138 THE SCHOOLING RITUALS OF ANTHROPOLOGISTS' John Singleton Professor of Education and Anthropology University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Anthropologists, as members of an academic tribe, participate in rituals of professional recruitment, socialization, and initia- tion. Such rituals, usually carried out in graduate "training" programs, are generally thought to be efficacious in transmitting the tribal culture and in creating professional competency. Be- cause our folk term for professional socialization is "training," we are often constrained by the Skinnerian behaviorist models of learning--derived, in part, from watching rats running mazes. From the viewpoint of an educational anthropologist, I would rather describe our professional socialization as "cultural transmission." From this perspective, the worldview of anthropology is the cul- tural content of our disciplinary tribe and the schooling rituals of our universities are our social instruments for transmitting the culture of anthropology. These schooling rituals are the carriers of "a time-tested and group-licensed way of seeing" (Kuhn 1970:189) --which is one definition of science. This implies that the knowledge of our scientific community is much more than some set of specific skills or an accumulation of content and information (as might be suggested from a university catalog or course descriptions). It is the complex worldview of our tribe. As an anthropologist, I think we should look at our- selves ethnographically, much as Howard Becker and his associates studied the education and the student culture of a group of medical students (1961). In order to make some comparative statements and suggest hypotheses for specific ethnographic investigation in the cultural context of our discipline, this paper calls attention to some social and cultural processes in the schooling rituals of anthro- pologists as we initiate our neophytes into the tribal worldview. The focus is upon social selection, cultural transmission, and identity change that occur in the professional socialization of anthropologists. As an educator, I cannot resist adding some prescriptive suggestions in my analysis. It should be noted, of course, that the rituals of schooling are not the only means of socialization in our tribe. Our annual meetings are, for instance, themselves a powerful educational and ritual device. Areas of concern to be explored in this presentation include: (1) the conflict between models of ritual transition in the rites 139 of professional passage and our images of desired professional competence, (2) patterns of paternalism and socialization to bureau- cratic dependency aimed at our students, (3) the contradiction in cultural anthropology between inductive research models and the deductive organization of teaching, and (4) the significance of playfulness in professional socialization. 1. Rites of Passage and Professional Competence The period of graduate professional schooling is a time for transition for the novice, a period of liminality in Victor Turner's and Arnold Van Gennep's terms, the second stage of a rite of passage after one has been separated out of the crowd (admitted to graduate study) and before the time of incorporation into the new social identity of anthropologist. The whole process is importantly defined by the change of social identity, and one does not avoid ritual participation by skipping graduate ceremonies. The whole process of graduate training is itself a ritual. As Goodenough (1963:216) said: Elaborate initiations into new social identities are by no means confined to primitive or under- developed societies. . . . They are matched in our own with the acquisition of one's occupa- tional identity . . . [for instance] graduate student(s) working for their Ph.D. degree(s) are subject to institutionalized physical and mental ordeals, tests of competence, and organized haz- ing. At the same time, they receive instruction in the performance of their future occupational roles, are let in on professional secrets, and are indoctrinated with a code of 'professional ethics.' While engaged in this transitional process of identity change, anthropology graduate students may tend to be like the neophytes in more traditional rites of passage whom Turner (1969:95) describes. Their behavior is normally passive or humble; they must obey their instructors implicitly, and accept arbitrary punishment without complaint. It is as though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life. Goodenough (1963:219) said it well: "The psychology of iden- tity change does not vary according to the god or message in whose name such change is undertaken." 140 Ten years ago, while looking at the organization of graduate education in our neighboring tribe of psychology, Carl Rogers listed some of the implicit assumptions he had observed. Violating his personal faith in the potentiality and wisdom of human beings was the major assumption that "The student cannot be trusted to pursue his own scientific and professional learning" (1969:171). Faculty were so busy assigning work, supervising its completion, and setting formal evaluation of student progress that it looked as if evalua- tion and test-setting was considered to be the basic educational process! Watching the student behaviors rewarded by faculty in their evaluation, it seemed that they believed that "creative scientists develop from passive learners." Don't anthropologists often make similar assumptions? While these assumptions fit the