Dialogue and the Transmission of Culture: The Spindlers and the Making of American Anthropology

Review Essay

Dialogue and the Transmission of Culture: The Spindlers and the Making of American Anthropology MARCELO M. SUAREZ-OROZCO University of California, Sun Diego

The American Cultural Dialogue and Its Transmission George and Louise Spindler with Henry Trueba and Melvin D. Wil- liams. Bristol, Penn.: Falmer Press, 1990. Pp. ix-xvi + 1-182.

Interpretive Ethnography and Education: A t Home and Abroad Edited by George Spindler and Louise Spindler. Hillsdale, N.J.: Law- rence Erlbaum, 1987. Pp. xi-xii + 1-505.

Education and Cultural Process: Anthropological Approaches Edited by George Spindler. Prospect Heights, Ill. : Waveland Press, 2d edition, 1987. Pp. vii-xviii + 1-505.

I have to confess that only recently, as I was preparing myself for this review essay, did I become fully conscious of the formidable nature of George and Louise Spindler’s contributions to the making of Ameri- can anthropology. I suspect that I am not alone. Indeed, I suspect that many in anthropology, except perhaps their closest colleagues and collaborators, while familiar with aspects of the Spindlers’ oeuvre, may not fully recognize the overall spectrum of their contributions to the field. Don’t let their casual and mild demeanor fool you: Here are two of the wisest and most productive people in the history of anthropology.

What is perhaps most impressive about the Spindlers’ work is that it addresses key and enduring problems in various branches of anthropology. The Spindlers are anthropologists’ anthropologists par ex- cellence. Their important contributions to psychological anthropology are well known to psychological anthropologists, but most of my friends in psychological anthropology are only vaguely aware of the Spindlers’ fundamental contributions to the study of the formal transmission of culture in schools in plural settings. Likewise, those in ed-

Marcel0 SuArez-Orozco is Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Univer- sity of California, San Diego.

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ucational anthropology are not fully aware, I am sure, of the signifi- cance of the Spindlers’ Herculean work with the Rorschach test, doc- umenting patterns of acculturation and change (as well as their use of many other innovative techniques in psychological anthropology such as the Values Projective Technique).

And then there are their enduring contributions to American Indian studies (among Menominee Indians, Blood Indians, and Mistassini Cree), and their key studies of German village life (emphasizing change and urbanization) and rural life in Wisconsin (particularly con- sidering ”hinterland values,” and ruralhrban continuities and discontinuities in “cultural dialogue”). Lastly, there are their classic studies of schooling, in rural Wisconsin and Germany, as well as in California. In summary, the Spindlers have left their permanent imprint in the fields of educational anthropology, psychological anthropology, American Indian studies, and European culture studies.

In addition to their own basic research and publications (George, for example, has published some 18 major books), the Spindlers’ contributions to the making of American anthropology include their mon- umental work as editors at the American Anfhropologist (1963-1967), and as series editors for Holt, Rinehart and Winston (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology, 1960-present, 147 titles; Studies in Anthro- pological Methods, 15 titles; Case Studies in Education and Culture, 17 titles; and Basic Anthropology Units, 12 titles). In short, the Spin- dlers’ career spans over 40 of some of the most interesting and productive years in the making of modern American anthropology. Lastly, I must mention their training of various waves of anthropology graduate students at Stanford and Wisconsin-Madison. Here, I must especially point out their extraordinary record in giving first-rate training to minorities and women at those institutions. Many of these former students, as well as others influenced by their vision of the field, have included chapters in the volumes under consideration in this specific review.

This review essay, of course, cannot possibly do equal justice to all aspects of the Spindlers’ multifaceted work. Rather, here I wish to con- centrate on the Spindlers’ approach to the study of culture, particularly American culture, with special reference to their theory of “dialogue’’ and its transmission in formal school settings. I will also briefly consider the influence of the Spindlers’ project on the work of other key figures in our field included in the edited volumes under consideration in this review.

