Educational Anthropology

The Formative Years

The anthropology of education is an interdisciplinary field that has its roots in nineteenth-century anthropology and became structured over the course of the twentieth century through the engagement of anthropologists and educators as they examined notions of culture, particularly in non-western groups.

Anthropological interests in educational problems, practices, and institutions can be traced back to Edgar I. Hewett's articles in the American Anthropologist titled “Anthropology and Education” (1904) and “Ethnic Factors in Education” (1905). In these papers, Hewett recommended the incorporation of ethnological and cultural history within the course of study in public schools, joint meetings of national education and anthropology societies to discuss mutual problems, and the inclusion of anthropological studies in the training of teachers.

As early as 1913 Maria Montessori drew on work in physical anthropology to inform her work with children, which stressed a developmental process, respect for individual differences in growth and function, and the study of local conditions in the development of her notion of “pedagogical anthropology.” In his 1928 Anthropology and Modern Life, Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, argued for anthropological research to be used by educators to better understand cultural notions of child development.

From the 1890s through the early 1950s anthropologists engaged in intensive fieldwork in small communities using participant observation of everyday life to understand the culture or ways of life of a particular group. Using these ethnographic methods enabled researchers to detail what they believed to be the “total way of life” of a group including the use of language, enculturation of their young, and ways formal and informal education took place within these groups. Anthropologists working during this time period were particularly interested in cultural maintenance (how cultures were continued across generations) as well as cultural acquisition (how people got culture). These researchers often reported on the life-cycle development from birth through childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and elderhood and focused on learning and teaching in all aspects of the culture. Much of this early descriptive work was an effort to capture indigenous cultures before they were transformed through contact with other cultures, particularly western cultures.

Elizabeth Eddy (1985) described 1925 through 1954 as the formative years of anthropology and education, when many anthropologists were engaged in studies documenting formalized systems of education and the enculturation of the child. Major anthropologists contributing to this body of work include Gregory Bateson, Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, John Dollard, John Embree, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Felix Keesing, Ralph Linton, Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Hortense Powdermaker, Paul Radin, Robert Tedfield, Edward S apir, W. Lloyd Warner, and John Whiting.

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