write a replay about a reflection

N O N - W E S T E R N E D U C A T I O N A L T R A D I T I O N S

TIMOTHY REAGAN

1 An Introduction to the Study of

Non-Western and Indigenous Educational Traditions: A Philosophical Starting Point

We find it pedagogically tragic that various indigenous knowledges of how action affects reality in particular locales have been dismissed from academic curricula. Such ways of knowing and acting could contribute so much to the educational experiences of all students; but because of the rules of evidence and the dominant epistemologies of Western knowledge production, such understandings are deemed irrelevant by the academic gatekeepers.. . . Our intention is to challenge the academy and its "nor- mal science" with the questions indigenous knowledges raise about the nature of our existence, our consciousness, our knowledge production, and the "globalized" future.

—Semali and Kincheloe (1999, p. 15)

I fully concur with the sentiments expressed so clearly by Ladislaus Semali and Joe Kincheloe, and this book is a result of roughly the same impetus that drove them to produce their book, What Is Indigenous Knowledge? Voices from the Academy.1 Most books and courses that deal with the history and philosophy of education include few, if any, references to indigenous educa- tional ideas and practices in Africa and the Americas, and relatively few refer- ences to those of Asia. Although for some time now there have been calls for the inclusion of the perspectives of women and people of color in studies of the history and philosophy of education, such efforts, where they have taken place, have often entailed little more than the addition of vignettes indicating the contributions of members of such groups to the Western tradition. In other words, the idea that there might be valuable insights to be gained from a serious examination of non-Western educational traditions themselves—in- deed, that these traditions might be fully comparable to the Western tradition in their unique richness and diversity—is one that rarely has been voiced. Furthermore, where non-Western educational ideas and practices have been discussed, they are often subjected to a treatment roughly comparable to the

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2 Chapter 1

"Orientalism" discussed by the late Edward Said with regard to the Western (and specifically, Anglo-French-American) response to Islam and the Islamic world. According to Said:

Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, au- thorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient... . European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even under- ground self.2

In other words, when scholars do try to examine non-Western educational thought and practice, all too often they tend to do so through a lens that not only colors what they see, but also one that reifies the object of study—mak- ing it, in essence, part of "the Other" and hence alien. Reification results not only in the distortion of what one is trying to understand, but also in its sub- jugation to one's own preexisting values and norms. This problem is not, of course, unique to the study of educational thought and practice; it is a com- mon criticism of Western scholarship about the non-Western world in gen- eral. For example, in his discussion of the study of indigenous African relig- ions by Western scholars, the Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek wrote of the' "systematic and intensive use of dirty gossip" in place of solid and sensitive scholarship.3 In a similar vein, the anthropologist Adam Kuper wrote of The Invention of Primitive Society by 19th- and 20th-century anthropologists and social theorists in the West.4 In terms of traditional African educational prac- tices, A . Babs Fafunwa commented that "because indigenous education failed to conform to the ways of the Westernised system, some less well-informed writers have considered it primitive, even savage and barbaric. But such con- tentions should be seen as the product of ignorance and due to a total misun- derstanding of the inherent value of informal education."5 At the present time, there is perhaps no better place to see this tendency at work than in the examination and treatment of the Musl im world and Islamic tradition in the West. As Joshua Cohen and Ian Lague noted in their "Preface" to Kaled Abou El Fadl's recent book, The Place of Tolerance in Islam:

Since September 11, Western discussions of Islam have typically been con- ducted through a contest of caricatures. Some analysts present Islamic extrem- ism as a product of a "clash of civilizations" that pits Eastern despotism against Western individualism. Others see such extremism as a grim "blowback" of America's cold-war foreign policy. Engagement with the Muslim faith com- monly takes the form of simplistic pronouncements about [the] "essence" of Islam: Osama bin Laden either represents the true message of the Prophet or corrupts a "religion of peace" . . . . These discussions are driven more by West-

Ik PMImphloil Starting Point i

i uni ci us "are Muslims dangerous or not?"—than by a serious effort to st.tnd Islam and the place of toleration and moral decency in its concep-

tion ui ,i proper human life.''

Hilt It 'iiinplislic misunderstandings and misrepresentations remain all too ttllllliinn -is we seek to understand the Other, and it is as a challenge to such flllilliideistandings, in part, that this book has been written.

Tin- same, of course, can be argued with respect to Western treatment of ( | U l l H , ' " , , l l s educational ideas and practices in Asia, the Americas, and else-

1nr. In short, when we speak of the history of educational thought and "Mi I lit*, what we have actually meant in the past has been the history 0 f Wesr-

I nliUiitiniuil thought and practice, and the effect of our meaning has been, I fini'iiu1, to dismiss, or at the very least to delegitimatize, the many alterna-

HVM In I he Western tradition that have developed, evolved, and thrived else- in (I - world. In other words, it is discourse itself—the way that one

|lk«. thinks about, and conceptualizes educational thought and practice— M l U ill issue. As Stephen Ball noted in a discussion of the work of the French

philosopher Michel Foucault, "Discourse is a central concept in Foucault's iHnlylii al framework. Discourses are about what can be said and thought, but

itliout who can speak, when, and with what authority. Discourses em- uly miMiiing and social relationships, they constitute both subjectivity and Wfi relations."7

The underlying purpose of this book, then, is to begin the process by Whhli I lie existing discourse in the history of educational thought and prac- f | l f inn he expanded in such a way as to provide a starting point for the de- 'Vflnpnu'iil of a more open and diverse view of the development of various

[iprtitiches to educational thought and practice. Needless to say, this work lllleiuled to be only a beginning. If the study of the various educational

fUlllllons discussed here is to be taken seriously, then these traditions (and "(liy others as well) wil l require, and are certainly entitled to, the same sort

C O I K that has long been accorded the Western tradition. Furthermore, IJVfll their differences from the Western tradition, it is essential that we all

If Hill to invite and listen to the "multiple voices" and perspectives that can fnll | | lilfii o u r understanding of these traditions, just as we must learn to ftVMtylii/.c that different groups may, as a consequence of their sociocultural UltUexIs and backgrounds, possess ways of knowing that, although different

our own, may be every bit as valuable and worthwhile as those to Which we are accustomed.8 As Carol Gilligan suggested with respect to "Woiniin's place in man's life cycle" in In a Different Voice: Psychological f / l W y and Women's Development:

Al « lime when efforts are being made to eradicate discrimination between the lexett in the search for social equality and justice, the differences between the

4 Chapter t

sexes are being rediscovered in the social sciences. This discovery occurs when theories formerly considered to be sexually neutral in their scientific objectivity are found instead to reflect a consistent observational and evaluative bias. Then the presumed neutrality of science, like that of language itself, gives way to the recognition that the categories of knowledge are human constructions. The fascination with point of view that has informed the fiction of the twentieth century and the corresponding recognition of the relativity of judgment infuse our scientific understanding as well when we begin to notice how accustomed we have become to seeing life through men's eyes.9

A very similar kind of argument can be made with respect to the differ- ences in perspective and worldview in various non-Western cultural and his- toric traditions. To be sure, at the present time, this argument remains largely speculative in nature with respect to many of the traditions to be discussed in this book, although in the case of women there is now a growing body of fairly compelling empirical evidence. M y hope would be that others, from a wide array of different backgrounds, would challenge, modify, and add to the base that is offered here, and someday the study of the Aztec calmecac and tel- pochcalli, of the imperial Chinese examination system and its content, and the role of various African initiation schools, among others, might be as com- monly taught in courses in the history of educational thought as the study of Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey is today. Having said this, I also want to stress that I am not arguing that Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey (among others) should be eliminated; they, and many others, are important figures in the de- velopment of our own historical tradition, and certainly merit serious study. M y focus here is not on replacing the Western tradition, but rather on trying to expand our understanding of education, broadly conceived, through the examination and study of other approaches to educational thought and prac- tice with which many of us tend to be less familiar. Ultimately, of course, as we better understand the educational traditions of other societies and cul- tures, we will also be forced to reexamine and to reflect on our own tradition in somewhat different ways—and this will be immensely beneficial to our un- derstanding of our own traditions.

THE CHALLENGE OF ETHNOCENTRISM -J

As we begin the process of trying to broaden our perspectives on the history of educational thought and practice, it is important for us to understand that the activity in which we are engaged will inevitably involve challenging both our own ethnocentrism and the ethnocentrism of others. Basically, ethno- centrism refers to the tendency to view one's own cultural group as superior to others—a tendency common to most, i f not all, human societies. How-

A Phllotophiotl Starting Point 5

ever, in contemporary scholarly discourse, one seldom comes across such blatant ethnocentrism. Rather, what is far more common is simply the prac- tice of using one's own society and sociocultural practices as the norm by which other societies are viewed, measured, and evaluated. Ethnocentrism of this kind takes two somewhat distinct forms: cultural ethnocentrism and epistemological ethnocentrism.1 0

Cultural ethnocentrism refers to manifestations of ethnocentrism in indi- vidual scholars and their work, as well as to the sociocultural context that has helped to form and support such individual and idiosyncratic biases. In other words, we see examples of cultural ethnocentrism when writers and scholars allow common biases, prejudices, and assumptions to color their work in various ways. Racism, sexism, linguicism, ageism, and so on, all contribute to cultural ethnocentrism, most often in ways that are uncon- scious. Thus, the topics that a scholar chooses to explore, the questions that are asked about the topic, the framework within which hypotheses are con- structed, how conflicting evidence is weighed, and even what counts as evi- dence, can all be affected by personal biases.

This brings us to the second sort of ethnocentrism, epistemological ethno- centrism, which deals not so much with individual assumptions and biases, but rather with those common to an entire field of study. With epistemo- logical ethnocentrism, we are concerned with what the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called the dominant "paradigm" in our own field of study.11 A paradigm, on Kuhn's account, is far more than merely a model or a theory. As Patton explained:

A paradigm is a world view, a general perspective, a way of breaking down the complexity of the real world. As such, paradigms are deeply embedded in the socialization of adherents and practitioners: paradigms tell them what is im- portant, legitimate, and reasonable. Paradigms are also normative, telling the practitioner what to do without the necessity of long existential or epistemo- logical consideration. But it is this aspect of paradigms that constitutes both their strength and their weakness—their strength in that it makes action possi- ble, their weakness in that the very reason for action is hidden in the unques- tioned assumptions of the paradigm.12

Thus, the dominant paradigm in a field of study at any given point in time essentially establishes the parameters within which "legitimate" discourse may take place. Kuhn explained the significance and power of the dominant paradigm in a field of study as follows:

Scientists work from models acquired through education and through subse- quent exposure to the literature often without quite knowing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community

6 Chapter t

paradigms That scientists do not usually ask or debate what makes a partic- ular problem or solution legitimate tempts us to suppose that, at least intu- itively, they know the answer. But it may only indicate that neither the question nor the answer is felt to be relevant to their research. Paradigms may be prior to, more binding, and more complete than any set of rules for research that could be unequivocally abstracted from them.13

In the case of the study of the history and philosophy of education, the dominant paradigm has focused almost entirely on a single educational tradi- tion (albeit one with many branches), to the exclusion of virtually all others, as was mentioned earlier in this chapter. The study of traditional, indigenous educational practices has been reduced to the study of "socialization" and "acculturation," and has been left to anthropologists and others. Because scholars have tended to equate "education" with "schooling," and because they have consistently focused on the role of literacy and a literary tradition, many important and interesting—indeed, fascinating—traditions have been seen as falling outside of the parameters of "legitimate" study in the history and philosophy of education. Furthermore, even in the study of the Western educational tradition itself, scholars have been somewhat remiss in examin- ing aspects of the traditions that seem to fall outside the bounds of their ex- pectations. For example, even recent works concerned with educational thought and practice in classical antiquity generally ignore the formidable work of Martin Bernal, who has, since the early 1980s, been arguing that the civilization of classical Greece has deep and important roots in Afroasiatic cultures.14 Similarly, until fairly recently, the contributions of women to the Western educational tradition were largely ignored, in part as a result of over- looking the contributions of specific individual women, but even more, by defining education in such a way as to eliminate from discussion what might be called the "reproductive" (as opposed to the "productive") aspects of edu- cation.1 5 Thus, although throughout virtually all of the Western historical tra- dition women have played the central role in raising children and in educat- ing them, this was largely ignored in formal studies of the development of the Western educational tradition.1 6

Although dangerous and pernicious, cultural ethnocentrism is actually somewhat easier to challenge than epistemological ethnocentrism, because individual scholars in a particular field at the same point in time may differ to a considerable degree with respect to issues related to cultural ethnocentrism. Thus, many scholars today are far more sensitive to issues of gender, race, and ethnicity than others, while nonetheless working within the same epistemo- logically ethnocentric paradigm.

A n example in which both cultural and epistemological ethnocentrism can be clearly seen was written in the mid-1970s by H . M . Phillips, and is pre- sented here:

A Phlloiophleal Starting Point 7

In Africa, education was extremely limited and associated with the very small numbers who were in contact with Islam over the land routes and later with Iluropeans in the ports or administrative centres already starting to be set up in those parts of Africa which were colonized. But basically the continent as a whole was still completely underdeveloped and tribal. African potential, though great, was late in being mobilized.17

The epistemological ethnocentrism of this passage can be seen, for instance, in its conflation of "education" with "formal schooling" to the obvious detri- tuent of traditional education in Africa, which has been informal in nature .itid closely tied to the social life of the community(5?By assuming, as Phillips i l i iMi ia t "education" or>A "crhnnHnj" oro cynr.nymnn<; mnstrnf tfr, c\rtf djp- tnaticaUy distorts the reality of the African experience. The passage also dis- plays elements of cultural ethnocentrism, especially in its presentation of colonialism and imperialism (whether Islamic or Western) as essentially pro- gressive in nature, whereas indigenous practices, ideals, and so on are seen as "underdeveloped" and "primitive"—spoken of only in terms of "potential," suggesting the need for "development."

In short, as one considers both cultural and epistemological ethnocentrism in the study of the history of educational thought and practice, there is good reason to believe that perhaps it is time to begin to challenge the dominant paradigm in the field. This might be done in roughly the same way that an in- creasing number of educational researchers have challenged the traditional, essentially positivistic, paradigm in educational research, seeking to replace it with or, at the very least, supplement it with a naturalistic, interpretivist qual- itative paradigm.1 9 In the case of the history and philosophy of education, the paradigmatic challenge must rest in large part on the reality of diversity, and the lack of any "universal" tradition—a theme discussed by Paul Ricoeur, in his book History and Truth: "When we discover that there are several cultures instead of just one and consequently at the time when we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, be it illusory or real, we are threatened with destruction by our own discovery. Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves are an 'other' among others."20

The recognition that one's own tradition is simply one among many (and not necessarily even primus inter pares.21 at that) wi l l for many be difficult to accept, and yet that is precisely what is required i f the study of the history of educational thought and practice is to be more than a parochial artifact. Fur- thermore, in order to better understand the many educational traditions that exist and have existed in the world, it will be necessary to expand substantially (he methodological tools at the disposal of scholars, using not only the stan- dard methods of historical and philosophical scholarship, but increasingly, those of such disciplines as anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, sociol- ogy, comparative literature, archeology, and others. Our scholarship, in

8 Chapter 1

short, must become far more interdisciplinary in both theory and practice than has been true in the past.

