Curriculum Studies, The Future of: Essay 3

Curriculum studies is a field whose future must grapple with the cultural significance of curriculum as a symbolic act. Reconceiving curriculum from the perspective of culture will require a radical rupture in curriculum thought. Consequently, I draw on Clifford Geertz's seminal essay “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” to liken the curriculum to culture. Geertz's analysis of the Balinese cockfight recognizes the doubleness of cultural events, as well as the fact that events are not really real, but are made real through interpretation. The cockfight is a critical element of the culture of the Balinese in which blood sacrifice is offered to the demons to pacify their ravenous, cannibalistic hunger. Prior to any major temple festival, holiday, or ritual, a cockfight is held. However, as Geertz suggests, it is not just cocks fighting. The identification that Balinese men make with their cocks is a complex one. In Balinese culture, there is a profound revulsion of animality (anything to do with animals) because it is the direct inversion of what it means to be human, and yet men are obsessed with their cocks and the cockfight. The doubleness of the cockfight suggests that the Balinese man is identifying with what he most fears and hates, and ambivalence being what it is, he is fascinated by the power of darkness. I would like to suggest that, like a cockfight, curriculum represents what is most feared—darkness and death and the inevitable unknown that accompanies it. The crosswise doubleness of the curriculum rests in the projection of an ideal (the known) and the projection of what is most feared (the unknown). The struggle (or cockfight) over curriculum reflects not only the fight over the need for control, but also the profound fear of the unknown. When curriculum serves as the really real, it keeps fear, darkness, and death at bay. Ironically, it is this fear that keeps curriculum from being a living, breathing presence. In order to live, the curriculum must die.

The curriculum, like the cockfight, is a cultural symbol through which there is an ongoing negotiation of meaning. Culture is not universal and static, but is always an interpretative act engaged in reading the text of life. The cockfight is not just a cockfight, but a bloody drama in which fears, tensions, and desires are negotiated. Cultural rituals and rites are, as Geertz maintains, symbols that signify layered and deep meanings. The curriculum is not just curriculum, but functions on a highly symbolic level. Curriculum, like the cockfight, is the bloody drama in which we might liken the U.S. school children as the sacrifice to assuage the fear of the unknown or not knowing. As part of this culture, curriculum theorists are implicated in this bloody drama.

I draw on Geertz's essay to begin my thoughts on curriculum for a number of reasons. First, it is provocative, and much like my initial attraction to anthropology, it is intended to make the familiar strange. Curriculum has functioned for me as a window into the world. Curriculum questions foundational and fundamental aspects of a society: What is knowledge? What knowledge is valued? Who can be a knower? The ways in which these questions are understood and answered are critical to the production of subject identities and the possible identities made available in any particular time and space. It is this relationship between knowledge, identity, power, and culture that curriculum theory seeks to address.

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