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The social facting of education:

Durkheim's legacy
Hervé Varenne
Published online: 17 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Hervé Varenne (1995) The social facting of education: Durkheim's
legacy, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 27:4, 373-389, DOI: 10.1080/0022027950270403

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 J. CURRICULUM STUDIES, 1995, VOL. 27, NO. 4, 373-389

The social facting of education: Durkheim's legacy

HERVÉ VARENNE

Much has been made, over the past 20 years, of the inescapable grounding of all social
scientific activity in ideological structures imposed on practitioners by, and revealed in,
the very narrative and rhetorical tools at their disposal.
Alternatively:
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Much has been made, over the past 20 years, of the fact that all researchers, because
of their long participations in particular groups, develop particular narrative and
rhetorical styles that reveal their ideological position.
Both these statements attempt to capture something that all social science
has to grapple with: when one looks at human action, one always recognizes
it as in some way particular, rather than universal. Teaching is always
teaching in a particular classroom in a particular school, it is never 'simply
teaching'. Doing educational research is always doing it from within a
particular tradition or culture. The two statements, however, are not
identical in terms of their implicit theory of the relation between actor and
tradition. The latter constructs an encultured actor with a specific identity;
the former constructs an organized landscape of institutions for generalized
actors. Both do this construction through rhetorical tricks: in the former
'activity reveals constraints'; in the latter 'actors reveal themselves'. In the
former constraints are externalized and the actor struggles with the world;
in the latter the constraints are internalized and the actor struggles with the
self. In the former style, the one that I am adopting and defending in this
paper, one writes that a person 'teaches in America', that is with a particularly
organized group of other persons caught in a social structure with positions
such as Teacher, Student, Administrator, or Researcher. In the other style,
the one that I criticize, one writes that a person who 'is' an 'American', or
'French', also 'is' a teacher or 'becomes' an administrator.
The difference between the two styles is, of course, not merely stylistic.
In the long run, a particular way of writing about the world, a way that makes
it much easier to say certain things than others, constructs and reconstructs
a world with particular limitations from which future generations of
researchers will have a more and more difficult time escaping. It may be the
case that, if one is indeed interested in the constitution of identities, that is
specific selves with particular qualities, what I will refer to here as the
'pragmatist' (American) tradition opens paths into aspects of humanity that
would otherwise remain unexplored. On the other hand, if one is puzzled by
institutions and their impact, one may, indeed should, feel oneself badly

Hervé Varenne is Professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, New

York; NY 10027, USA. A cultural anthropologist, he is the author of books and papers on
everyday life and education in the USA, most recently Ambiguous Harmony (Ablex, 1992).
0022-0272/95 $10-00 © 1995 Taylor & Francis Ltd.
 374 HERVE VARENNE

served by the concurrent closing of other paths into alternate aspects of the
human experience. Take for example the classical question all research in
educational processes seems to ask, 'Why can't Johnny read?' There may be
some justification in exploring why it is that Johnny, as an encultured self,
is actively unable to read. There is however little justification for stopping
there. Eventually one must also strive for a way to investigate under what
conditions he is noticed as not reading, by whom, and for what purposes.
This may even lead to a statement about what it is that Johnny actually does
do with his being known as 'not knowing how to read'. Many are struggling
with versions of all this, but the normal models available for conducting
research, writing results, and developing theory remain severely limiting.1
We need to recapture other models and narrative forms that in fact were
offered, and then dismissed, particularly where America dominates.
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Durkheim: provocation and possibilities

My goal here is to recapture one non-pragmatist tradition that has remained
underdeveloped in the USA. I will refer to this tradition as Durkheimian, to
emphasize the source of its first coherent elaboration in the work of Emile
Durkheim. It might also be referred to as 'structuralist', to stress its
transformation in the work of subsequent sociologists, linguists, and
anthropologists, particularly in France, and to a certain extent, in the
USA- albeit in a modified fashion that can easily be misinterpreted when read
in America.2 The possibility of this misinterpretation eventually reveals the
very process that a structuralist analysis can help understand. Durkheim has
been read in the USA for 75 years and, depending on what one means by the
word, he has been 'understood' What he is saying is not radically foreign.
New statements, whether appreciative or dismissive, can be made with his
statements. What, actually, is made (has been made, and could not be made)
with it, is the issue that I want to address. In other words, I am not interested
here in correcting 'understanding', or in offering my version of what
Durkheim 'really said'.3 My task is not archaeological. It is rather a critique
of what can be done (that is what can be written), given the nature of
intellectual practice, with what he wrote. I want to emphasize those
properties of his work that have not been used in the American conversation,
or, if they have been used, have been used only as a rhetorical counterpoint
to reaffirm the common-sensicality of the pragmatist statements.
Furthermore I want to show how these properties can help move certain
recent developments in the anthropology of education, particularly those
inspired by ethnomethodology and resistance theory.
Durkheim's work is often summarized through a difficult quote from a
prescriptive book about method. Durkheim is struggling with stating what
is the proper unit of study for sociological investigation. This is the 'social
fact' for which he (1982 [1895]: 59) gave the following formal definition: 'A
social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over
the individual an external constraint'.
In the French version, the phrase 'way of acting' is rendered as une
maniere defaire? and not une maniere d'agir: the social fact is, precisely, a way
 DURKHEIM'S LEGACY 375