According to the Spindlers there is a dominant, mainstream ”cultural dialogue” in the United States. Unlike previous culture theorists, the Spindlers view the work of culture as a malleable ”dialogue.” American culture, in their view, is an open-ended, polyvocal, con- tested dialogue around some basic (and historically enduring) themes.

This dialogue pivots around independence, freedom, conformity, success, community, optimism, cynicism, idealism, materialism, technology, na-

Suarez-Orozco Dialogue and the Transmission of Culture 283

ture, work and other value orientations and their permutations and oppo- sitions. The dialogue goes on since the Revolution. Immigrants and those rising from the lower socioeconomic ranks assimilate, appropriate and acquire this dialogue as they become mainstream. This assimilative process will go on, for it is the American ethos, the central process of American culture and society. Ethnicity is not lost but participation is gained. However, ethnicity is reshaped. [The American Cultural Dialogue, pp. xi-xii]

As it turns out American culture, not unlike pornography, is much more difficult to precisely define than it is to simply identify. The sheer size of the United States, its ethnic complexity, class and castelike stratification and conflicts, gender divisions, variations in life-styles, regional differentiation, urban-rural discontinuities and the like have lead many a novice in search of a common thread to give up in despair.

The Spindlers, far from novices, see a common thread. It is in the form of a common language, a ”dialogue” developed by these other- wise hopelessly diverse groups, to meet together in the (re)public arena. This dialogue finds form in ”culturally phrased expressions of meaning referent to pivotal concerns such as those just mentioned” (The American Cultural Dialogue, p. 1).

The dialogue, according to the Spindlers, is not a fixed, monolithic, dry scripture. Rather, it is created and re-created, shaped and reshaped as voices meet in the public realm. Yet the dialogue is also pat- terned by an underlying grammar, with recurring structures and themes. Although the structural units of the dialogue (independence, freedom, conformity, etc.) show striking continuity over the historical course of the republic, mutually understandable ”dialects” have also sprung up, contesting the mainstream voice and, in the process, broadening the dialogue.

The suspicious postmodernist surely will be surprised to find out that the Spindlers are too wise to simply “privilege” the dialogue of the dominant, mainstream ”referent ethniclass,” the white, northern European, Protestant males (The American Cultural Dialogue, pp. 22- 40). That would have hege(de)monically asphyxiated “the Other,” and we all know that is bad. Postmodernist fatuousness aside, the Spindlers indeed include perceptive chapters on how the voice of Af- rican-Americans (in The American Cultural Dialogue by M. D. Williams) and Chicanos (in The American Cultural Dialogue by Henry T. Trueba) has informed and transformed the mainstream cultural dialogue. As the Spindlers and their colleagues point out, given simple demographic changes (Hispanics, for example, are the second largest and fastest growing ethnic group in the United States), nonmainstream voices must also be heard if we are to fully grasp the range of the dialogue and its transmission in this complex land.

The Spindlers have devoted a substantial portion of their productive intellectual lives to exploring (and teaching others to explore) how cub tures maintain themselves through education. In the process of elab- orating upon this concern, they have almost single-handedly given

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birth to the modern field of anthropology and education (see the in- formative historical overview of the development of the field of educational anthropology by Elizabeth Eddy in Education and Cultural Pro- cess). In the United States, a heterogeneous land of immigrants and other involuntary minorities, formal schooling has come to function, in the popular view, as a major instrument to achieve a ”melting pot” of ethnicities and classes in the service of a dominant view of the society.

Of course, as the Spindlers note, the idea of the “melting pot” has come under heavy fire in social science. That has led to the question of what culture to promote in our increasingly pluralistic schools. The Spindlers ask,

Are our schools so heavily culturally loaded with mainstream values that many ethnic groups and social classes find themselves in opposition to the culture promoted in them? Are there ways that we could bring more diverse elements of our society into a productive relationship with our economic and social institutions? Why are 25% of our youths dropping out of school before they acquire a high school diploma? Have we somehow decided to throw away one-fourth of our coming generation? Are our schools designed for failure as much as for success? [The American Cultural Dialogue, p. 51

