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Disrupting Book Smartness: Critical Ethnography and the “Ontological Turn” in Anthropology and Educational Studies

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Critical Anthropological Engagements in Human Alterity and Difference

Part of the book series: Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference ((ATSIAD))

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Abstract

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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Vocational Teacher Education, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Oslo, Norway

    Lars Gjelstad

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  1. Lars Gjelstad
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Bjørn Enge Bertelsen

  2. University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Synnøve Bendixsen

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Gjelstad, L. (2016). Disrupting Book Smartness: Critical Ethnography and the “Ontological Turn” in Anthropology and Educational Studies. In: Bertelsen, B., Bendixsen, S. (eds) Critical Anthropological Engagements in Human Alterity and Difference. Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40475-2_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40475-2_7

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-40474-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-40475-2

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