of 'facting', or making something, and perhaps even 'constructing' in the

modern sense. The possible distinction between action (behaviour) and
'facting' (construction) is one that should be explored further. But what is
really controversial in this passage, particularly in the USA, is the adjective
'external', particularly given the way Durkheim (1982 [1895]: 59) expands
the definition:
[A social fact is a way of constructing] which is general over the whole of a given society
whilst having an existence of its own, independent of its individual manifestations.
How can Durkheim talk about something that has 'an existence of its own'
independently from 'individual manifestations'?
These are serious questions, and we must continue to struggle with
restating a definition that Durkheim himself presents as temporary. Still, he
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is pointing us in a particular direction that we might want to follow for a while

before we make the blanket statement that, after all, there is nothing to society
but individuals. On the one hand, he is asking us to notice all the signs that
suggest that individuals are not the highest level of organization in the
evolution of life. In the same manner as an individual is not 'simply a
collection of cells' but rather an entity of a new and different order, there is
a good reason to think that a 'society' is also such an entity with particular
properties that may not be deduced by examining the constitution and
behaviour of the units that make it up. On the other hand, Durkheim is also
asking us to look at individual behaviour as constrained, which is different
from determined. Indeed in his detailed discussion on how to understand the
relationship between an actual suicide and the rate of suicide, Durkheim
(1951 [1897]: Book III) repeatedly emphasizes that the rate, as such, cannot
push any particular person to commit suicide. The rate of suicide is not
internalized, and so it is not driven by the social constitution of individuals.
The rate of suicide, or, more exactly, the rate of the particular kinds of
suicides typical of a particular kind of society, is constraining on all
participants even if they, personally, will never consider suicide. One could
in fact go further than Durkheim did on this matter by suggesting that
suicide is differently constraining depending on one's position within the
social system: a coroner will experience, that is be constrained by, the suicide
rate, differently to a priest, differently to a bus driver. Educationally, the
Durkheimian tradition asks us, for example, to think of a classroom less as
a bunch of individuals of various ages, genders ethnicities, and learning
disabilities, and more as a system of teachers and students-not to mention
administrators, curriculum designers, politicians, educational researchers,
etc. The tradition also asks us to approach any individual within a particular
performance of Classroom less as a 'student' or 'teacher' with specified
identities (including role definitions and particular qualities in the
performance of the role, i.e. whether one is a 'good' or 'bad' student or
teacher), and more as a struggle with identifications that are continually being
recollectivized.5
Asking such questions in the context of educational research can help us
move away from an ungrounded critique of the definition of the social fact,
and recapture something that is in fact alive, though sometimes in hidden
ways, in contemporary conversations, for example, in certain readings of
 376 HERVE VARENNE

classical texts by Garfinkel (1967); in McDermott and Tylbor's (1983)

attempts to develop a theory of 'collusion' in educational encounters; and in
Willis's (1977) discussion of 'resistance'. Some of these developments often
presented themselves as developments within the pragmatic traditions, and
as reactions against what passed as a sociological tradition supposedly
developing Durkheim's work. Thus, Garfinkel quotes Schiiltz (who quoted
Dewey) against Parsons (who sometimes quotes Durkheim). Constrastively,
Dewey (1973 [1896]), for example in an early paper on the reflex arc, or
G. H. Mead (1934) in the discussion of the 'conversation of gestures', are
arguably coming much closer to a structural understanding of human
interaction than some of their students and followers ever did. In recent
years, someone like Mehan (1991) - through a critique of Bourdieu's possibly
unwitting cultural determinism, and from the point of view of someone
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interested in 'constitutive practices'-has in fact started quoting Durkheim

in a positive manner not found in the US for many years. My goal here is
not to tar writers in one tradition as American (and misguided), and others
as structuralists ('French'? and enlightened). Rather it is to analyse
contrastively two analytic logics and to draw the lines that lead, and
constrain, authors in particular directions. 6
In this perspective, we can look briefly at a few pages from the first chapter
of Dewey's (1966 [1916]: 4-5) Democracy and Education. They can serve to
summarize the major properties of the pragmatic tradition, or culture. In
these pages, Dewey is summarizing what he understands to be the current
state of knowledge about what constitutes society and about the relationship
of the individual to society, it is both a philosophical and social scientific
statement.
Society... may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication. There is more
than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication. Men
live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and
communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What they
have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations,
knowledge-a common understanding.... The communication which insures
participation in a common understanding is one which is one which secures similar
emotional and intellectual dispositions-like ways of responding to expectations and
requirements.
Consensus demands communication.
Indeed, as it is developed (Dewey 1966: [1916]: 13-14), it is also an
anthropological statement:
[When a child] really shares or participates in the common activity... his original
impulse is modified. He not merely acts in a way agreeing with the actions of others,
but, in so acting, the same ideas and emotions are aroused in him that animate the others.
A tribe, let us say is warlike...
This is followed by a parable illustrating how the children of a warlike tribe
become warlike themselves. For a while readers find themselves with Ruth
Benedict and Margaret Mead, Erik Erikson and Jules Henry, not to mention
Oscar Lewis.7
Given Dewey's concern with grounding individual consciousness in
particular, rather than universal, human conditions, we would be justified in
thinking of his work as making explicit the philosophical underpinning of
 DURKHEIM'S LEGACY 377

