SHRI VILE PARLE KELVANI MANDAL’S

MITHIBAI COLLEGE OF ARTS, CHAUHAN INSTITUTE OF

SCIENCES & AMRUTBEN JIVANLAL COLLEGE OF

COMMERCE AND ECONOMICS (AUTONOMOUS)

SUBJECT: ANTHROPOLOGY

SEMESTER 6

TOPIC: ANTHROPOLOGY OF LEARNING

CLASS : TYBA (B) SOCIOLOGY

PAPER : ANTHROPOLOGY

NAME : ANITA PARMAR

ROLL NUMBER :028

SAP NUMBER : 40310190078

The paper place a great emphasis on culture acquisition and tries to recommend how the study of
first-language acquisition might offer a useful model. The simple way of writing adopted by the author
helped in understanding the article much better and also helped in analyzing every aspect of the article
that he is trying to convey with his words. I agree with the author about being skeptical of social
scientist and educators who consider teaching and learning as one and the same. I personally think that
they both are two different concepts which have some similarities but the approach followed in both of
them is different and the outcome of both the processes is also discrete. In addition to that, another
disagreement was observed with anthropological nonchalance where it seems to equate the transmitting
of culture with learning of culture.

Societies are often portrayed as both overbearing in their domination over the individuals who
comprise them and overly successful in their efforts to produce, or reproduce, the very type of individual
the society wants. I think anthropology of learning as an area is about collective academic interest and
to invite colleagues to share their views on the topic. I feel that anthropologists have shown more
interest in reporting what transmitters try to transmit than what learners are actually learning seems
understandable as stated by the author. Self conscious efforts to transmit culture have captured more
attention and has given the field worker explicit behavior to observe and describe the events. The first
formalization of thoughts was taken place in a symposium on the Anthropological of Learning in
December 1980. The first task that came along with the formalization of thoughts was to reflect upon the
ways that earlier contributors in anthropology and related social sciences have brought us to where we
are today.

In Anthropological fashion, the paper show a tendency to link ideas rather closely to the elders
with whom the association is made. But, also in anthropological fashion, I feel that there are numerous
ideas, concepts and hypotheses floating about that have not been subject to rigorous review. As stated by
the author, a curious characteristic of anthropology, comforting to those within its sphere and
confounding to outsiders, is that hypotheses are conceived rather randomly and then abandoned to make
it quite on one own self. The efforts and input given by the author and his colleagues provides an
occasion to sift carefully through myriad possible explanations that were given by others. I also feel that
perhaps academic ideas, like academicians themselves, should be subject periodically to ‘up or out’
scrutiny.

Personally, I liked the idea of the author to mention about the other writers and giving his
perspective about their work. Firstly, stating about Margaret Mead’s longtime interest in both teaching
and learning. The author mentioned that her attention was more drawn to processes of teaching than to
learning per se. Mead once proposed a contrast between “learning cultures” and “teaching cultures”
(Mead 1942, as noted in Gearing 1973). As stated by Mead, “learning culture” refers to a small,
homogenous group that shows little concern for transmitting culture because there is virtually no danger
of anyone going astray. “Teaching culture” refers to societies that regard it as imperative that those who
know inform and direct those who do not know. Mead’s view of the contrast between learning and
teaching is apparent in her observation in Culture and Commitment that “Learning, which is based on
human dependency, is relatively simple. But human capacities for creating elaborate teachable systems
are very complex. I think that, Mead was usually in the mainstream of ideas. Her cavalier dismissal of
learning as “simple” is reflected in the writings of other anthropologists.

Next, the author stated about the work of Bateson. The work of Bateson, on the contrary , serves
as reminder that some anthropologists have extended their interests to include a consideration of
learning or have felt free to explore beyond customary anthropological bounds, although Bateson
himself did ponder whether anthropologists had anything to offer on the topic of learning other than
their questions. “Raising problems” was something that Bateson did extremely well, however, and he
frequently turned his attention to raising problems about the nature of the learning process. He proposed
a hierarchical classification of 1earning“levels” based upon the assumption that “all learning is in some
degree stochastic (i.e., contains components of ‘trial and error’)” and thus that the types of errors to be
corrected provide the basis for a classification of learning levels. Lastly, talking about the scholar,
Powdermaker, his description of culture transmission in Lesu aptly characterizes how anthropologists
have tended to portray children as ever-present but minimally engaged, patiently waiting for the onset of
puberty before suddenly blossoming into adult roles.

