This is the fourteenth in a series of notes to fifteen lectures for my class ITSF5016 "Ethnography of Education"
  1. It has been said of Margaret Mead that "she came to help" (Gilmore 1992, McDermott 2001). 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.
    1. 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.
  2. All these theories have economic and political aspects. They also have an "educational" aspect where "education" generally stands for the spread of compulsory and universal schooling controlled by the state with limited curricula.

    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).

    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).

  3. I will focus on "technology" (rather than politics, religion, philosophy) and the ethnographic evidence for both
    1. pre-industrial investigation/discovery/learning and teaching
      1. 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.
    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:
          1. deliberations in the transformation of social relationships
          2. Hutchins and the division of practical cognition
          3. "loss" of forms of knowledge and new disabilities
          4. 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 (Payal Arora)
Some questions
StudyPlace conversation
  • what can happen when "local knowledge" is globalized?
  • what might be the role of schools in the introduction of GPS technologies in any population?
  • is the spread of personal computers in the United States (or any instanciations of your favorite software) a case of "development"?
  • how would one look at this spread as a matter of education (whatever impact it might then have on school outcomes)?