ritual model of liminality I have been describing, I would hope that someone would be as angry as Carl Rogers and rise to ask whether these are, indeed, appropriate processes and assumptions for the task of professional socialization. We should, of course, recognize the values of ritual affirmation of the identity changes a professional neophyte must undergo, but we can surely question whether the model of professional practice we wish to achieve is served by the tasks and tests we devise for our neophytes' education. For example, in the simple matter of testing, we should rec- ognize our participation in the overwhelming uniformity of school practice in our society--and here I refer specifically to North American school practice. Our tests are, by and large, teacher- constructed, designed for objectivity in evaluation, and pervasive. More importantly, they are a specific artifact of the schools and of only a few related bureaucratic organizations--notably the civil service. Test-taking is a school-specific skill, the results of which we rely upon for assessing and advancing students on their way to a professional credential. Once initiated, a professional will not again face such an ordeal. Two drawbacks of conventional testing procedures which should be noted are: (1) they rarely encourage a creative professional response--test-wise students know that they must "psych out" the testers as the safest strategy for academic survival, and (2) they rarely represent or simulate the tasks by which initiated profes- sionals will be judged--as in academic publications or in applied problems of human and organizational relationships. Carl Rogers (1969:189-202) suggests that university-entrance selection procedures be rigorously directed toward the desired characteristics of creative professional performance rather than success in school survival skills, that testing procedures during professional socialization be de-emphasized, and that final evalua- tions be conducted by external authorities. The latter suggestion is specifically aimed to take off the teachers the double load of mentor and evaluator. It is like asking the football coach to act as referee in the game. 141 The problem underlying these suggestions is simply that the models of ritual initiation and institutionalized ordeals do not simulate or stimulate the competencies some would wish of a creative professional. As one researcher into scientific creativity sug- gested: A knowledgeable person in science is not, as we are often wont to think, merely one who has an accumulation of facts, but rather one who has the capacity to have sport with what he knows, giving creative rein to his fancy in changing his world of phenomenal appearances into a world of scientific constructs (MacKinnon quoted in Rogers, 1969:181). 2. Socialization to Bureaucratic Dependency Anthropologists have not found it difficult to recognize a social function of compulsory schooling as socializetion to bureau- cratic dependency. We can easily see that children are taught to acquiesce to bureaucratic authority, to develop patterns of relia- bility in bureaucratic or industrial time scheduling, and to accept as inevitable and just the judgmental labels distributed by schools. Are we equally willing to look at the patterns by which neophyte anthropologists are socialized into bureaucratic dependency upon the university and upon the agencies which fund their professional activities? In the last several decades there have developed some beliefs and practices that can only be described in this way. Even now, the idealized goal of most anthropology departments is to turn out ini- tiates who will succeed in the currently fierce competition for prestigious university faculty appointments. The recognition of a future dependence on careers outside of higher education is very much with us, but there is no change in the status hierarchy of the profession--communicated to neophytes in the process of their pro- fessional socialization. University teaching is best, applied jobs are for those who don't capture an academic slot. In the departments I know best, the faculty feel a strong paternalistic responsibility for their graduate students. Every effort is made to find financial support for those students judged as potentially successful in the rituals of transition. It is a deep source of faculty shame if successful graduates are not "placed" through their major professor's or departmental contacts, whether in academic or applied work. Even the major models of non-academic careers appear to be tied to large-scale bureaucratic organizations--government, corporations, or foundations. The idea of individual entrepreneurship is rarely discussed, though we do have successful models in the profession. 