According to the author, the topic of education has always received some anthropological
attention; occasionally it has provided a major focus and major contribution. In addition to that, wide
interest in ethnography provides us with an unusual opportunity to demonstrate that anthropology has
more to offer to the field of education than simply a “fieldwork” approach to research. Perhaps
anthropology can serve as a reminder to educational researchers that their preoccupation with method
borders on making method an end in itself. Anthropological concern has never been with method per se.
Its focus is in making sense of the lived-in world.

The author states that “ethnographic method” has caught educator attention, so there is
opportunity to get beyond ethnographic technique into the realm of the stuff with which ethnographic
research deals, a realm that Geertz describes as cultural interpretation. I agree with the author when he
says that for most students, learning is a dull and pedestrian topic of study today and all they knew was
that learning is confined to a couple of words i.e. a change in behavior. George Spindler, the author’s
esteemed mentor, has always been keenly interested in the processes of cultural transmission and in
identifying “cultura1 antecedents” of behavior. He has interpreted cultural transmission very literally,
focusing almost exclusively on what humans do, consciously and explicitly, to transmit culture.
Secondly, Solon Kimball has also addressed the topic “The Transmission of Culture”. In a paper that
first appeared in 1965and has been frequently reprinted, but his interests have often found him writing
about the learning of culture as well. He has described his baptism to fieldwork as a process of “learning
a culture” (1972). In organizing his own papers for publication in a single volume, he placed six of
them, including his chapter on cultural transmission, in a section entitled “Culture and Learning” (1974).
If anthropology is a rich resource on learning, it is a largely untapped one and its utility has not yet been
demonstrated. According to the author’s knowledge then, no one has prepared a bibliography dealing
exclusively with anthropological contributions to the study of the learning process and anthropological
sources rich with descriptions about learning, although many such references are cited in bibliographies
in anthropology and education dealing with closely related topics.

The writer states that Fred Gearing is among the minority of anthropologists who have
expressed long-term interest in the “receiving” as well as the transmitting of culture. In an earlier
discussion dealing with the development of “anthropology and education,” Gearing once posited a
hypothetical juncture in the evolution of cultural anthropology, a juncture at which processes involved
with the transmission of culture, rather than a preoccupation with the content of it, might have become
the core of anthropological inquiry. Had learning won out at the moment of Gearing’s hypothetical coin
toss, there would have been no need to develop a special subfield of anthropology and education. But
with culture content serving as the core of the discipline, the question of how content is transmitted
tends to be overshadowed by the endless task of description. I think that the “road not taken” would
have led to a more overriding concern for cultural process instead of a preoccupation with cultural
content. Given their preoccupation with cultural inventory, it is noteworthy that anthropologists have
given at least passing attention to educational processes, particularly to child-training practices. Mead’s
characterization of some societies as “learning cultures,” in which there seems so little likelihood of
anyone failing to “catch” the cultural heritage that no self-conscious effort is made to transmit it,
reminds us how easy it is to regard culture as virtually self transmitting.

Spindler has made the assertion in this regard that “It would be difficult for a child not to learn
his culture”. For me that statement is not only true but need not be made with any tentativeness. A
comparable statement holds for learning the languages heard about ourselves. We neither invent
language and culture on our own nor have any options about learning them. More than that, the very
process of transmitting culture is a time for defining it as well, as Pettitt aptly observed in Primitive
education in North America . Pettitt’s oft-quoted words appear in discussions about the process of
cultural transmission. I think they help explain why even those anthropologists not particularly intrigued
with enculturation per se have nonetheless been attentive to the transmitters. The author’s and his
colleague’s efforts on behalf of an anthropology of learning invited careful attention to what it is that
learners learn of their culture and to how and why learners attend to some things rather than others.
Their starting point is to recognize that we all have to acquire some cultural knowledge in at least one
major cultural system and no one, not even the anthropologist, is going to acquire all of it.

According to author, studies in language acquisition seem to offer a promising direction for an
anthropology of learning. Language acquisition was hardly a new field of inquiry then, but he shared
with others a sense of its growing importance for understanding the processes of cultural acquisition. He
recognized the long debate regarding the suitability of language acquisition processes as analog for
cultural acquisition, including the problem that language must then double both as an aspect of cultural
learning and as a model for it. Along with author, I could also recognize the problem of referring to a
language acquisition “model” that implies that linguists are themselves in agreement about how the
process occurs.

