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Tickets to the Opera: A Negotiation of Western Knowledge—Beyond Resistance or Reproduction
Author(s) -
ElOr Tamar
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
anthropology and education quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.531
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 1548-1492
pISSN - 0161-7761
DOI - 10.1525/aeq.2004.35.2.189
Subject(s) - icon , reproduction , negotiation , resistance (ecology) , sociology , ethnography , empowerment , judaism , prism , gender studies , social science , political science , anthropology , law , history , ecology , physics , archaeology , optics , computer science , biology , programming language
What are the prices of “must knowledges?” Does the study of English impose Anglocentric control on its learners or can English as an icon for “must knowledge” enable disempowered populations to empower themselves? This article examines these questions through an ethnographic study of middle‐/lower‐class Orthodox and Sephardic Jewish women in an adult education course. The women did not resist “Western knowledge,” yet its potential for empowerment was not realized. This study offers anthropologists of education an opportunity to reexamine the relations between local cultural systems and external knowledges beyond the binary prism of resistance versus reproduction.