An Anthropology of Learning

This book deals with the black box of social science methodology: participant observation. From the perspective of anthropology, it explores the difference between an ethnographer as participant observer and any other participant. It discusses and gives insight into what participant observers do before they write their texts. It explains how they learn to engage with other people's cultural ecologies and develop relational expertise. Showing that anthropology is a craft of cultural learning processes, the book introduces the engaged participant observer as an expert ethnographer capable of aligning engagements with others. It argues that culture as representation is replaced by culture as a frictioned learning process through which collective and social cultures emerge. To advance understanding of the ethnographer's learning process, the book introduces a new methodological vocabulary of cultural learning processes that is based on a diffracted reading of ethnography, anthropological theory, post-phenomenology, feminist materialism and cultural-historical activity theory.

Résumé
This book has one explicit purpose: to present a new theory of cultural learning in organisations which combines practice-based learning with cultural models - a cognitive anthropological schema theory of taken-for-granted connections - tied to the everyday meaningful use of artefacts. The understanding of culture as emerging in a process of learning open up for new understandings, which is useful for researchers, practitioners and students interested in dynamic studies of culture and cultural studies of organisations. The new approach goes beyond culture as a static, essentialist entity and open for our possibility to learn in organisations across national cultures, across ethnicity and across the apparently insurmountable local educational differences which makes it difficult for people to communicate working together in an increasingly globalized world. The empirical examples are mainly drawn from organisations of education and science which are melting-pots of cultural encounters.

Contenu

Foreword.- 1. Introducing the engaged anthropologist.- 2. Culture as contested field.- 3. Collective and social cultures.- 4. Position matters!.- 5. Social designations of cultural markers.- 6. Learning from culture contrast.- 7. Towards nested engagement.- 8. Future zones of development.- 9. Epilogue. Index.