As J. Ogbu points out in his important chapter, it is critically important to understand the issue of variability in “nonmainstream” adaptation to school (in Interpretive Ethnography of Education). The fact is that not all nonmainstream groups face similar problems in schools. J . Ogbu argues that immigrant minorities most often are able to overcome initial difficulties and eventually use the school system of the mainstream culture for their own advancement. Involuntary minorities, on the other hand, tend to develop more chronic school problems. In- deed, according to Ogbu’s findings, many involuntary minorities (such as African-Americans and American Indians in this country) find themselves in opposition to the schools, contesting the cultures they promote and the system of stratification they reproduce.

In addition to the cultural loading of “mainstream” values in schools, J. Ogbu and his associates also explore how a “job ceiling” in the posteducational economic opportunity structure may also promote patterns of school alienation among certain nonmainstream groups.

J. Ogbu notes that as schools come to be seen as culturally hostile to nonmainstream values and irrelevant to the economic-occupational future of nonmainstream youths, many give up hope on schools as a viable avenue for status mobility. Such youths may develop their own nonmainstream, indeed countermainstream, avenues for status mobility.

As many of the authors in the edited volumes point out (see the ex- emplary individual chapters by H. Mehan, M. Gibson, C. Delgado- Gaitan, J. Macias in Interpretive Ethnography of Education; and the chapters by J. Hostetler, D. Eggan, P. Sindell in Education and Cultural Pro-


cess), it is not the task of the school, usually peopled by teachers drawn from the mainstream culture, to “acculturate” minorities to be part of a melting down process of assimilation. In a multiethnic society no one needs to be melted down, but they do need to be encouraged to pur- ticipute in public processes. Public activity must include continual input into the management of schools.

It is the role of the school to be an educative service to the community into which it has been placed. As the Spindlers point out, contrary to many suppositions among the mainstream “referent ethniclass,” racial and language minorities, as well as those in the more modest segments of the economic opportunity structure, most often are vitally interested in the successful education of their children. Indeed, immigrant minorities around the world want a better tomorrow. The dream that immigrant and other minorities pursue is a better life for their children. And schooling, more often than not, emerges among many nonmainstream populations as the key to a better tomorrow (see the critical chapters on Punjabi immigrant attitudes toward schooling by M. Gibson in both edited books and the chapter by J. Ogbu, “Var- iability in Minority Responses to Schooling: Nonimmigrants Vs. Im- migrants” in lnterpretive Ethnography of Educu tian).

In these cases, the nonmainstream immigrants under consideration know full well that their children have a precious opportunity to study and to better themselves, an opportunity the parents could not realize in the home country. As M. Gibson notes, nonmainstream immigrants in the United States are often willing to ”play by the rules” and are eager to instrumentally use formal schooling as the key avenue to social mobility.

The reader of these volumes senses that a problem is that some nonmainstream parents, particularly in groups experiencing school problems (see J. Ogbu), have no sense of how to become involved, how to have concrete input, how to operationalize their dream. Nor is suffi- cient or effective effort made by members of the dominant ”referent ethniclass” to involve minority or nonmainstream parents in the schooling process. The middle-class majority teachers and administra- tors remain generally unmindful of how to overcome reluctance on the part of ethnic or working-class parents who must discomfort themselves by entering into unfamiliar group processes wherein they feel lack of equal status.

The Spindlers elegantly describe, without a trace of meanness, how teachers from the dominant “referent ethniclass” are often not fully aware of their own (class and ethnic) background and its impact in pat- terning certain classroom interactions. Their data show that some teachers may be unaware of how cultural biases directly influence their selective interactions with nonmainstream children (see the Spindlers’ devastating chapter on how ethnic and class biases, at an unconscious level, influence the interactions of a teacher in a Wiscon-

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sin fifth grade, The American Cultural Dialogue, pp. 58-69). What the Spindlers and many others have noted is that many mainstream teachers unconsciously identify with certain students, those who, alas, are more like themselves. Teachers selectively spend more time and en- ergy working with these students at the expense of ignoring others, most often nonmainstream students needing the most attention and help. Hence the reproduction of failure among those who are least like the referent ethniclass teachers.

