anthropology and education: issues from the issues

Anthropology and Education: Issues from the IssuesAuthor(s): Charles HarringtonSource: Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Winter, 1982), pp. 323-335Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3216287 .

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Anthropology and Education: Issues from the Issues1

Charles Harrington*

I am the first editor of AEQ to serve the two three-year terms allowed by the bylaws of the Council on Anthropology and Education. As I depart I offer a few thoughts relating the last six years of AEQ to their context: the past and future of anthropology and education. The remarks are offered as an opportunity for the reader to evaluate whatever my biases may have been. Beginning with an overview of our heritage from anthropology, I review the development of anthropology and education in order to relate what we have published to the core issues of the field. At the end I offer some thoughts on the issue of public policy. ANTHROPOLOGY, EDUCATION, THEORY, HISTORY, POLICY.

Overview and Origins

Anthropology is easily the most ambitious of the sciences concerned with human behavior. It has always been characterized by an extreme eclecticism both of subject and of approach to subject. After all, it includes within its domain four traditional fields of interest: physical anthropology, the study of the physical characteristics of Homo sapiens; archaeology, the study of the residues of the human past; linguistics, the study of ways of speaking in all human societies; and cultural anthropology, the study of contemporary (people alive today) human societies and behaviors. Each of these four fields is composed of numerous schools and theoretical strands that challenge the new student as well as the experienced professional to keep track of the diversity with which one is faced.2 What disciplines-in both senses of the term-this anthropological diversity is the orientation that people are part of one human species. Anthropology is devoted to its study. Wherever, when- ever, and whatever humans have done or are doing is grist for the anthropologist's mill. Given this breadth of subject matter, the diversity and eclecticism that characterize the discipline should not be unexpected.

In addition to and concomitant with this diversity, anthropology has developed differently in different countries. Within cultural anthropology in the United States, anthropology has grown in ways different from those found in other countries, for example, England and France. American anthropology by comparison with those two traditions is a sprawling and, to some, bewildering accumulation of diverse theoretical themes as well as diverse subjects for study. On something as simple as the concept of culture, which most nonanthropologists in the social sciences associate with anthropology, there is such diversity that some anthropologists do not even use the term. Books could be and have been written (see Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952) simply on an inventory of the various definitions of culture. Space does not allow a complete review here. Culture is of course an abstraction. As distinct from a group of people, you cannot see "culture" any more than you can see

*Teachers College, Columbia University New York, New York 10027



324 Volume XIII, Number 4

evolution or gravity. This is one reason why so many definitions exist. Another is that our definition is purposely broad so as to include more into the cultural domain than it excludes.

Although American anthropologists use the term "culture" frequently and indeed took their definition from the nineteenth-century Englishman E. B. Tylor, the term is almost totally absent in today's British literature of the discipline. In the British literature one encounters "society" but rarely "culture." By focusing their attention on society, many British anthropologists are declaring their interest in behavior, seeking regularities of social interac- tions or human behaviors. They are less interested in people's feelings, attitudes, values, or beliefs than in how these attitudes, values, or beliefs are translated into action. Instead, the Americans, and to a certain degree the French as well, focus on "culture," by which they mean society as it is understood in England, plus the value systems of that society, plus the individual and/or shared attitudinal belief and value systems that support it. This view leads inevitably to a concern for the relationship between the individual and culture, the main theoretical antecedent of anthropological research in education. It is therefore not accidental that anthropology and education has developed within the United States.

Culture is a much misunderstood concept. Clyde Kluckhohn formulated in 1965 a definition with which many anthropologists would agree: "Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups. . . . "Culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as influences upon further action" (Kluck- hohn 1965:73). For some, culture is primarily a descriptive concept. It is considered a product of human action: observe the action and you can label the culture. For others, culture is an explanatory concept; culture is seen as influencing further action. "He is a Hopi" is a statement that is essentially little more than a use of the culture concept as a way of labeling humans into

culturally discrete units. It is often important for anthropologists to do so. The second use of culture as an explanatory concept treats culture as a functional rather than a status characteristic. "He behaves that way because he is Hopi" is an example of the latter. Such explanations are usually unsatisfactory because

they are a shorthand representation of much more complicated phenomena that the theoretical structures described later are designed to elucidate.