classical Boasian anthropology. In brief, the argument grounds cultural

distinctiveness in 'values', 'individuals', 'internalize', and 'share' with other
individuals. We are here in the domain of what Bourdieu (1977 [1972]:
14—15)-whom, in certain quarters of modern cultural anthropology, it
appears more sexy to quote that Dewey or G. H. Mead-had called the
habitus, the 'disposition inculcated in the earliest years of life and constantly
reinforced by calls to order from the group, that is to say, from the aggregate
of the individuals endowed with the same dispositions, to whom each is
linked by his dispositions and interests'. 8 As some have begun noticing, such
a statement ends up being radically deterministic of the constitution of the
self and of what one can do in the concrete settings of one's life.
In contrast Durheim (1974 [1925]: 27) writes sentences like: 'Morals is
not simply a system of habits. It is a system of commandments.' Note the
shift in vocabulary from 'values' to 'morals'. Note the specific rejection of
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the notion of 'habit'. Note the emphasis on external controls. This is the core
of a long discussion of discipline and of the need to bend the will to legitimate
authority:
Man is made to live in a particular environment that is always limited however large
it may in fact be; and the ensemble of the acts which make life has the goal of adapting
ourselves to this environment or adapting it to ourselves ... To live is to put ourselves
in harmony with the physical world which surrounds us, with the social world of which
we are members. Both of them, however vast they may be, are limited. The ends which
we normally have to seek are thus equally specified, and we cannot free ourselves from
this limit, without placing ourselves at war with nature. (1974 [1925]: (42)9
Culture, as a result of a historical evolution, has less to do with the habits
we acquire than with the houses we inhabit. 'Particular environments',
however institutionalized and hegemonic, do not determine, they constrain,
and they may in fact prod human negativity to resistance, deconstfuction,
resistance to resistance, and an eventual reproductive transformation
grounded in history.

Durkheim as educational researcher

It is well known that Dewey was deeply concerned with education

throughout his life, both as a practitioner and as a philosopher, and that he
is deeply implicated, though ambiguously so, in the institutional
development of American education. 10 It is less well known that Durkheim
was also actively implicated in the development of the French educational
system and that he conducted extensive research in educational processes.11
Indeed, Durkheim received his first academic appointment in 1887 to a
position in 'social science and pedagogy'. Throughout his life, first in
Bordeaux, and then Paris, he taught two major courses a year, one oh aspects
of sociological theory, and one on ''pedagogy'. The latter course focused, over
the years on moral education, intelligence, psychology of education, 'and the
history of educational thought in Europe. In both of these endeavours, he
was conscious that his was a political task that would provide the intellectual
''(scientific and "thus, for him as a man of the nineteenth century, eve'ritually
authoritative) foundation fer the institution shaping 'of -France 'into the
 378 HERVE VARENNE

socialist, lay, country that its history made it inevitable it would

become-though not without the active work of individuals like himself.
Durkheim published only a few short articles on education during his life.
These are collected in Education et Sociologie (1977 [1922]). The other works
(L'Education morale 1974 [1925]; L'Evolution pedagogique en France 1969
[1938]) are edited versions of his lectures which he always wrote in full. The
first of these books L'Education morale, is the text of a course taught by
Durkheim in 1902—1903. There are two main parts. The first establishes the
foundation of a scientific approach to a practical social question-the proper
understanding of what is to be meant by moral education with the stress on
moral and scientific. Science implies rationality (as against religion)-the
postulate that the world is fully intelligible to human beings.12 He then
explores the distinction between le bien and le devoir-what one values
because it is good vs. what it is one's duty to do whether one likes it or not.
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He demonstrates that they are both aspects of the same thing: the recognition,
both positive and negative, that we are part of something greater than
ourselves, something that has special properties different from those that we
have as individuals. The second part of the book is more directly didactic.
It uses a somewhat antiquated child psychology, and little could be saved
from it. Most interesting here is the discussion of the ideological foundation
for the classical French educational system. Here, again, Durkheim speaks
of the need to make intelligible (rationally) what is our condition being part
of something larger and other to which we have duties even though it is not
universally rational. Durkheim is probably most radical, within French
ideology, when he insists on the recognition of a reality that is rationally
intelligible even when it is not itself rationally organized.
The second of these books, L'Evolution pedagogique en France, is a history
of secondary education from early Christian communities in the third and
fourth centuries, through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Jesuit
colleges, and the first lay public schools of the 19th century. This is
Durkheim's one specifically empirical study of a body of evidence. As such
it throws a light on his more theoretical statements, and may make them less
misleading. Durkheim wrote this analysis in 1904—1905 with an explicit
political goal within the context of contemporary France: he wanted to
contribute to the elaboration of a major reform in high school organization
and curricula that would best reflect what a modern, socialist lay France was
to be. For him, this reform would have the best chance of achieving this if
it followed a scientific understanding of social process. The book itself takes
the form of a history that is also the tracing of an evolution that little by little
revealed, and constructed, an essence that now needed to be perfected. It is
about change and resistance to change, inevitability and specific, willful,
action. The chapters on the Jesuits are particularly interesting. He interprets
their action, or better, their 'faction', what they made, as fundamentally, and
deliberately, resistant to the main orientation of their day. They were
counter-reforming, though less against the Protestant alternative than
against the humanist challenge of the sixteenth century. In order to bend the
Renaissance's interest in Greek and Roman antiquities as corrective to the
power of the Church in earlier centuries, they co-opted it:
 DURKHEIM'S LEGACY 379

