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