The diversity within anthropology is so great that to some the field seems to recreate in their own discipline an early and particularly American view of culture: as a collection of shreds and patches without structure or shape. We turn now to an alternative view that attempts to delineate structure and shape for this discipline whose influence upon educational research is increasing rapidly.

A Selective History of Anthropology and Education

Franz Boas is accorded the traditional position as founder of American anthropology. As a trained physicist, his concern was typical of nineteenth- century natural science after Darwin. Like Darwin, he was concerned with the collection and understanding of facts. Theories emerged after the facts and



Anthropology & Education Quarterly 325

were actually simply ways to explain them. Later, sophisticates might argue that theory determines the facts you collect, indeed, that if theory building must await completion of fact collection that theory can never be built, since facts are produced by addressing theories with appropriate methods to produce data appropriate to what is studied. It follows that the more scientists

generate facts, the more facts there are to gather. Despite the naivete of his position, Boas's influence on his students was profound. Indeed, it was Boas's fate to be responsible for both the strength and the weakness of early American anthropology: its commendable empiricism and concern for

salvaging descriptions of native cultures before they disappeared, and (unlike Darwin) its inability to generate one theory powerful enough to produce understanding and adequately direct further inquiry.

Boas's own, now extreme, position must be understood as a timely caution based in a reaction to the speculative theory building of the nineteenth-century. While pure Boasian thought did not characterize the

discipline for long, because of its influence on the development of anthropology as a university discipline in the United States, it was a powerful determiner of the image formed for anthropology by other disciplines. The reputation of anthropologists as essentially ethnographers-producers of

description and not theory-is a picture drawn largely from Boas or his students. Boasian skepticism did not in fact characterize the discipline for long. To be sure, Lewis Henry Morgan and other nineteenth-centuryarmchair theorists were dismissed, and quite forcefully too (see Lowie 1920), but theoretical concerns quickly resurfaced. Wissler's theory of diffusion as

explanation of social change in North America was an important early theory, and it was respected by the Boasians because of its heavy empirical base (Wissler 1923). Boas's own The Mind of Primitive Man (Boas 1911) is not merely a refutation of the thought of others but also a powerful statement of a postulated psychic unity of human beings that survives to the present day. Anthropology also inherited the social Darwinism of the nineteenth century, which in the United States led to a concern for ecology and to what were later to emerge as the ecologically oriented theories of Julian Steward and his followers. In the 1920s, Malinowski introduced Freudian theory to anthropology and for better or worse psychoanalytically oriented theory dominated anthropological studies of childhood and personality into the 1970s. Marxism or neo-Marxism came into play at various times, although Marx himself was treated badly or ignored by early twentieth-century anthropologists in the United States because of his reliance on the discredited L. H. Morgan for this theory, and mid-twentieth-century anthropologists seemed unwilling to be publicly associated with Marxism. Boas's student Margaret Mead introduced American psychological theories of adolescence; and his student Douglas Haring in 1940 wrote (with Mary Johnson) a theoretical treatment entitled Order and Possibility in Social Life. While overtly a theoretical book, the latter is still characteristically Boasian in that descriptive data "without interpretive comment" are presented before the theory building section (Haring and Johnson 1940: vii).

No discipline could survive without theoretical structures. All researchers, anthropologists or not, are theorists first and foremost. Boas himself was not against theory, but was rather against bad theory-bad in the sense of




being inadequate to address known facts and, worse, often contradicted by such facts. His naive solution to the problem was to say to not build theory until after the facts are in. His advice, taken literally, would have put an end to scientific inquiry, and within the discipline its form was eventually abandoned for its substance. After all, the descriptive data presented by Haring and Johnson were collected with some idea in mind, and they selected certain facts from all the available descriptions with their theory at least implicitly guiding what they selected.