To use paganism to glorify and propagate Christian morality, was ... a rather difficult
task; still, the Jesuits were confident enough to attempt it and succeed. In order to do
that one had to transform the ancient world; one had to show the authors of
Antiquity... in such a way as to leave in the shadows what made them true pagans, and
all that made them men of a particular city, or of a particular time, in order to highlight
the ways in which they were simply men, men of all times and all countries. (1969 [1938]:
287)
They went so far as, for a long while, forbidding the study of French in their
French schools, thereby pushing what we might now call 'the culture of their
students' out of the school. The students, of course, resisted, and produced
the kind of intellectual work that could only be reintegrated into a Jesuit
curriculum after it had lost its contemporaneity and, having become a
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'classic', could then be eviscerated. This resistance of the Jesuits to the

anti-religious movements of their contemporaries, in turn justified the
revolutionary activities that established a lay secondary school system which
the French Republican State still had specifically to strengthen.
Anthropologists have learned in recent years that a historical perspective,
far from weakening their disciplinary tasks, enriches them. Indeed, we might
read Durkheim's history as a series of ethnographic sketches about the
organization of religion at various periods in European history that focuses
on tensions and resulting transformations within a massive evolutionary line.
There is something French about France, but it is always challenged from
within and never completed as it becomes aware of its limitations. Thus,
Durkheim can find in the early Middle Ages, when the Church controlled
all institutions, the signs of a concern for non-religious elements as
constitutive of education. This is what would flower 1,500 years later in the
schools of the Third Republic. Still, the story Durkheim's tells is one of
struggle between a more intellectual Irish Church that nurtured humanistic
impulses, and the Benedictine order that saw it as dangerous to Church
authority. But the eventual victory of the Benedictines was a Pyhrric one as
they in fact absorbed the intellectualist impulses of the Irish monks. In the
process of such historical writing, and regardless of the accuracy of the
history as history, Durkheim's method is revealed and we may understand
better those general statements that may appear contradictory or simply
ungrounded postulates:
None of the educational systems were in any way arbitrary; if any one has survived it
is not because it was the product of human aberration, but because it was the result of
specific social states and in harmony with them; and if it changed, it is because society
itself changed. (1969 [1938]: 16)
This apparently deterministic statement is followed by a discussion of change
and its grounding in specific historical conditions: 'the new institutions that
are needed cannot be constructed a priori by imagination' (1969 [1938]: 17)
Things do not move in linear fashion; they must be deliberately manipulated
to construct something that is both in harmony with the modern world, the
France that actually exists, and, eventually, in evolution over it.
Contemporary France is given to fashions and fads; one must move away to
recapture what is central and must still be constructed in the future.
Having understood that the essence of Durkheim's method, when applied
to empirical situations, is historical and constructive, rather than
 380 HERVE VARENNE

mechanically deterministic, there is less danger in looking in more detail at

his more theoretical statements, particularly his most general paper where
he gives a definition of education from a sociological point of view. The paper
'Education, its nature and its role' was first written for a dictionary published
in 1911. Durkheim (1977 [1922]: 51) writes:
Education is the action exercised by adult generations On those who are not yet ready
for social life. The goal of education is to arouse and develop in the child a certain
number of physical, intellectual and moral states required of him both by the polity in
its ensemble and by the special environment to which he is specifically destined:

When such statements are read as ideological calls for a system that will
convince each child to become exactly what his birth fated him to achieve,
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they seem to place Durkheim within a conservative tradition that no

enlightened American, concerned with helping each child develop to his
utmost and become whatever he wants, could countenance. In his time, of
course, Durkheim was not seen by most of the political forces of his time as
conservative at all. He was, however, concerned with grounding the action
of the State as it struggled withmany threatening forces. In the first decade
of the twentieth century the France that a historian like Weber (1976) can
now describe as somehow completed, was still being constructed, and it was
not yet clear that the construction would hold. Indeed, 30 years later, under
the shock of a major military defeat, the alternative that Durkheim fought
against was briefly ^institutionalized. In 1905 the 'classical' school of the
Third Republic was anything but classical. It was in process.
Rather than dismissing Durkheim's definition for political incorrectness,
and particularly because we, like him, are indeed interested in political
institutionalization, let us examine it as an attempt to summarize a set of
empirical observations that we cannot quite wish away. These observations
and arguments are basedi as has already been mentioned, on the irreducible
variability in educational systems, and on the fact that one can see, in any
particular one, both the traces of what came earlier and, if one has the
perspective, the seeds of what is to come. This insistence is a leitmotif that
Durkheim continually picks up. He (1977 [1922]: 55) is always most critical
of theories that abstract the human being from all societies: 'Man is a man
only to the extent that he lives in society'. This of course is but ah early
statement of what Geertz (1973: 49) once stated as 'Without men, no culture,
certainly; but equally, and more significantly, without culture, no men'.
Given a premise that is now well grounded in observation, how are we to talk
about education in a manner that does not contravene the fundamental
sociability of human beings?