The author was intrigued with the similarities of issues related to the biological basis for
language and cultural learning, the utility of talking about each of them as the learning of a set of
unwritten rules that guides the operation of appropriate (linguistic or cultural) behaviors, and the
contrast linguists have made between performance that what one actually does and competence the
totality of what one understands. The most exciting contributions for me was from linguistics for the
study of cultural acquisition is the conceptualization shared by many child language learning scholars of
the language learner as an active participant in the learning process, an incipient but persistent “theory
builder” constantly sifting and sorting and seeking regularity from a continuous, almost random
bombardment of linguistic and cultural elements swirling about. As all human beings are confronted a
new with rediscovering-figuring out for themselves-how their social environment “works.” Until people
figure out how those them go about getting what they need and want, they cannot get the system to
work, or to work predictably, on their own behalf. The author states that each of us must “gropingly
discover” the unexplicated rules of our language through deriving a grammar for at least one of the
languages spoken around us. As well, each of us must work out a comparable “grammar” of what Geertz
called the “informal logic of actual life” .

As we all know that our ecological environment presents a certain range of possibilities, and
biological needs create some urgencies and predispose us toward others. But we learn to cope with these
exigencies, and to cope with our fellow “copers”as well, through figuring out underlying “grammars”
and recognizing significant variation in the styles those about us use in behaving and in communicating.
Every normally endowed, normally functioning human is engaged life-long in a constructive and
effortful process to figure things out sufficiently well to develop a personal life-style and live out a
unique life within some linguistically and culturally bounded system.

Anthropologists have been interested in “how to” learning, but I think their commitment to
context finds them particularly suited to inquire Into the learning of morality and intellect. I find
Wallace’s ideas about the Learning of morality especially provocative, for he is describing the learning
of Human qualities that find their expression in placing the welfare of the group Above one’s own needs
or interests.

The term observational learning” seems to make “learning” synonymous with “watching” or
even “seeing. “Both “imitation” and “observational learning” seem more helpful than Spindler’s
depiction of learning one’s culture by a process of “osmosis” I do not deny that something goes on in
human cognition that can be Called “observational learning” or even “learning by osmosis.” But I hope
we can find more precise ways to describe that learning. More importantly, can We find ways to
distinguish circumstances when we have every reason to believe learning is taking place from other
moments when we believe it might Be taking place?

Also unsorted is the cross-cultural examination of the circumstances by which persons charged
with formal responsibilities as educators are to be Regarded as strangers or friends. When the social
distance between learner And teacher is great, Tax’s hypothesis might suggest that efforts would be
made to narrow the gap. For example if assign teachers only slightly older than the students, or address
teachers by kin terms. We often see “beginning” Teachers try to effect this closeness, but my sense of
the anthropological Evidence is that teachers have traditionally been cast in the role of stranger. In The
absence of real strangers to perform some formal ceremony or initiation, it has been pointed out that a
group can create strangers with the use of masks. In our society and certainly among professional
educators, we virtually insist that didactic instruction be given by strangers. We do not want to be
“lectured to” by friends. At the same time, we expect public-school teachers to Be friends, or at least
friendly, particularly in the early years of schooling.

In our call for more anthropological attention to learning, I think Attention should be focused on
learning that occurs in natural settings rather than on learning done in schools. This is not to say that
school learning is unimportant or that anthropologists have nothing to offer; rather, I think, School
learning already receives adequate attention and anthropologists are Contributing to that work. Of late,
“anthropology and education” seems to have focused unduly on schools and given too little attention to
education in broader cultural context. Schools should not dominate either our research or our perspective
when schooling itself deals with such a narrow spectrum of the cultural repertoire. We should be
bringing our anthropology to bear on Classroom observations, not drawing our perspectives from them.
Perhaps this is why Lave’s work on the apprenticing of tailors in Liberia, viewed as an Alternative to
formal schooling rather than an alternative form of it, has struck such a note of interest in anthropology
and education .