But others have followed the form of Boas and not the substance. They never reach the theory as even Mead and Haring did. They argue that anthropology must be essentially atheoretical and descriptive. This view is a misunderstanding not only of science in general, but of anthropology in

particular. Parenthetically, it is a fault of educational researchers who have mastered the methods of anthropology but not its theory. To pursue this point, it will be necessary to make explicit the link between theory building and ethnography. These educational ethnographers (and they are often not trained anthropologists) are the ones who have recently come under implicit criticism by Hymes (1980), whose argument is that anthropology and education's promise lies in ethnology, not ethnography. Ethnography is at heart

idiographic, as Radcliffe-Brown defined it: "in an idiographic inquiry the

purpose is to establish as acceptable certain particular or factual propositions or statements (Radcliffe-Brown 1952:1). Ethnology, on the other hand, is nomothetic:

A nomothetic inquiry, on the contrary, has for its purpose to arrive at acceptable general propositions. . . . In anthropology ... the term ethnography applies to what is specifically a mode of idiographic inquiry, the aim of which is to give acceptable accounts of . . . peoples and their social life . . . the ethnographer derives [one's]. . . knowledge, or some major part of it, from direct observation of or contact with the people about whom . . . [one] writes, and not, like the historian, from written records [alone]. (Radcliffe-Brown 1951:2)

Ethnological studies, on the other hand, imply comparative generalization and are overtly theoretical, albeit built upon the facts of ethnographic inquiry.

John Ogbu offers a further distinction between macroethnography and

microethnography. In macroethnographic educational inquiries, for ex-

ample, the researcher goes beyond description of a particular school to examine how schooling is linked to other institutions and "how societal forces, including beliefs and ideologies of the larger society, influence the behaviors of participants in the schools" (Ogbu 1981:13). Since these are comparisons within a culture, we can use the label macroethnography for ethnological inquiries whose comparisons do not cross cultural boundaries, but are made with other levels and other institutions within the same culture.

Interestingly, while known to other researchers for its ethnography, anthropology and education has been from the beginning ethnological. Whiting's pioneering study of the Kwoma (Whiting 1941; reprint 1979) was overtly an effort to apply Hull-Dollard learning theory to derive an under-

standing of education in a New Guinea tribe-the application of a general theory to specific ethnographic data. George Pettit's powerful study of education in native North America was a bold attempt to synthesize the




ethnographic data on North American societies and build conclusions upon them for the purpose of general understanding (Pettit 1946). Although Pettit's work was more overtly comparative than Whiting's, encompassing an entire continent rather than one tribe, Whiting's strong theoretical orientation forced his data into a comparative perspective implicit in the theory itself. Of course, Whiting then turned to studies that were both theoretical and explicitly and broadly comparative in his (with Irving Child) classic 1953 study of child training and personality in 75 societies (Whiting and Child, 1953). Spindler's concern for education as cultural transmission was broadly comparative, examining cultural systems where a wide variety of teaching and learning techniques are utilized (Spindler 1967). Suffice it to say here that the pioneers of the field were overtly ethnological. Only recently, as large numbers of ethnographic studies have been done with little attention to theoretical or comparative issues, has an imbalance been created. It is almost as if for some researchers anthropology is synonymous with ethnography alone. As Hymes has said,

It will serve us well, I think, to make prominent the term 'ethnology' that explicitly invokes comparative generalization. ... An emphasis on the ethnological dimension takes one away from immediate problems and from attempts to offer immediate remedies, but it serves constructive change better in the long run. Emphasis on the ethnological dimension links anthropology of education with social history through examination of the ways in which larger forces for socialization, institutionalization and reproduction of an existing order are expressed and interpreted in specific settings. The longer view seems a surer footing. (Hymes 1980:5)

Implications for Anthropology and Education

In my opening editorial (volume 8, number 3), I identified three hallmarks of anthropology that characterize our approach to education. These can be related to what I have just written. The first hallmark of anthropological approaches to education, and one which emerges directly from the previous discussion, is our insistence that educational phenomena be examined in a cross-cultural framework. As such, anthropologists are not content with mere ethnography of one setting, but wish to place particular settings and behaviors in comparative cross-cultural frames either implicitly or explicitly. Such comparisons are usually broader than those found within "comparative education," because that field is usually limited to societies with Western- influenced schools, whereas the anthropological inquiry is broad enough to include comparison across all human cultures. It should also be noted that when studies of education in the United States occur-and they do with ever- increasing frequency-such research is at least implicitly put into some cross- cultural or cross-ethnic frame. Our work is therefore ultimately ethnologic.