In cases where cultural discontinuities and conflicts are leading to the obscene reproduction of failure among talented nonmainstream youths, the Spindlers recommend the implementation of what they call ”cultural therapy” (The American Cultural Dialogue, p. 68). Cultural therapy is, in some respects, the other side of the coin in P. Freire’s plea to ”raise the consciousness” of the oppressed. The Spindlers pro- pose to raise the consciousness of the more powerful referent ethniclass by making them aware, whenever possible, of the cultural and unconscious determinants of their negative selective interactions with certain (most often nonmainstream) children. Insight into the cultural and unconscious aspects of such behaviors and attitudes, the Spin- dlers argue, may lead to angry denials on the part of those afflicted, but it is a first step, indeed a sine qua non, to changing pathological interactional patterns.

The ethnographic study of formal schooling has gained increasing momentum in the past four decades since the publication of George Spindler’s 1955 edited book, Education and Anthropology. That book was based on the legendary conference the Spindlers organized in Carmel Valley, California. The pages of the leading publications in education, mental health, and the field of justice increasingly rely on the ethnographic findings of anthropologists and others to confront the problems facing youths, often nonmainstream youths, in complex societies. The study of schooling as an institution of society is of im- mense policy importance given its complex relationships with press- ing issues such as unemployment and underemployment rates, delin- quency rates, and other key indexes of social anomie and psychological alienation. And, even more important for a theory of culture and its continuity is the fact that schools have become key institutions in the process of formal cultural transmission.

The field of educational anthropology, as we know it today, is a relatively new specialization within the broader subfield of sociocultural anthropology. The study of the anthropology of education grew in the shadow of its older cousins, psychological anthropology and anthropological linguistics. Psychological anthropology has been influencing the field of anthropology and education most notably through the work of some its finer minds including George DeVos, George and Louise Spindler, and others.

Any history of anthropology and education, therefore, must fully consider the impact of psychological anthropology via its empirical


studies of socialization as a form of what the Spindlers call ”cultural transmission.” Additionally, the field of linguistic anthropology, particularly the study of the relationships between language, cognition, and society, has also made singular contributions to the field of anthropology and education (see H. Mehan’s essay in Interpretive Eth- nography of Education).

Anthropologists now consider the school in society as a key institution taking over certain socialization tasks that in simpler societies were typically the responsibility of the kin group. According to the Spindlers, a great deal of the formal, intentional transmission of culture takes place in schools.

Yet it has been only in the last four decades that a distinct subfield of anthropology and education has emerged with its own scholarly lit- erature, special journals, and annual meetings. The comparatively late arrival of this subfield can be traced to some central concerns of both American and European anthropologists favoring the study of small- scale, isolated “traditional” societies, relatively ”uncontaminated” by Western and modern influences. There was need to record “native culture,” before the advancing modern world would forever change it. Franz Boas’s efforts among the Pacific Northwest Coast Indians, for example, were in part motivated by this urgency to record learned patterns of native art and artisanship, social structure, mythology, economic exchange, and the like, before they were altered by the en- croaching modern world.

Anthropologists generally worked in technologically simpler societies without institutions of formal schooling as understood in the West- ern world. Typically, in these societies socialization was primarily in the hands of the kin group. Increasing technological complexity lengthened the period between childhood and adulthood, giving relatively recent birth to a concept of “adolescence” as a specific stage in the life cycle. Technologically simple societies traditionally had no schools nor did they have adolescents: only boys, girls, men, and women. Schools rose as formal institutions bridging the increasing gap between childhood and full adulthood.

When Western-style schools did appear in simpler societies, many early anthropologists selectively avoided study of them. It was the view of many early anthropologists that these new institutions simply represented the introduction of Western culture modifying native tra- ditions. Of course, those involved with the various colonial adminis- trations did concern themselves with how to accommodate instruction to various ”native” cultural themes and patterns.