THE ROLE OF CONSTRUCTIVE EPISTEMOLOGY

IN THE STUDY OF INDIGENOUS EDUCATIONAL TRADITIONS

As our discussion of ethnocentrism in general, and of epistemological ethno- centrism in particular, makes clear, a critical component of the study of non- Western educational traditions must necessarily be that of epistemology, es- pecially with respect to our view of the nature of knowledge. In this book, two important assumptions are made about knowledge: First, knowledge is, to some degree, relative, in that it is both reasonable and indeed appropriate for us to talk about "multiple perspectives" on reality.2 2 Thus, in order to make sense of the events and debates of the American Civi l Rights Movement, for instance, one would need to understand the perspectives of the various actors in that movement: civil rights workers (both black and white), hard-core seg- regationists, politicians, and everyday black and white people living in differ- ent parts of the United States. It is important to note that although we need to recognize all of these perspectives (and indeed many others as well), that does not mean that we presuppose that all perspectives should be treated as equally valid. To grant the legitimacy of an individual's or a group's perspective is by no means the same as granting its accuracy.23 In short, what we do when we accept the idea of "multiple perspectives" is to admit that a single event or set of events can be understood in very different ways by different groups and in- dividuals—and that it is important to take into account as many of these dif- ferent perspectives as possible in any serious examination of the event or events.

Second, an assumption is made here that knowledge is constructed by each individual. 2 4 In other words, "knowledge" is not something that is "out there" that we need to grasp or obtain; rather, it is something that we our- selves build based on our own background, experiences, prior understand- ings, and the data before us. This means that each of us wil l construct our own knowledge in what is inevitably a unique manner, and each of us will , therefore, have idiosyncratically derived understandings of reality (and, hence, we see the need for the recognition of "multiple perspectives"). It is important to stress here that constructivist epistemology is more than sim- ply an alternative to other approaches to epistemology; rather, it entails a rejection of some of the core assumptions that have been shared by Western epistemology for some two and a half millennia. 2 5 As von Glasersfeld ar- gued, "The crucial fact [in understanding constructivism is] that the con- structivist theory of knowing breaks with the epistemological tradition in

A Philosophical Starting Point

philosophy,"-" which is why it has been labeled not merely postmodernist, but postepistemological by some writers.2 7

Up to this point, we have discussed constructivism as a single entity; in re- ality, it has become fairly commonplace in discussions of constructivism to distinguish between what are often taken to be two fundamentally distinct, competing types of constructivism.2 8 The first type of constructivism, radical constructivism, is fundamentally an epistemological construct that has been most clearly and forcefully advocated in the work of Ernst von Glasersfeld.29 Radical constructivism has its philosophical roots in Piaget's genetic episte- mology,3 0 and is essentially a cognitive view of learning in which "students actively constructJheir ways of knowing as they strivp tn bf pffecjjve by re- stonng coherence to the worlds of their personal experience."31 Radical con- structivism is premised on the belief that an individual's knowledge can never be a "true" representation of reality (i.e., in an observer-independent sense), but is rather a construction of the world that the individual experiences. In other words, knowledge is not something that is passively received by the learner; it is, quite the contrary, the result of active mental work on the part of the learner. Thus, from a radical constructivist perspective, knowledge is not something that can merely be conveyed from teacher to student and any ped- agogical approach that presumes otherwise must be rejected.

The alternative to radical constriidiyisnyis social constructivism, which has the work of Lev Vygotsky as its primary theoretical foundation 3 2 Social constructivism, while accepting the notion that individuals dp jpdped rrm- struct their own knowledge, argues that the process of knowledge mnstmr- tion inevitably takes place in a sociocultural context, and therefore knowledge is in fact socially constructed. As Driver and her colleagues argued with re- spect to science education, "It is important . . . to appreciate that scientific knowledge is both symbolic in nature and also socially negotiated. . . . The objects of science are not phenomena of nature but constructs that are ad- vanced by the scientific community to interpret nature."3 3

The tension between radical and social constructivism, between the per- sonal and the social construction of knowledge, is to a significant extent more apparent than real, and in any event, is certainly amenable to resolution on a practical level, criticisms to the contrary notwithstanding.3 4 As Paul Cobb as- serted, "The sociocultural and cognitive constructivist perspectives each con- stitute the background for the other,"3 5 and von Glasersfeld recognized that "we must generate an explanation of how 'others' and the 'society' in which we find ourselves living can be conceptually constructed on the basis of our subjective experiences."36 Ultimately, even D. C. Phillips, a leading critic of the philosophical foundations of radical constructivism,3 7 agreed:

It is worth stressing that these philosophical issues do not have to be settled be- fore the business of education can proceed. I suspect that von Glasersfeld and I

10 Chapter 1

are very close in the kinds of educational attitudes and practices that we en- dorse. If you are about to undergo brain surgery, you do not have to wait until surgeons reach agreement about the thorny philosophical issues surrounding the body-mind problem. Similarly, a student can manipulate geological sam- ples without having to settle upon a defensible philosophical account about the nature of the existence of these samples.38

Perhaps the most reasonable way to articulate the common, shared ele- ments of radical and social constructivism is to talk about learning as "socially mitigated but personally constructed," a formulation that at the very least moves us away from a strong bifurcation of radical and social constructivism. Finally, it is important to keep in mind that not only is reality a social and in- dividual construction in a certain sense, but further, that any academic disci- pline is itself the result of both personal and social construction.3 9 As Gunnarsson argued:

Scientific language and discourse emerge in a cooperative and competitive struggle among scientists to create the knowledge base of their field, to estab- lish themselves in relation to other scientists and to other professional groups, and to gain influence and control over political and socioeconomic means. In every strand of human communication, language and discourse play a role in the formation of a social and societal reality and identity. This is also true both of the different professional and vocational cultures within working and public life and of the formation of different academic cultures.40

THE CONCEPT OF "TRADITION" AND ITS LIMITS

This book is about non-Western educational traditions, and throughout "tradition" is discussed in a number of different ways. Patricia Weibust com- pellingly argued that the concept of "tradition" is a far more complex one than is generally recognized. She suggested that "tradition" can come in three very different, and in fact logically distinct, forms: the historical tradition (i.e., what really took place historically), the defined tradition (i.e., what members of the culture believe to have taken place historically), and the con- temporary tradition (i.e., the way in which the tradition is manifested in peo- ple's lives today), and furthermore, that "tradition" is best understood not in static terms, but rather as an ongoing process.41 This distinction is a powerful and useful one as a heuristic device and analytic tool. However, in practice the three kinds of tradition are often far from distinct, and it is very difficult in- deed to distinguish among them in many of the instances that we examine. Our task becomes even more complex in this regard when one considers that some of the traditions that we study here are living ones, whereas others con- tinue to exist in very truncated forms, i f at all. Thus, although we are con-

A Philosophical Starting Point II

cerned primarily with the historical tradition in each of the cases wc examine, the defined tradition may well function as a limitation to our understanding, and in some cases, confusion may arise between the historical, defined, and contemporary traditions. Finally, as we talk about different traditions, it is important that we keep in mind that traditions are in fact processes that con- tinually change, develop, and evolve and that, at best, we are looking at a snapshot of a tradition at a particular point in time.

THE WESTERN-NON-WESTERN DICHOTOMY

The title and organization of this book would appear to create a dichotomy be- tween Western and non-Western traditions and practices. It is important that we note that such a dichotomy, although heuristically useful, is in fact mislead- ing. As Swartz noted, "The categories 'Western' and 'Non-Western' are our creations, and reflect neither the diversity of beliefs (often mutually contradic- tory) that people hold, nor the commonalities that exist across apparently very different groups of people."42 The problem is really one of oversimplification: Although there may be certain similarities from one non-Western culture to another, there are also bound to be significant and relevant differences, just as there are significant and relevant differences among different Western tradi- tions. Furthermore, individuals often tolerate (and even thrive on) mutually contradictory beliefs—thus, people in Western traditions may well hold stereo- typic non-Western beliefs, and vice versa. Finally, the distinction itself is poten- tially problematic ideologically, in that the terms "Western" and "non- Western" may (and often do) reflect biased and loaded assumptions. In other words, even the labels that we are using may lead us to errors akin to those identified by Said with respect to "Orientalism."

If the labels "Western" and "non-Western" are such a problem, then why use them? The answer to this very reasonable question is actually quite sim- ple: The biases inherent in the terms are in fact a significant and telling com- ponent of the phenomenon that we are concerned with studying. The as- sumptions and stereotypes that need to be challenged are already present, and if our language reflects them, then it may be useful to recognize the biases that are inherent in the language that we use. Thus, what begins as a false dichot- omy can emerge as an effective way of challenging and reforming racist and ethnocentric assumptions and biases, both conceptually and linguistically.

LEARNING FROM ORAL TRADITIONS

An important element in the process of expanding our perspectives on the history of educational thought and practice is learning more about the many ways in which different societies pass on their traditions, histories, and so on.

12 Chapter f

Although many of the societies that we will examine in this book do have written traditions, similar to those found in the Western tradition, others have relied primarily or exclusively on oral traditions. Written traditions have many advantages, but so do oral ones—advantages that our own society, for the most part, lost long ago. In his landmark work, Oral Tradition as History, Jan Vansina argued:

The marvel of oral tradition, some will say its curse, is this: messages from the past exist, are real, and yet are not continuously accessible to the senses. Oral traditions make an appearance only when they are told. For fleeting moments they can be heard, but most of the time they dwell only in the minds of people. The utterance is transitory, but the memories are not. No one in oral societies doubts that memories can be faithful repositories which contain the sum total of past human experience and explain the how and why of present day condi- tions. Tete are ne nne: "Ancient things are today" or "History repeats itself. . . . How it is possible for a mind to remember and out of nothing to spin com- plex ideas, messages, and instructions for living, which manifest continuity over time, is one of the greatest wonders one can study, comparable only to hu- man intelligence and thought itself. Because the wonder is so great, it is also very complex. Oral tradition should be central to students of culture, of ideol- ogy, of society, of psychology, of art, and, finally, of history.45

One might well add, of students of education, because education plays a key role both in the perpetuation of any oral tradition (as it does in the perpetua- tion of any written tradition) and in helping to determine the content of that tradition.4 4

It is important to understand that oral and written traditions are different, and each is useful and valuable in its own right. Neither is intrinsically supe- rior to the other in all ways; each has its own strengths and each has its own limitations.4 5 It is also important for us to bear in mind that much of the Western tradition has its origins in oral traditions—the epic poetry of Homer, 4 6 Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry,4 7 the Irish epics,4 8 even the synoptic Gospels,4 9 all have their origins in oral, rather than written, traditions.5 0

Finally, the fact that we attempt to discuss oral traditions in a written text is itself something of a paradox. As Karl Kroeber commented about the study of American Indian tales, "One must ask i f any written text can accurately pro- duce an oral recitation."5 1 The problem is that oral literature is, by its very na- ture, dependent on performance. As Ruth Finnegan explained in her discus- sion of oral literature in Africa:

Oral literature is by definition dependent on a performer who formulates it in words on a specific occasion—there is no other way in which it can be realized as a literary product . . . without its oral realization and direct rendition by

A Philosophical Starting Point 13

singer or speaker, an unwritten literary piece cannot easily be said to have any continued or independent existence at all. In this respect the parallel is less to written literature than to music and dance; for these too are art forms which in the last analysis are actualized in and through their performance and, further- more, in a sense depend on repeated performances for their continued exis- tence.52

Thus, when we discuss oral traditions in a book like this one, we are at best dealing with a mere shadow of the true reality of the oral text (somewhat anal- ogous to Plato's allegory of the cave). The risks of such an undertaking are made clear in the following story, an example of dissident humor in the for- mer Soviet Union:

Standing on Lenin's tomb in Red Square, Stalin was acknowledging the accla- mation of the masses. Suddenly he raised his hands to silence the crowd.

"Comrades," he cried. "A most historic event! A telegram of congratula- tions from Leon Trotsky!"

The crowd could hardly believe its ears. It waited in hushed anticipation. "loseph Stalin," read Stalin. "The Kremlin. Moscow. You were right and I

was wrong. You are the true heir of Lenin. I must apologize. Trotsky." A roar erupted from the crowd. But in the front row a little Jewish tailor gestured frantically to Stalin. "Psst!" he cried. "Comrade Stalin." Stalin leaned over to hear what he had to say. "Such a message! But you read it without the right feeling." Stalin once again raised his hands to the still excited crowd. "Comrades!" he

announced. "Here is a simple worker, a Communist, who says I did not read Trotsky's message with the right feeling. I ask that worker to come up on the podium himself to read Trotsky's telegram."

The tailor jumped up on the podium and took the telegram into his hands. He read: "loseph Stalin. The Kremlin. Moscow."

Then he cleared his throat and sang out: "You were right and I was wrong7. You are the true heir of Lenin? 7 must apologize7""

Needless to say, the tailor's rendition of the telegram conveyed a radically different meaning to the text—a meaning disguised by the written text, and best made clear in an oral rendition. The use of italics in the text may help us to reproduce the oral event, but it requires a performance to really make sense. It is just such risks that we must be sensitive to when we examine any oral tradition or written rendering of an oral "text." In addition, it is essential that we keep in mind "that all texts are in some sense intertextual, all dis- courses interdiscursive, requiring a Foucaultian archaeology to uncover and explicate how it is that they are multiply formed."5 4

14 Chapter 1

E.T., THE LOST CONTINENT OF ATLANTIS, AND CANNIBALISM:

SOME REFLECTIONS ON CREDIBILITY AND "OTHERNESS"

One of the more interesting aspects of studying non-Western cultures is the variety of ways in which the impressive accomplishments of such cultures and societies have often been either rejected altogether, diminished in impor- tance, or attributed to other civilizations and sources. For example, the ruins and ancient mine shafts of Great Zimbabwe in southern Africa were claimed to have been the creation of some mysterious civilization in the distant past, perhaps related to the Carthaginians or some other ancient people, perhaps even the product of some extraterrestrial culture—anyone, in short, other than the ancestors of the indigenous Africans living in the area today.5 5 It was simply inconceivable to many people that these incredible remnants of a once-great civilization could have been produced by people who were, in the words of the South African historian George McCal l Theal, "fickle barbari- ans, prone to robbery and unscrupulous in shedding blood."5 6 Such views were common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, not just about Africa but also about the indigenous peoples of Asia and the Americas,5 7 and might perhaps be dismissed as mere historical oddities, except that many of the ele- ments of these views (and much of the work of the historians who proposed and supported them) has continued to be circulated, studied, and taught de- spite the overwhelming rejection of such ideas by academic historians and archeologists.58

The same tendency also appears, often overlapping "New Age" rhetoric and practice, in efforts to explain Mesoamerican and other non-Western civi- lizations by proposing ties to Atlantis, ancient Egypt, Stonehenge, and to vari- ous extraterrestrial sources. Such efforts date back at least to the 19th cen- tury,5 9 but have become increasingly popular in the years following the initial publication of Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods.60 A quick trip to my local bookstore offered a selection of recent examples of such works, includ- ing not only a number of follow-up works by von Daniken,6 1 but also Maurice Cotterell's The Supergods: They Came on a Mission to Save Mankind,62 about the Maya; David Furlong's The Keys to the Temple,63 which ties the pyramids in Egypt to Mayan temples and to Marlborough Downs; and Jose Argiielles' The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology,6* which purports to use Mayan sources to explain harmonic convergence (among other things). Although these works, and those like them, tend to include ties to Atlantis, ancient Egypt, the Mayas, and the Incas—and, of course, extraterrestrial contacts— they also share another common theme: They are all based, at least implicitly, on the idea that various aspects of human civilizations (almost always non- Western civilizations, interestingly enough) cannot be explained by "normal" human history, sociocultural development, and so on. Instead, they all posit some sort of deus ex machina who, it is asserted, must have been responsible

