Responses Reflecting on the Reflections: Where Did We Come From? Where Are We Going?

JOHN SINGLETON

University of Pittsburgh The editor's invitation to reflect on the future work of anthropology and education has brought us a collection of provocative suggestions. Looking at those that are here gaining the (guiding) light of publication, we have some well-imagined futures. Ideologies of culture, language, schooling, education, gender, and the "field" are the explicit focus. Some call for basic ethnography beyond the school and beyond the assumptions that are said to have framed our work up to now. The agenda defined by these essays is, in short, 1. theorizing about "culture"even when "culture does not exist anymore" (Gonzalez this issue) 2. extending the anthropological "field"even while we reinvent fieldwork and cooperative relationships there (Rogers and Swadener this issue) 3. connecting our work with broader topics of anthropologysuch as by using gender as a cultural heuristic for social organization (Stambach this issue) 4. breaking out of the boundaries of compulsory "schools," including the social construction of postcompulsory schooling (Jensen this issue) 5. looking at communicative (and cultural) development over a lifetime (Dunn this issue) In many ways, these suggestions are comfortablethey reflect much of what we intended for the Council on Anthropology and Education (CAE) during the earliest organizing sessions in 1968. That history is described in the 15th-anniversary issue of Anthropology and Education Quarterly (AEQ) (Singleton 1984). Spindler introduces that volume with reference to four major themes as the "roots" of our field: 1. the search for a philosophical as well as a theoretical articulation of education and anthropology; 2. the necessity for sociocultural contextualization of the educative process;
Anthropology & Education Quarterly 30(4):455~459. Copyright 1999, American Anthropological Association.

455

456

Anthropology & Education Quarterly

Volume 30,1999

3. the relation of education to "culturally phrased" phases of the life cycle; and 4. the nature of intercultural understanding and learning. [1984:4] Many of us first found these roots, and the field of education and anthropology, in the report from a conference of anthropologists and educators that Spindler organized in 1954 (see Spindler 1955). The environment of our work then, however, was different from that of the present. Conventional educational researchers were largely unaffected by anthropology. They were committed to the experiment: as the only means for settling disputes regarding educational practice, as the only way of verifying educational improvements, and as the only way of establishing a cumulative tradition in which improvements can be introduced without the danger of a faddish discard of old wisdom in favor of inferior novelties. [Campbell and Stanley 1963:172] Since then there has been an increasing respect for, and inclusion of, ethnography and anthropology in educational research. Epistemological pluralism came to that research, and anthropologists, together with colleagues from "Chicago School" sociology and social psychology, were taken in as "qualitative" researchers. At the same time, there has been an increasing acceptance of research on education (and schools) in academic anthropology departments. This supplements much longer standing interests in "enculturation" and "socialization" (Herskovits 1948) and child development (Mead 1928; Whiting and Child 1953). Often this acceptance was enhanced by governmental and foundation funding for educational research. But it has also been enhanced by the contributions of educationally oriented anthropologists in other segments of anthropologyfor example, psychological and cognitive anthropology or the anthropologies of science, technology, and work. This history of the field has not necessarily been conveyed to the current generation of practitioners and scholars in education and anthropology. Many have come to the CAE via association with the newer pluralistic educational research in schools of education. We have infiltrated this research and the departments where it is taughtbut a vulgarized anthropology, including antique conceptions of "culture," "ethnicity," and "race" popularly associated with anthropology, has been incorporated into what many educationists perceive as their own "discipline" for educational research. In addition, education has been conflated with schooling. Because many of us have made our teaching careers in these institutional contexts, and there have taught anthropological research methods to educators, we are partly to blame. Overconfident educational researchers have not felt it necessary to look into contemporary anthropology and are satisfied to work within the circles of educational research. There is a "community of practice" (to use Jean Lave's term) in educational