The individual in the society vs. the society in the

individual
To set Geertz by Durkheirri is another way to stress the relatedhess of the
pragmatist'ahd structuralist traditions. Both are founded on the same kinds
of analytic insight —that humanity is* fundamentally social;- and thus
cultural - and both have similar moral, that is'; political goals: to ground^ a;
 bURKHEIM'S LEGACY 381

proper democracy on scientific bases, and also to foster it, institutionally and
inthe persons who will live and reconstruct it. I referred earlier to Dewey's
sketch of what we can now call cultural variation, and I have stressed how
central this variation also is to Durkheim's thinking. Indeed, Durkheim may
go further given his understanding of variability based on social complexity
that is somewhat missing in Dewey. In a society where labour is divided, life
conditions are necessarily different for people fated, through birth of other
accident, to enter society in particular positions. In a modern society, the
poor and the rich are in fundamental, organic, interdependence upon each
other. They do not, however, live in quite the same world. The difference
between the structuralist and pragmatist traditions arises when the time
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comes to make the next statement: does the fact that the poor and the rich
live in different worlds mean that they are different in their very selves, in
their identities? And, further, is it the case that sociability among the rich
or the poor is dependent on similarity, if not consensus, among those who
make up the rich and the poor? Do the poor have a culture, a culture 'of
poverty?
Anthropologists of education are now quite aware of the illegitimacy of
any reference to cultures of poverty. What is not so easy is to find theories
of culture that do not reproduce the bind Oscar Lewis placed anthropologists
in by adopting the most powerful theories of culture of the 1940s and 1950s
as they were presented in the works of Erik Erikson (1970 [1950]). They were
theories that explicitly tried to bring together Boas with Freud to explain
processes of enculturation and learning that were presented as fundamental.
Lewis, of course, applied these theories in the kind of human contexts that
G. H. Mead or Ruth Benedict had not considered when they talked about
internalization or the transformation of the individual, but neither Mead nor
Benedict had specifically warned against such a use. The other Mead,
Margaret, once talked about cross-cultural comparison as the equivalent of
experimentation in the other behavioural sciences. Even if the analogy does
not quite work, it must be the case that what happens in the South Bronx
is relevant to what happens in Samoa^ and that a theory of culture that does
not work in the South Bronx cannot work in Samoa^ even if it allows for such
powerful statements as these sentences from Berger and Luckman (1967:
19-20):
The world of everyday life is not only taken for granted as reality by the ordinary
members of society in the subjectively meaningful conduct of their lives. It is a world
that originates in their thoughts and actions, and is maintained as real by these.

The world of everyday life, for Durkheim, could never be said to originate
in the thought and'action of 'members' because it is'irreducibly external to
any individual or plurality. It is always already there when one enters it;as
a child; or asan adult in anewposition; After one has entered; inevitably one
becorries a member, or,; following my restatement of Durkheimianinsights-
ah occupant^ if not a squatter. One's position is constrained but not
determined by the struggle to achieve that position; Whether one then
becomes^ in Dewey's (1966 [1916]: 14) phrase 'a sharer orpartnerih the
associated activity so that lie feels its success as his success; its failure as his
failure' is an open question, one that' Durkheim addresses but" never
 382 HERVE VARENNE

completely settles. He addresses it above all in his long discussions of

discipline as something destined to mould the individual in a particular
fashion. Individuals must adapt by habituating themselves, but the source
of the habit is never their very selves and there is a suggestion that a properly
educated person stands somewhat apart from total allegiance to something
that he should also criticize. Durkheim insists heavily that, when talking
about discipline, that is about the entry of human beings into their particular
world, one is talking about rules imposed by institutions (religion, science,
etc.) historically constructed by the group as legitimate. One is not talking
about habits:
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By definition, habits are forces interior to the individual... On the contrary, a rule is,
in its very essence, something external to the individual. We can only conceive of it as
an order, or at least an imperative suggestion, that comes from outside... A rule is not
simply a habitual way of acting, it is a manner of acting that we are not free to change
as we please. It is, to the very extent that it is a rule, not subjected to our will. There
is something that resists us, that is greater than we are, that imposes itself on us, that
constrains us. (1974 [1925]: 24-25)

A rule is authoritative. It resists us. For Durkheim, to the extent that he was
justifying a Utopian state, it appears that it is always the duty of the person
to bend his will to the rules of the well constituted group. As an advisor to
struggling politicians, he also knew that individuals can, and sometimes
must, resist their social conditions. What is theoretically interesting here is
the systematic construction of the person as wilful, resistant, and never
radically 'habituated' to his position. The implication is not simply that
human beings can change, or that their enculturation is never complete, or
that learning is a life-long process. The implication is that the social world
is made of historically constituted positions through which persons move and
differently resist.

