For the past quarter century Lave’s work on learning and society has become ubiquitous in many disciplines and fields of application, from anthropology to cognitive psychology, from teacher education to business management. For someone who started her academic career among the Krikati (Ge) Indian communities of Amazonia, and who spent years looking at apprentice tailors in Liberia, and women in California supermarkets, this is a rare achievement indeed. Jean Lave, perhaps most powerfully in recent years, has demonstrated again that rigorous ethnography can indeed be generalized far beyond the contingencies of single cases. Most importantly, she has convinced new generations of scholars and practitioners outside anthropology that this can be the case. And finally, she has done this from the point of view of the core concerns of the anthropology of education, particularly learning as it is enhanced, controlled, and limited, by the social arrangements that make it possible. In the process, she opened anthropology to new conceptualizations of culture and social structure.
As an apprentice anthropologist at Harvard, working with David Maybury-Lewis, she wrote about the then classical problems of disciplinary anthropology: forms of marriage and residence, conceptions of time and space, naming practices. In the first paragraph of what may be her first academic publication (Lave 1966) several words appear that will become leitmotiv in her work, and then in ours as we build on hers: “practice,” “particular society,” “formal analysis,” and “ethnographic enquiry” as guided by “theoretical concerns.” Of course, the meaning of these words have changed over the intervening decades. To a large extent it is the product of her own work as she has persisted in wondering what we are to mean by a “particular society” (community?), by “formal analysis” (legitimate peripheral participation as a model for the processes of learning?), “ethnographic enquiry” (what should we look at? Women in supermarkets!).
The second decade of her work took her to Michael Cole’s Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition and to Liberia. This led to the work for which she is now best known. As she pondered the practices of apprentices in tailor shops, she found a particularly productive way of challenging earlier understandings of cognition and learning with profound implications for all fields concerned with education. Now, in psychology as well as in anthropology and all the sciences of education, her approaches and conceptualizations cannot be ignored.
In 1977 she published for the first time in the Anthropology of Education Quarterly about the cognitive implications of apprenticeship. The paper introduces the main themes of her work that led to the major breakthrough that has characterized her career so far. Learning is a social process that is made possible, and limited, by participation. Learning cannot be separated from the people and activities that reveal it. Learning may thus not be a pure psychological process but an aspect of the social processes within which it appears.
Lave’s work in Liberia was developed by research on everyday cognition and practice. This led to her most influential work, Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger 1991). The book is paradigmatic of the kind of work great anthropologists produce: it takes systematic ethnographic enquiry, well contextualized within a set of classical theoretical and practical problems, and it generalizes the representation to a model of the activity that can provide the basis of further work on a completely different footing. The book made popular a series of words like “situated learning,” “communities of practice,” and “legitimate peripheral participation.” And it started a series of productive controversies that are far from settled. As more disciplines and fields of professional practice have adopted the terms, the opportunities they opened took them in all sorts of direction. Like many such breakthroughs Lave’s has somewhat escaped her authorship, but it has not stopped her own further explorations.
Most recently, Lave has pursued the implication of her model on matters of identity, history, practice. She has pointed at what some of those who have been working with the concept of “community of practice” may miss, and that it is, also, about social control and thus the estrangement of people from their own learning (Lave and McDermott 2002). Others have noted that her model is a major advance on all earlier approaches to social structure in that it is a model about movement through positions constituted by the very efforts to move, or to prevent movement.[Ftn 1] Above all, it is a model for human transformation, and thus for education in general.[Ftn 2]
But Lave has not completed her contributions. She is now completing a book locating the shifts in her work on the Vai tailors over the past thirty years to specify further where the work has actually been taking her. There, again, she will raise the bar for anyone using anthropology to talk about education.
Jean Lave has been one of the most powerful voice insisting that the anthropology of education cannot only be the anthropology of modern schooling. But we also know that we cannot escape schooling as we speak to our audiences and attempt to work with them. What Jean Lave has demonstrated is that one’s work can be directly relevant to the world of schooling, learning and teaching, equity, testing, etc., without being necessarily the result of research in this world or in its terms. As all great anthropologists have done before her, she showed that the work that may the most useful “here” is work that looked “there” and that displacement (in terms of political control as well as location) is a most powerful tool for analysis and reform. One has but to consider the relevance of the model of legitimate peripheral participation as it applies to school children, teachers, administrators, politicians. Shifting the attention from needed knowledge to the public acknowledgment that one will be OK as a more or less peripheral participant is just what was needed to refresh the anthropology of schooling.
Footnotes
1. The more I think about the few pages where Lave introduces the model (in Lévi-Strauss's sense) of the "community of practice," the more I think it is in fact a much more general model for all collective activity (and not simply for learning). The great advance, and the concern with learning, that is change, was essential for this development, lies in the modeling of movement through positions constituted by all the practical activities that make this movement noticeable (or not). As Lave insists what appears to be "positions" such as "peripheral" or "full" participation are not only defined in terms of each other (the Lévi-Strauss structuralism take on this) but in term of the collective mechanisms that make movement possible (or not). In this perspective, gate-keeping (any activity directing movement into positions) becomes an essential aspect of social structuring. While Lave has, on some occasions, feared that her model re-opened tired disquisitions about "boundaries," boundaries, as the historical production of gate-keeping practices, become essential as what the model must make us consider. One should wonder, for example, how one become an apprentice--a movement that involves not simply the entry into the position, but also the process of considering that one might wish (or have) to enter into the position. A "community of practice" is something into which one is caught, whatever one's initial intentionality or understanding, and out of which it may be very hard to escape. This take on Lave's writing builds on two books she suggested we read when she, Ray McDermott, and I, held a joint seminar at Stanford and Berkeley in the Spring 2004 -- an ethnography of getting caught in witchcraft in France (Favret-Saada 1977) and Jacques Rancière's discussion of the power of ignorance to move people (1999 [1987]).
2. I have developed this point at some length in my first serious effort to face education as the fundamental human activity that produces what then appears as "culture" (2007). In this piece, I also argue for replacing the word 'community' with the word 'polity' in the phrase "community of practice" given both the intellectual history of 'community' and its political valence in America. 'Polity' is less common and does emphasize that everything about moving people across social fields is political (or collective), but rarely communal in the mostly positive senses of the word.