A Philoiophioal Starting Point 15

lor the emergence of the great non-Western civilizations. The problem with such explanations, apart from the fact that they are simply pseudoscience in the garb of scholarship"5—no small problem in its own right, to be sure—is that they also serve to support and reinforce beliefs and ideologies that are de- monstrably racist in both origin and nature. In short, to assume or presup- pose that the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica, for instance, needed help from escaping Atlanteans, planet-hopping extraterrestrials, or whomever, would inevitably seem to suggest that they were not themselves capable of creating the civilizations whose ruins and remnants remain so impressive even today. This, it seems to me, does these people, the civilizations they cre- ated, their descendants, and indeed, all of us as human beings, a serious injus- tice. It is far better, I would suggest, and certainly more credible in any mean- ingful sense of the term, to suppose that human beings in many different times and places have been able to create great civilizations, as well as archi- tectural, artistic, musical, and literary feats.66

If there sometimes seems to be a reluctance to believe that various indige- nous peoples, or their ancestors, could have been the creators of great civiliza- tions, then there is no similar reticence in believing that such people might be capable of horrible atrocities of various sorts. To be sure, human beings in many times and places have behaved in awful ways and done things that cer- tainly deserve condemnation (child sacrifice and abandonment, both not un- common in the ancient world, 6 7 come to mind here, as does the Holocaust). However, it may be the case that we have been far too quick, and perhaps too gullible, in believing some of the more extreme claims about other peoples and societies. One example here is that of cannibalism. We know beyond any reasonable doubt that cannibalism has taken place in certain extreme situa- tions; the question is whether there have been cultures in which ritualized cannibalism has been relatively commonplace. As Martin Gardner argued:

No one denies that during life-and-death emergencies, such as starving after a shipwreck or airplane crash, or during times of extreme famine, individuals may choose to eat human corpses rather than die. No one denies that there have been occasions among primitive peoples when, after a military victory, the body of a once-feared enemy leader was ritually devoured, either out of re- venge or out of a belief that the enemy's powers would be acquired by the eat- ers. . . . The big question is this: Has cannibalism ever been a common cus- tom?68

Although some anthropologists continue to maintain that ritual cannibal- ism is indeed found among some groups,6 9 other scholars have begun to re- ject such claims and to argue that they are in fact the result of "pure folklore, fabricated by the desire of one culture to feel superior to another."7 0 A l - though this debate is still an active and unresolved one in anthropology, it nevertheless does provide us with a strong reason for being careful about

16 Chapter I

believing claims of extreme practices on the part of other cultures, peoples, and societies.

COMMONALITY AND DIVERSITY IN INDIGENOUS TRADITIONS

The role of oral traditions is a common theme in many of the different socie- ties examined in this book, and the commonality of this theme raises an im- portant question. If different non-Western societies share many features, such as the role of an oral tradition, a communal approach to the education of children, a reliance on nonformal kinds of educational experiences, and so on, then to what extent are they really different traditions? Is it, in short, really necessary for us to study many different non-Western traditions, or would it not be sufficient for us to simply study one tradition in detail?

This is an important question, and one that does not have a simple answer. The different educational traditions that we explore in this book do indeed share many common features, but they also differ in significant ways. One way to think about this that may prove useful is to draw an analogy to a concept used in contemporary linguistics. Linguists distinguish among different kinds of linguistic "universals" (i.e., properties and characteristics common to all lan- guages). The most important distinction made in linguistics in this regard is that between what are called "absolute universals," which "are properties all languages share," and "relative universals," which "are general tendencies in language."71 In other words, there can be no exceptions to absolute universals, but there may be exceptions to relative universals. Furthermore, the way in which such universals are manifested in particular languages may differ dra- matically. The study of non-Western educational traditions is in fact fairly sim- ilar to the study of the diverse languages used by human beings around the world. Although there are likely to be certain absolute universals (e.g., the goal of helping the child to become a "good person," albeit perhaps defined in dif- ferent ways), and there are also likely to be relative universals (e.g., a concern with treating other people with respect), the ways in which such universals are in fact manifested in any particular culture—as well as the means by which the society seeks to accomplish these goals—will be very distinctive.

The purpose of studying non-Western educational traditions is both to help us understand the common principles that underlie all educational un- dertakings and to understand the different means that human beings have de- vised to accomplish these principles. Such understanding is of course valu- able in its own right, but it may also have profound effects on the way in which we view diversity and difference writ large, and as it impacts our own personal and professional lives. A n understanding of Aztec education, for in- stance, is unlikely to have an immediate and direct use for the classroom

A Philosophical Starting Point 17

leacher—there is no likelihood whatsoever that a teacher will have to deal with a child whose parents wish him to be prepared to enter a calmecac. Nev- ertheless, an awareness of how the Aztecs educated their children, both in terms of the goals that guided their educational system and the means they used to achieve these goals, may well help each of us as educators to develop a more critical and sensitive understanding of the educational goals and meth- ods used in our own society.

POSITIONALITY AND N0N-WE5TERN EDUCATIONAL TRADITIONS

In contrast to the pluralism and relativism inherent in constructivist views of knowledge discussed earlier in this chapter, traditional positivistic research has presupposed a very different view of both reality and of the nature of knowledge. In essence, positivism presupposes that reality is singular and ob- jective. In addition, the purpose of scientific investigation is to provide data that allow us to come to understand and, at least in a weak sense, to know as- pects of this reality. Thus, the role of researchers and that of the object of their research must be kept independent. In other words, the "knower" and the "known" are logically and practically distinct.7 2 This means that in the context of any particular investigation; the researcher's background and presence should (at least ideally) be irrelevant in that it should have no effect whatso- ever on the outcomes of the investigation. If our approach to knowledge gen- eration assumes that research must be replicable, then it follows that it should make no difference who does the replicating.

This view of the investigator as a neutral observer has come under increas- ing fire in recent years from a number of different perspectives. Many re- searchers now believe that their background knowledge and experience influ- ence not only their choice of research topic, but also their understanding of the topic. If knowledge is indeed socially constructed, then this makes a great deal of sense because the building blocks of knowledge must be individually distinct. Thus, in much post-positivistic research, we find that scholars and researchers will , as a sort of "truth in advertising," acquaint the reader with information about the researcher's own background. This process is referred to as identifying the author's "position," and includes relevant information about such factors as gender, language, race and ethnicity, nationality, aca- demic training, ideology, and so on. This is not, of course, to justify bias in our writing; rather, it is to make any biases that appear all that much clearer to the reader. By explicating our "position" up front, we provide the reader with information that will be helpful in understanding and critiquing our own work. In short, the view of the researcher as a neutral observer is rejected as myth—and potentially dangerous myth, at that.

18 Chapter t

The recognition of one's "positionality," although important and valu- able, does not determine the outcomes and findings of one's research. As Michael Apple, citing the work of Edward Said, argued, "Authors are not mechanically determined by ideology, or class, or history. However, authors are very much in the history of their societies, 'shaping and shaped by that history and their social experience.' " 7 3 Apple continued, making clear the tension that inevitably emerges as we focus on positionality in scholarly re- search and writing:

Do not misconstrue what I am saying here. As so much feminist and postcolonial work has documented, the personal often is the absent presence behind even the most eviscerated writing, and we do need to continue to ex- plore ways of heightening the sense of the personal in our "stories" about edu- cation. But, at the same time, it is equally crucial that we interrogate our own "hidden" motives here. Is the insistence on the personal, an insistence that un- derpins much of our turn to literary and autobiographical forms, partly a class discourse as well? The "personal may be political," but does the political end at the personal? Furthermore, why should we assume that the personal is any less difficult to understand than the "external" world? I cannot answer these ques- tions for all situations, but I think that these questions must be asked by all of us who are committed to the multiple projects involved in struggling for a more emancipatory education.74

I believe that Apple is absolutely correct here, and the rhetoric and dis- course of positionality can serve to mask as well as to unmask, to enlighten as well as to befog. This does not, however, mean that identifying one's position and background is not a good idea; rather, it simply reminds us that the reader must continue to be critical. So, with that said, who am I and why am I writing this book about non-Western educational traditions?

M y background is largely that of what remains the norm for mainstream U.S. academics: I am white, male, middle-aged, and middle class. I was born and raised in the United States and received my university education at U.S. institutions. Unlike many of my colleagues, however, I am multilingual, and have spent a good deal of my adult life living and working in both Africa and the Middle East. This book is a product of my own curiosity and desire to un- derstand the ways in which human beings have conceived of education and have structured experiences to educate their children in various times and places. Academically, the work is informed by my training in history, philoso- phy, and linguistics, as well as by my practical experiences teaching and work- ing with other teachers in a wide range of settings. It is written from what is, basically, a U.S. perspective, and is intended primarily for others from this perspective—although, of course, the insights and perspectives of those from other societies are especially valuable because they can provide critiques as well as support for what is written here. Finally, my views and observations

A Phlleaophlcal Starting Point 19

are those of a parent, and rolled my deep belief that whereas we may well dif- fer about what is best for our children, virtually all parents—now and in the , i a s t —are concerned with providing the best possible life preparation for their children.

CONCLUSIONS

In short, this book proposes that it is neither idealistic nor unrealistic to sug- gest that we can learn much from non-Western and indigenous educational traditions. As A l i Mazrui argued in the first of his BBC Reith Lectures with re- spect to Africa and its relations with the West, "I cannot help feeling that it is about time Africa sent missionaries to Europe and America, as well as teach- ers, engineers, doctors and ordinary workers It is indeed time that Africa counter-penetrated the western world." 7 5 Perhaps it is time not only for Af- rica, but for the non-Western world in general, to begin penetrating the study of the history of educational thought and practice. It is with this goal in mind that this book was written.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

1. What are the implications of Edward Said's notion of "Orientalism" for what should be taught in the public schools in our society? For what class- room teachers should know?

2. This chapter asserts that "schooling" and "education" are by no means synonymous concepts. In our own society, how do these concepts differ? What are the implications of these differences for "public education" and "public schooling"?

3. When Paul Ricoeur wrote that when "we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopo ly . . . we are threatened with destruction by our own dis- covery," what did he mean? What are the implications of this claim for the curriculum in the public schools? For the curriculum in teacher education programs?

4. Although our own culture is predominantly a written rather than an oral culture, one could nevertheless make a strong case for one or more oral traditions coexisting and paralleling the written tradition. What would the el- ements of such oral traditions be in our own society? How are these traditions passed on from one generation to the next? Are there some oral traditions in our society that are not transgenerational? What are the implications of your answers for the classroom teacher?

20 Chapter t

5. The concept of "multiple perspectives" is a very powerful one that can help us make sense of many different social, political, and cultural conflicts. Identify three current controversies in the news, and explain how the concept of "multiple perspectives" can assist us in understanding what is taking place in each of these controversies.

6. What are the implications of constructivist epistemology, as discussed in this chapter, for our understanding of history? What are its implications for teaching and learning in the classroom context? In informal educational settings? How does constructivist epistemology differ from that proposed by Plato?

7. In order to test the author's claim that even the terms "Western" and "non-Western" may contain hidden biases, construct a list of adjectives that seem to you to intuitively fit in each of these two categories. What conclu- sions can you draw from this experience?

8. What does it mean when we say that, "To grant the legitimacy of an in- dividual's or a group's perspective is by no means the same as granting its ac- curacy"7 Can you provide examples of legitimate perspectives that may not be accurate? How is this possible?

9. In a recent book, critical of "pseudoscientific" claims about history and archeology, Francis Harrold and Raymond Eve wrote that many popular books, articles, movies, and so on, about historical issues (and especially about human origins and past civilizations) "make claims about the past which are simply wrong—sometimes spectacularly so.'"6 Can such a claim be reconciled to the notion of "multiple perspectives" and constructivist episte- mology, and if so, how?

10. Do you think that A l i Mazrui was serious when he called for Africa to send missionaries to Europe and America? If you think he was serious, what kinds of messages do you think that such missionaries might carry? If you think that he was speaking metaphorically, what are the implications of the metaphor?

RECOMMENDED FURTHER READINGS

The late Edward Said's book Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978) provides a powerful and challenging perspective on how cultural expectations and bi- ases can influence and distort the way that we make sense of the "Other," as does his more recent Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993). Also quite useful in helping us to understand traditions different from our own is Jan Vansina's Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wis- consin Press, 1985). Wi th respect to education in particular, two recent books

A Philoiophioal Starting, Point 21

provide wonderful introductions: l.aclislaus Semali and Joe Kincheloe (eds.), What Is Indigenous Knowledge? Voices from the Academy (New York: Falmer Press, 1999), and Maenette Kape'ahiokalani Padeken A h Nee-Benham, with loanne Cooper (eds.), Indigenous Educational Models for Contemporary Prac- tice: In Our Mother's Voice (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000). A fascinating perspective on the concept of democracy as it has emerged in various non-Western societies is provided in Raul Manglapus' Will of the People: Original Democracy in Non-Western Societies (New York: Greenwood, 1987). Finally, although dealing with issues of mental health rather than education, Culture and Mental Health: A Southern African View (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998), by Leslie Swartz, is an incredi- bly powerful example of the kind of critical response to Western biases in scholarship and practice that is being advocated here.

NOTES

1. Ladislaus Semali and Joe L. Kincheloe (eds.), What Is Indigenous Knowledge? Voices from the Academy (New York: Falmer Press, 1999).

2. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 3. Also relevant and useful in this regard are Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Bryan Turner, Orientalism, Postmodernism, and Clobalism (London: Routledge, '994); John J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The En- counter Between Asian and Western Thought (London: Routledge, 1997); Robert Young, White Mythology: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990); Cyan Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography," Comparative Studies in Society and History 32 (1990): 383-408.

3. Okot p'Bitek, African Religions in Western Scholarship (Nairobi, Kenya: East Af- rican Literature Bureau, 1971), 22.

4. Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion (London: Routledge, 1988). Also of interest in this regard is Henrika Kuklick, The Sav- age Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945 (Cambridge, Eng- land: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

5. A. Babs Fafunwa, A History of Education in Nigeria (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974), 17. See also Alan Williamson, "Decolonizing Historiography of Colonial Edu- cation: Processes of Interaction in the Schooling of Torres Strait Islanders," Interna- tional lournal of Qualitative Studies in Education 10, 4 (1997): 407-423.

6. Joshua Cohen and Ian Lague, "Editor's Preface," in Khaled Abou El FadI, The Place of Tolerance in Islam (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), vii.

7. Stephen Ball (ed.), Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge (London: Koutledge, 1990), 2.

8. Mary Field Belenky, Blyth McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule, Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

22 Chapter I

9. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory anil Women's Develop- ment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 6.

10. See V. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (London: Currey, 1988), 19.

11. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd enlarged ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

12. Michael Patton, Utilization-Focused Evaluations (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1978), 203.

13. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 46. 14. See Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization,

volume 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, volume 2: The Archeological and Documentary Evidence (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). See chapter 3 for a detailed examination of the is- sues surrounding Afrocentrism and Afrocentric perspectives in contemporary Ameri- can education.

15. Jane Roland Martin, "The Ideal of the Educated Person," in Daniel DeNicola (ed.), Philosophy of Education: 1981 (Normal, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 1982), 3-20.

16. See Jane Roland Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). An outstanding analysis and critique of Roland Martin's work is found in D. G. Mulcahy, Knowledge, Gender, and Schooling: The Feminist Educational Thought of Jane Roland Martin (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 2002).

17. H. M . Phillips, quoted in Niara Sudarkasa, "Sex Roles, Education and Develop- ment in Africa," Anthropology and Education 13, 3 (1982): 281.

