Education: Constraints, possibilities, and transformations

This is an advanced research seminar and reading group reviewing theoretical developments in culture theory particularly as it takes seriously "education" as the fundamental human process that transforms experience into the 'arbitrary' patterns generally known as "culture"--as well as an institutionalized process in (post?-) modern polities.

My goal is to continue the exploration of the issues raised in my recent Successful failure (with R.P. McDermott. Westview, 1998), particularly Chapters 2 to 5 and 8, as well as my earlier American school language (1983). This seminar stands on its own but students would be well served by reading those authors who are not in the schedule this semester but which were discussed in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2007.

For many years I have searched for a way to recognize, on the one hand, the disabling power of arbitrary institutions on everyday life and the life careers of humans, as well as, on the other hand, the enabling power of human action that is revealed in the very appearance in history of arbitrary institutions. Culture must be both hegemonic and, in terms Boon borrowed from Thoreau, extra-vagant. In the not so long run, and continually in the details of everyday life, "culture" cannot captured by any forms of hegemony.

In recent years, this has brought me back to thinking about education as the fundamental and irreducible process through which human beings, always together, construct, maintain, demolish, and reconstruct, differently, that which ends up as their particular world. This has led to recent edited volumes and papers (2007, forth) as well as an ongoing ethnographic project.

While the class gestalt will be strongly anthropological, doctoral students in linguistics, sociology, history, political science, philosophy, communication, pedagogy, etc., may also be interested. There are no specific pre-requisites. It will help if students have taken (or are familiar with the authors and topics addressed in) either of my courses Communication and Culture or Ethnography of Education. I will also expect students to have some relatively well-formed research interest about which they want to think theoretically in terms of education and culture. I will easily give permission to register to students who have taken these courses, or who have not at least one year of graduate anthropology. To the others I will ask questions such as:

• what is your background in the social sciences?
• how much do you know of the developments in culture theory and/or theories of language and conversing over the past 40 years?
• have you read people like Foucault? Bourdieu? de Certeau? Latour? Garfinkel?
• have you read people like Marx? Durkheim? Saussure? Weber? Parsons? Levi-Strauss?
• do you have an interest that may become a research interest?

More information about this course is available by moving your mouse on the "Course Link" tab on the left of your screen.