Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
The study of formal education has, until recently, been a relatively marginal concern within anthropology. By contrast, a more broadly-defined interest in learning, particularly as it relates to cultural transmission, has been central to the anthropological project. At various times, this broader interest has been reflected in studies of *socialization, *literacy, *cognition, knowledge, *childhood, the *body, apprenticeship and so on. The lack of emphasis on formal education, as such, may in part reflect a tradition of studying communities in which institutionalized education was either non-existent, had little obvious impact on informants, or was effectively beyond local aspirations.
The learning processes which existed in such communities seemed to bear little resemblance to Western-style education. More to the point, it seemed a distortion to automatically relate these forms of learning back to Western models.
This was, to cite one example, the position taken by †Audrey Richards in her study of the chisungu, an initiation *ritual for Bemba girls (Richards 1988). The ceremonies involved some forms of instruction, and the Bemba themselves stressed that the chisungu was partly held in order to teach certain things to young women. But Richards argued against the notion that this process of initiation could be seen as a kind of ‘primitive education’, not least because the girls were mostly being told things which they already knew. Often during the ceremonies they were told nothing whatever, their heads wrapped in blankets. Richards instead stressed the role of the chisungu in enforcing social obligations and promoting traditional Bemba values.
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