142 In the sponsorship of research, it is always considered important to get a "grant," regardless of financial need. Unfunded research is somehow less than legitimate, at least for neophytes on the dissertation level. The idea of self-sponsored research is anathema. Does anybody remember that Benjamin Whorf supported his anthropological career by selling insurance? What has happened to our myth of the celebrated American entrepreneur who searches for resources by himself and creates commercial or self-reliant enterprises? Even our history of the survival strategies and resourcefulness of anthropologists in the last great depression is only slowly coming back to light. Some social workers have begun to perceive another form of bu- reaucratic dependency in their professional socialization. Cloward and Piven (1977:59), in their article, "The Acquiescence of Social Work," suggest that the transition rites of professional social work are designed to support the mythology of the agencies within which their students hope to be employed. They say: One striking feature of professional socializa- tion [in social work] is the frequent presumption that students know virtually nothing. . . . Students quickly sense that although they may be mature, resourceful, and committed adults, they are often credited with very little. . . . Stu- dents educated to mistrust their own judgment, and feelings are then ready to be trained to acquiesce to the authority of others. Profes- sional education is, in no small part, training in submission to bureauractic authority. This training, they suggest, makes it difficult for social work students to perceive that the agencies for which they work are not necessarily benign in their relationships with their clients, that what is good for the agency is not necessarily good for the client, that the social effects of poverty and inequality are often treated as problems of individual psychological defects, and that images of professional knowledge are often used to unjustly enforce bureau- cratic power over people. I suspect that unexamined faith in the universities and organizations in which we expect to employ our students is a product of our anthropological schooling rituals. 3. Inductive Research vs. Deductive Teaching Until one has struggled to create and make sense out of volumi- nous fieldwork data, to devise an index, identify key observations, and make inferences about real social systems in complex contexts, there is no way we can teach the ethnographic research process. I am struck, however, by the opposition of our common deductive teaching paradigm with the inductive ethnographic model of knowing. It is impossible to transmit, in deductive logical models of 143 presentation, the analytical processes that underlie ethnographic research presentations. Inductive models of professional training do exist, however, and we have a few outstanding models of inductive socialization. The Spradley and McCurdy text, The Cultural Experience, suggests how an introductory course in anthropology can be organized around student ethnographic exercises. Yet some doctoral students have not conducted such an exercise before they set off for the dissertation fieldwork. Fieldwork, itself, is a lonely professional enterprise, but the analytical process which follows it is even lonelier. Some of our neophytes have not been forewarned. L. S. B. Leakey's guidance of Jan VanLawick-Goodall's profes- sional socialization to anthropology represents a larger model of inductive initiation. He sent her off to the field to observe chimpanzees for several years before recommending her admission to a program of study in anthropology. With a wealth of field observa- tion already accomplished, she was ready to absorb a worldview--a theoretical framework that would make sense out of her experience. Perhaps more of us should experiment with such alternative models of professional socialization. The recruitment of inexperienced graduate students coming straight through the school system reinforces the tendency to teach didactically. Perhaps more attention should be paid to recruiting people with previous significant cross-cultural experience and with some history of an ability to survive on their own, independent of school connections. It is my experience that teaching is enhanced and bureaucratic dependency is reduced with such students. 4. The Significance of Playfulness After reflecting on the previous observations and recommenda- tions, I note a serious flaw. They are much too sober and serious. The anthropology of anthropology ought to be a playful exercise in an application of anthropology. In populations uncorrupted by the rituals of "modern" schooling, the critical functions of play as a juvenile learning process for all of us primates has been widely observed (cf. Herzog 1974). If we have any youthfulness left, what better strategy could be found for the initiation and continuing education of anthropologists? The puritanical principle that learning requires suffering is not supported by our discipline. Anthropology can be fun. Playfulness can be a productive intellec- tual tool. If that can be communicated among the rituals of schooling, too, we may yet take encouragement for our scientific and human future as anthropologists. 144 NOTES lThis paper was originally developed for a symposium, "The Anthro- pology of Anthropology," at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Los Angeles, 1978. Dr. Barbara Frankel, organizer of that symposium, carries the moral responsibility of encouraging several of us to take a humerous, but serious, look at ourselves. REFERENCES CITED Becker, Howard S., et al. 1961 Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cloward, Richard A. and Frances Fox Piven 1977 The Acquiescence of Social Work. Society, January/Febru- ary. Pp. 55-63. Goodenough, Ward H. 1963 Cooperation in Change. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Herzog, John D. 1974 The Socialization of Juveniles in Primate and Foraging Societies: Implications for Contemporary Education. Council on Anthropology and Education Quarterly, February. Pp. 12-17. Rogers, Carl R. 1969 Freedom to Learn. Columbus: Charles E. Merrill. Turner, Victor W. 1969 The Ritual Process. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.