Negotiating Legitimacy: Rituals and Reflection in School by Robert Hamm

Authors

  • Russell Dudley-Smith UCL Institute of Education

Keywords:

ritual, Foucault, strategy

Abstract

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...

Author Biography

Russell Dudley-Smith, UCL Institute of Education

Doctoral student

References

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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

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Published

2015-07-31

Issue

Section

Book Reviews/Review Essays