For Plato, so long as the human being could not fully grasp the metaphysical system of rational (Heidegger 1998), the philosopher was needed to liberate human beings into the proper virtues of life. Aristotle rejected this requisite. Instead, moral virtues were not arrived at just by learning, but were realized through practice. Practice did not simply make way for making meaning between the human being and the environment. It, more importantly, provided the opportunity for practical reason- when to do the right thing at the right time, what Aristotle referred to as the Doctrine of the Mean.  Finding this mean, avoiding excess and deficiency, required full participation in its circumstance. Thus, an appreciation for context rather than a phenomenon abstracted from it was to be recognized.

Although inscribed as ancient ethics, I begin with Aristotle and Plato, for Plato’s philosopher-king, a learned man of science and metaphysics who enlightens the rest who are not in the know, is not an idea of intellectual debate but a cause, as it resonates with the notion that human beings reproduce their own impoverished conditions. Lewis (1959) depicted five Mexican families in this manner. In 1965, this perception was applied to the single-mother head of household “Negro family” of the “urban ghetto” in the United States in the Moynihan report.(1) Pitched as a solution to the “culture of poverty”,(2) Moynihan proposed “establishing a stable Negro family structure” (1965).(3) It was not enough to describe the conditions in the ghettos as alarming so it could be improved, but there was also something deficient in the ‘Negro’ self that needed to be fixed by an other.

In 2010, the Culture of Poverty was rehashed as “culture and poverty”, pointing again to “culture” as the culprit.(4) The perception extends well beyond the borders of the United States, where the idea of ‘stabilizing’ the ‘Negro’ family in 1965 is transplanted as restructuring societies that are in need “saving”. Despite heavy criticism, the assumptions underpinning the perception Culture of Poverty continues to influence policy-making in the work of saving groups of human beings, who are, unfortunately, often dehumanized as reproducers of indolence or violence. The unexamined need for Plato’s philosopher-king as a cause is still very much alive in 2013.

This position statement is far from advocating cultural relativism, for if it were to do just that, then it would not interrogate this ‘missionary urge’ as a practice. What this hopes to put forth, instead, is to examine one way an Anthropology of Education may enable a conversation about initiatives, in such a way that deflects the worsening of existing problems anywhere, everywhere. Thus, I position an Anthropology of Education as an approach to calling into question the dehumanizing of others. To provide an example, I draw on my current research on the howzevi (seminarian) women in Iran, a group of women often caricatured as either repressive automatons or helpless products of their socio-religious conditions.

Given that Education has been a mark of social stability for the past thirteen years,(5) in this research I specifically focus on an Anthropology of Education that takes “education” beyond schooling, and instead defined as “…the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, or sensibilities, and any learning that results from the effort, direct or indirect, intended or unintended” (Cremin 1972). This is in recognition that much of what human beings come to find out about staying between excess and deficiency emerges through social interactions, outside of classrooms, curriculum, textbooks, guidelines, maps, written laws, religious text, and so on. As a researcher, to be able to analyze these moments proper to its participants, I depend on an Anthropology of Education which uses longitudinal participant-observation in generating data and the grounded method for its analysis.

My fieldwork in Iran for fifteen months consisted of living in the same neighborhood as the women of my study, as well as participating in the same activities as they were in. To account for the women’s experience, I chose an angle within the Anthropology of Education which moved away from cornering them in a space of determining procedures (Foucault 1995), as well as away from situating them within Bourdieu’s (1977) inescapable dissimulation and misrecognition. Foucault’s embodiment of self-policing, as an overreaching effect of perfected disciplinary procedures and control, could not fully capture the complexity of the context, relationships, and participation of the houzevi in the howzeh (seminary) setting. And, to label their self-willed regulation merely as a result of perfected procedures of control would be a return to dehumanizing their narratives. Likewise, to analyze the data according to Bourdieu’s acquisition of knowledge would have guaranteed a reproduction of dire straits. Yet, many howzevi of this study exceeded expectations made of them, feats which could not simply be relegated as misrecognition of something they have internalized/externalized. In a similar way Lewis described the Mexican families in 1959, it would have been too convenient that I, as a researcher, could somehow pinpoint ‘the invisible’ that has taken hold of the howzevi’s entire being, which they themselves could not see.

Instead, I coded specific themes that emerged from the data, which were then situated in the existing discourse about women in Iran. In doing so, I found that the howzevi of my study saw themselves as active participants in changing their own and the conditions of other women in society through collectively ‘reading’ Islamic text. Using the metaphor of a path made by walking, in my work, I describe how they actively changed their conditions without necessarily always undermining constraints, and often doing so by intensifying these and the limitation of movement on themselves. Revamping a conversation grounded in Islamic text of whether a woman could become a Marja’e Taqlid (Source of Emulation) was just one out of their many endeavors. Thus, through an Anthropology of Education, I argue for an alternative in looking at the ways in which specific groups of people are popularly depicted as reproducers of their woeful conditions; specifically, an alternative which allows for a recognition of the significance of an Islamic education social in the lives of girls and women as a path towards access to resources.

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1 <http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm> last accessed February 18, 2013.

2 a phrase taken from Oscar Lewis (1959) on the social reproduction of poverty on and of “the poor” living in the urban areas of Mexico and Puerto Rico as a “culture” that is cyclical and bleak, without accounting for the subtle ways individuals continue to survive under specific conditions.

3 “The thesis of this paper is that these events, in combination, confront the nation with a new kind of problem. Measures that have worked in the past, or would work for most groups in the present, will not work here. A national effort is required that will give a unity of purpose to the many activities of the Federal government in this area, directed to a new kind of national goal: the establishment of a stable Negro family structure” (Moynihan 1965). <http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm> last accessed February 18, 2013.

4 “‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback” by Patrick Cohen, <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/18poverty.html> last accessed February 18, 2013