This is the seventh in a series of notes to lectures for my class ITSF4010 "Cultural & Social Bases of Education" ( )

 

Harding, Susan "Convicted by the Holy Spirit: The rhetoric of a fundamental Baptist conversion." American Ethnologist 14:167-181. 1987

The common sense, mentioned by many as if it were a truism, and must now be critiqued:

Ordinarily we are unaware of the special lens through which we look at life. It would hardly be fish who discovered the existence of water. (Kluckhohn 1949 [and many others before him])

1. "Getting caught" and the shaping of the self with consequences
   1. conversions to christianity
   2. other movements into an ideology
   3. education?
2. Early Boasians and American pragmatists: Culturings of the self
   1. self: George Herbert Mead

      Gestures become significant symbol when they arouse in an individual making them the same responses which they explicitly arouse, or are supposed to arouse, in other individuals, the individuals to whom they are addressed; and in all conversations of gestures within the social process, whether external (between different individuals) or internal (between a given individual and himself), the individuals consciousness of the content and flow of meaning involved depends on this thus taking the attitude of the other toward his own gestures. (Mead, G.H. 1934: 47)

   2. personality: Margaret Mead, etc

      The anthropologist deals with tradition as it is embodied in the living habituated bodies of the human beings who make up the society which shares that tradition--in their gestures, their words, their expectations, in the images which the words evoke in speaker and in listener... (Mead 1951: 1)

   3. identity: from Holland onward (in anthropology)
3. Specifically: beyond Freud, Dewey, and all psychologists of the individual cognition, values, misundertandings, biases, etc.
   1. shaping the unconscious
   2. prejudices and their consequences
4. Consequences: Oscar Lewis, Julius Wilson, and all social scientists grounding poverty and all forms of disadvange in what has been called a "culture of poverty"
   1. life styles and their reproduction
      1. Oscar Lewis and the "culture of poverty"

         n my writings it is the label for a specific conceptual model that describes in positive terms a subculture of Western society with its own structure and rationale, a way of life handed on from generation to generation along family lines. The culture of poverty is not just a matter of deprivation or disorganization, a term signifying the absence of something. It is a culture in the traditional anthropological sense in that it provides human beings with a design for living, with a ready-made set of solutions for human problems, and so serves a significant adaptive function. This style of life transcends national boundaries and regional and rural-urban differences within nations. Wherever it occurs, its practitioners exhibit remarkable similarity in the structure of their families, in interpersonal relations, in spending habits, in their value systems and in their orientation in time. (Lewis 1966)

5. Beyond Lenin,Pierre Bourdieu, Paulo Freire and all those who imagine the working classes as "mis-understanding" their conditions
   1. Marx and many others on "opium of the people" (religion) and "false consciousness"
   2. Bourdieu and the reproduction of "méconnaissance" (mis-knowing) through the habitus

      The habitus is a spontaneity without consciousness or will, opposed as much to the mechanical necessity of things without history in mechanistic theories as it is to the reflexive freedom of subjects 'without inertia' in rationalist theories. (Bourdieu [1980] 1990" 56 )

   3. Freire and the need for special forms of education to produce a critical consciousness