18. Traditional African educational thought and practice is discussed in detail in chapter 3.

19. See Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1985); Michael Patton, Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods, 2nd ed. (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990). An interesting example of a scholarly effort to chal- lenge epistemological ethnocentrism is Robbie Davis-Floyd and Carolyn Sargent (eds.), Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

20. Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 278.

21. "First among equals"—the way in which the role of the Pope with respect to the other bishops of the church is traditionally discussed.

22. See Lincoln and Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry, 70-91; David Erlandson, Edward Harris, Barbara Skipper, and Steve Allen, Doing Naturalistic Inquiry: A Guide to Methods (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993), 5-28. See also Jonathan Jansen (ed.), Knowledge and Power in South Africa: Critical Perspectives Across the Disciplines (Johan- nesburg: Skotaville, 1991), for a detailed examination of the role of epistemology and perspective in critical scholarship. The complexity of constructivism as an epistemol-

A Philosophical Stirling Point 23

ogy is explored cogently and in detail in Ian I lacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

23. See Harvey Siegel, Rationality Redeemed? Further Dialogues on an Educational Ideal (New York: Routledge, 1997), 130-133. This point also leads to the issue of the 1 rust worthiness of observations in general, and of naturalistic research in particular. See Lincoln and Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry, 289-331. A fascinating and powerful ex- ample of the phenomena being discussed here is provided in Marshall Sahlins' book, I low "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1995).

24. See Catherine Fosnot (ed.), Constructivism: Theory, Perspectives, and Practice (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996); Hacking, The Social Construction of What?; Yasmin Kefai and Mitchel Resnick (eds.), Constructionism in Practice: Designing, Thinking, and Learning in a Digital World (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associ- ates, 1996); Thomas Duffy and David Jonassen (eds.), Constructivism and the Technol- ogy of Instruction (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992); Virginia Rich- ardson (ed.), Constructivist Teacher Education: Building a World of New Understandings (London: Falmer Press, 1997); Ricardo Baquero, Alicia Camilloni, Mario Carretero, Jose Castorina, Alicia Lenzi, and Edith Litwin, Debates contructivistas (Buenos Aires: Aique, 1998); and Nel Noddings, Philosophy of Education (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995), 115-119. Two recent works in the philosophy of mathematics are outstanding examples of the implications of constructivist epistemology for how we conceptualize various fields of study: see Stanislas Debaene, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Reu- ben Hersh, What Is Mathematics, Really? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). for a powerful and critical theoretical examination of social constructivism, see Finn Collin, Social Reality (London: Routledge, 1997).

25. See Kenneth Gergen, Towards Transformation in Social Knowledge (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1982). Also of relevance here is Kenneth Gergen, "Social Construc- tion and the Educational Process," in Leslie Steffe and Jerry Gale (eds.), Constructivism in Education (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), 17-39.

26. Ernst von Glasersfeld, "A Constructivist Approach to Teaching," in Leslie Steffe and Jerry Gale (eds.), Constructivism in Education (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), 6.

27. See Nel Noddings, "Constructivism in Mathematics Education," in Robert Da- vis, Carolyn Maher, and Nel Noddings (eds.), Constructivist Views on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics (Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1990), 7-18.

28. See Paul Cobb, "Where Is the Mind? Constructivist and Socioculturalist Per- spectives on Mathematical Development," Educational Researcher 23 (1994): 13-20; Paul Cobb, "Where Is the Mind? A Coordination of Sociocultural and Cognitive Con- structionist Perspectives," in Catherine Fosnot (ed.), Constructivism: Theory, Perspec- tives, and Practice (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996), 34-52; L. Magadla, "Constructivism: A Practitioner's Perspective," South African Journal of Higher Educa- tion 10 (1996): 83-88.

29. Among Ernst von Glasersfeld's works, the most helpful in this regard include "An Introduction to Radical Constructivism," in Paul Watzlawick (ed.), The Invented Reality: How Do We Know What We Believe We Know? (New York: Norton, 1984), 17-40; "Cognition, Construction of Knowledge, and Teaching," Synthese 80 (1989):

24 Chapter t

121-140; "Questions and Answers about Radical Constructivism," in Kenneth Tobin (ed.), The Practice of Constructivism in Science Education (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993), 23-38; "A Constructivist Approach to Teaching"; Radical, Constructivism: A Way of Knowing (London: Falmer Press, 1995); "Footnotes to 'The j Many Faces of Constructivism,' " Educational Researcher 25 (1996): 19. j

30. Jean Piaget, L'epistemologie genetique, 3rd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de I France, 1979); H . Sinclair, I. Berthoud, J. Gerard, and E. Venesiano, "Constructivisme ; et psycholinguistique genetique," Archives de Psychologie 53 (1985): 37-60.

31. Cobb, "Where Is the Mind? A Coordination of Sociocultural and Cognitive Constructionist Perspectives," 34.

32. Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Proc- esses (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). See also Luis Moll (ed.), Vygotsky and Education: Instructional Implications and Applications of Sociocultural Psychology ' (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Ricardo Baquero, Vigotsky y el aprendizaje escolar (Buenos Aires: Aique, 1997).

33. Rosalind Driver, Hilary Asoko, John Leach, Eduardo Mortimer, and Philip Scott, "Constructing Scientific Knowledge in the Classroom," Educational Researcher 23 (1994): 5.

34. See, e.g., William Cobern, "Contextual Constructivism: The Impact of Culture on the Learning and Teaching of Science," in Kenneth Tobin (ed.), The Practice of Constructivism in Science Education (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993), 51-69; Jere Confrey, "How Compatible Are Radical Constructivism, Sociocultural Approaches, and Social Constructivism?" in Leslie Steffe and Jerry Gale (eds.), Constructivism in Education (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), 185-225; R. E. Young, "The Epistemic Discourse of Teachers: An Ethnographic Study," Anthropology and Education Quarterly 12, 2 (1981): 122-144.

35. Cobb, "Where Is the Mind? A Coordination of Sociocultural and Cognitive Constructionist Perspectives," 48.

36. von Glasersfeld, "A Constructivist Approach to Teaching," 12. 37. See Denis C. Phillips, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Many Faces of

Constructivism," Educational Researcher 24 (1995): 5-12. 38. Denis C. Phillips, "Response to Ernst von Glasersfeld," Educational Researcher

25 (1996): 20. 39. See Britt-Louise Gunnarsson, Per Linell, and Bengt Nordberg (eds.), The Con-

struction of Professional Discourse (London: Longman, 1997). 40. Britt-Louise Gunnarsson, "On the Sociohistorical Construction of Scientific

Discourse," in Britt-Louise Gunnarsson, Per Linell, and Bengt Nordberg (eds.), The Construction of Professional Discourse (London: Longman, 1997), 99. For extensions of the implications of this argument, see Eva Krugly-Smolska, "An Examination of Some Difficulties in Integrating Western Science into Societies with an Indigenous Scientific Tradition," Interchange 25, 4 (1994): 325-334; Janice Raymond, "Medicine as Patriar- chal Religion," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 7 (1982): 197-216.

41. See Patricia Weibust, "Tradition as Process: Creating Contemporary Tradition in a Rural Norwegian School and Community," International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 2, 2 (1989): 107-122.

A Philosophical Starting Point 25

Al. Leslie Swart/., Culture and Mental Health: A Southern African View (Cape town: Oxford University Press, llM8), l)2.

•13. Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, rev. ed. (Madison: University of Wis- i cuisin Press, 1985), xi.

44. See Louis-Jean Calvert, La tradition orale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de 11 ance, 1984), 9-25. See also David Olson, El mundo sobre el papel: El Impacto de la l^ritura y la Lectura en la Estructura del Conocimiento (Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa, IW8); David Olson and Nancy Torrance (eds.), Cultura escrita y oralidad (Barcelona: I Jitorial Gedisa, 1998); Eldred Jones, Eustace Palmer, and Marjorie Jones (eds.), ' hature in African Literature Today (London: James Currey, 1992); Russell Kaschula I al.), Foundations in Southern African Oral Literature (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1993); Graham Furniss and Liz Gunner (eds.), Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995); i i.iry Gossen, Chamulas in the World of the Sun: Time and Space in a Maya Oral Tradi- tion (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1974); Isidore Okpewho, African Oral Litera- ture: Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992).

45. See Russell H. Kaschula (ed.), African Oral Literature: Functions in Contempo- raryContexts (Cape Town: New Africa Books, 2001). The relation between written and oral texts and traditions is also of considerable interest in this regard. See Jack Goody, 'I'he Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge, England: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1987); Anita Rampal, "A Possible 'Orality' for Science?" Interchange 23, 3 (1992): 227-244.

46. See Geoffrey Horrocks, Greek: A History of the Language and Its Speakers (Lon- don: Longman, 1997), 17-23; Maurice Balme and Gilbert Lawall, Athenaze: An Intro- duction to Ancient Greek, Book I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 74-75.

47. See James Hulbert, Bright's Anglo-Saxon Reader (New York: Henry Holt, 1435), evi-exv. Also relevant here are Robert Diamond, Old English: Grammar and Header (Detroit, M l : Wayne State University Press, 1970); Richard Hamer, A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse (London: Faber & Faber, 1970); Bruce Mitchell, An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1995); Bruce Mitchell and Fred Robinson, A Guide to Old English, 5th ed. (Oxford, England: Ulackwell, 1992).

48. Colin Graham, Ideologies of Epic: Nation, Empire, and Victorian Epic Poetry (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1998).

49. See Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, 159-160. 50. See Colin Renfrew, Archeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Ori-

gins (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 21-23; in contrast, see Mzo Sirayi, "Oral African Drama in South Africa: The Xhosa Indigenous Drama forms," South African Theatre Journal\0, 1 (1996): 49-61. For an outstanding discus- sion of the role of rhetoric and oratory in a contemporary setting, see Philippe-Joseph Salazar, An African Athens: Rhetoric and the Shaping of Democracy in South Africa (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002).

51. Karl Kroeber, "The Art of Traditional American Indian Narration," in Karl Kroeber (ed.), Traditional Literatures of the American Indian: Texts and Interpretations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 2.

26 Chapter t

52. Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (Nairobi, Kenya: Oxford University Press, 1970), 2. See also Ruth Finnegan, "Reflecting Back on Oral Literature in Africa: Some Reconsiderations after 21 Years," South African Journal of African Languages 12, 2 (1992): 39-47.

53. Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Humor (New York: Morrow, 1992), 121-122. 54. Christopher Candlin, "General Editor's Preface," in Britt-Louise Gunnarsson,

Per Linell, and Bengt Nordberg (eds.), The Construction of Professional Discourse (Lon- don: Longman, 1997), ix.

55. This was the view promulgated, e.g., in Richard Hall's Ancient Ruins of Rhode- sia: Monomotapae Imperium, 2nd ed. rev. and enlarged (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969) (original publication 1904). See Christopher Saunders, The Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Race and Class (Cape Town: David Philip, 1988), 36-37; Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (Lon- don: Verso, 1998), 117-119; Erik Hornung, The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 173-188.

56. Quoted in Ken Smith, The Changing Past: Trends in South African Historical Writing (Johannesburg: Southern, 1988), 37.

57. In the North American case, it was a commonplace belief in the 19th century that Native Americans were descended from the lost tribes of Israel. One variation of this view is represented, e.g., in the Book of Mormon (see Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985], 25-39). Others, most notably DeWitt Clinton, during the same period argued that the Indians had more likely come from Asia, perhaps with a possible link to the ancient Scythians, or had ties to the seafaring Carthaginians and Phoenicians. See Evan Cornog, "Ameri- can Antiquity: How DeWitt Clinton Invented Our Past," The American Scholar 67 (1998): 53-61.

58. Theal's work, e.g., was widely cited and utilized by conservative historians well into the 1970s and 1980s, and its influence is clearly present in such works as C. F. J. Muller's Five Hundred Years: A History of South Africa, 5th ed. (Pretoria: Academica, 1986); and F. A. van Jaarsveld's From Van Riebeeck to Vorster, 1652-1974 (Pretoria: Perskor, 1975). See also Saunders, The Making of the South African Past; Smith, The Changing Past. A significant exception and alternative to such works, albeit in a broader context, worth mentioning here is Raul Manglapus' book, Will of the People: Original Democracy in Non-Western Societies (New York: Greenwood, 1987).

59. See, e.g., Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (New York: Do- ver, 1976), which was originally published in 1882.

60. Erich von Daniken, Chariots of the Gods: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past (New York: Berkley, 1968).

61. Erich von Daniken, The Return of the Gods (Shaftesbury, Dorset: Element, 1995); Erich von Daniken, The Eyes of the Sphinx (New York: Berkley, 1996); and Erich von Daniken, Arrival of the Gods (Shaftesbury, Dorset: Element, 1997).

62. Maurice M . Cotterell, The Supergods: They Came on a Mission to Save Mankind (London: Thorsons, 1997).

63. David Furlong, The Keys to the Temple (London: Piatkus, 1997). 64. Jose Argiielles, The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology (Sante Fe, N M : Bear

& Co., 1987).

A Philosophical Starting Point 27

65. See Francis Harrold and Raymond live (eds.), Cult Archaeology and Crea- tionism: Understanding Pscudoscienlific lieliefs About the Past, expanded ed. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995).

66. This is not, of course, to deny the obvious and significant influences that differ- ent societies and civilizations have had on one another. The issue raised here is simply the need to distinguish between those cases where contact and the historical and ar- iheological record make such influences possible or likely, and those instances where it is less likely or not at all likely. Demonstrating possibilities, especially in cases where I he evidence is scarce to begin with, can obviously be done. Virtually anything is possible; the question is whether a claim is likely, probable, or credible.

67. See, e.g., John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon, 1988), especially part I.

68. Martin Gardner, "Is Cannibalism a Myth?" Skeptical Inquirer 22, 1 (1998): 14,

my emphasis. 69. See Eli Sagan, Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form (Santa Fe,

NM: FirstDrum, 1993); Garry Hogg, Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice (London: Hale, 1990).

70. Gardner, "Is Cannibalism a Myth?" 14. For a clear and cogent articulation of ihis position, see William Arens, The Man-Eating-Myth: Anthropology and Anthropol- ogy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

71. David Crystal, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, 3rd ed. (Oxford, Eng-

land: Blackwell, 1991), 367. 72. See Lincoln and Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry, 93-94. 73. Michael Apple, Cultural Politics and Education (New York: Teachers College

Press, 1996), ix. The quote is from Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), xxii.

74. Apple, Cultural Politics and Education, xiv.

75. Ali Mazrui, The African Condition: The Reith Lectures (London: Heinemann,

1980), 16. 76. Harrold and Eve (eds.), Cult Archaeology and Creationism, ix.

Conceptualizing Culture: "I, We, and the Other"

Culture is an invention, tied up with the invention of anthropology. . . . Unlike earlier generations of anthropologists who thought of culture in essentialist terms, we now realize that it is a creation on our part, and one which may become increasingly poeticized—in fact and in text. . . . Whether construed in the singular, and denoting a philosophic counter- point to nature, or in the plural, designating sociological entities, we can no longer claim culture to be an objective fact.

