I have been putting together a special issue of the Teachers College Record. Much of the seminar will be about this work and opening to future research work I am beginning to plan.
This, of course, must be understood reflexively: It applies to anthropological practice as disciplined and evolving through analysis and debate within "polities of practice." Thus I am particularly interested in this seminar in exploring "the extra-vagant culture of culture in anthropology" by tracing two major tradition of writings that play off humanity as disabling and humanity as enabling. These traditions are strongly constraining but, I trust, not hegemonic. We will start with Foucault to the extent that he echoes fundamental anthropological concerns with differ(e)(a)nce and its impact on human beings as they classically appeared in the writings of Benedict or Radcliffe-Brown. We continue with Durkheim, Bourdieu, and Giddens as they struggled with the factualization of human constructions, and the very constructing itself ("agency"?). We then push all this by focusing particularly on the recent work of Garfinkel, Boon, and Lave. They are currently providing what I find the most useful material for my exploration of the possiblities of "education" as a key for a more complete accounting of human action.