Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Frederick Erickson 1
Key Words
Apprenticeship ` Community of practice ` Conflict theory ` Culture ` Culture
change
Abstract
Culture used to be thought of as a whole, internally consistent system of
symbols and values held in common by members of bounded social groups, in-
cluding whole societies. That view is changing among anthropologists currently.
This article traces the intellectual history of those changes, across the earlier
perspectives of functionalism and conflict theory, through recent perspectives
on culture as residing in the practices of local communities of practice. Both
those local social groups and the persons within them are presumed currently to
be multicultural rather than monocultural. Implications of this for the study of
human development are that (1) acquisition of culture involves apprentice-like
interaction in specific communities of practice, and that (2) a key unit of analy-
sis in the study of the acquisition of culture is the indiviudal's encounters with
various specific communities of practice in that individual's distinctive daily
round. Patterns of culture in whole societies in relation to those in local commu-
nities of practice are currently undertheorized.
Copyright 2002 S. Karger AG, Basel
1
My doctoral study was interdisciplinary, including courses in anthropology, sociology, and so-
ciolinguistics in relation to education, and my doctoral thesis was a sociolinguistic analysis of cultural
differences in oral discourse stragegies for argumentation, comparing discourse in small groups of Afri-
can-American teenagers with discourse in small groups of Euro-American teenagers (PhD in education,
Northwestern University, 1969). Currently I am especially interested in video-based sociolinguistic
research on social interaction as a learning environment, in the use of digital multimedia to document
complex teaching and learning practice in classrooms, and in methods of ethnography in modern socie-
ties. I am a past president of the Council on Anthropology and Education of the American Anthropo-
logical Association, and past Vice President for Division G (The Social Context of Education) of the
American Educational Research Association. Currently I am George Kneller Professor of Anthropology
of Education, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, UCLA, where I am also Director
of the Center for Research and Innovation in Elementary Education, Corinne A. Seeds University Ele-
mentary School, the laboratory school at UCLA.
References
Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Ed. M. Holquist. Austin. University of Texas Press.
Bernstein, B. (1971). Class, codes, and control. 2nd rev. ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. London: Cambridge University Press.
Erickson, F., & Rittenberg, W. (1987). Topic control and person control: A thorny problem for foreign
physicians in interaction with American patients. Discourse Processes, 10, 401415.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Goodenough, W. (1974). Mutliculturalism as the normal human experience. Anthropology and Educa-
tion Quarterly, 7, 47.
Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Holland, D. (1997). Selves as cultured: As told by an anthropologist who lacks a soul. In R. Ashmore &
L. Jussim (Eds.), Self and identity: Fundamental issues. New York: Oxford University Press.
Holland, D., Lachicotte, W. Jr., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (2001). Identity and agency in cultural worlds.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hymes, D. (1974). Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Ortner, S. B. (1984). Theory in anthropology in the sixties. In Comparative studies in society and his-
tory, vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 126166.
Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Rogoff, B., Turkanis, C. G., & Bartlett, L. (eds). (2001). Learning together: Children and adults in a
school community. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tylor, E. B. (1871/1970). Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy,
religion, language, art, and custom. London: Murray.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
<