Negotiating Legitimacy: Rituals and Reflection in School by Robert Hamm
Keywords:
ritual, Foucault, strategyAbstract
There are good reasons for studying ritual-like events in school settings. Both disciplinary (subject-knowledge) and non-disciplinary teaching (norms of behaviour) may seek to produce new kinds of identity and patterns of self-evident truth other than those established in the family. Schools like to emphasise their universalistic character—the responsibility of transmitting non-disciplinary moral standards and sanctified disciplinary subject knowledges. This creates a problem: how to get pupils to become subjects of these cultural arbitraries?
The arbitrary nature of the imposition is of course denied. Yet any historical study of...References
Allen, A. (2014). Benign Violence: Education in and beyond the Age of Reason. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and Philosophy. translated by Ben Brewster, New York: Monthly Review Press
Bourdieu, P. (1992). Language and Symbolic Power. translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, Cambridge: Polity
Dowling, P. (2009). Sociology as Method: Departures from the Forensics of Culture, Text and Knowledge. Rotterdam: Sense
Thomassen, B. (2014). Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing
Wulf, C. (2013). Towards a Historical Cultural Anthropology of Education: The Berlin Ritual Study. in Anderson-Levitt, K. (ed.)
Anthropologies of Education: A Global Guide to Ethnographic Studies of Learning and Schooling New York: Berghahn Books
Wulf, C., Althans, B., Audehm, K., Bausch, C., Göhlich, M., Sting, S., Tervooren, A., Wagner-Willi, M. & Zirfas, J. (2010). Ritual and Identity: The staging and performing of rituals in the lives of young people. London: The Tufnell Press
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License of their choice (usually CCBY 3.0 unported, but determined at the proofing stage by consultation with the Editor - readers looking for copyright permissions are required to do this on a case by case basis) that allows others to share the work in some way with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. We appreciate authors placing a link to the Other Education site wherever they choose to offer a PDF download to the original OE article.