Resistance and operations

Resistance, rather than socialization, is key to a rewriting of Durkheimian

insights that will move us ahead. As such 'resistance' is not a Durkheimian
concept, certainly not as it is understood in Willis's (1977) instant classic on
working class youths. A more sensitive analysis, such as the one by Comaroff
(1985), may proceed with frequent bows to Levi-Strauss and Bourdieu (often
critically) without exploring further the historical roots of a view of action
as practical, local, and productive of new conditions. Durkheim himself talks
about society resisting us, not us resisting society. He is worried about the
resistance the traditionalist forces in France exerted against what he
considered in inevitable evolution of the country into a lay state based on
scientific rationality. He feared the resistance of the individual will against
the necessary disciplinary activities of teachers (and by implication
policemen) when these are exercised in the name of a fully legitimate
authority. He was not systematically engaged in rooting out all hegemonies.
He appears quite convinced that there are proper hegemonic state practices
 DURKHEIM'S LEGACY 383

and that these should be defended against improper resistance. There is

certainly no evidence that he would glorify adolescents who refuse a public
education specifically designed to make them active citizens at particular
positions within a complex society that needs their labour. The mythical
teachers of the Third Republic did not countenance such nonsense and there
was little of it in their schools. He would probably talk of people cursing
teachers, disrupting classrooms, and dropping out, as symptoms of
something pathological at work. The pathology would however be a social
pathology, not an individual one. It would be the sign of the need to
investigate how particular instances of institutions were not operating in such
a fashion as to require the kind of disordering resistance that someone like
Willis (1977) documents.
Once, again, one is entitled to refuse the political agenda that is never far
from Durkheim's writing. 13 Still, we must pay close attention to a theoretical
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process, a method of analysis really, that both, on the one hand, assumes that
individuals are never fully socialized, and are absolutely free to resist, and,
on the other hand, contrastively emphasizes that individuals are never fully
able to start something radically new out of nothing. Human beings are never
'creative', if we think of the word in the biblical sense where a transcendent
God 'creates' the world out of nothing. Neither are they determined or purely
reproductive. Rather, they are always at work constructing something
somewhat different from that which they experience. The best development
of this aspect of Durkheim's thinking that he himself did not quite develop
is probably Levi-Strauss's (1966 [1962]) discussion of bricolage as now
further developed by someone like Comaroff (1985). Again, Levi-Strauss did
not talk about bricolage as a form of resistance.14 but the implication is there:
if a myth-maker can always, physically and logically, take a piece from a myth
and incorporate it into another myth to make something different that could
not be predicted from examining the original piece, it must be because he
is precisely not determined by, or fully encultured into the social conditions
of his birth or adulthood.
What is important here is that this is a general process. Resistance is not
simply something that is done by people in various peripheries (class, ethnic,
gender, etc.) against an hegemonic centre. It is something in which people
who can be analytically placed in the centre are also engaged in, and perhaps
all the more vigorously since they have more to lose. In a Durkheimian
perspective, of course, the culture of the centre-that is the particular
organization of the institutions that constitute it as central to a periphery-is
not the culture 'of the people in the centre. There is no culture of the rich
any more than there is a culture of the poor. All are at work with and against
conditions that resist them. It can be argued, for example, that America, as
a specific culture, is distinguished by the institutionalization of public
schooling understood as the embodiment of a particular understanding of
social relations that is given a narrative incarnation in texts ranging from the
Bill of Rights, to Dewey's Democracy and Education. The United States is
also distinguished by the continually renewed development of private
schools that challenge the wisdom of the public school and resist particular
instantiations. Thus the Catholics resisted the Protestants in the enormous
sacrifices they made to develop their own educational system. Thus
 384 HERVEVARENNE

Evangelicals protest secular humanism, and, perhaps, the affluent middle

class now resist the working class and the poor. When a President of the USA
who presents himself as a supporter of public education sends his daughter
to a private school, it is analytically limiting to assume that he must simply
be acting as a 'member of his culture'. It would be much more powerful to
understand him and his wife as struggling with, if not resisting, the specific
conditions they encountered when they moved to Washington, DC, that is as
doing something slightly different than what they might have been expected
to do.
This is not the place to go much further in exploring the possibilities
opened by a view of action in society that liberates the actor from the
responsibility of carrying its organization in his own psychical constitution.
It may be useful however to stress another property of the theory that is most
radically at odds with the pragmatic tradition, and may still be alive as people
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who feel comfortable with it push the limits. For Dewey (1966 [1916]: 4),
we saw earlier, 'men live in a community in virtue of the things which they
have in common'. This is a fundamental statement, and we find versions of
it everywhere, including in authors not regularly placed within the tradition.
In this view, consensus is central to communication, interaction, and thus
sociability, and consensus is about similarities in meanings, that is quite exact
agreement on the referential power of signs or symbols. If a symbol has the
same meaning for two individuals, then they can communicate. Otherwise
they will misunderstand each other, and, under certain conditions, move to
hurt each other.
The best critique of this position may be found in the work of someone
who has moved the pragmatic tradition in the most interesting direction.
Garfinkel (1967) specifically builds upon the work of Alfred Schutz who was
himself directly influenced by Dewey and G. H. Mead. Indeed Garfinkel's
central concern with the grounding of everyday activity in face-to-face
situations can be seen as an attempt directly to confront Mead's discussion
of the conversation of gestures as central to the human experience. Mead
however moves immediately from sketching the conversation as a social
situation to a long discussion about the ways this conversations shapes a self
who internalizes the position of the other. Schutz (1962) himself writes about
an ' I ' who is 'biographically constituted' and interprets his experiences with
others. Garfinkel, on the other hand, backs up to wonder about the exact
mechanisms that make conversation possible in the first place. Clearly his
Central problem is not experience as such, though his methodology might in
fact lead us to a better understanding of the phenomenology of social life.
Given his starting point in a traditional concern with knowledge and common
understandings, what is particularly interesting in my perspective is the
evidence of a struggle in his writing to explicitly confront these central
symbols.
It will be remembered that, in Garfinkel's classic collection of articles in
Studies in Ethnomethodology, the first two chapters are organized around the
account of the same experiment, consisting of a transcript of a conversation
and comments from a participant about what a reader might need to know
that was not made explicit in the conversation. The issue is a classic one in
the iptagrhatist tradition and it is 'discussed in some detail 'by Schutz (il 964).
 DURKHEIM'S LEGACY 385

