Anthropological notes towards a theory of education
This is the introduction to the Stanford version of this lecture
return to general introduction
I will proceed on the assumption that most of you are well familiar with the paper Ray McDermott and I have written on "Culture as Disability" (1995). He and I travelled different paths but have been finding ourselves together on several fundamental issues:
- human activity in history (one way of stating an interest in "culture")
- must produce particular forms of "disabilities"
- (though I would have preferred it had remained correct to talk about "handicaps" and that I will mention today as "extra burdens")
To this general statement, I was recently asked to answer a query: "can there be a culture that does not disable?" I suggested that some of you might want to look at my response before this lecture (Varenne 2003). It contains a brief summary of one version of the general point of the original paper and it develops an argument about intellectual activity given constraints that we must assume apply to all, not only the "informants" of our research, but also ourselves as political agents:
- no theory of culture as activity (practice?) in history can hint that this activity will not produce distinctions and identifications that will not place extra burdens on all.
- this is not a cause for fatalism since such theories of culture require activity and change.
I will also assume here that you will recognize in this approach the convergence of two massive traditions of investigation in the social sciences
- classic Boasian cultural anthropology understood as a theory of history (adaption and and non-lineary evolution) rather than as a theory of psychology
- classic Durkheimian sociology as understood through ethnomethodology.
This theory of culture as activity in history is what I want to continue exploring today through what will appear to some of you as a detour through "education" understood as an activity fully separate from socialization or enculturation.
If you have looked at our Successful Failure (1998), you know that Ray and I spend a lot of time critiquing theories of culture that proceed through any kind of internalization of cultural patterns.
Our problem is not so much with internalization as such (a plausible process that we are happy psychologists are investigating) but in any theory that makes of internalization a central process in all activity involved in "reproduction."
We are convinced that this does not make theoretical sense for social science
And we are convinced that it is dangerous in an institutional atmosphere (read "American culture") where it then become hard
- not to start investigating the individual carrier
- rather than
- the historical situation or
- the interactional processes involved
that may eventually produce a new historical situation that will look a lot like the initial one. My search is to get a theory of social (quasi-)reproduction that does not involve the enculturation of those who are caught within the social processes.
This is what I want to explore today through an apparent detour and one illustrative case.
A detour in belated homage to Lawrence Cremin
I hope I can also assume that you have all heard of Lawrence Cremin and particularly his definition of education (Cremin 1978: 701).
This is a hard definition for sociologists and anthropologists. I did not quite understand it when I first read it. And yet, on re-reading it, I have come to see in it a challenge well worth taking.
Cremin, rather obviously to me, was trying to distinguish education from socialization and internalization--two concepts or, better, traditions of theorizing about the human condition with which he was fully conversant but that did not help him do justice to what had happened in the history of America. Education could be it, but what would education be, from a social scientific point of view (leaving aside the explicit philosophical humanism with which he was also, of course, fully conversant).
So he comes up with a definition that takes into account the complexities that social scientists had noticed, including much that anthropologists had written about families and communities.