—Hastrup (1995, p. 16)

Words, the primary tools that human beings use to communicate with one another, are incredibly powerful, but are also potentially problematic and dif- ficult. Nearly half a century ago, the historian Carl Becker wrote:

Now, when I meet with a word with which I am entirely unfamiliar, I find it a good plan to look it up in the dictionary and find out what someone thinks it means. But when I have frequently to use words with which everyone is per- fectly familiar—words like "cause" and "liberty" and "progress" and "govern- ment"—when I have to use words of this sort which everyone knows perfectly well, the wise thing to do is to take a week off and think about them.1

The word "culture" is perhaps the prime case of a "week-off word"; as Ray- mond Williams noted, culture is "one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language."2 We use the word culture in a wide variety of contexts with an equally wide range of meanings. Sometimes the term is used to speak about aspects of what is also called "high culture," which refers pri- marily to aesthetic manifestations of social life: literature, music, visual art, and so on. Although examples of popular culture might be included here,3 in general the emphasis is on the work of writers, poets, musicians, and artists who have been identified, over time, as "great," or at least "good" or perhaps

29

30 Chapter 2

"meritorious." The term can also be used to discuss intellectual or spiritual developments in a society, as when we talk about the cultural development of western Europe with a concern for the evolution of religious and philosophi- cal thought. Finally, and of greatest relevance to us here, the term culture is used to refer to what Young Pai and Susan Adler described as "that pattern of knowledge, skills, behaviors, attitudes and beliefs, as well as material artifacts, produced by a human society and transmitted from one generation to an- other."4 Although certainly a useful starting point, such a definition still leaves much to be desired as we try to make sense of the construct of "culture" and its role in the history of humanity. In this chapter, we wil l explore this, complex and often perplexing construct, and try to establish a foundation for discussing cultures and traditions in a variety of times and places throughout human history.

UNDERSTANDING CULTURE: THE ROLE OF ANTHROPOLOGY

The academic discipline that has had as its principle focus and purpose the study and understanding of human cultures is anthropology. A product of the 19th century, from its inception in the 1860s and 1870s, anthropology was closely tied to popular scientific, pseudo-scientific, and ideological beliefs and values about the peoples and groups studied. Further, in its formative period, much anthropological work was focused on the study of "primitive" cultures and peoples. As Adam Kuper noted:

The idea of primitive society is intimately related to other potent and beguiling notions concerning primitive mentality, primitive religion, primitive art, primitive money, and so on. . . . The rapidity with which the anthropological idea of primitive society was worked out is very striking, but its persistence is perhaps yet more extraordinary. . . . The persistence of this prototype for well over a hundred years is the more remarkable since empirical investigation of tropical "primitive" societies only began in a systematic way and on any scale in the last decade of the nineteenth century.5

The normative element in anthropology, which sought to place relative values on different cultures and cultural practices, is no longer a part of main- stream academic anthropology. Indeed, professional academic anthropolo- gists would reject the characterization of any human society as "primitive" out of hand. As Gardner and Lewis explained, anthropology at its best:

promotes an attitude and an outlook: a stance which encourages those working in development to listen to other people's stories, to pay attention to alterna- tive points of view and to new ways of seeing and doing. This outlook continu- ally questions generalised assumptions that we might draw from our own cul- ture and seek to apply elsewhere, and calls attention to the various alternatives

Coneaptualizing Culture: "I, We, and the Other" 31

thai exist in other cultures. Such a perspective helps to highlight the richness and diversity of human existence as expressed through different languages, be- liefs and other aspects of culture. Anthropology tries to show the interconnect- edness of social and economic life and the complex relationships which exist between people under conditions of change. Finally, anthropology encourages us to dig as deeply as possible, to go beyond what is immediately apparent, and to uncover as much of the complexity of social and economic life that we can.6

Underlying such a view is, in some form, the notion of cultural relativism, a widely cited and nearly as widely misunderstood construct itself. In its most basic form, cultural relativism can be formulated in two very distinct ways: el- ementary cultural relativism and empirical cultural relativism.7 Elementary i ultural relativism, as it was articulated by Will iam Graham Sumner, argues that "in the folkways, whatever is, is right."8 Empirical relativism offers a somewhat more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of cultural diver- sity, noting instead that "the ethical judgments supported by different . . . primps are often different and conflicting in a very fundamental way."9 The difference between these two formulations is very significant, because the for- mer results in ethical as well as cultural relativism, whereas the latter does iiol. 1 " Clajude^eyjUSjrauss, one of the greatest French anthropologists, has insightfully noted that "cultural relativism affirms that no culture has any ab- solute criteria for judging the activities of another culture as 'low' or 'noble.' I lowever, everyculture can and should apply such judgment to its own activi V tics, since its members are actors as well as observers."" On an even deeper level, however, cultural relativism as a doctrine is useful in reminding us to be wary of making judgments about cultural differences. It does not, however, prevent such judgments altogether. As Clifford Geertz suggested, "The truth of the doctrine of cultural (or historical—it is the same thing) relativism is that we can never apprehend another people's or another period's imagina- tion neatly, as though it were our own. The falsity of it is that we can therefore never genuinely apprehend it at all. We can apprehend it well enough, at least us well as we apprehend anything else not properly ours; but we do so not by looking behind the interfering glosses that connect us to it but through them."1 2 In other words, cultural relativism can be a valuable tool in helping

/ us to recognize our own epistemological lenses and limitations, but does not actually make it impossible to study and even to understand the Other.

Contemporary anthropologists define culture in a variety of ways.13 In part because of its problematic history, in part because of its lack of a clearly agreed on meaning, it is even considered by some anthropologists to be, per- haps, more trouble than it is worth. And yet, it remains a widely used and use- ful construct. As Geertz explained:

The term "culture" has by now acquired a certain aura of ill-repute in social anthropological circles because of the multiplicity of its referents and the stud-

32 Chapter 2

ied vagueness with which it has all too often been invoked. . . . In any case, the culture concept to which 1 adhere has neither multiple referents nor, so far as I can see, any unusual ambiguity: it denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men [sic] communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.14

Geertz provides us with a very valuable starting point in conceptualizing culture. Culture, on his account, is systematic, communal, and dynamic. It is learned rather than inherited, and it is necessarily permeable. Indeed, cultural identity is inevitably plural to some extent: Each of us belongs to a variety of cultural communities. For instance, ethnic identity, religious identity, gender identity, age identity, political identity, social class identity, professional iden- tity, and so on, can all relate to or be grounded in different (albeit perhaps over- lapping) cultures. These cultural communities are not of equal importance for us, of course, and our membership in them is often context and time specific. Indeed, we often distinguish between "cultures" and "subcultures," or "micro- cultures," as a way of indicating relative importance, although this practice can also unfortunately indicate the very sorts of value judgments about different cultures that we wish to avoid. Among the characteristics that can distinguish one cultural community from another are language, behavioral norms, cultural artifacts, family and kinship patterns, gender roles, religious and spiritual be- liefs and practices, attitudes and values, and so on. Although far from perfect, this attempt to define culture at the very least provides us with a useful heuristic device for studying and discussing different cultures.

| Culture actually_exists in a contextual framework that mediates between thejmiyersajjispects of human nature and the specific aspects of individual personality, as welluasjbetweeni learned and inherited characteristics. As Geert Hofstede,1 5 using the analogy of computer programming to explicate human patterns of thinking and behavior, explained:

Human nature is what all human beings, from the Russian professor to the Australian aborigine, have in common: it represents the universal level in one's mental software. It is inherited with one's genes. . . . The human ability to feel fear, anger, love, joy, sadness, the need to associate with others, to play and exercise oneself, the facility to observe the environment and talk about it with other humans all belong to this level of mental programming. However, what one does with these feelings, how one expresses fear, joy, observations, and so on, is modified by culture.. . . The personality of an individual, on the other hand, is her/his unique personal set of mental programs which (s)he does not share with any other human being. It is based upon traits which are partly inherited with the individual's unique set of genes and partly learned.16

Culture, in short, however difficult it may be to define and demarcate, is nonetheless an inextricable and essential component of both individual and social identity.

Coitoeptualiziita, Culture: "I, We, ui the Other"

THE MISREPRESENTATION OF CULTURE

11 would not be unreasonable at this point for the reader to wonder why all of I his talk about culture really matters. After all, even i f there are different meanings for the term, there is certainly an everyday understanding of the concept of culture, and such an everyday understanding could surely suffice lor our purposes here. The response to this argument is that the way in which we cpnce^uafize cul^re_doei^in_fact, makeji huge difference both in how we analyze and how we understand cultures other than our own, and further, lhat our ewjydjy^concejjtualizatipn of culture may well contain in it the very biases thatjye^are seeking to avoid. As Christopher Hutton recently demon- strated in his masterful work Linguistics and the Third Reich, many of the fun- damental constructs used in modern linguistics are far from neutral histori- cally and, in fact, overlap much of the history of 19th- and 20th-century European nationalism.1 7 Likewise, particular conceptions of culture have not only reflected, but have also guided and informed government, social, and educational policies. Such applications of anthropological concepts and con- structs have had, and in many settings continue to have, important conse- quences for the daily lives of groups and individuals—and especially of domi- nated and oppressed groups and individuals.

Perhaps there is no better example of the misuse and misapplication of an- thropological concepts than was found in 20th-century South Africa. Social anthropology was first introduced as an academic discipline in South Africa at the University of Cape Town in 1921, and rapidly became a significant in- tellectual endeavor. Not only were many of the early South African anthro- pologists internationally recognized and admired scholars who did important work on indigenous South African societies and cultures (including Isaac Schepera, Monica Wilson, Hilda Kuper, and Eileen and Jack Krige), but oth- ers—especially those involved in what came to be called Volkekunde at Afr i - kaans universities—provided invaluable intellectual and scholarly support lor the development and maintenance of apartheid. Just as intellectuals and scholars in Nazi Germany provided important support for the National So- cialist regime,1 8 so too did many academics in South Africa offer their support to the apartheid regime.

The key academics involved in the development and articulation of Volkekunde, especially in the period following World War II, were W . M . Fiselen, Pieter Schoeman, P. J. Coertze, J. A . Engelbrecht, A . J. Van Schalkwyk, and F. J. Language. As W . D. Hammond-Tooke clearly demon- strated in his powerful and critical history of anthropology in South Africa, "There is no doubt that these Afrikaner academics, and others who followed them, sought to justify their essentially political claims by the fact that they were anthropologists—scientists and so-called experts on 'the life of the Na- tives' (this was a ploy often used by Eiselen in his various defences of apart-

34 Chapter 2

heid)."| , J These individuals not only supported apartheid, but more impor- tant, they provided much of its intellectual and ideological foundation. Although Volkekunde is generally translated simply as "ethnology," it is in fact a fairly complex term and quite difficult to translate accurately. It is not the study of ethnic groups, as "ethnology" might suggest, but rather the study o different Volke. This Afrikaans term has the same meaning as the German Volk, and is every bit as ideologically bounded as the German term. P. J.i Coertze, in his introductory text Inleiding tot die Algemene Volkekunde, ex- plained the concept of Volk, as opposed to "culture," as follows:

A Volk is not an accidental number of individuals living together in a particular area. The members of a Volk form an organized unit. However, a Volk is not or- ganized by people. It has come into existence through a growth process and is therefore a type of organic unit. The members of a Volk are, so to say, cells in a greater organism which is linked together in a particular way.. . . The members of a Volk also stand in a special relationship to one another, each with his own status and playing his role within the greater whole. The structural relationship in which they are ordered lies locked in the cultural pattern. It is the experience of, and conformity with, a particular shared culture that binds a number of in- dividuals into an organic whole. Among people who have lived together from a long period, there occurs a biological tie caused by intermarriage. In addition, a spiritual unification takes place, which binds people together on the spiritual level. This is expressed in the unfolding of a unified language, and a single form of life and thought, i.e., a one and only culture. The structural form of such a Volk is therefore contained in its cultural pattern. This is why a Volk and its cul- ture is a two-fold unity. The term "Volk" refers to the ordering of relationships in a closed unity (people), while the term "culture" refers to the structure of re- lationships, the pattern of thought, attitudes, interactions and the result of the labor of the members of such a Volk.20

Using the essentialist concept of Volk rather than culture, these scholars argued that only by separating the different Volke present in South Africa could real social justice be achieved. As early as 1943, Afrikaans anthropolo- gists were engaged in describing an apartheid-based "solution" to the "Native Problem," as R. D. Coertze noted as recently as 1991:

What was here advocated in 1943, five years before the coming to power of the National Party, was a policy of "radical and total apartheid" which must be re- alized in practice through a strong central government over a period of 50-100 years. The implications of such a policy must be worked out in the social, polit- ico-administrative, educational, religious and economic spheres. The core of the exposition involved the propagation of a foundation of separate political bonds for the different black groups, each with an area in which the population could enjoy a decent economic existence. . . . [This] is the only policy that could . . . guarantee tranquility and peace in South Africa.2 1

Cono«ptu«llzina Culture: "I, We, en« the Other"

Apartheid, on such an account, was a Utopian vision as well as an incred bly complex effort at social engineering. In the educational sphere, for ir •.I.nice, this vision was manifested in separate educational systems for the di l«i cut Volke, justified by the educational theories of "fundmentele pedagogict I" 111 n d a mental pedagogics"):

Perhaps the central article of faith of fundamental pedagogics is that different i iiltural groups have different "philosophies of life," and that, in turn, appro- priate educations for different cultural groups must therefore be grounded in significantly different philosophies of education. . . . Fundamental pedagogics does not, however, serve merely to mystify the process and content of educa- tion. It is an integral component of the ideological foundation of apartheid, and it thus functions to both justify and legitimate the reality of separate edu- cational systems. By asserting that different ethnolinguistic, cultural and racial groups have different "philosophies of life" and "worldviews," the fundamen- tal pedagogicians in essence deny the possibility of a unified, integrated educa- tional system in South Africa. In short, fundamental pedagogics provides an intellectual and "scientific" justification for racist and separatist educational policies.22

The misrepresentation of cultures is hardly unique to the South Africa experience, however. Somewhat closer to home, the traditional represent? (ions of Native American cultures are in many ways just as problematic. In a essay documenting how Native Americans are presented in contemporat museums as both unidimensional and essentially ahistorical and disemboc led from the local past, James Nason commented:

lew exhibitions about Native Americans have anything to do with the contem- porary world. Indians are virtually always presented as elements from the com- munity's past—elements that no longer have any importance or bearing on current life in the community. Indian culture is seen as a relic of the past. This disassociation between the community's past and present essentially "disem- bodies" the reality of a continuing Indian presence by the simply expedient of denying it. Even the exhibition of historic photographs of Native Americans serves to reinforce this deadly notion, as these photographs present a fading glimpse of bygone days, and thus of long-gone people.23

Nason went on to suggest that such exhibitions inevitably influence bot lilt* attitudes and perceptions of visitors, and further, that the exhibitior convey important (albeit, perhaps, arguably unintentional) messages and le; ions:

1 believe these exhibitions convey several messages. First, "real" Indians are gone, regardless of what one reads of "Indians" in today's newspapers. Second, "real" Indian culture and life are also past, and their material products are of

36 Chapter 2

no more importance than their nonexistent values, beliefs, and perceptions. Third, there is no such thing as Indian history, and therefore no contribution by Indians to "progress" or "significance" in the lives of present-day people. Fourth, the "real" Indians who once existed are interesting only as an extin- guished footnote or as obstacles that had to be removed from the "real" prog- ress that characterizes the history of the community or the nation.24

Such concerns about the messages conveyed about Native Americans are especially timely in many parts of the United States, including my home state of Connecticut, as tribes seek federal recognition (often, at least in part, in or- der to construct casinos). The arguments against such federal recognition are complex, and rely on a variety of different kinds of evidence.25 A n important assumption of many such arguments, however, is all too often precisely the sort of view articulated by Nason.

