matters remain matters that must concern us when looking at families, classrooms, schools, etc. -- whether we use the word "community" (which I discourage because of its political connotations) or not:
         1. whole: now very controversial in anthropology ... but ... what about the dance?
         2. ecology: now seems a matter of course (except that ecological approaches imply systematicity and wholes...)
         3. social structure: yes, still (capitalism or neo-liberalism, industrialization and globalization, and their local correlates), but difficult to deal with systematically;
         4. link to other communities: everyone agrees about this;
         5. wholes and parts: keeps open all the other issues (are parts, e.g. families, church congregations, clubs, "wholes" to themselves as well as parts?).
3. Jean Lave (note that I am crediting what I am using here to Lave, though the book is properly credited to both her and Etienne Wenger. However their careers separated after this work and he took the phrase "community of practice" in a different direction to the one I stress here).
   1. Lave is a social anthropologist whose first field work was conducted in the Amazons
   2. Lave and (distributed) participation
      1. her relationship to Michael Cole and the dilemmas of everyday, practical, cognition
         1. cognition as practice
         2. a highly theoretical question to be addressed through extremely detailed and localized ethnography
      2. if schools teach (develop cognition)
         1. then what is the relationship of schooling to the tasks human beings human beings have to perform as adults?
      3. understanding "distribution" and localization (context)
   3. she then started looking at settings where one would espect to observe cognition (and learning) at (naturalistic) work. This took her to look at
      1. Liberian tailors
      2. shoppers in supermarkets
      3. other forms of apprenticeship
   4. a struggle against easy understandings of "context," "learning by doing," and an attempt to bring in aspects of Marxist historicity:

      learning is an integral and inseparable aspect of social practice (p. 31)

      1. which modernizes the sense of "community as social structure."
      2. and is not at all the same thing as saying or assuming that practice is dependent on learning.
   5. thus:
      1. legitimate
      2. peripheral
      3. participation
4. a model
   The ultimate "ignorant school master"?
   1. It is essential to pay close attention to Lave's repeated statement that she is not describing (or generalizing to the "typical" on the basis of multiple observations. She is asking us to pay attention to a series of distinctions and processes. All, again, must be understood as relations, not as entities
      1. the (legitimate) assymetry between peripheral and full participation. This assymetry is what is fundamental here, not what is one to mean by "periphery," "full," or "center." No one is ever quite "at the periphery" or "at the center" but there will necessarily be an assymetry among the (necessarily full) participants in almost any conceivable setting for learning/education. Full equality is only imaginable (like Rousseau's state of nature for human beings)
         1. this is why the expansion of the notion of "community of practice" as a better setting for education or workplace efficiency than "traditional" settings is not compatible with the basic insight.
      2. the emphasis on assymetry also introduces movement in social structure since in some (not all, e.g. slavery) settings people will shift from peripheral to fuller participation (and often then find themselves in a new periphery.
      3. the mention of "legitimacy" is also essential since it indicates the need to seek the source, organization, enforcement and disciplining, of the activities that will constitute, at any particular time and place, the type of assymetry, the criteria for activities allowing for the recognition of movement, and the properties of the gatekeepers who will establish that a movement towards fuller participation as occured and that one is now entitled to the "rights and privileges" "attached" to the new position.
      4. this model raises the question of boundaries. While Lave herself has said that she does mean "boundary," I would say that one must pay attention to the activities that will be disciplined as "illigitimate," to the activities that bring people into the "legitimate periphery." I have personally been interested in the kind of social "gravity" that certain institutions have: eventually, little by little, like space dust being caught within the gravity well of a star, all human beings will be caught by schooling even if they never attend school but to the extent that they are then known by people with full authority as "not having gone to school, remaining uneducated, being denied certain benefits, in need of specific help, etc."
   2. All of this constitutes a major advance in all earlier theories of social structure to the extent that it emphasizes the dynamic aspects of social structure: social structuring is not about positioning people and keeping them there but in moving them from one position (e.g. child) to another (e.g. accountant, school principal, bus driver). From a social system to reconstitute itself, all participants must move, and all are placed continually in new situations.
      1. Which is why the best example of a social system is Garfinkel's footnote about traffic flow on a superhighway (a social fact) and driving within this flow (a dangerous personal exercize where the price for "screwing around," [Garfinkel's term] is high indeed).
5. Polities of practice
   1. my word, for the model -- in the hope of escaping being caught by the American optimism attached to the word "community."
   2. a polity, in this sense, is not an object but a set of relationships that bind people in a particular way. These relationship are continually evolving in two ways
      1. any relationship requires continuous work to acquire people, deal with (think new-parents and infants evolving into parents-with-experience and adolescents)
         1. their relative ignorance of what is entailed
         2. and then their experiments with possibilities opened by more expert performance
         3. and finally their movement out
      2. while it may in the interest of most of the people involved to reconstitute the properties of the relationships and accompanying practices through various forms of instruction (think Garfinkel), it is always the case with human beings that reconstitutive practices are always open to (practical) critique ("why dont' we do it that way?") and play with any of the features (poetry, as per Jakobson, expanded, e.g. Mullooly & Varenne 2006 and Varenne & Cotter 2006)
   3. the set of positions (roles, statuses, etc.) that have been the focus of most sociologies are but temporary product of the organizing practices that human beings cannot fail to engage in. Positions and properties are facts (they are made-up), conditions, possibilities and handicaps. But it is not the facts or properties we observe. It is the practices.
   4. and, from my point of view, all these processes and practices involve educative practices: including teaching, learning, observing, critiquing, etc. -- that is transforming

An exercise in autho-ethnography
Some questions
in what ways might a new-born be considered a "legitimate" participant? to what set of relationships? can a set of cars (drivers?) moving down a freeway be considered a "community of practice"? if "community" is understood as "in unity with," how are we to take "unity" or "with"?