Abstract
Daniele challenged us to reconsider how we normally think about the anthropology of education being solely about education when it may also be a prism to look at the workings of the modern state. Education constitutes another of its pillars next to for example the army and bureaucracy. The university is a central institution in the functioning of the state, funded to provide it with workers (and we made links with feminist critiques of how the domestic sphere produces workers for capitalism). But education is also seen as a right, and the funding and contents of which are also politically contested between government and society which produces its own private universities. The blurred boundaries between state, civil society, and the private sector discussed last month were clear here. The link between knowledge and power also becomes evident when we view universities as playing fields for legitimacy and critique, with hierarchies of disciplines and of universities in which quality may not coincide with prestige. The university is an institution to be understood within its social context, providing social spaces for the construction of identity and as such it also provides a window into how society is “made.” In the specific contexts of Daniele’s research in Egypt and Jordan, issues emerge, for example over who gets to speak in the name of Islam?
We also discussed our own role as academics in higher education and our reluctance identified by Bourdieu to work on the conditions of our own production. So, whatever your area of research, the anthropology of education is of interest to us all!
01 Dec 2022