The second hallmark of anthropological approaches to education is the methodology brought to bear on the problems researched. Cultural, social, psychological, and other branches of anthropology, described later, all share a dedication to the efficacy of a variety of techniques subsumed under the label "participant observation." By participant observation we mean not one technique, but rather a melange of strategies aimed at producing an accurate




model of the behaviors of particular people (including the related problems of how people justify their behaviors to themselves and how they describe them to others). Participant observation is often-and to me wrongly-called a qualitative methodology when, in fact, it is a blending of qualitative and quantitative techniques, and always has been (see Hymes 1977). Participant observation is usually carried out in explicit or implicit combination with other strategies designed to elicit different sorts of data. Various subgroups of

anthropology have developed their own ancillary methods in response to the specific problems that each has chosen to solve. For example, psychological anthropology has emphasized the importance of the systematic observation and recording of data, the collection of life and family histories, the use of adaptations of psychologist's assessment techniques, and so on. However, participant observation remains central in anthropological approaches to education, and this means that our work is at base ethnographic.

A third anthropological orientation that sets anthropology apart from other disciplines studying education is that it takes a very broad view of education, insisting that it not be confused with just schooling. This approach is due to the number of ethnographic studies showing education by parents or

peers when no schools are present, as well as the prevalence of theoretical orientations stressing that education must encompass both formal and informal learning. Anthropologists' definitions of education have been so broad as to encompass nearly everything that is learned by a person through a lifetime, whereas definitions used by educators have occasionally been so narrow as to be limited to what a child learns through the formal curriculum of a school. The breadth of the anthropologists' definitions of education is due in

part to the eclecticism that characterizes the discipline itself; but it is also due to the orientation of the particular theoretical models that have been brought to bear on education.

Theoretical Orientations

We turn now to an overview of the current theoretical approaches in

anthropology that have been used or are most likely to be useful to an

anthropology of education. Comitas and Dolgin, in a recent summary for AEQ of an extensive report on anthropology and education for the National Academy of Education, argue that the

approaches to anthropological inquiry with current significance in the United States would perforce include the following [theoretical perspectives]: structural- functionalism (in its various modern guises); psychological anthropology; Weberian theory; neo-Weberian theory (associated particularly with Talcott Parsons and his students); ethnoscience; ethology; interactionalism and ethno- methodology; cultural ecology; structuralism; phenomenology; symbolictheory; and Marxist theory (in its several guises). (Comitas and Dolgin 1978:169)

They also point out that, while several of the approaches are congruent and in fact combinable, others are partially or wholly contradictory. We do not have

space here to describe all in detail, but it is necessary to review the major trends that have been addressed in AEQ's pages. A goal of our editorship has been to include as great a diversity of theoretical viewpoints as possible so as to




improve the richness of the theoretical base upon which anthropology and education can be built.

For many educators, cultural transmission is the most familiar approach, but the term can also be more properly understood as an anthropological definition of education itself. Cultural transmission examines the means by which and the forms through which values and attendant behavior are taught within the specific content of the societal, cultural, or group value system. The study of cultural transmission originated in a subbranch of anthropology labeled culture and personality: a field concerned with the relationship between the individual and the culture. Preeminent in the field of culture and personality were issues that were easily related to education. How did a culture transmit itself from generation to generation (enculturation)? How do individuals adjust to change within their own lifetime (if due to culture contact: acculturation)? Indeed the very label cultural transmission makes the ancestry clear. However, further developments that led to a relabeling of culture and personality as psychological anthropology, or cross-cultural human development, or more specific fields like cognitive anthropology were slow to come into anthropology and education. These perspectives were designed to improve on some of the limitations of the older approaches, some of which continued, according to Comitas and Dolgin, in the culture transmission field. Most notable among these improvements was the re- emphasis that socialization was not a simple transmittal from one generation to another but a dynamic process through which differentiation and change can occur, that not all members of the culture are identical, and that these within-culture differences were worthy of study. These orientations, first articulated by A. F. C. Wallace (Wallace 1961), emphasized that one generation was not a replica of the last, nor was each individual a carbon copy of one's neighbor. Indeed it emphasized that the job of culture was to successfully organize such diversity for its own survival. The diversity that Wallace is addressing goes beyond the discontinuities between statuses or institutions, which after all had been addressed (see Spindler 1967). It is a diversity of acceptable behaviors within such apparent patterns.

