Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice

In this extended meditation, Jean Lave interweaves analysis of the process of apprenticeship among the Vai and Gola tailors of Liberia with reflections on the evolution of her research on those tailors in the late 1970s. In so doing, she provides both a detailed account of her apprenticeship in the art of sustained fieldwork and an insightful overview of thirty years of changes in the empirical and theoretical facets of ethnographic practice. Examining the issues she confronted in her own work, Lave shows how the critical questions raised by ethnographic research erode conventional assumptions, altering the direction of the work that follows.

As ethnography takes on increasing significance to an ever widening field of thinkers on topics from education to ecology, this erudite but accessible book will be essential to anyone tackling the question of what it means to undertake critical and conceptually challenging fieldwork. Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice explains how to seriously explore what it means to be human in a complex world—and why it is so important.

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Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice

In this extended meditation, Jean Lave interweaves analysis of the process of apprenticeship among the Vai and Gola tailors of Liberia with reflections on the evolution of her research on those tailors in the late 1970s. In so doing, she provides both a detailed account of her apprenticeship in the art of sustained fieldwork and an insightful overview of thirty years of changes in the empirical and theoretical facets of ethnographic practice. Examining the issues she confronted in her own work, Lave shows how the critical questions raised by ethnographic research erode conventional assumptions, altering the direction of the work that follows.

As ethnography takes on increasing significance to an ever widening field of thinkers on topics from education to ecology, this erudite but accessible book will be essential to anyone tackling the question of what it means to undertake critical and conceptually challenging fieldwork. Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice explains how to seriously explore what it means to be human in a complex world—and why it is so important.

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Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice

Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice

Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice

Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice

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Overview

In this extended meditation, Jean Lave interweaves analysis of the process of apprenticeship among the Vai and Gola tailors of Liberia with reflections on the evolution of her research on those tailors in the late 1970s. In so doing, she provides both a detailed account of her apprenticeship in the art of sustained fieldwork and an insightful overview of thirty years of changes in the empirical and theoretical facets of ethnographic practice. Examining the issues she confronted in her own work, Lave shows how the critical questions raised by ethnographic research erode conventional assumptions, altering the direction of the work that follows.

As ethnography takes on increasing significance to an ever widening field of thinkers on topics from education to ecology, this erudite but accessible book will be essential to anyone tackling the question of what it means to undertake critical and conceptually challenging fieldwork. Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice explains how to seriously explore what it means to be human in a complex world—and why it is so important.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780226470733
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 04/15/2011
Series: Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture Series , #1993
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 216
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

Jean Lave is professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, affiliated with the Departments of Anthropology, Geography, and Education. She is the author or editor of many books, including Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life.

Read an Excerpt

APPRENTICESHIP in Critical Ethnographic Practice


By JEAN LAVE

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2011 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-47072-6


Chapter One

Introduction: Apprenticeship and Critical Practice

Overview

The title of this book sums up its several concerns. The book is about apprenticeship—that of Vai and Gola tailors in Liberia in the 1970s, my own, and by extension, yours. It explores the tailors' practices of apprenticeship. It explores my ethnographic inquiry, which unfolded over five years, furnishing an example for apprentice ethnographers of a long process of sustained and changing ethnographic work. "Long process" and "changing practice" are certainly terms that may evoke a notion of "critical ethnographic practice," but still, this may sound more strenuous than critical.

Critical ethnographic practice? My ethnographic project on tailors' apprenticeship began with an impulsive three-week field trip to Monrovia, Liberia, in 1973, spurred by discussions with colleagues about how to address the cultural shortcomings of cross-cultural psychological research practice. The political and ethical implications of cross-cultural psychological experimentation were egregious, although for the most part their multilayered ethnocentrism went unnoticed and unaddressed. A detailed account of tailors' apprenticeship, a local example of informal education, was intended to challenge Western psychologists' claims about divisions between modes of education and modes of thought, as well as their assumptions about the unmatched superiority of schooling for fostering general cognitive power. How was I to proceed? It seemed likely that the only way to be heard by psychologists was to speak to them in the language of psychological experiments. I thought that well-formed experiments, based on close ethnographic work, might demonstrate the ethnocentric distortions inherent in the cross-cultural psychological enterprise and plead the case for robust cultural guidelines for cross-cultural experimentation.

The project was intended to be critical of the work of others, but critical ethnography is not only an objection to something. The term "critical ethnographic practice" here refers to the craft of ethnographic inquiry integral to a historical-materialist theoretical stance. This stance is rooted in a Marxist theory of praxis—forged through the work of many, as in all theoretical traditions, into a contemporary relational theory of practice. Within this perspective, critical ethnographic practice is part of its logic of inquiry.

Part of critical ethnographic practice is an ongoing commitment to rethinking and redoing one's work as ethnographer and activist. The question is how to become over the long term an apprentice to one's own changing practice. It takes practice to come to inhabit a critical ethnographer's craft. Most anthropologists would say that this transformation principally takes place during the course of fieldwork. This may sound as if "critical ethnographic practice" is dedicated to empirical investigation, as if fieldwork is foremost in shaping anthropological identities. Fieldwork is widely and correctly viewed as a rite of passage in anthropology and it is deeply empirical, but critical ethnographic practice is just as deeply a matter of theoretical formation. In my view, the ethnographic account of the tailors' apprenticeship is also an account of the theoretical unfolding of the project. (That makes apprentice ethnographers and apprentice social theorists one and the same.) The ethnographic project in Liberia didn't stand still theoretically. It began to move from one theoretical—ontological, epistemological and political/ethical—stance to another, which of course changed the direction of field inquiries, which further changed theoretical concerns, and so on.

I've come to call the theoretical stance, or "problematic," toward which the project moved "social practice theory." One assumption underlying social practice theory (and thus this conception of critical ethnographic research) is that theoretical and empirical endeavors are mutually constitutive and cannot be separated—social practice theory is a theory of relations. So research on learning (through apprenticeship) and research as learning (through critical ethnographic practice) are each and together empirical/theoretical practices. It is difficult to address these relations—unless you do so as they are produced. That concern helps to explain why I focus on the process of research on the tailors' apprenticeship throughout the book, for this makes it possible to address critical ethnographic practice, in practice.

Becoming an apprentice to one's own changing practice? Briefly, I made four additional field trips to Liberia between 1973 and 1978. On the second visit to Monrovia, I spent six months in Happy Corner, the tailors' alley, trying to grasp the lineaments of apprenticeship. I spent the following two summers comparing math used by tailors whose tailoring experience and schooling varied. Surprising and puzzling results from these learning transfer experiments led to one more summer of field research focused on differences between experimental and everyday math practices in the tailor shops. For good and for ill, a comparative theory that divided "formal" from "informal" education furnished an agenda of expectations and explanations that shaped my research questions throughout the project. I finished a book manuscript called Sowing Knowledge in 1981, worked on half a dozen other versions of that manuscript over the next twelve years (some arguably titled with better puns, gave the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures on this material in 1993, and worked on several other versions after that. I was critical from the beginning of conventional assumptions about education and learning transfer, but the more I worked on the project, the more clearly I could see that most of my fieldwork in Liberia was predicated on those very assumptions. Clearly something further was required. As I worked through the implications of my last field trip to Liberia in 1978, looking at everyday math in the tailor shops, I began to consider seriously the possibility that learning, knowledgeability, skillfulness, whatever else they might be, are always only part of ongoing social arrangements and relations. From this it followed that the meaning of tailoring must come from its partial relations in the tailors' lives more broadly. What relations? How? A retrospective eye certainly makes it easier to call attention to the tensions and uneven movement between empirical and theoretical work as different lines of questions, different aspects of the tailors' practices, and understandings of those questions and practices unfolded. In the long run, this process led me from a vernacular commonsense problematic to a relational one, from one to another set of assumptions about the world and how we know it, and to different ways of exploring and investigating participation in social life.

Given the existence of different problematics, we can hardly turn to the ethnography of tailors' apprenticeship without first addressing anthropological debates about ethnography, its place in anthropology, its political-ethical commitments and relations with broad questions about theory and practice—looking for guidance about whether and how to change theoretical problematics through ethnographic labor. Later sections of this chapter will address several kinds of historical framing of the tailors' project, first by considering the intellectual ambience that shaped it in the 1970s in the work of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychologists. We'll consider historical relations between craft apprenticeship as an exemplar of "informal education" and other kinds of labor and learning in Western commonplace wisdom. We'll then turn to a quite different history of craft practices with respect to Vai and Cola tailors. Finally, we'll address the long trajectory of the book and the trajectories of its changing parts.

Ethnographic Practices

Some of the predilections that inform this book also shaped a seminar on ethnographic research that I taught for many years as a way for apprentice ethnographers to learn by doing. Each student engaged in a modest ethnographic project, from start to finish, over the course of a year. The seminar was a place to learn by finding field sites, research problems, developing field notes, lines of inquiry, writing, discussing, making analytic arguments and mistakes. It was not exclusively a fieldwork course, nor was it an ethnographic writing course (a distinction dear to historical and theoretical debates about ethnography). Cerwonka and Malkki explore field research similarly, not by talking about how to do it, but instead by following Cerwonka's day-to-day practice, "that process," Malkki says, is "the critical theoretical practice of ethnography ... typically long, often meandering, inescapably social, and temporally situated" (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007, 177). The present book follows such a process over the five-year project with the tailors.

ETHNOGRAPHY IN DEBATE

Ethnographic practice in anthropology has been reconceived several times over in its little more than a century of existence, first from Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough, whose genre stands for the whole until about 1920, to structural-functional anthropology from roughly 1920 to 1980. Then a line between old and new ethnography in the 1980s, styled as "postmodern," rejected in a "crisis of representation" an earlier "modernist" practice of ethnography. The novel discussions of the 1980s included Clifford and Marcus 1986, Rabinow 1986, and Geertz 1988 and were mounted from the borders of anthropology with a cultural/literary version of cultural studies (Tyler and Marcus 1990, 129).

Given their differences, is it possible to set periods of ethnographic fashion beside one another in a way that allows consideration of what they have in common? Strathern set herself this difficult task in her Frazer Lecture in 1986, casting the differences between genres of ethnography as a pair of relations: between the ethnographer and the social world she studies and between the ethnographer and her audience (1990, 91). This double relation breaks out of simple empirical/theoretical and fieldwork/writing dichotomies to see the anthropologist as a mediator between two social worlds, facing problems of "how to manipulate familiar ideas and concepts to convey alien ones" (101). Malinowski has been widely credited with inventing the central anthropological tradition of long-term fieldwork, whose mission was to explain how an apparently bizarre culture (to readers) was common and ordinary (to the objects of study). Strathern contends that Malinowski's role as emblem of an epoch and a genre of ethnographic practice could not be explained as a matter of founding fatherhood, for his supposedly novel research practices—"holism, synchrony, intensive fieldwork, and the rest"—were in fact in place many years previously. Rather, she argues,

it lay in how he wrote, and specifically the organization of text. This implemented the kinds of relationships between writer, reader and subject matter that were to dominate anthropology, British and beyond, for the next sixty years.... What must be laid to Malinowski's door ... is the proclamation of the kinds of spaces that had to be made to convey the "new" analytical ideas. It was because this contextualisation was novel that the ideas themselves came to appear novel and that other scholars who might have been regarded as former exponents of them were rendered invisible. Its power for anthropologists lay in the parallel between the framework of the monograph and the framework of the field experience. (97–98)

What sort of framework? Strathern suggests that

once that context had been created in the separation of the culture of those to whom [Malinowski] was speaking from the culture of those about whom he was speaking ... the audience was required to connive in its distance from the anthropologist's subject matter. Meanwhile the anthropologist moved between the two. His proximity to the culture he was studying became his distance from the one he was addressing, and vice versa. This, tout court, is how the modern(ist) fieldworker has imagined him- or herself ever since. (103)

What about fieldwork in relation to the production of written ethnographies? Strathern agrees with Clifford 1986 that "the fieldwork experience was reconstructed in the monographs in such a way as to become an organising device for the monograph as such" (1990, 98; emphasis hers).