A number of important developments had an influence on the char- acter of anthropology as it is practiced in the postcolonial period. An- thropologists today are increasingly turning inward, examining their own societies, finding that the idea of culture, the dominant idea in modern anthropology, applies well to the study of problems in modern complex systems.

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Anthropologists are not as welcome in the postcolonial world. Sec- ond, scholars from outside the Western cultural tradition are themselves becoming anthropologists, offering their own readings of “native” cultures. Third, anthropology’s “former natives” have become a substantial and enduring feature in the inner cities of the more powerful wealthier centers of northern Europe and the United States. To- day our cities become ever more complex as nonmainstream peoples of the former colonies migrate north and close the colonial and de- pendency circle. As those studying inner cities in the United States and Western Europe can attest, immigrant minorities are part of a more interdependent and complex ethnic world than the founders of the discipline of anthropology could have anticipated.

The postwar era in the United States and Europe has indeed wit- nessed migrants and refugees from the “peripheries” or “developing” world continuing to infiltrate the wealthier centers of the north in search of a better tomorrow for themselves and, most important, for their children. In addition to the previous waves of migrants into the United States is the most recent surge of Hispanic immigration. As Henry Trueba discusses in his chapter “Mainstream and Minority Cul- tures: A Chicano Perspective” (in The American Cultural Dialogue and Its Transmission), Hispanics are now the second largest minority group in the United States. Because of a fertility rate about 60% higher than the non-Hispanic average and continuing immigration from Mexico and Central and South America, Hispanics are the fastest-growing minority group in the United States. Soon they will numerically surpass Af- rican-Americans as the nation’s largest minority group. As the chapters by M. Gibson and C. Finnan (in Interpretive Ethnography of Educa- tion) make clear, Asians are also entering in increasing numbers and are changing the demographic mix in U.S. schools.

In similar fashion, Europe, traditionally a continent of emigration and not immigration, has seen important population changes since World War 11. It is now estimated that by the beginning of the 21st century, almost one-third of the population under the age of 35 in urban Europe will be of immigrant background. 1 must emphasize that these immigrants did not sneak in overnight, unnoticed or unwel- come. In the United States, the so-called bracero program encouraged the entry of seasonal migrant workers from Mexico. Likewise in northern Europe, in many cases, the postwar immigrants from north Africa and southern Europe were actively recruited by powerful sectors of the very countries that now face a “guest worker problem.” In the process, these immigrants became ”minorities,” and created a new uneasiness about the ”foreigners” in cities of the developed world. The chapters by the Spindlers (on Germany, Interpretive Ethnography of Education), Anderson-Levitt (on France, Interpretive Ethnography of Ed- ucation), and Yeats (on England, Interpretive Ethnography of Education) explore how ethnographic studies are addressing questions of region-


alism (urban-rural), ethnicity, and class in the transmission of culture in European schools.

I only wish the Spindlers would have included some chapters on the very interesting research being carried out in Europe on the educational problems facing the so-called second- and third-generation children of “guest workers” in Belgium, France, Germany, and Holland. This is rapidly becoming a critical issue in the research agenda of some of Europe’s foremost anthropologists, sociologists, and education re- searchers. And, given the striking similarities in the nature of the problems encountered by some of the so-called guest workers in Eu- rope and some nonmainstream populations in this country, the prospect of transatlantic comparison seems very promising indeed.

As many of the authors in these volumes point out, in the United States the problem of school functioning among nonmainstream children is hardly a recent development. Already over a century ago there were premonitions that certain key problems in the education of nonmainstream children, heatedly debated today, would be difficult to re- solve. It is unnerving to think that the problem of nonmainstream variability in educational adaptation described by J. Ogbu in his contri- bution (in Interpretive Ethnography of Education), with some immigrant minorities doing brilliantly in schools and other groups doing poorly, was already evident in the United States over a century ago. As the Spindlers note, some features of the American cultural dialogue are indeed deeply rooted in history.

It has become obvious that the survival and broadening of American democracy and its economic base depends on raising the educational achievement and economic attainments of nonmainstream children, as well as improving the educational and economic attainments of those in every segment of our society whatever their past origin.