Singleton

Reflecting on the Reflections

457

research that continues to have problematic channels of communication with anthropology. Many educators, for instance, never got beyond the "cookie-cutter" concept of cultures modeled in the Human Relations Area Files. In contrast, some of us in anthropology and education thought of culture as "the shared products of human learning" (Goodenough 1963) and were better able to talk about "culture in process" (or enculturation) and "multiculturalism as the normal human experience" (Goodenough 1976). The critical confusion of education with schooling continues to bedevil us. An anthropology of education instructs me that schools are complex social institutions, not general models of education and learning (cf. Waller 1961). If anything, they are extremeand unlikelymodels of enculturation. From the early acquisition of language to the later induction into occupational and social roles, we learn by observing and enacting social roles in everyday social contexts. Learning is situated in communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991), and schools are very limited as such communities. We do learn to be students in school (Cusick 1973), but we learn to be adults in adult society. We should not assume that schools are fundamentally about learning the reified knowledge of their explicit curricula statements. Enculturation is found in the implicit, or hidden, curriculum. Schools are, however, fascinating social organizations with a full range of political, economic, and other social processes of cooperation and competition enacted and institutionalized. "Education" itself needs to be seen as a problematic concept. My own research on apprenticeship in Japanese "folkcraft" pottery villages is about learning in likely placeswhen a master and apprentice work together over extended periods of time to achieve their separate goals. Pottery production and appreciation, not schooled education, is their purpose. With 20 colleagues, including my early CAE Newsletter coeditor Jacquetta Hill, I have just published a volume of such studies of learning in Japan (Singleton 1998). None of the studies is about schools or classrooms, though the collection includes studies on the education of auto mechanics, medical interns, potters, painters, and actors. An educational anthropology based on graceful ethnographic interpretations of significant places and people has been, I believe, the major achievement of our field. Exemplary ethnographic works in the CAE era (since the 1960s) that have had significant impact on me include Cassell 1977, Gibson 1988, Gladwin 1970, Hill 1969, Holland and Eisenhart 1990, Moffatt 1989, Ogbu 1974, Wax et al. 1964, and the "Brad Trilogy" (chapters 3, 7, and 11) in Wolcott 1994. It is works such as these that have ethnographic and theoretical meaning for our field. They should not be lost from view. Dunn summarizes well our basic anthropological questions on education as "questions about the nature of human learning, cultural change and continuity, and human growth and development across the hie

458

Anthropology & Education Quarterly

Volume 30,1999

span" (this issue:454). These reflections on the future by active young researchers reassure me that the work of education and anthropology will continue to be an exciting professional and personal enterprise in the next century.

John Singleton is Professor Emeritus, Education and Anthropology, at the University of Pittsburgh and was also president of the CAE in 1970-71 (jsin@pitt.edu).

References Cited
Campbell, Donald, and Julian Stanley 1963 Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research on Teaching. In Handbook of Research on Teaching: A Project of the American Educational Research Association. N. L. Gage, ed. Pp. 171-246. Chicago: Rand McNally. Cassell, Joan 1977 A Group Called Women: Sisterhood and Symbolism in the Feminist Movement. New York: McKay. Cusick, Philip A. 1973 Inside High School: The Student's World. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Gibson, Margaret A. 1988 Accommodation without Assimilation: Sikh Immigrants in an American High School. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gladwin, Thomas 1970 East Is a Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goodenough, Ward 1963 Cooperation in Change: An Anthropological Approach to Community Development. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 1976 Multiculturalism as the Normal Human Experience. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 7(4):4-7. Herskovits, Melville J. 1948 Man and His Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Hill Burnett, Jacquetta 1969 Ceremony, Rites, and Economy in the Student System of an American High School. Human Organization 28:1-10. Holland, Dorothy C , and Margaret A. Eisenhart 1990 Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement, and College Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger 1991 Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mead, Margaret 1928 Coming of Age in Samoa. New York: William Morrow.

Singleton

Reflecting on the Reflections

459

Moffatt, Michael 1989 Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. OgbuJohnU. 1974 The Next Generation: An Ethnography of Education in an Urban Neighborhood. New York: Academic Press. Singleton, John 1984 Origins of the AEQ: Rituals, Myths, and Cultural Transmission. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 15:11-16. Singleton, John, ed. 1998 Learning in Likely Places: Varieties of Apprenticeship in Japan. New York: Cambridge University Press. Spindler, George 1955 Education and Anthropology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1984 Roots Revisited: Three Decades of Perspective. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 15:3-10. Waller, Willard 1961 [1932] The Sociology of Teaching. New York: Russell and Russell. Wax, Murray L., Rosalie H. Wax, and Robert V. Dumont Jr. 1964 Formal Education in an American Indian Community. Atlanta: Emory University Press. Whiting, John W. M., and Irvin L. Child 1953 Child Training and Personality: A Cross-Cultural Study. New York: Yale University Press. Wolcott, Harry F. 1994 Transforming Qualitative Data: Description, Analysis, and Interpretation. Thousand Oaks, C A: Sage Publications.