Only direct face-to-face interaction can insure a full understanding of what

those who are directly 'we' to each other are doing together. Otherwise
something is missing that must be provided in a secondary step. The earlier
telling of this experiment is included as Chapter 2 in the book. It was
originally published in 1964. As it was in Dewey's 1916 statement, 'common'
is central here, and it is with the implications of this word that Garfinkel is
struggling. What is it that people have in common when they act together
unproblematically? What is a common understanding? In attempting to
answer these questions Garfinkel resists simply saying that participants
'share' meanings. Rather, referring to Schutz, he writes that

for the conduct of his everyday affairs the person assumes, assumes the other person
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assumes as well, and assumes that as he assumes it, the other person assumes it of him,
that a relationship of undoubted correspondence is the sanctioned relationship between
the actual appearances of an object and intended object that appears in a particular way.
(1967: 50)

This points the way to another discussion about 'trust' but fundamentally
preserves a focus on the state of mind of the actors.
The later piece, reworked as an introduction for the volume, goes further
by centring on the impossibility of specifying fully the 'knowledge'
apparently implicit in the original conversation. Then, in a major leap,
Garfinkel goes beyond the vague reference to 'assuming' and 'trust'. Against
all cognitivist or interpretive traditions of analysis that postulate sharing
(commonality) as the foundation of sociability, he (1967: 29-30; my
emphasis) writes:

Suppose we drop the assumption that in order to describe a usage as a feature of a

community of understanding we must at the outset know what the substantive common
understanding consists of.... By dropping such a theory of signs we drop as well,
thereby, the possibility that an invoked shared agreement on substantive matters
explains a usage.

If these notations are dropped, then what the parties talked about could not be
distinguished from how the parties were speaking. 'Shared agreement' refers to various
social methods for accomplishing the member's recognition that something was
said-according-to-a-rule and not the demonstrable matching of a substantive matters.
The appropriate image of a common understanding is therefore an operation rather than
a common intersection of overlapping sets.

Concerted action is an operation that makes (facts) something for all

implicated actors. By shifting the focus from the content of the under-
standing to the operations performed by actors when they get in contact,
Garfinkel moves our attention from the constitution of the self ('me') to the
conditions that the person (T) must operate with. Methodologically, this
means that we do not have to worry overly anymore about reconstructing
what the participants 'meant' during the interaction as long as we can specify
the operations that they performed and the objects that they made for each
other, and perhaps also for contemporaries whom they never meet, and for
successors who may not even be born. While Garfinkel does not go that far,
we are now close to Levi-Strauss's bricolage-the recognition that the
 386 HERVEVARENNE

fundamental human act is making relatively new products with old stuff. It
may be that such work can end with a group of human beings looking very
much alike-particularly if they are all working with the same historical
left-over stuff-but this appearance of commonality should always be
suspected of being an epiphenomenon of the observer's distance. The
fundamental human situation is not really the Utopian I-Thou fusion. It is
the situation of a genitally male human being successfully passing as a
female —the spectacular case Garfinkel (1967) discusses so brilliantly. The
human condition consist of the work one must do with what one finds on
one's path. In the process a particular position is constituted, to the extent
that others participate in, accept and legitimize, knowingly or not (again
'knowing' is no longer central here), this constitution.
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The ethnomethodological tradition, however, is distinguished more by

demonstrations of how objects are jointly constructed (Garfinkel, Lynch and
Livingstone 1981, Goodwin in press) than by explorations of the sources of
the objects that people use, and the impact of the objects they construct. The
thereness of complex social facts, for example, the set of practices one must
use to establish one's gender constructed by multitudes over hundreds of
years, is something that is more often assumed than confronted, in
educational research it still appears more in keeping with a constructionist
stance to demonstrate how an individual child is made into a 'failure' than
it is to trace how the success/failure pattern has become so completely
institutionalized in modern Education. There have been calls for such a
broadening of the perspective of researchers (Mehan 1991), and some have
misunderstood the ways in which work like that of McDermott and his
colleagues (1978, 1979) in fact emphasizes the constituent presence in the
local performance of patterns that are in fact locally produced. As Garfinkel
(1967: 15) put it in other words, 'what members are doing in their inquiries
is always somebody else's business'. The social frame to our actions is always
external to any particular participant' behaviour (but not to humanity). What
we do is always potentially everyone else's business.
I am closing with a bow to the most powerful text in ethnomethodology,
both as a recognition of the value of the pragmatic critique of simplistic
understanding of social structuralisms, and as a warning to those-and they
are many—who are using Garfinkel to revive a concern with the constitution
of the self that will always distract us from the concern we must have with
the conditions of the person. The best in the modern work that grounds itself
in Sacks, Bateson, Garfinkel, and others like them, who urge us to look,
and then look again, and then continue looking, is clear in its understanding
that the 'frame'-whether it is a question routine, a classroom, a school,
or 'Education' as an institution-is best approached as a historically
produced practical condition. The 'conversation of gesture', about which
G. H. Mead wrote, is not the result of a local negotiation between two
separate individuals dealing strategically with each other and establishing a
consensus both will now share. Whether they do or not is beside the
anthropological point-to the extent that anthropology is not social
psychology. A local conversation, a local classroom, a local school, a local
culture, are always, are always, first, and foremost what we must call with
Durkheim, a Social Fact.
 DURKHEIM'S LEGACY 387