ISSUES OF CULTURE, POWER, AND DOMINANCE

Examples such as those already cited make clear that the study of culture takes place in a broader ideological context. To be sure, such misunderstandings and misrepresentations are not unique to anthropologists; virtually all of the social sciences have comparable cases that could be cited, as of course do biol- ogy, genetics, and many other fields.-* What is really at stake here is not so much academic or intellectual endeavors per se, but rather the uses and mis- uses of such undertakings in social, political, ideological, and economic con- texts. When dealing with issues of culture, cultural difference, and cultural di- versity in particular, it is important to keep in mind the warning offered by the Australian scholar Brian Bullivant, who noted that programs designed and intended to encourage ethnic and cultural identification, including many multicultural education programs, "are ideal methods of controlling knowl- edge/power, while appearing through symbolic political language to be acting solely from the best of motives in the interests of the ethnic groups them- selves."27 Issues of power and dominance, in short, are closely related to issues of culture, and we need to be aware of this nexus even as we seek to explore and to understand various cultures.

WHAT IS "WESTERN" CULTURE?

This book is about non-Western cultures, which of course immediately raises the prior question of what we mean by "Western" culture. There is no easy answer to this question, as was implied in chapter 1 when we discussed the apparent dichotomy between "Western" and "non-Western." Although there

Conceptualizing Culture "I, W«, ind thi Othtr" 37

is certainly an historical, intelleclual, aesthetic, and religious chain linking the Classical Greek period (and even before) to the present in Europe and the areas of the world colonized and settled by Europeans, such a "Plato-to-NATO" per- spective inevitably involves considerable distortion. There is no single "West- ern" culture in any really meaningful sense; rather, there are many different and distinct cultures that share certain elements of a common historical back- ground that are manifested in different ways in the present. There are, in addi- tion, popular cultures that parallel and overlap more traditional conceptions of culture in all of these different settings, as well as an almost infinite variety of "subcultures" and "microcultures." Although presumably intended to be a tongue-in-cheek comment, Mahatma Gandhi's attributed response to a re- porter's question about what he thought of "Western civilization" comes to mind here: Gandhi said that he thought it would be a good idea. Such humor aside, however, it is far easier to talk about "Western" culture than it is to actu- ally define it, and it is interesting to note that this is a task that many of the most vociferous advocates of the "Western" cultural heritage seem to avoid.2 8 Be- yond this problem is another, which is in fact even more telling: Although the "Western" cultural heritage is often seen as a kind of "umbrella" under which different Western cultures coexist, in reality this coexistence is itself often very problematic, as any number of major wars among groups that presumably share this common cultural heritage make clear. Even today, the noticeable di- visions within the so-called "Western" world are often at least as great as those between "Western" and "non-Western" societies.29

THE CULTURE OF THE DEAF-WORLD

At this point, we can turn to an examination of a particular culture in order to understand how the study of cultures other than our own can be both inter- esting and useful. The culture that I have chosen for this exercise is one that coexists with the cultural world in which most of us live, and that even touches our world from time to time, but nonetheless remains largely un- known and alien. In discussions about the complex relations that can and do exist between language and identity, Deaf people stand out as an exception- ally complicated and intriguing case.30 As Charlotte Baker recently observed, "Deaf people do not necessarily identify with the hearing world and increas- ingly regard the hearing world as a different language community. Rather than allowing themselves to be defined by the majority hearing group, Deaf people are progressively expressing and valuing their own self-constructed identity."3 1 Since the 1970s, there has been a growing recognition that many individuals identify themselves as members of a common Deaf cultural com- munity (in American Sign Language, or ASL, this concept is expressed in the sign D E A F - W O R L D 3 2 ) . Such a cultural conceptualization of deafness pre-

38 Chapter 2

sents a significant challenge to the more popular view among hearing people of deafness as a disability. The difference is not merely a semantic one; it is fundamental to one's conception of what deafness is, what it means to be deaf/Deaf, and how both individuals and society as a whole ought to address deafness. As Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan noted in their powerful book, A Journey into the DEAF-WORLD, "When hearing people think about Deaf people, they project their concerns and subtractive perspective onto Deaf people. The result is an inevitable collision with the values of the D E A F - W O R L D , whose goal is to promote the unique heritage of Deaf language and culture. The disparity in decision-making power between the hearing world and the D E A F - W O R L D renders this collision frightening for Deaf people."3 3

The complexities of the situation become even greater when one takes into account the fact that not all deaf people are Deaf. Audiological deafness and cultural Deafness are distinct and different conditions. The deaf population can be subdivided into a wide range of different groups, distinguished in part by degree of hearing loss, but also by language preference, educational expe- rience, and relative integration into either the D E A F - W O R L D or the hearing world. 3 4 Among the different subgroups within the deaf population, then, are those who:

• use ASL as their primary language and identify with the Deaf cultural community;

• communicate primarily through speech (i.e., in a spoken language) and identify with the hearing community;

• became deaf later in life, as a result of the aging process (i.e., the elderly deaf);

• do not know either ASL or English, but rather communicate through gestures, mimes, and their own "home" signing systems; and

• have normal hearing but (generally as a result of family ties to deaf peo- ple) understand and use ASL and integrate with the Deaf cultural com- munity.

Our focus here will be on understanding the multiple, competing concep- tions of deafness that divide the D E A F - W O R L D and hearing world, with em- phasis on the dominant constructions of deafness that exist in each of these worlds. It is important to note at the outset, then, that the concern here is pri- marily with Deaf people rather than with deaf people. As Harlan Lane ob- served in his book The Mask of Benevolence, "Most Americans who have im- paired hearing are not members of the American deaf community. They were acculturated to hearing society, their first language was a spoken one, and they became hard of hearing or deaf in the course of their lives, often late in

Conceptualizing Culture: "I, We, ana1 the Other" 39

life. This book is not about them; it is about people who grow up deaf, accul- lurated to the manual language and society of the deaf community."3 5 A l - l hough there are many interesting issues that might be addressed with respect to the identities of deaf people, as well as with regard to the complex identities of the hearing children of both deaf and Deaf people, these issues are beyond the bounds to be discussed here.36 It is, nevertheless, important to recognize that the dichotomy separating the hearing and Deaf worlds is in fact a false one; rather than two completing distinct identities, the reality of deafness is one of a continuum of multiple identities ranging from "hearing" to "Deaf."

At issue here is the broader issue of disability. As numerous scholars have explored in detail in recent years, "disability" is a social construct grounded in cultural, political, ideological, and economic assumptions and biases.37 In the case of Deaf people, the relative emphasis and importance accorded to audio- logical versus social factors is the central feature of differentiation between what can be labeled the etic and emic views of deafness.38 At stake, ultimately, is the question of who defines "deafness": the dominant hearing world or the D E A F - W O R L D . It is, at a fundamental level, the relation between power and discourse that is at stake.

Deaf constructions of Deaf identity, which are grounded in the experiences and history of the D E A F - W O R L D , stress the sociocultural and linguistic as- pects of deafness.39 As Carol Padden and Tom Humphries wrote at the start of their book Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture.

The traditional way of writing about Deaf people is to focus on the fact of their condition—that they do not hear—and to interpret all other aspects of their lives as consequences of this fact.... In contrast to the long history of writings that treat them as medical cases, or as people with "disabilities," who "compen- sate" for the deafness by using sign language, we want to portray the lives they live, their art and performances, their everyday talk, their shared myths, and the lessons they teach one another. We have always felt that the attention given to the physical condition of not hearing has obscured far more interesting fac- ets of Deaf people's lives.40

Describing this same phenomenon, and attempting to explain the emic con- struction of deafness in an essay published in The Atlantic, Edward Dolnick wrote:

Lately... the deaf community has begun to speak for itself. To the surprise and bewilderment of outsiders, its message is utterly contrary to the wisdom of cen- turies: Deaf people, far from groaning under a heavy yoke, are not handi- capped at all. Deafness is not a disability. Instead, many deaf people now pro- claim, they are a subculture like any other. They are simply a linguistic

40 Chapter 2

minority (speaking American Sign Language) and are no more in need of a cure than are Haitians or Hispanics.41

In short, emic constructions of deafness focus primarily on Deaf people as a cultural and linguistic minority community (and, indeed, on that commu- nity as an oppressed one). The Deaf cultural community is, from this per- spective, characterized by the same sorts of elements that might characterize any cultural community, including the following:

• a common, shared language • a literary and artistic tradition • a shared awareness of Deaf cultural identity • endogamous marital patterns • distinctive behavioral norms and patterns • cultural artifacts • a shared historical knowledge and awareness • a network of voluntary, in-group social organizations.

The single most significant element of Deaf cultural identity in the United States is, without a doubt, communicative competence in A S L . 4 2 ASL serves multiple roles within the Deaf community, functioning not only as the com- munity's vernacular language, but also as an indicator of cultural group membership.4 3 It is important to note here, however, that this applies only to ASL; other types of signing commonly used in the United States (including both the contact sign language normally employed by hearing signers and the artificially constructed manual sign codes) fulfill very different functions and are viewed very differently by members of the Deaf community.4 4 For in- stance, contact sign language is viewed as an appropriate means of communi- cation with hearing individuals, whereas manual sign codes are often rejected by the Deaf community as awkward efforts to impose the structures of a spo- ken language on sign.

ASL plays an important role in the construction of what could be termed the D E A F - W O R L D worldview—that is, the way in which Deaf people make sense of the world around them. It does this in two distinct ways: first, through its role as linguistic mediator, and second, as an identifying facet of cultural identity. For instance, ASL mediates experience in a unique way, as of course do all languages. The structures and vocabulary of ASL provide the framework within which experience is organized, perceived, and understood, and this framework is inevitably distinct from the frameworks employed by other languages. For example, in ASL i f one describes a person as V E R Y H A R D - O F - H E A R I N G , then it means that the person has substantial residual hearing, whereas A LITTLE H A R D - O F - H E A R I N G would suggest far less re- sidual hearing. In other words, the concepts themselves are based on different

Ca-oeptualiziita, Culture: "I, We, and the Other" 41

nouns than would be the case in English (where themeanings ofthesetwo ex- pulsions would be reversed).

The use of ASL as one's primary vernacular language is arguably the single most important element in the construction of Deaf cultural identity. Deaf t iillural identity presupposes communicative competence in ASL, and is im- possible without it. As Jerome Schein has explained, "Being deaf does not in

self make one a member of the deaf community. To understand this, one has to remember that the distinguishing feature of membership in the deaf i (immunity is how one communicates."4 5 It is not merely signing that is nec- essary, however—it is, specifically, the use of ASL. Many hearing people sign,

relatively few are competent in ASL. ASL has historically functioned as a "language of group solidarity" for Deaf people, serving both as a badge of in- 14 roup membership and as a barrier to those outside the cultural community. Kecently, as more hearing people have begun to learn ASL, new complica- tions have arisen with respect to issues of "ownership" of A S L . 4 6 As one leader in the U.S. Deaf community noted,

have asked a number of deaf individuals how they feel about hearing people signing like a native user of ASL. The responses are mixed. Some say that it is acceptable for hearing people to use ASL like a deaf person on one condition. The condition is that this hearing person must make sure that the deaf person knows that s/he is not deaf. Some people resent the idea of seeing hearing peo- ple signing like a native ASL user. Those who are resentful may feel sociolinguistic territorial invasion by those hearing people.47

The role of ASL in the construction of Deaf identity, then, is quite complex— it is clearly a necessary condition for Deaf cultural identity, but (as is demon- strated in the cases of hearing individuals who use ASL fluently) not a suffi- cient condition for group membership. Indeed, for nongroup members, use of ASL can present significant challenges to one's credibility and status as a sympathetic outsider, and it is far from uncommon to find Deaf people who seek to "protectively withhold from hearing people information about the DEAF-WORLD's language and culture."4 8

Members of the Deaf cultural community identify themselves as socially and culturally Deaf, maintaining a clear-cut distinction between audiological deafness and sociocultural deafness—a phenomenon sometimes referred to as "attitudinal deafness."49 Thus, within an emic construction of deafness, the fact of audiological deafness is actually neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for cultural deafness. Hearing children of Deaf people, who grow up with ASL as their first language, are (at least in some significant ways) po- tential members of the Deaf culture, just as older hearing people who lose their hearing are, under normal circumstances, not Deaf—they are, rather, hearing people who can no longer hear. It is interesting to note that in ASL there is actually a very pejorative and insulting sign ("HEAFIE") used to deni-

Chtpttr a

grate a deaf person who "thinks like a hearing person." further, a common] facet of cultural identity for many ethnic groups is the presence and mainte-j nance of endogamous marital patterns, and the same is true in the case ol Deaf people. Indeed, estimates of the rate of in-group marriage in the Dea community range from 86 to over 90 percent—a remarkably high rate in con- temporary American society.50 This high rate of in-group marriage is cer^ tainly facilitated by the role of the residential schools for the deaf, but is also tied to the common, shared language of Deaf people as well as to the power o: the concept of attitudinal deafness.

This concept of attitudinal deafness is, further, a key element in under< standing much of Deaf humor.5 1 Jokes and funny stories abound in the D E A F - W O R L D , and many involve the presumed difference between Dea: people and the D E A F - W O R L D and hearing people and the hearing world—• almost inevitably, as one would expect, with the punch line focusing on hear- ing people's ignorance of signing, deafness, and Deaf people. One story, for instance, involves a hearing man who is hitch-hiking, and is given a ride by a Deaf man. As they drive along, the Deaf driver exceeds the speed limit, and is stopped by a police officer. The police officer comes to the car, and the Deaf man signs to him, indicating that he is deaf. Unable to communicate with the driver, the police officer just says, "Oh, never mind—just slow down!" Some time later, the hearing man offers to drive so that the Deaf man can rest. The Deaf driver accepts the offer, and the hearing man begins driving. Before too long, they are again stopped by a police officer. The hearing man, recalling what occurred before, copies what he saw the Deaf man sign to the police offi- cer. This police officer, however, immediately signs back, "Oh, you're deaf? So are my parents. So why are going so fast, anyway?" The joke, of course, is on the hearing man, who had tried, for selfish reasons, to "pass" as a Deaf per- son.

There are also differences with respect to behavioral norms between the hearing world and the D E A F - W O R L D . Most notable here would be differ- ences in eye contact patterns, rules governing the permissibility of physical contact of various sorts (including touching to gain attention), the use of fa- cial expressions, gesturing, and so on. 5 2 Similarly, the cultural artifacts of the Deaf community are primarily technological devices designed in recent years to facilitate the ability of the deaf to function in the hearing world. The key difference between the audiologically deaf and culturally Deaf with respect to the use of such technologies is that there is a reluctance on the part of many culturally Deaf people to utilize technological devices (e.g., hearing aids) that focus primarily on hearing. For the most part, other kinds of technological in- novations, such as TDD/TTYs , which allow the deaf to use the telephone, television decoders for closed-captioned programs, doorbells and alarms tied to lights, and so on, although to some extent cultural artifacts, are widely and ' commonly used both within the Deaf culture and by those who are audio-

Conoaptiiiliiinj Culture: "I, W», tni thi Oihir" 43

logically deaf but not culturally Deaf. Cultural artifacts emphasizing mem- bership in the Deaf culture (e.g., jewelry, T-shirts, bumper stickers, etc.), which often involve visual images of signs, are additional artifacts that are somewhat more likely to be found among culturally Deaf people, although such artifacts are also used more generally by both deaf and hearing people with an interest in deafness—sometimes even inappropriately, as Tom W i l - l.ird articulated in a wonderful short essay entitled, "I've had enough of the I- I .OVE-YOU sign, thanks."5 3

Members of the Deaf community have a strong sense of the history of their community, and this awareness has been passed from generation to genera- lion largely through "oral" means in the past. However, the 1981 publication of Jack Gannon's Deaf Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America54 has contributed to a broader access to the historical awareness of the Deaf com- munity, and more recently, there have been a number of outstanding schol- arly works on the history of Deaf people that are also reinforcing pride in the community's history and heritage.55

Finally, there is an extensive voluntary network of social organizations serving Deaf people, which work to maintain the cohesiveness of the Deaf community and provide, to a very significant extent, for the companionship needs of group members. This network includes local deaf clubs, the state and national organizations of the deaf (e.g., the National Association of the Deaf), sports associations, the National Theatre of the Deaf, and so on.