At the same time that I draw attention to this learn-then-teach cycle that Tax describes as the
“short-jump percolation” of information, I must note that Anthropologists have rightly called attention to
the enculturative influence of every family member. They have made a particular effort to show how
certain functions that mainstream American families assume to be the “normal” Child-rearing
responsibilities of two parents are often performed by others like older siblings, mother’s brother,
“equivalent” members of extended families in different societies. But we need not cite exotic
circumstances to bring attention to the influence of people in roles other than parents and Peers. In our
own society, for example, we have given rather slight attention to the role of grandparents in cultural
acquisition. Margaret Mead often alluded To the educative influence of grandparents and wrote
personally of her experience of grand mothering . Ethnographic accounts sometimes mention
grandparent-grandchild relationships, especially if they are characterized by special behavior such as the
“joking relationship” and Reciprocal forms of address noted among some American Indian tribes.
Perhaps the anthropology of learning can draw attention to the influence that Grandparents exert in our
efforts to discover our culture and locate ourselves In it.

It is understandable that anthropologists inquiring into a culture are Drawn toward older
informants who are, in one sense, the best source of Cultural knowledge. But in our ethnographic
determination to “get right to The source,” we inadvertently gloss over the age-grading of knowledge.
We lose track of the fact that even our oldest informants continue to learn.

In this paper I have saw the terms acquisition and learning Interchangeably. Until scholars
interested in second-language learning began Making a distinction between the terms, 1 think they were
used Interchangeably by most linguists and anthropologists. I wonder now if a more self-conscious
anthropology of learning might make better use of this distinction. Of course, “acquisition” may prove
in the long run to be no more Than a fancy synonym for “osmosis,” acknowledging the presence of a
Complex process without in the least helping us to understand it. Nonetheless, Our concern with
identifying appropriate terms serves notice of our effort to distinguish broad, pervasive learning
“contexts” from attempts to induce learning through purposeful engagement, error correction, and the
explicit teaching of rules. Extending the distinction between acquisition and learning into the cultural
sphere provides a perspective for understanding why anthropologists, for all their success at “learning”
other cultures, seldom achieve the “good intuitions” or “deep understandings” to the degree that the
natives have, even though the anthropologist may easily outperform the native in “explaining” a
particular society.

My hunch is that in attending to the “imponderably of actual life” Anthropologists have probably
observed far more “problem finding and Stimulus seeking” behavior than they have reported. They have
not made much of such behavior because they have tended to view it as distinctive and individual. If we
were to aggregate such behaviors, we might see patterns that reflect cultural influences in terms of the
ordinary range of behaviors From which one may select alternatives or “do one’s own thing.” Do some
Societies foster problem finding more than others? Stated another way, in What ways do different
societies accommodate problem-finding and stimulus seeking behavior? I feel that my explanations must
work in the natural settings in which Ethnographic research is conducted. And that stands to be the
major Contribution from the anthropological study of learning.

I view rather critically the tendency to equate what cultural transmitters are attempting to transmit
with what cultural acquirers are necessarily acquiring. The call proposed here for an anthropology of
learning is a call for increased attention to the processes through which individuals continue throughout
their lives to “gropingly discover” what they need to know. An anthropology of learning can also serve
as a reminder that learning remains an individual matter; culture is, at best, only imperfectly “shared.”
As Goodenough states, “People learn as individuals. Therefore, if culture is learned, its ultimate locus
must be in individuals rather than in groups” . I have examined a number of learning-related terms and
concepts that anthropologists have used or introduced. It is time for sifting and sorting. To the end of
providing some structure for the anthropology of learning, I have attempted to identify central issues and
have raised cautions, primarily with the intent of keeping our attention focused on what we have actually
observed, rather than borrowing too heavily from psychological theory or working from popular
anthropological assumptions that have not themselves been subjected to scrutiny.

I am quite taken with the generally accepted view among linguists that sees learning as a constructive
and effortful process. In that view, learners are seen as active hypothesis makers or theory builders
constantly discovering and refining a set of underlying principles that corresponds closely enough with
the behavior of other humans around them to guide the conduct of their everyday lives. A distinction
between cultural acquisition and cultural learning, comparable to the distinction second-language
learning scholars are making between language acquisition and language learning, could prove helpful
in accounting for the fact that learners accumulate a storehouse of data that far exceeds what they are
actively attending to at any given moment. To be able better to distinguish the learned from the learnable
in all that stuff we carry about in our heads would help us with the dilemma of seeming at once to
explain so much and so little when we observe that it would be “difficult” for children not to learn their
culture.
The signal contribution from a rekindled anthropological interest in learning may come not from the
recognition of the inevitability of acquiring one’s culture but from the reminder that human social
learning is essentially a process of active rediscovery. For even as we display new facets of our own
linguistic or cultural competence, we only succeed in proving that we have rediscovered, and now claim
as our own, what our elders knew all the time.