In their essays, Concha Delgado-Gaitan (in Interpretive Ethnography of Education) and Henry Trueba (in The American Cultural Dialogue) spe- cifically consider various features of an ongoing pattern of Chicano adaptation to schooling in the United States. The authors enter directly into why there has been such a high rate of failure, or poor utilization of the vocational and general possibilities of American public education by this nonmainstream group. What are the complex relationships between culture, minority status, educational outcomes, and economic attainment across groups? Is, simply, class background the answer, as Marxist-oriented scholars have been advocating. Is it the prime mover in the educational achievement and eventual economic attainment of children? Or, conversely, is it culture, particularly as it shapes a work ethic, or its opposite, a “culture of poverty”? Or, is it a matter of language and other cultural discontinuities between groups coming in contact? How is the mainstream cultural dialogue transmitted, interpreted, and transformed by members of this group? Del- gado-Gaitan and Trueba directly dispute any facile culture “deficit” theory to explain failure.

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Many chapters in these books are empirically grounded, seeking to acquaint the readers up close with the daily activities and experiences of children, be they Hispanics in California (H. Trueba in The American Cultural Dialogue and Its Transmission, and C. Delgado-Gaitan in In- terpretive Ethnography of Education); Chinese children in a village setting (N. Chance in Interpretive Ethnography of Education); African-Americans and "voluntary immigrants" in the United States (J. Ogbu in Interpre- tive Ethnography of Education, and M. Williams in The American Cultural Dialogue); American Indians (J. Macias in Interpretive E thnography of Schooling); Vietnamese refugees (C. Finnan in Interpretive E thnography of Schooling); rural Norwegians and Hungarians (M. Hollos in Educa- tion and Cultural Process); or urban Koreans (J. Robinson in Education and Cultural Process).

The various chapters, each from its own ethnographic vantage point and favored theoretical twist, explore many aspects of the social and personal meaning of daily life in which school attendance is one important part. How do parents in these various settings interact with children with respect to school culture and home culture? What continuities and discontinuities are experienced in interaction as nonmainstream children move from the home culture to the school setting? Economic hardships, linguistic limitations, the upheaval of migration, as well as class and gender considerations (see the individual chapters by J. Canaan, R. Goodenough, and R. Page in Interpretive Ethnography of Education) all influence the children's world and their interactions in school.

How do the children themselves learn about their society? How is the cultural "dialogue" transmitted? How do nonmainstream children manage to bridge the home culture and the majority culture? And what governs their relative receptivity to new norms? As M. Williams explores in his essay on the African-American experience (in The Amer- ican Cultural Dialogue), it is often beneficial for the school to be in the hands of members of the community into which it has been placed.

Schools must be seen as instruments of the community and not as institutions run by outsiders, especially when such outsiders are seen as an antagonistic "ethniclass." In the context of the serious apathy of some nonmainstream groups regarding the educational prospects of their children, there needs to be awakened an awareness among nonmainstream parents of being a subject, an initiator of action. If some nonmainstream parents lack the necessary knowledge on how to become involved in the schooling of children, there must be put into place some system whereby the individual or group is helped to understand and afforded the means to learn how to cause things to hap- pen.

The books, as all-important and ambitious books, have some short- comings that readers with various agendas will be quick to point out. I already mentioned the lack of substantial reference to the important


new research being conducted by European social scientists on the education of their new nonmainstream populations. Likewise, the impact of the women’s movement on the transformation of the American cultural dialogue is far from exhaustive. Yet others will rapidly note that some areas of the world are completely neglected (South America, for example). Lastly, I must note that a few of the chapters in the edited volumes (Interpretive Ethnography of Education and Education and Cultural Process) are uneven in quality of data and theoretical sophis- tication. Regardless of these issues, the books represent a most coher- ent and satisfying overview of key issues in the study of the formal transmission of culture.

Dialogue and the Transmission of Culture: The Spindlers and the Making of American Anthropology

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