It is clear, in an anthropological sense, that the D E A F - W O R L D is a legiti- mate and viable culture. Thus, attempts medically to "cure" or "remediate" .mdiological deafness are seen as not merely misguided, but as culturally and linguistically oppressive as well. This point was made quite vividly by I. King lordan, the president of Gallaudet University, in a recent interview. Jordan was asked by the interviewer i f he would like to have his hearing restored, to which Jordan replied, "That's almost like asking a black person if he would rather be whi t e . . . . I don't think of myself as missing something or as incom- plete. . . . It's a common fallacy if you don't know deaf people or deaf issues. You think it's a limitation."5 6 From within the Deaf culture, this response was appropriate, meaningful, and indeed relatively uncontroversial; from outside the culture, it no doubt strikes many hearing people as somewhat bizarre. Precisely the same situation, albeit in reverse, can be found in the following miote from a chairperson of a National Institutes of Health planning group in The New York Times: "I am dedicated to curing deafness. That puts me on a collision course with those who are culturally Deaf. That is interpreted as genocide of the Deaf."5 7 It is the tension between the two kinds of construc- tions of deafness that is at stake here, and it is this tension that is, on a funda- mental level, probably irreconcilable.

Perhaps the clearest contemporary manifestation of this tension has been the debate about the use of cochlear implants in young children. Cochlear

44 Chapter

implants do not restore hearing; rather, they can create the perception cm sound that, coupled with effective rehabilitation, can assist some hearing irrm paired individuals to function more effectively. In the case of young c h i l d r e n advocates of cochlear implants argue that "early implantation of deaf c h i M dren should be considered as a way to expose them to the spoken word, enjB able them to learn spoken languages, and develop better speech skills."5 8 hvM plantation involves a three- to four-hour surgical procedure:

The hospitalized child is placed under general anesthesia.. . . The surgeon cuts the skin behind the ear, raises the flap, and drills a hole in the bone. Then a wire carrying electrodes is pushed some twenty-five millimeters into the coiled in- ner ear. The tiny endings of the auditory nerve are destroyed and electrical fields from the wire stimulate the auditory nerve directly. A small receiver coil connected to the wire is sutured to the skull and the skin is sewn over it. A small microphone worn on an ear piece picks up sound and sends signals to a proces- sor worn on a belt or in a pocket. The processor sends electrical signals back to the implanted receiver via a transmitter mounted behind the ear, and those sig- nals stimulate the auditory nerve.59

In short, the cochlear implant functions as a kind of hearing aid. There is n< doubt that cochlear implants can be helpful for some late-deafened ind iv idu-M als, for whom the procedure was originally designed. The debate is not aboutjM the choice of adults to seek cochlear implants; it is about whether the p r o c e - | dure is appropriate for very young children.6 0 From an outsider's perspective,^ the arguments in favor of cochlear implants for young deaf children are fairly compelling. The procedure does have the potential to help the hearing i m - paired individual function more effectively in the hearing world, offering i f not a cure for deafness, then at least the possibility of the individual acquiring the skills necessary to "pass" as hearing and, hence, as "normal."6 1

It is this very conception of what constitutes "normal" that is at the heart of much of the resistance to such procedures in the Deaf community. Just as Michel Foucault made clear the epistemological power of socially established norms, whether in terms of mental illness, punishment, or sexuality, so too is the challenge to the conception of "normal" and its equation with "hearing" important in understanding this topic. It is, in Foucault's words, necessary for us to examine "the power of normalization and the formation of knowledge in modern society."6 2 Returning once again to Harlan Lane's observation, from a Deaf perspective it is clear that:

if the birth of a Deaf child is a priceless gift, then there is only cause for rejoic- ing, as at the birth of a black child, or an Indian one. Medical intervention is in- appropriate, even if a perfect "cure" were available. Invasive surgery on healthy children is morally wrong. We know that, as members of a stigmatized minor- ity, these children's lives will be full of challenge but, by the same token, they

Coneeptueli-ing Culture: "I, We, tnd the Other" 45

have a special contribution to make to their own community and the larger so-

ciety.63

Although the tension between the dominant hearing and Deaf construc- tions of deaf identity may well be irreconcilable on a conceptual level, it is nevertheless important to recognize that the reality of deaf experience is more i omplex and less clear than this might suggest. The vast majority of Deaf peo- ple become members of the Deaf culture relatively late in comparison with membership in most cultures. This is the case because most Deaf people have hearing parents and are introduced to the Deaf culture not by adults but lather by peers, most often in the context of residential schools for the deaf, further, membership in the Deaf culture is not really an either-or proposi- tion: Individual Deaf people identify as culturally Deaf in different ways and to different extents. Perhaps the clearest example of this complexity is mani- fested in the case of the hard-of-hearing, for whom membership in the Deaf culture is related to often conflicting attitudes about deafness itself. The ex- tent to which the process of normalization of deafness to hearing norms (or "hearization") is accepted or rejected is key here, as Nover made clear: "Hearization leads many deaf children into wishing or thinking they will be- come hearing some day. Others prefer to be called 'hearing impaired' or 'hard-of-hearing' rather than deaf. Unfortunately, deaf and hard-of-hearing children may learn to view hearing people as superior to those who are deaf."6"

The cultural and linguistic identity of individuals who are hard-of-hearing is, in short, both potentially and practically ambiguous,6 5 as indeed is the identity of many other individuals who straddle multiple cultural and Unguis- tic worlds. It is this ambiguity that makes simple descriptions of cultural identity misleading, not only in the case of the deaf, but with respect to virtu- ally all minority cultural and linguistic groups.6 6

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

The academic study of other cultures, especially as it has been manifested in itnt hropology, although unquestionably useful and valuable, has from its very inception been closely tied to colonialism and imperialism. As Katy Gardner it ml David Lewis noted:

The utilisation by anthropologists of opportunities for fieldwork within colo- nial administrations has subsequently been subject to considerable criticism. The best-known critique is by Talal Asad and colleagues, who mounted a pow- erful retrospective attack on the aims and motivations of these anthropologists and indeed upon anthropology itself, based upon what Asad sees as the sub-

46

ject's colonial origins. It was the unequal encounter between Europe and the Third World, it was argued, which gave the West the opportunity to gain access to the types of cultural information upon which anthropology depends. An- thropology itself became part of this act of domination, though Asad recog- nizes that anthropology simultaneously—as part of what he terms "bourgeois consciousness"—provided ideas and activities which did not reflect the ideol- ogy of the colonial administration.67

Such critical views of anthropology6 8 were all too often justified, as we hav seen, although it would be easy to overemphasize the actual impact of an thro pological scholarship in many colonial and postcolonial settings. At the sam time, anthropology has provided us with the essential tools and vocabulary! necessary to study and understand cultures other than our own, and, indeed, even to more accurately understand our own culture.

In this chapter, we have explored the complex nature of the construct of culture, as well as some of the ways in which this construct has been used and misused. We have also examined an unusual culture with which most of us1 are not terribly familiar, and seen how the application of what are essentially anthropological perspectives can enhance and strengthen our understanding; of this culture. It is precisely in the same manner that anthropological per-; spectives, concepts, and constructs wil l be utilized in the remainder of this book—that is, as valuable but very much two-edged tools.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

1. This chapter begins with a discussion of what the historian Carl Becker called "week-off words." Generate a list of such words that are common in educational discourse, and then try to explain why such terms are significant for teachers, students, and the public to understand.

- 2. One of the fundamental debates in U.S. education in recent years has been the role of the school in cultural reproduction. In essence, the debate is about whether the school should seek to inculcate a common national culture in all students, or whether it should rather emphasize and celebrate the cul- tural diversity of our society. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each view? What do you believe the school should do with respect to address- ing cultural diversity?

>. 3. What are the implications of the concept of "cultural relativism" for the classroom teacher? For the curriculum? For the organization of the school? For the connection between the school and the community?

4. As we have seen, Geert Hofstede distinguished among human nature, culture, and personality. Based on your own experience working with chil- dren, give examples of each of these constructs, and explain whether it is in

Conceptuillzlnj Culture: "I, We, eiwi the Other" 47

some sense an inherited or innate characteristic, or whether it is a learned or experienced characteristic. What are the implications of your answer for ilassroom practice? '

5. "Fundamental pedagogics" is one of the educational manifestations of Volkekunde, as it is explained in this chapter. Its basic, core belief is that dif- ferent cultural groups have different worldviews, and thus require different kinds of education and educational experiences. How does this view differ, both in principle and in practice, from contemporary multicultural educa- tion in the United States?

6. Consider Brian Bullivant's claim that programs designed and intended to encourage ethnic and cultural identification, including many multicultural education programs, "are ideal methods of controlling knowledge/power, while appearing through symbolic political language to be acting solely from the best of motives in the interests of the ethnic groups themselves." Do you agree or disagree with his assessment? Why?

- 7. How would you define "Western" culture? What criteria for inclusion and exclusion are you applying? Can you identify any borderline cases that are difficult to label as either "Western" or "non-Western"?

8. This chapter makes a case for the D E A F - W O R L D constituting a dis- tinctive cultural group. To what extent do you believe that comparable argu- ments might be made for other commonly identified "disabled" groups (e.g., the blind, individuals with mental retardation, etc.)? In what ways would these arguments be similar to those used in the case of the D E A F - W O R L D , mid in what ways would they be different?

9. According to Harlan Lane, "If the birth of a Deaf child is a priceless gift, I lien there is only cause for rejoicing, as at the birth of a black child, or an In- dian one. Medical intervention is inappropriate, even if a perfect 'cure' were tivailable." Do you agree or disagree with his view? Why?

10. In your own words, explain what the author means when he said that culture is a "valuable, but very much two-edged, tool." As an educator, how mn the concept of culture be usefully and appropriately applied? What are the risks involved with the concept?

RECOMMENDED FURTHER READINGS

There are any number of excellent introductions to anthropology and the critical issues raised with respect to anthropology. Clifford Geertz's The Inter- pretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973) and his Local Knowledge: further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983) are now widely regarded as classics. More recent works worth reviewing, in my view, include Kirsten Hastrup's A Passage to Anthropology: Between Expert-

48 Chapter 2

ence and Theory (London: Routledge, 1995), Bruce Knauft's Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology (New York: Routledge, 1996), and Katy Gardner and David Lewis' Anthropology, Development and the Post-Modern Challenge (London: Pluto Press, 1996). For readers interested in the culture of the D E A F - W O R L D , the best available works include Harlan Lane's The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community (New York: Knopf, 1992); Harlan Lane, Robert Hoffmeister, and Ben Bahan's A Journey into the DEAF- WORLD (San Diego, C A : DawnSign Press, 1996); and Carol Padden and Tom Humphries' Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press, 1988). Finally, for an excellent discussion of dis- abilities studies as a distinct kind of cultural studies, see James Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), as well as Lennard Davis' ed- ited collection, The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997).

NOTES

1. Carl Becker, "What Are Historical Facts?" Western Political Quarterly 7 (1955): 328.

2. Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1983), 87. 3. See John Storey, An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, 2nd ed.

(Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998). 4. Young Pai and Susan A. Adler, Cultural Foundations of Education, 3rd ed. (Up-

per Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice-Hall, 2001), 21. 5. Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformation of an Illusion

(London: Routledge, 1988), 1. 6. Katy Gardner and David Lewis, Anthropology, Development and the Post-Modern

Challenge (London: Pluto Press, 1996), 167-168. 7. Robert Ennis, Logic in Teaching (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969),

412-417.

8. William G. Sumner, Folkways (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1940, original publication 1906), 28.

9. Richard Brandt, Value and Obligation (New York: Harcourt, Brace &. World, 1961), 433.

10. Although cultural relativism can be an immensely valuable tool in anthropol- ogy and other social sciences, its application in the field of ethics is considerably more controversial, as indeed it is when applied as an epistemological strategy (see chap. 1). See, e.g., James Harris, Against Relativism: A Philosophical Defense of Method (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1992), and F. C. White, Knowledge and Relativism: An Essay in the Phi- losophy of Education (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1983).

11. Claude Levi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, Depres et de loin (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1988), 229, my translation.

Cofioeptualiilno, Culture: "I, We, end the Other" 49

12. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 44.

I V See, e.g., Geert Hofstede, Culture's Consequences, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Vine, 2001), 1-40.

I A. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), ll'i.

15. Hofstede, Culture's Consequences, as well as his Cultures and Organizations: So/iwarc of the Mind (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997).

I ft. Hofstede, Cultures and Organizations, 5-6. 17. See Christopher M . Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-Tongue

I'tficism, Race and the Science of Language (London: Routledge, 1999); also of interest line is Dirk Scholten, Sprachverbreitungspolitikdes nationalsozialistischen Deutschlands I liankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang, 2000).

IH. Max Weinreich, Hitler's Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany's Crimes A\;tiitist the Jewish People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999, original publi- lalion 1946).

I1). W. D. Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa's Anthropologists, l{>.'()-1990 (Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 1997), 129; see also .Sin11 Dubow, Illicit Union: Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge, Eng- land: Cambridge University Press, 1995); R. Gordon, "Serving the Volk with Volkekunde: On the Rise of South African Anthropology," in J. lansen (ed.), Knowl- edge and Power in South Africa: Critical Perspectives Across the Disciplines (Johannes- burg: Skotaville, 1991), 79-97.

20. P. J. Coertze, in his introductory text Inleiding tot die Algemene Volkekunde (Jo- hannesburg: Voortrekkerpers, 1959), 61-62, my translation.

21. R. D. Coertze, "Aanvang van Volkekunde aan Afrikaanstalige universiteite in Stiid-Afrika," South African Journal of Ethnology 14 (1991): 31, my translation.

12. Timothy Reagan, "Philosophy of Education in the Service of Apartheid: The Unle of'Fundamental Pedagogies' in South African Education," Educational Founda- tions 4, 2 (1990): 65-66.

23. James D. Nason, " 'Our' Indians: The Unidimensional Indian in the Disem- bodied Local Past," in The Changing Presentation of the American Indian: Museums itiid Native Cultures (Seattle and Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, in association with the University of Washington Press, 2000), 37.

24. Nason, " 'Our' Indians," 38-39. 25. See, e.g., Jeff Benedict, Without Reservation: How a Controversial Indian Tribe

Hose to Power and Built the World's Largest Casino (New York: Perennial, 2001), and Kim Eisler, Revenge of the Pequots: How a Small Native American Tribe Created the World's Most Profitable Casino (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

2(i. There is in fact a growing body of very powerful historical work dealing with the misuses of science in various contexts. In the U.S. setting, perhaps among the most horrific examples of such misuse, driven by racism, is documented in James H. Jones, Hml Blood: The Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment, expanded ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1993). The case of Nazi Germany is similarly well-documented; see, e.g., Gotz Aly, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and

$0 Chapter t

Racial Hygiene (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1994), and Robert Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2000). The Soviet case is discussed in Vadim). Birstein, The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science (Cambridge, MA: Westview, 2001).

27. Brian Bullivant, The Pluralist Dilemma in Education: Six Case Studies (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991), 291.

