Despite the multiple and various “critiques in anthropology [that] have largely dethroned the concept of culture from its once-central position in anthropological theory” (Gershon and Taylor 2008: 417), culture remains an enduring and relevant notion in my work on education in America. I take seriously that “[a]s anthropologists, we must face culture if only…because facing culture will reveal something about ‘education’ that will remain hidden if we fall for equating education with schooling” (Varenne 2008:356). My research considers culture not as the “self-enclosed, bounded, “thing-like” reality posited as separate, distinct, and relatively autonomous” against which De Genova (2005) rages, but as the “human construction that resists human action” (Varenne and McDermott 1998: xiv). Simply, despite De Genova’s (2005) argument that the accumulated connotations of culture have rendered it a useless analytical category, “whatever the infirmities of the concept of ‘culture’ (‘cultures,’ ‘cultural forms;…) there is nothing for it but to persist in spite of them (Geertz 1995:15).

Culture, in my studies of education, is not about individuals learning, but rather it is about educational policy, educational practices, and their products—cultural forms that both constrain and enable. Culture takes into account what has been made for us, what we are now making, and also the possibilities we may make in the future. It is “the product of what people continually construct with what they find always already there around them” (Varenne and McDermott 1998:3). Culture is about people making situations together, engaging in activities, and accomplishing things, together. Culture is a process in which actants—both human and non-human—interact on the same levels, often arbitrarily, and with the same ability to create change. The arbitrariness of culture requires actors to figure out what is happening in the circumstances shaped by policy; it demands that they, in often very different ways, orient their actions to deal with the uncertainties of policy. In my research, culture consists of linked individuals and objects, actors who are acting and being acted on in the cause of attending to a particular version of some cultural phenomenon, such as school “failure.

References:

De Genova, Nicholas. 2005.Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “illegality” in Mexican Chicago. Durham, Duke University Press.

Geertz, Cliford. 1995. After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gerson, Ilana and Janelle S. Taylor. 2008. Introduction to “In Focus: Culture in the Spaces of No Cuture.” American Anthropologist 100(4):417-421.

Varenne, Hervé. 2008. Reflections from the Field: Culture, Education, Anthropology. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 39(4):356-368.

Varenne, Hervé and Ray McDermott. 1998. Successful Failure: The School America Builds. Boulder, CO: Westview.