Where to Look for “Global” and “National” Cultures

• In Event: Ethnography as Epistemology: An International Dialogue on Challenges Facing Ethnographers Studying Knowledge Construction Across Disciplines, Time Scales, Actors, Institutions, and Countries

Abstract

Fred Erickson rightly points out that cultures, understood as the making of meaning in social interaction, are located in communities of practice, particularly in face-to-face communities of practice (2011). It is in the give and take of interaction that people make and challenge and resist and remake cultural meanings (Street 1993). But what does this perspective on culture mean for the ethnographer who seeks to conduct a "vertical case study" (Vavrus & Bartlett 2009; cf. Marcus 1998), tracking the connections between meaning-making at the local level and the making--or imposition--of meaning at regional, national or global levels? What could we possibly mean by "world culture" from this perspective (as in, for example, Ramirez 2003)? What, for that matter, could we mean by "national culture" if we conceive of culture as constructed in communities of practice? How and where should we conduct ethnographic studies of the global flow of meaning? And how are we to conceive of artifacts--the language, texts, institutions, and other tools left as traces of social interactions, which have been so important to many of our analyses?

In this paper, following Bodley's dictum that it is always people--particular people, usually in groups, but not things or texts or organizations--that act, I will propose that ethnographers look for the construction of national cultures in the communities of practice of the individuals who can make a warranted claim to speak for national organizations (such as ministries of education or nationally prestigious think tanks). Similarly, we can look for the construction of world cultures of education in the interactions of decision makers and influential thinkers situated in locations like the World Bank, UNESCO, and bilateral aid agencies. National culture needn't be widely shared by residents of a nation; what matters is that people who successfully claim to speak for the nation construct it among themselves. In the same way, people who successfully claim that they speak on behalf of the world, that is, that they represent international standards or an emerging global model, construct world cultures among themselves. Of course, the reports and websites and institutions that these actors produce matter, but only as other actors on the ground in various locations interpret and reinterpret those artifacts. To illustrate the kind of ethnography this perspectives requires, I will draw on Anna Tsing's multi-sited but always "local" study of loggers and environmentalists in Borneo (2005) and on my own work on the global flow (or construction and reconstruction) of ideas about good teaching practice (2002, 2003).

Author

• Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt, University of California - Los Angeles