•  Verrips, Jojada, and Birgit Meyer "Kwaku's car: The struggles and stories of a Ghanaian long-distance taxi-driver." in Car cultures. Edited by D. Miller, 153-184. New York: Berg 2001

•  Sammadar, Sunanda, and Hervé Varenne "To Not/Wear or to Not Not/Wear Hijab: The Girls and Boys of Bangladesh Avenue, in America" (Chapter 8 of Educating in life: ethnographies of challenging new normals. Routledge (2019).)

1. On wondering why "they" did not develop: a matter of the "spirit" (of capitalism/industrialization)
   1. a matter of racial development (simple racism)?
   2. a matter of historical development (simple Marxism)?
   3. a matter of the "spirit" (of capitalism/industrialization)?
      1. Protestants vs. Catholics
      2. West vs. East
      3. North vs. South
   4. "their culture"
      1. "local knowledge" (possibly romanticized) (Geertz 1983)
      2. "ontology" (Latour --- possibly misunderstood)
2. It has been said of Margaret Mead that "she came to help" (Gilmore 1992, McDermott 2001).
   1. She is but one of the many social scientists who, having diagnosed something as a problem for someone near or far, thought it their duty to propose solutions that, sometimes, were taken seriously by colonial administrators, post-colonial agencies of all types and all relationships to political modes of control, and often also the governments that took over the newly independent states.
   2. This urge to help has produced a continuing stream of research in "development" with roots, implicitly and more and more explicitly, in Marxism and, particularly, among those, like Max Weber who pursued the question of the historical precedence of the Protestants in shifting to a capitalistic, industrial, modern, rationalistic, liberal, democratic (take your pick) mode of production and political organization.
   3. All this has an "educational" aspect to it: "they" do not have schools (or not the schools they should have). Thus missionary, colonial, and then post-colonial schooling
   4. The latest (occidentalizing) version: Qatar asking the Rand Corporation to redesign its schooling.
3. All these theories have economic and political aspects.
   1. They also have an "educational" aspect where "education" generally stands for the spread of compulsory and universal schooling controlled by the state and with focused curricula.
   2. The shift from no (western) schooling to schooling is often written of as a shift for the people from a state of being "uneducated" (illiterate, dis-abled) to being "educated" (literate in various modalities, en-abled).
   3. I will be concerned here with evidence that people, everywhere and everywhen, have educated themselves to their conditions and each other (e.g., in Marx's term in the German Ideology, education about the historical condition other human beings continue to produce)---including being colonized, de-colonized, freed from dictators and constitutionalized (think India and Japan "borrowing" either the British or American institutionalization of "democracy"), NGOed, etc.
4. "Indigenous" schoolings (in the "global south" and apart/against 18th and 19th century European political thinkers):
   1. from rites of passage (as well of course as all forms of apprenticeships) (e.g. West African "secret societies")
   2. to the examination system in imperial China (possibly the model of Euro-American schooling)
   3. to religious training (learning the Koran or the Vedas) (Fuller 2003)
   4. to philosophical argumentation (e.g. Iran) (Tawasil 2013)
   5. to ecological adapatation in pre-industrial times
      1. management of water and terraces in Bali (Lansing 2006)
      2. there are many example of this in the archaeological record of human activity. One example:
         1. "terra preta" in pre-colonial Brazil: on discovering new technologies for the development of the Amazonian bassin, hundreds of years ago, and ongoing to this day.
   6. to .....
5. For example, in the world all human beings now inhabit: "technology," "health," "science"
   1. Niger farmers using trees. Who was the prime mover in this transformation?
      1. the farmers
      2. the government which changed its policies regarding trees?
      3. Euro-American NGOs?
   2. post-industrial transformation of that which development experts (now not only from Europe or America) and/or commercial interests have brought into local populations with subsequent transformations that are not only "caused by" and but also "causes of" further historical movements
      1. again, many examples, for example
         1. Kwaku's car
         2. GPS, rifles, and snowmobiles (Aporta & Higgs 2005):
            1. deliberations in the transformation of social relationships
            2. "loss" of forms of knowledge and new disabilities
            3. the fatefulness of "that which has happened" (the "new") and the new forms of ignorance that will produce new forms of knowledge along with the new forms of social organization ... ad infinitum (history will not end) ...
         3. computers in Indian villages (Arora 2010)
         4. repairing what was designed not to be repaired (Kemble et al. 2015)
6. It is their culturING that will make them do something we cannot predict

   Figuring out what to do next (religion, ideology, art) and teaching about it

   1. among many substeps to be taken in that process, figuring out
      1. resources?
      2. stakeholders who may have to become, or made themselves interlocutors
      3. imagining possibilities
      4. dealing with initial consequences
   2. producing/performing an "identity": Sammadar on the young women of Bangladeshi Avenue in Detroit
   3. a personal example
   4. and another