A second limitation of the culture transmission approach was suggested here by Ogbu in 1981. Cultural transmission studies of formal education focus almost entirely on school, classroom, home, and playground, and ignore other societal institutions. Although it is recognized that schooling is just one type of cultural transmission, the field has focused on persons who have direct contact with children and has ignored such indirect influences as social class. As Burton's 1978 article pointed out, it has also deemphasized phenomena of childhood per se and has generally ignored the possibility of adult learning. We have published two articles devoted to such criticisms of culture transmission approaches (Knight 1980; Funnel and Smith 1981; see also Spindler and Spindler 1981).

Anthropologists concerned with psychological anthropology had mean- while turned their attention to a systematic examination of cross-cultural variations in learning, socialization, and social change. As I reported on the field for the National Academy of Education, psychological anthropology has a goal of explaining the diversity of human cultures and how cultures, and hence the diversity, are maintained over time (Harrington 1979). The latter ex-




planation lies in the ability of the culture to transmit itself from one generation to another and, in the process, to grow and incorporate change. Psychological anthropology offers perspectives on three areas critical to an anthropology of education: perception and cognition, socialization, and social change. In studies of perception and cognition-the learning process itself-we must be concerned with what individuals learn with, and for these purposes that means what they can be aware of-which is a precondition to learning and what they do with their perceptions. Taken together, studies of perception and cognition describe how people experience their world and think about it and how these processes occur or vary in all human societies (see, e. g., Lave 1977; Akinnaso 1981). For studies of socialization, individuals are seen as becoming members of particular groups, learning which actions and beliefs are acceptable (or possible), how to perceive reality, and change aspects of it (see Mehan 1980). Socialization is conceptualized not as the filling of an empty vessel but as a dynamic process by which individuals learn to structure reality in ways that enable them to sort out and make sense of the diverse stimuli that form their environment, and to behave in ways congruent with others'

expectations of them in the social process (see Lancy 1980). Students of socialization are sometimes criticized for taking conservative

views of the world by seeing societies as if they were in equilibrium or static. This, however, is not due to the socialization model itself, but rather to the view of society held by some authors. In discussing socialization, cultures are often treated as stable, but if one defines society as made up of competing factions in competition for scarce resources, socialization approaches would need to account for how people learned to participate in such competing systems (see Ogbu 1979). In studies of sociocultural change, psychological anthropologists have studied acculturative processes and the dimension of

change in various societies, including its effects upon individual actors. Studies of culture change within psychological anthropology have included studies of change due to contact across cultures (acculturation), as well as change generated within cultures due to revolutionary or revitalizing forces (Wallace 1961; see Sexton 1979, and Sudarkasa 1982).

As Comitas and Dolgin point out, social anthropology, including structural-functional theory, provides tools for describing the social structures that mediate between the more global concepts of society and the individual and that offer the frames within which individuals' choices are constrained in

particular social contexts (Comitas and Dolgin 1978). Before the psychological anthropologist can study learning processes, the social anthropologists' tools are necessary to lay out the frames within which learning occurs and the behaviors they encompass (e.g., Kelley 1977 and Fonseca 1982). There has been a heavy commitment to the analysis of social structure following Firth's definition as the establishment of precedents and providing and limiting the range of alternatives, as distinct from social organization, which involves the decisions that individuals actually make among sets of possible actions yielding information about the systematic ordering of social relations. This emphasis has been particularly noticeable in studies that view classrooms as social structures. But this is only one imbalance. As Bond's 1981 article points out, under the rubric of social anthropology are included a rich diversity of theoretical perspectives not all of which have been fully developed as they




apply to education: structural functional theory (e.g., Sieber 1979; Johnson 1982), Weberian and neo-Weberian theory (e.g., MacGaffey 1982), structuralism (see Studstill 1979), and Marxist theory in its various guises (see especially Hakken 1980). Linkages through social anthropology to sociology of education have been limited, while historically the field shares much with sociology. This parallels an interesting pattern in that psychological anthropologists have been more likely to work collaboratively with psychologists than with psychologists of education.