Acknowledgements
This paper may have had its genesis in a conversation Ray McDermott and
I had, walking down Amsterdam Avenue near Teachers College. I was
complaining about his call for a close reading of G. H. Mead whom I
considered too dangerous an author to be put in the hands of a US audience.
We went back to the source, we conducted a joint seminar with a group of
supportive students. Together we resisted, and I am truly grateful for this
resistance, and for that of the many others with whom I have also talked about
the usefulness of Durkheim. I also want to thank Richard Blot who organized
the session at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological
Association in the fall 1990, where an early version of this paper was first read.
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Notes
See, for example, the struggles of the authors of papers in a recent edited volume on
minority education (Jacob and Jordan 1993).
When talking about 'America'-as I explained elsewhere (1986) and develop here-I am
not talking about Americans. I am talking about a pattern revealed in artifacts and
institutions, a pattern dominant in the US and extremely powerful, though often radically
contested, in the rest of the human world.
My argument is convergent with one used by Joseph (1992) in his article on readings,
that is writings by Bloomfield and Chomsky, about Saussure.
'Maniere defaire' may be a dead metaphor in French. It may still be one that it would
be worth while to try to bring back to life as a guide to research.
Rizzo-Tolk and Varenne (1992) explored this way of understanding school failure (failure
in school, failure of a school) in an analysis of a lesson in an alternative urban school where
objective 'success' gets systematically interpreted as a failure, and failure makes no
difference given the overall identification of the school as a school for 'drop-outs'. In other
words, this school is so organized by its place within the structure of schools in New York
City, that students who are overwhelmingly evaluated as failing, whatever their 'objective'
qualities, and who in fact move through the school, graduate, and, with some frequency,
go on to college. The implication, of course, is that a concept like 'objective success',
outside of a context of interpretation, is not useful.
My critique does emphasize the limitations of pragmatism. Rhetorically, it builds up the
Durkheimian, structuralist, tradition. Louis Dumont (1991) has recently published a
perceptive critique of the Durkheimian tradition as he tried to explain to a French
audience the wisdom of a German understanding of the constitution of the self in culture
which, of course, prefigures American pragmatism and cultural anthropology.
My approach here is not historical. It is closer to that of Louis Dumont, sketching the
major lines of a cultural system in order to contrast it to another one with different
properties. It develops Boon's (1982: 138) exploration of the contrasts and relationships
between the semiologies/semiotics of Pierce and Saussure, leading to a joint discussion
of Levi-Strauss and Geertz in the context of an understanding of pragmatism 'branded'
as 'a significantly American, continued resistance to any simple, particularistic
empiricism yet mistrust of Continental schools or rationalism or idealism'. Like Boon,
I see something profoundly particular in its development between the original pragmatist
philosophers and Boasian cultural anthropology, and its transformation into symbolic
anthropology, symbolic interactionism, and Parsonian theories of culture.
Durkheim ([1938] 1969: 137) himself used the word in his lectures on education at the
turn of the century. He also wrote extensively about habituation which he defines in terms
very close to Bourdieu's (1977 [1972]: 24—25)-and indeed to those used in the pragmatist
traditions (e.g. Dewey 1966 [1916]: Ch. 4).
 388 HERVEVARENNE

9. When a French edition of a work from Durkheim is cited, the translations are my own.
Otherwise, the English quote is from the cited translation.
10. The extent to which actual schools in the United States are in fact an embodiment of what
Dewey meant as a philosopher remains a burning issue as the controversy started by
Cremin's (1961) classical work indicates.
11. Durkheim, of course, was one of the central authors who gave the ideological grounding
for the educational system that turned 'peasants into Frenchmen' (Weber 1976), and
constituted the 'French modern' (Rabinow 1989).
12. This rationality, thus, is not Cartesian, logical rationality. Durkheim makes this point,
repeatedly as he criticizes traditional French Cartesianism for its postulate that everything
can be understood through a process of analysis into the simplest constituent parts.
Society, for Durkheim, is irreducibly complex, and thus not accessible to simple logical
analysis. A specific science is necessary to understand its working.
13. This refusal must however be more systematically grounded than it has recently been in
the many studies that stop with a demonstration that some practices are hegemonic and
some are resistant. What next? The relation of anthropologists to the State is fraught with
contradictions as many practitioners insist on the need for their work to be both 'relevant'
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to the people they study, and independent from the institutions that might design
programs and implement them on the public sphere. All anti-hegemonic discourses are
hegemonic.
14. In France however, there is good reason to argue that bricolage, typically a working class
activity by people with limited resources, is precisely a form of resistance to a certain kind
of industrial modernity (Weber 1986).

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