LEVINSON, Bradley (Indiana) DRAWING THE DOTTED LINE AROUND "STUDENT" AND "SCHOOL" CULTURE: A PLAYFUL EXAMPLE FROM MEXICO
One of the reasons why cultural anthropologists have not taken schools more seriously as sites of cultural production is because of the school's deceptive boundedness as an institution, and because of the clumsy notions of culture educational anthropologists often use to analyze school dynamics. In this paper, I offer a working definition that leaves "culture" open to historical and situational contingencies, capturing the active agency, blending, and mobility involved in contemporary meaning production. Analytics of culture must acknowledge the workings of power and the uneven representation of interests and perspectives, must recognize the subjective force of linguistic "discourses" (Hanks 1996) without being reduced to language (Chartier 1997), and must enable us to conceptualize the linkages between and amongst variously defined microcultures and the cultures of region, nation, state, and globe. Drawing on my ethnographic work at a Mexican secondary school, I describe the "play" of student culture_the strategic practice of meaning creation in the school_as one moment of cultural production. Yet this emergent student culture relates to other orders of culture, including a broader urban youth culture, a national culture, and the class/ethnic intimate cultures of family, neighborhood, and region (Lomnitz_Adler 1992). In all these orders of culture, it is best not to think in terms of "shared meanings" but rather of mutually intelligible communicative frames and resources_the discourses organizing social life. In sum, culture provides the rules, guidelines, and resources for the game of strategic practice.