Symbolic anthropology is related to aspects of both psychological and social anthropology. It is concerned with codes through which meaning originates, is expressed, defined, and changed, and is shared through interaction and communication. It attempts to ascertain the systems of symbolic forms that educators and students use to act and define educational environments. Through the analysis of symbols, linkages between educational institutions and other institutions can be examined and underlying structures revealed. The use of the concept of symbol is close to Bion's notion of transformations in which various realities are transformed into symbolic forms that give them meaning. We include in symbolic anthropology ethnoscience, or inquiries into classification systems and logic in other cultures; interactionalism, or studies of symbolic interaction (Moore 1980); phenomenology (Young 1981); and symbolic theory (Everhart and Doyle 1980; Kapferer 1981).

Implications for Research on Educational Policy

The stuff of anthropology can directly bear on educational policy, and the number of applied anthropologists doing research in education and involved in planning educational programming around the world increases rapidly. The job facing educators is often similar to main-line anthropological skills of description, generalization, and synthesis. The tools of ethnography, the concepts of ethnology, and the broad definition of what is educative provide a basis for educational programming properly grounded in the knowledge about needs, goals, and opportunities of individuals. While anthropology is thoroughly grounded in the particular-how this school, this classroom, this child can be affected-it is wedded to a general frame in which specific knowledge can be generalized and made useful in other settings (e.g., Goldberg 1979; Au 1980; Burton 1980; Lewis 1981).

Policy makers are often wary of anthropology because ethnography can be a time-consuming and expensive methodology, but this is a misunderstanding of what the full potentialities of the discipline can be, as we have tried to argue. The major effects of the discipline to date have been indirect, one might argue: the correction of culture-bound practices in assessment, the use of knowledge about how change happens in complex organizations, the assumptions about the meaning of change (see e.g., Zimmer 1979, and the entire issues numbered 2 and 4 of volume 9). But the real test of the usefulness of anthropology to education will wait for the incorporation of the full range of what anthropology has to offer into the habits of the education policy maker and researcher. As Comitas and Dolgin have said, the ultimate testing of any policy can only take place in a world where people actually live.




In abstracting from reality the anthropologist, like other social scientists, selects some parts for study (and then re-examines them against actual) behaviors and activities. . . . This procedure is conceptually similar to one long employed by those formulating action programs and by those responsible for policy implemen- tation . . . [but] is a research task uniquely suited to the interests and strengths of anthropology. (Comitas and Dolgin 1978)

It is in fact the great strength of anthropology that it simultaneously strives to deal with both the particular and the general. Policy that is only concerned with general rules often falls down in the translation of general into specific times and places. Policy generated totally from particular problems is of dubious utility in other settings. It is the anthropologists' unique perspective that enables him to see both the general and the particular. As Conrad

Arensberg argued years ago, anthropologists' views of particular communities allow them a perspective that examines how the general laws of the larger society are translated into action at the local level. Indeed, Arensberg and Solon Kimball (1965) were to argue that it is only at the community level that such an examination can be made. Congress, for example, might think that it had successfully implemented desegregation in schools by mandating certain criteria in terms of percentages of students who are black or white, and so on, in each school. But the ethnography of a particular school shows that within each grade there is one all-white class and the rest of the classes are all

minority. Is this integration? Or take an evaluation of a federally funded

program such as Title I. Such evaluations have taken place on the basis of the effect of the program on the child, without ever bothering to observe whether in fact the particular programming that was funded was implemented! The real potential of anthropology for policy makers is that it makes possible, following established methodological and disciplined procedures, the examination of the particular cases as tests of the need for and efficacy of policies made at other levels, and that it does so through direct observation of and involvement with those most affected by the policies themselves. While some have criticized the field for taking so long to collect data that there can be limited policy impact, it seems that a more reasoned criticism might equally address the tendency of policy makers to intrude on the basis of their own

perceptions of others' needs, and to implement general policy without

adequate knowledge of its impact on the particular people involved, or of such people's own perceptions of their need.

Endnotes

1. This article has been substantially revised from my article appearing in the fifth edition of the Encyclopedia of Educational Research (AERA, 1982).

