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(2016) Critical anthropological engagements in human alterity and difference, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Disrupting book smartness
critical ethnography and the "ontological turn" in anthropology and educational studies
Lars Gjelstad
pp. 159-179
Schooling is vital in disciplining young people into text-oriented modes of apprehending the world. This chapter claims that a dominant "culturalist" approach in the anthropology of education, from Mead to recent Cultural Studies perspectives, actually helps to reinforce a naturalization of propositional knowledge. Critical ethnography developed in the 1980s as part of a broader interdisciplinary theoretical shift to "problems of epistemology, interpretation, and discursive forms of representation" (Marcus and Fischer 1986, 9). This chapter explores some further possibilities that relational ontology and other post-representational theory afford the practice of doing critical ethnography of education. I consider vocational education as a felicitous starting point for exploring alternative ontologies, given its broad range of assemblages of materials, tools, skills, and sensory engagements.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-40475-2_7
Full citation:
Gjelstad, L. (2016)., Disrupting book smartness: critical ethnography and the "ontological turn" in anthropology and educational studies, in B. Enge bertelsen & S. Bendixsen (eds.), Critical anthropological engagements in human alterity and difference, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 159-179.
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