28. A noteworthy exception to this claim is provided in the work of E. D. Hirsch, who indeed attempted to articulate what is to be included in the concept of "Western culture." See E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know] (New York: Vintage, 1988), as well as his more recent The Schools We Need and Why' We Don't Have Them (New York: Doubleday, 1996). The problem with Hirsch is not that he avoided the problem of articulating the content of Western culture, but rather, that his conception of what is to be included (and, by extension, what is to be ex- cluded) is both idiosyncratic and atheoretical. There are extensive critical analyses of Hirsch's work available. See, e.g., Michael Apple, Official Knowledge: Democratic Edu- cation in a Conservative Age, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000); Michael Apple, Ed- ucating the "Right" Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001); D. G. Mulcahy, Knowledge, Gender and Schooling: The Femi- nist Educational Thought of fane Roland Martin (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 2002).

29. See, e.g., lean-Francois Revel, L'ohsession anti-americaine: Son fontionnement, ses causes, ses inconsequences (Paris: Editions Plon, 2002).

30. See Jennifer Harris, The Cultural Meaning of Deafness: Language, Identity and Power Relations (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1995), and Ila Parasnis (ed.), Cultural and Language Diversity and the Deaf Experience (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998). I have attempted to follow the common practice of distin- guishing between audiological deafness, which is represented with a lowercase "d," and cultural Deafness, which is represented with an uppercase "D." It is also important to note that the discussion here focuses on the specific case of the Deaf community in the United States, but that comparable cases exist worldwide.

31. Colin Baker, "Sign Language and the Deaf Community," in Joshua Fishman (ed.), Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 129.

32. The use of all capital letters here is deliberate. This is the normal practice for in- dicating when signs rather than words are being employed. Thus, DEAF-WORLD rep- resents a specific sign in ASL. This convention is especially important in instances in which ASL has a sign that cannot be adequately or easily translated into English.

33. Harlan Lane, Robert Hoffmeister, and Ben Bahan, A Journey into the DEAF- WORLD (San Diego, CA: DawnSign Press, 1996), 371.

34. See A. Hagemeyer, The Red Notebook (Silver Spring, MD: National Association of the Deaf, 1992).

35. Harlan Lane, The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community (New York: Knopf, 1992), xi.

36. The identity issues of the hearing children of Deaf adults are explored in a number of recent works. See, e.g., Lennard Davis, My Sense of Silence: Memoirs of a Childhood with Deafness (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), P. Preston,

Conceptualizing, Culture: "I, We, and the Other" 51

MO/HER FATHER DEAF: Living Helmrn Sound mid Silence (Cambridge, MA: I lar- va rd University Press, 1994).

37. See Len Barton, "Blaming the Victims: The Political Oppression of Disabled People," in Russell Farnen and Heinz Siinker (eds.), The Politics, Sociology and Eco- nomics of Education: Interdisciplinary and Comparative Perspectives (Houndsmills, England: Macmillan, 1997), 63-72; James Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: disability Oppression and Empowerment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995); Lennard Davis (ed.), The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Uoutledge, 1997); Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Phillip Safford and Elizabeth Safford, A His- tory of Childhood and Disability (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996); Joseph Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: Times Books, 1993). With respect to the Deaf community's response to the op- pression of the disabled, see Katherine Jankowski, Deaf Empowerment: Emergence, Struggle, and Rhetoric (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1997). Perhaps the most extreme examples of the oppression of the Deaf/deaf took place in Nazi (ier many as part of the ongoing eugenics efforts that constituted an important part of Nazi ideology and policy. See, e.g., Donna Ryan and John Schuchman (eds.), Deaf Peo- ple in Hitler's Europe (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2002), and Horst Biesold, Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany (Washington, DC: Gallaudet Uni- versity Press, 1999).

38. See Susan Gregory and Gillian Hartley (eds.), Constructing Deafness (London: I'inter Publishers, in association with the Open University, 1991).

39. See, e.g., Yerker Andersson, "The Deaf World as a Linguistic Minority," in Siegmund Prillwitz and Tomas Vollhaber (eds.), Sign Language Research and Applica- tion (Hamburg, Germany: Signum Press, 1990), 155-161; Yerker Andersson, "Deaf I'rople as a Linguistic Minority," in Inger Ahlgren and Kenneth Hyltenstan (eds.), Hi- liu^ualism in Deaf Education (Hamburg, Germany: Signum Press, 1994), 9-13; Jim Kyle, "The Deaf Community: Custom, Culture and Tradition," in Prillwitz and Vollhaber, Sign Language Research and Application, 175-185; Paddy Ladd, Under- building Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood (Clevedon, England: Multilingual Mat- ters, 2003); Peter Paul and Dorothy Jackson, Toward a Psychology of Deafness: Theoret- ical and Empirical Perspectives (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1993); Dora Quintela, Irene Ramirez, Ximena Robertson, and Ana Perez, ^Por que una educacion bicultural liilingiie para las personas sordas? Revista de la Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias tie la Educacion 3 (1997): 43-52; Timothy Reagan, "Cultural Considerations in the Ed- ucation of Deaf Children," in Donald Moores and Kathryn Meadow-Orlans (eds.), liducational and Developmental Aspects of Deafness (Washington, DC: Gallaudet Uni- versity Press, 1990), 73-84; Timothy Reagan, "The Development and Reform of Sign Languages," in Istvan Fodor and Claude Hagege (eds.), Language Reform: History and l:uture (Hamburg, Germany: Buske Verlag, 1990), 253-267; Timothy Reagan, "A Sociocultural Understanding of Deafness: American Sign Language and the Culture of Deaf People," International Journal of Intercultural Relations 19 (1995): 239-251; Oli- ver Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (Berkeley: University of (Itilifbrnia Press, 1989); Jerome Schein, Ar Home Among Strangers: Exploring the Deaf

52 Chatter 2

Community in the United States (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1989); McCay Vernon and Jean Andrews, The Psychology of Deafness (New York: Longman, 1990); Sherman Wilcox (ed.), American Deaf Culture: An Anthology (Burtonsville, MD: Linstok Press, 1989).

40. Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 1.

41. Edward Dolnick, "Deafness as Culture," The Atlantic 272 (1993): 37. 42. See Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan, A Journey into the DEAF-WORLD; Jerome

Schein and David Stewart, Language in Motion: Exploring the Nature of Sign (Washing- ton, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1995); Clayton Valli and Ceil Lucas, Linguistics of American Sign Language: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Gallaudet Uni- versity Press, 2000).

43. An indication of the important role of American Sign Language in the estab- lishment and maintenance of cultural identity can be seen in the use of "name signs." Name signs constitute a special category of signs in American Sign Language (and in other natural sign languages), and "seem to develop wherever a group of Deaf people have extended contact with each other and use sign language as their vernacular lan- guage. They are created for individuals within each generation or social grouping of Deaf people. Most typically, name signs originate in deaf school settings where Deaf children form an autonomous social world beyond the gaze of teachers... . The name signs that Deaf adults bestow on each other later in life are determined by Deaf social norms and visual language structures rather than those of the 'outside' hearing soci- ety." Further, "the acquisition of a name sign may mark a person's entry to a signing community, and its use reinforces the bond of shared group history and 'alternative' language use (in relation to mainstream society)." For more extended discussions of the role of name signs in various natural sign languages, see Tomas Hedberg, "Name Signs in Swedish Sign Language: Their Formation and Use," in Carol Erting, Robert Johnson, Dorothy Smith, and Bruce Snider (eds.), The Deaf Way: Perspectives from the International Conference on Deaf Culture (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1994), 416-424; Samuel Supalla, The Book of Name Signs: Naming in American Sign Language (San Diego, CA: DawnSign Press, 1992); Shunchiu Yau, "Creation d'anthroponumes gestuels par une sourde amerindienne isolee," Amerindia: Revue d'Ethnolinguistique Amerindienne 7 (1982): 7-22; Shunchiu Yau, "Lexical Branching in Sign Language," in Susan Fischer and Patricia Siple (eds.), Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research: Linguistics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 261-278; and Shunchiu Yau and Jinxian He, "How Do Deaf Children Get Their Name Signs During Their First Month in School?," in W. Edmondson and F. Karlsson (eds.), SLR '87: Papers from the Fourth International Symposium on Sign Language Research (Ham- burg, Germany: Signum Press, 1990), 242-254.

44. See Ceil Lucas (ed.), The Sociolinguistics of the Deaf Community (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989); Ceil Lucas and Clayton Valli, Language Contact in the Ameri- can Deaf Community (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1992); Timothy Reagan, " 'Nei- ther Easy to Understand Nor Pleasing to See': The Development of Manual Sign Codes as Language Planning Activity," Language Problems and Language Planning 19 (1995): 133-150; Timothy Reagan, "But Does It Count? Reflections on 'Signing' as a Foreign Language," Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages 48 (2000): 16-26.

Conoeptuillzlng Culture: "I, We, end the Other" 5i

•15. Jerome Schein, Speaking the language •>/ Sign: The Art and Science of Signing (Garden City, NY: Double-day, 1984), 130.

•Id. See Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan, A lourney into the DEAF-WORLD, 70-77; lai k l.evesque, "Let's Return ASL to Deaf Ownership," in Lois Bragg (ed.), DEAF- \\'( tltl.D: A Historical Reader and Primary Sourcebook (New York: New York Univer- sity Press, 2001), 116-117.

•17. Quoted in Schein and Stewart, Language in Motion, 155. •18. Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan, A Journey into the DEAF-WORLD, 71. •19. See Valerie Janesick and Donald Moores, "Ethnic and Cultural Consider-

ations," in Thomas Kluwin, Donald Moores, and Martha Gaustad (eds.), Toward Ef- Ici live Public School Programs for Deaf Students: Context, Process, and Outcomes (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992), 49-65; Reagan, "Cultural Considerations in the I ducation of Deaf Children."

50. See Reagan, "Cultural Considerations in the Education of Deaf Children." 51. See M . J. Bienvenu, "Reflections of Deaf Culture in Deaf Humor," in Erting,

lulmson, Smith, and Snider, The Deaf Way, 16-23; Guy Bouchauveau, "Deaf Humor and Culture," in Erting, Johnson, Smith, and Snider, The Deaf Way, 24-30.

52. See Sara Kersting, "Balancing Between Deaf and Hearing Worlds: Reflections ui Mainstrcamed College Students on Relationships and Social Interactions," Journal i>l Ikaf Studies and Deaf Education 2 (1997): 252-263.

53. T. Willard, "I've Had Enough of the I-LOVE-YOU Sign, Thanks," Silent News ,"> (1993): 2.

54. Jack Gannon, Deaf Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America (Silver Spring, MD: National Association of the Deaf, 1981).

55. See, e.g., Douglas Bayton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Bragg, DEAF- WORLD; Robert Buchanan, Illusions of Equality: Deaf Americans in School and Fac- tory, 1850-1950 (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1999); Nora Groce, Ev- eryone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha's Vineyard (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Harlan Lane (ed.), The Deaf Experience: (lassies in Language and Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); I larlan Lane, When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf {New York: Random House, P>K4); Lane, The Mask of Benevolence; Jonathan Ree, I See a Voice: Deafness, Language mul the Senses—A Philosophical History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999); John Van Cleve (ed.), Deaf History Unveiled: Interpretations from the New Scholarship (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1993); John Van Cleve and Barry ( aouch, A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America (Washington, I HI: Gallaudet University Press, 1989); Richard Winefield, Never the Twain Shall Meet: Hell, Gallaudet, and the Communications Debate (Washington, DC: Gallaudet Univer- ully Press, 1987).

56. Quoted in Harlan Lane, "Cochlear Implants: Their Cultural and Historical Meaning," in van Cleve, Deaf History Unveiled, 288.

57. Quoted in Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan, A Journey into the DEAF-WORLD, ,179.

58. Kathryn Woodcock, "Cochlear Implants vs. Deaf Culture?" in Mervin (iarretson (ed.), Viewpoints on Deafness: A Deaf American Monograph, Vol. 42 (Silver Spring, MD: National Association of the Deaf, 1992), 151.

54 Chapter 1

59. Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan, A Journey into I he DEAF-WORLD, 388. 60. A. Philip Aiello and Myrna Aiella, "Cochlear Implants and Deaf Identity," in

Bragg, DEAF-WORLD, 406-407; Marylyn Howe, "Untruths in Advertising: Cochlear Implants," in Garretson, Viewpoints on Deafness, 67-68; Harlan Lane, "Cochlear Im- plants Are Wrong for Young Deaf Children," in Garretson, Viewpoints on Deafness, 89-92; Harlan Lane, "Reproductive Control of Deaf People and the Deaf Search for a Homeland," in Mervin Garretson (ed.), Deafness: Life and Culture II: A Deaf American Monograph, Vol. 45 (Silver Spring, M D : National Association of the Deaf, 1995), 73-78; Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan, A Journey into the DEAF-WORLD, 386-407; Woodcock, "Cochlear Implants vs. Deaf Culture?"

61. See Woodcock, "Cochlear Implants vs. Deaf Culture?" 62. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard,

1975), 360.

63. Harlan Lane, "The Medicalization of Cultural Deafness in Historical Perspec- tive," in Renate Fischer and Harlan Lane (eds.), Looking Back: A Reader on the History of Deaf Communities and Their Sign Languages (Hamburg, Germany: Signum Press, 1993), 490-491.

64. Steven Nover, Our Voices, Our Vision: Politics of Deaf Education. Paper pre- sented at the 1993 CAIS/CEASD Convention, Baltimore, Maryland.

65. See S. Benson, Ambiguous Ethnicity (Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1981).

66. See also, e.g., S. Fordham and John Ogbu, "Black Students' School Success: Coping with the 'Burden of Acting White.' " The Urban Review 18 (1986): 176-206; M . Motoyoshi, "The Experience of Mixed-Race People: Some Thoughts and The- ories," Journal of Ethnic Studies 18 (1990): 77-94.

67. Gardner and Lewis, Anthropology, Development and the Post-Modern Chal- lenge, 32-33.

68. See Talal Asad (ed.), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca, 1973).

"A Wise Child Is Talked to in Proverbs": Indigenous African Educational

Thought and Practice

Africa has never been cut off from the crosscurrents of world history. It was the source of the earliest human biological and cultural develop- ments and the point from which some of the most essential elements of human society and growth were derived. . . . As early as the first millen- nium A.D., Africans participated in a busy Indian Ocean trading system dealing with distant places in Arabia, India, Persia, and China, and they exported gold and other commodities across the Sahara Desert to Eu- rope. The Middle East and Europe were also in contact with Africa, ex- changing scholars and ideas with important centers of learning in the Arabic-speaking world. Thus, long before the better-known contacts be- tween Europe and Africa that started in the fifteenth century, parts of Africa had interacted continuously with other world areas for centuries.

—Martin and O'Meara (1995, p. 6)

Africa is immense, not only in terms of its size and geographic diversity but, more important, with respect to the cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity that characterizes the people who live in its various parts. As Richard Olaniyan observed, "With almost a thousand separate language groups, a va- riety of climatic regions and greatly different levels of social and economic de- velopment . . . Africa is a continent of bewildering diversity and extraordi- nary dynamism."1 This immensity and diversity might lead one to believe that it is not possible for us to discuss traditional "African" educational thought and practice in any meaningful way because there is bound to be considerable variation on such a topic from one group to another throughout the conti- nent. This is an important issue, as Meyer Fortes made clear:

Take, to begin with, the idea of African culture: by what criteria can we include, under this rubric, both the culture of the Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari— those gentle, peaceful, propertyless, hunting and collecting folk who have been

55