2. For the purposes of this editorial, we will exclude anthropological linguistics from our discussion since it is has been dealt with admirably by Hymes (1977), and we will exclude physical anthropology and archaeology because of their limited relevance to research in education.




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Sexton, James D. 1979 Education and Acculturation in Highland Guatemala. Anthropology and

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1979 Classmates as Workmates: Informal Peer Activity in the Elementary School.

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1979 Education in a Luba Secret Society. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 10(2):67-79.

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1961 Culture and Personality. New York: Random House. Whiting, J.

1941 Becoming a Kwoma: Teaching and Learning in a New Guinea Tribe. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. (reprinted by AMS Press, New York, 1979).

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and Education Quarterly 12(2):122-144. Zimmer, Richard

1979 Necessary Directions for Anthropological Research on Child Care in the United States. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 10(3):139-165.

COUNCIL ON ANTHROPOLOGY AND EDUCATION

Anthropology and Education Questionnaire: A Report

This paper analyzes questionnaire responses from teachers of educational anthropology courses to determine the goals, content, instructor back- ground, student profile, and bibliography associated with such courses. The findings note that most courses are of a survey type, focusing on cross-cultural comparative education. There is homogenous use of texts, with the most widely used being paperback case studies. Most students are education majors and more than half are graduate students. Most instructors have combined anthropology and education degrees.

In 1968, during the meetings of the American Anthropological Associa- tion held in Seattle, the Council on Anthropology and Education (then called the Ad Hoc Group in Anthropology and Education) came into being. As described on the inside front cover of this journal, the group is "a professional association of anthropologists and educational researchers concerned with the application of anthropology to research and development in education." The response to the council since its inception is indicative of the exceptional interest in the field. By June 1969, membership numbered a prodigious 1,575. No doubt, part of this initial response was a "bandwagon" effect related to the

availability of educational research funds, while fadishness and such issues as civil rights and the Vietnam War may have also contributed to swelling the number. There are, nevertheless, currently some 1,100 members, a figure that is approximately a quarter as large as that of participants in the parent society,

12(4):300-303. Studstill, John D.

1979 Education in a Luba Secret Society. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 10(2):67-79.

Sudarkasa, Niara 1982 Sex Roles, Education, and Development in Africa. Anthropology and Education

Quarterly 13(3):278. Wallace, A.

1961 Culture and Personality. New York: Random House. Whiting, J.

1941 Becoming a Kwoma: Teaching and Learning in a New Guinea Tribe. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. (reprinted by AMS Press, New York, 1979).

Whiting, J., and I. Child 1953 Child Training and Personality. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Wissler, C. 1923 Man and Culture. New York: Thomas Crowell.

Young, R. E. 1981 The Epistemic Discourse of Teachers: An Ethnographic Study. Anthropology

and Education Quarterly 12(2):122-144. Zimmer, Richard

1979 Necessary Directions for Anthropological Research on Child Care in the United States. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 10(3):139-165.

COUNCIL ON ANTHROPOLOGY AND EDUCATION

Anthropology and Education Questionnaire: A Report

This paper analyzes questionnaire responses from teachers of educational anthropology courses to determine the goals, content, instructor back- ground, student profile, and bibliography associated with such courses. The findings note that most courses are of a survey type, focusing on cross-cultural comparative education. There is homogenous use of texts, with the most widely used being paperback case studies. Most students are education majors and more than half are graduate students. Most instructors have combined anthropology and education degrees.

In 1968, during the meetings of the American Anthropological Associa- tion held in Seattle, the Council on Anthropology and Education (then called the Ad Hoc Group in Anthropology and Education) came into being. As described on the inside front cover of this journal, the group is "a professional association of anthropologists and educational researchers concerned with the application of anthropology to research and development in education." The response to the council since its inception is indicative of the exceptional interest in the field. By June 1969, membership numbered a prodigious 1,575. No doubt, part of this initial response was a "bandwagon" effect related to the

availability of educational research funds, while fadishness and such issues as civil rights and the Vietnam War may have also contributed to swelling the number. There are, nevertheless, currently some 1,100 members, a figure that is approximately a quarter as large as that of participants in the parent society,



anthropology and education: issues from the issues

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