A major effect of the 1980s "crisis of representation" was to shift attention to ethnographic monographs as the site of the productive labor of anthropologists and to minimize the role played by fieldwork. Clifford's view of the relationship between fieldwork and the production of a monograph portrays fieldwork as a sort of amorphous object, "experience," or "quality of experience" to be made something of in the production of a text (1986, 162). He and similarly minded colleagues did not inquire into how fieldwork "made a new kind of persuasive fiction possible." Thus "ethnographic comprehension (a coherent position of sympathy and hermeneutic engagement) is better seen as a creation of ethnographic writing than as a consistent quality of ethnographic experience" (quoted in Strathern 1990, 98n23; emphasis Clifford's).

This certainly asserts a change in the relationship of the anthropologist to the object of study, though reducing fieldwork to "experience" seems to strip it of its complexities and reciprocal effects on the production of ethnographic texts. There was also a concern in the 1980s "to expose the figure of the fieldworker who was the register of the otherness of cultures." As Strathern puts it, "Clifford tackles the authority which anthropologists claimed this gave their writings: the fieldworker who came back from another society spoke for it in a determining way which now appears repugnant. Whether or not anthropologists ever did claim such authority is beside the point. It is the kind of book they wrote which is exposed" (1990, 109).

What about the anthropologist and his audience? If deep in the bones of modernist anthropology was a commitment to separate the context of a (holistic) culture from that of the author/anthropologist and his audience, the prescriptions of the '80s challenged this as well:

The postmodern mood is to make deliberate play with context. It is said to blur boundaries, destroy the dichotomizing frame, juxtapose voices, so that the multiple product, the monograph jointly authored, becomes conceivable.... A new relationship between writer, reader, and subject matter is contemplated. Decoding the exotic ("making sense") will no longer do; postmodernism requires the reader to interact with exotica in itself (Strathern 1990, 111)

At a distance of several decades (and from a point of view more in tune with recent reworking of ethnographic relations), the 1980s movement appears vulnerable to several critical worries, not least because of the habit of its proponents to collapse the entire discipline into their vision of ethnography' This is tantamount to saying that only one theoretical problematic is appropriate to the discipline as a whole. No wonder this view has led to considerable controversy, much of it couched in terms that obscure and reject, if only by remaining silent, other relations that constitute ethnography, including the ethnographer's concerns as theorist and political activist. The critique of ethnography in the 1980s failed to register deep theoretical differences inhabited by different anthropologists. Further, placing empirical fieldwork offstage left relatively untouched a commonsense empiricism around that "fieldwork experience." Its place in the writers' program remained unattended. This oversight has been recognized and regretred by Marcus (e.g., Faubion and Marcus 2009, 2n2; see also Westbrook 2008, 10–11; Comaroff and Comaroff 2003).

The 1980s movement to refashion ethnographic practice proposed that, to avoid conventional claims to ethnographic authority and as a matter of creative freedom from conventional representations of "the other," anthropologists should engage in new, experimental ways of writing ethnography. Gupta and Ferguson (1992), among others, found this solution inadequate:

Power does not enter the anthropological picture only at the moment of representation, for the cultural distinctiveness that the anthropologist attempts to represent has always already been produced within a field of power relations. There is thus a politics of otherness that is not reducible to a politics of representation.... The issue of otherness itself is not really addressed by the devices of polyphonic textual construction. (As reprinted in Robben and Sluka 2007, 344)

(Continues...)



Excerpted from APPRENTICESHIP in Critical Ethnographic Practice by JEAN LAVE Copyright © 2011 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Foreword by Thomas P. Gibson

Acknowledgments

1    Introduction: Apprenticeship and Critical Practice

2    Institutional Arrangements and the Uniform

3    Becoming a Tailor

4    Testing Learning Transfer

5    Multiplying Situations

6    Research on Apprenticeship, Research as Apprenticeship

Notes

References

Index
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