From Background to Foreground: Toward an Anthropology of Learning

Abstract

A “new” anthropology of knowledge transmission must expand its focus beyond traditional concerns with child development, schooling, and cultural continuity. Equally, it should probe the relationship between cultural knowledge‐as artifact and event, as analytic concept, and as empirical phenomenon‐and scientific knowledge and inquiry, moving us toward an anthropology of knowledge. Included in analysis should be processes of knowledge construction and transmission, structural variables, cultural values and assumptions, biophysiological variables, diachronic and synchronic contexts, and learning outcomes. EDUCATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, KNOWLEDGE TRANSMISSION, LEARNING, STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY.