Healing Multicultural America: The Ethnography of Race and
Ethnicity in a Cross-Cultural Perspective
Henry T. Trueba
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Keynote Address
The worst L.A. riots of the century started on Wednesday
April 29, 1992. A year before, on March 3, 1991, an African
American named Rodney King led the police on a high-speed chase
of up to 115 miles per hour. When he was finally caught and
surrounded by White policemen, he was brutally beaten: he
received 56 blows in 81 seconds. The beatings were recorded by a
casual video owner, and the T.V. channels flashed on the screen
again and again the physical abuse and violence by policemen.
When a year later the officers were found not guilty by the
courts, 72 hours of rioting broke out in the Black ghettoes of
Los Angeles; from the night of Wednesday, April 29, to Saturday
night, May 2, 1992. Rodney King pleaded: "Can we ALL get
along?"
The verdict in the Rodney King case that exonerated L.A.
policemen, was seen by many Blacks and Whites as a flagrant
miscarriage of justice only after it left 50 people dead, over
2,000 injured, and parts of the city burned and in debt; the cost
over $1 billion. President Bush felt the need to send Justice
Department prosecutors in search of violations of civil rights,
and 5,000 soldiers from the National Guard. The looting and
violence continued while the L.A. police were being charged with
negligence and disorganization. This unique show of frustration,
violence and senseless anger captured international attention and
had a profound impact on all peoples, especially those of color,
thus producing an added sense of a tragic disappointment in
American democracy and hopelessness in the face of injustice.
It is almost half a century since the first group of
distinguished scholars (most of them trained as psychological
anthropologists and ethnographers) were convoked by George
Spindler at Stanford to discuss anthropology and education.
Margaret Mead, Alfred Kroeber, Cora Dubois, Jules Henry, Solon T.
Kimball, and others ardently proposed the idea of helping
teachers cope with the problems in the classroom (G. Spindler,
1955). It was the generation of those anthropologists, under the
leadership of Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Melville Herskovitz and
Ruth Benedict, that had also strongly opposed the biological
determinism of previous generations of European anthropologists,
and the racist implications of that determinism. Their main
concern was to help anthropology become a genuinely comparative
science to explain cultural diversity and human behavior (Suarez-
Orozco, 1993:1-2). As Suarez-Orozco notes:
At one point various European groups claimed close kinship
with the "Aryans." The Aryans were the upper caste speakers
of an Indo-European dialect that migrated into the northern
part of India. Nazism was the most perverse form of such
concern over alleged evolutionary superiority founded in a
peculiarly mythical link to the noble conquerors of the
Indic subcontinent (Suarez-Orozco, 1993:33).
It is rather paradoxical that today, after many efforts in
research and many human struggles, we are still fighting (1)
determinism, with all its fatal consequences of racism and
intolerance, ethnic cleansing, neo-Nazism, and ethnocentrism, and
(2) anti-intellectual skepticism in the form of extreme
deconstructionism.
The ethnography of education was born with a profound
commitment to foster cultural understanding through the study of
cultural transmission, and that such a study required serious and
systematic scientific inquiry. The assumption that cultures can
be studied profitably and that ethnographic research plays a key
role in such study has been, until recently, the cornerstone of
cultural anthropology and educational ethnography. Some of the
most important contemporary issues are best explored through
ethnographic methods; for example, issues of race, ethnicity, or
gender and their consequences for academic achievement.
Indeed educational reformers around the world are asking
fundamental questions that require along-term process oriented
research: (1) What is the nature of American diversity and the
role of schools in creating an adequate learning environment in
which ALL children can learn, work and live together free of
sexual, racial and ethnic prejudice? (2) Given the knowledge we
have about differential achievement, what specific direction
should educational reform take in order to fulfill such a role?
In Western democracies school is viewed as an extension of the
home, and as an equalizer, that is, as an institution that offers
equal opportunity for advancement (upward higher mobility) to all
people; thus, school is seen as enhancing democratic ideals of
equity and balance of power. Yet, the reality of most democratic
countries today is that school has become a key factor in the
perpetuation of social inequality and injustice; the process of
racial/ethnic segregation and re-segregation, the differential
allocation of financial resources to schools according to the
incomes of families, the overall neglect of schools with
concentrations of low-income, poor, language minority and other
underclass populations serves to stereotype ethnic and racial
minorities and to exonerate policy makers and reformers for
neglecting certain children. Unfortunately, even the theoretical
developments of the 1980's and 1990's lead in the same direction,
as we will see shortly.
Challenge in the Ethnography of Race and Ethnicity
There are a number of challenges being faced by
ethnographers today. A number of concerns and views about
ethnography are often raised in conferences and in the
literature. For example, the following:
(1) Is "basic" or "pure" ethnographic research possible?
(2) What are the conditions for valid and reliable
ethnographic research?
(3) Can ethnographic research help explore "cultural
explanations" of human behavior?
(4) What theoretical orientation should ethnographic
research have? Is ethnography an inter- or an intra-
disciplinary affair?
(5) Are ethnographic approaches more conducive to process-
oriented research (in contrast with outcome research)?
(6) Should ethnographic research be primarily diachronic?
(7) Is technology compatible with ethnographic methods
which are primarily interpretive?
(8) Is ethnography a tool in the hands of radical thinkers,
and therefore a dangerous one?
(9) How does ethnography fit in the spectrum of qualitative
research approaches?
Nevertheless, while some of the above concerns will be
discussed here, the central focus will be on two issues:
(1) What is the role of ethnographic research in healing
multicultural America?
(2) What type of ethnographic research on race and
ethnicity is being conducted presently.
There are a number of research projects related to issues of
class, race, ethnicity focused on diversity, the role of culture
on ethnic hatred, etc. Many of these studies are based on
sociological, anthropological and psychological premises, and
some take into consideration global and cross-cultural
perspectives. Because these studies assume some comparability
across cultures, it might be useful to briefly examine issues of
ethnic and racial diversity is broad context.
Ethnic and Racial Diversity in a Global Perspective
We have little control over the waves of immigration
resulting from hunger, economic and political changes around the
world. In spite of efforts to curtail the flow of immigrants,
the United States continues to be a land of promise for
newcomers. Waggoner (1988:79-81) indicates that in 1980 there
were 34.6 million persons in the U.S. who speak other languages
than English (15% of the total population,or one in seven). From
them, 2.6 million were children under 5, and 8 million were
school-age children. There were 15.5 million Spanish speaking
people (45% of the language minority population), while the
French, German, Italian and Polish groups had at least 1 million
each, and 30 other groups had at least 100,000 each. During the
same year, 4.2 million Spanish-speaking children constituted 52%
of the 8 million school-age children, while there were 685,000
school-age French children, 594,000 German, and 437,000 Italian.
Other groups, such as Filipino, Polish, Native american, Chinese,
Greek and Portuguese, counted between 100,000 and 200,000. With
respect to the geographic distribution of language minority
school-age children in 1980, we know that 1.6 lived in
California, 1.1 million in Texas, and 926,000 in N.Y. Sixteen
states had each at least 100,000 language minority school-age
children (Waggoner, 1988:81).
While the new census data are being analyzed, we learned
that since 1980, at least 824,000 legal Spanish-speaking
immigrants have come to this country, (Waggoner, 1988:105), and
one could guess that by 1990 the total Spanish-speaking
population, putting together estimated additional legal and
illegal immigrants, may be near 25 million. that is not all,
while the Spanish-speaking represent only 11% of the total U.S.
school-age population, they are responsible for 55% of the total
increase int he total school-age children population of this
country. Furthermore, the Spanish-speaking children live in
families whose incomes barely permit them to subsist. In fact,
during the last ten years one more million Latino children
entered the ranks of the poor (defined as children in a family of
four members with less than $10,000). In 1989, 2.6 million
Latino children (out of the total 4.2 million Hispanic children)
were under the poverty level, and live in urban and suburban
areas (not in rural areas). The distribution as of 1989 of
children living in poverty among the various Latino groups are as
follows: 48.4% Puerto Rican, 37.1% Mexican, and 26.1% Central and
South American.
Obviously, schools affected by racial and ethnic problems,
and poverty are not unique to America; indeed minority children
may be in a much worse predicament in other democracies and other
countries. We know that during the last decade, Europeans have
made efforts to become competitive and strengthen their political
and economic interests via the European Economic Community. To
this end, they have modified their hiring policies of guest-
workers who had become an essential factor of European economic
competitiveness with Japan and America. The result of guest-work
policies has been a large "underclass" of "Europeans of color,"
born in europe to parents of North African, Turk, Moroccan and
other ethnic backgrounds. These persons are not viewed as
Europeans, nor are given the same rights as other Europeans.
Ethnic, social and cultural and linguistic differences have
often led to political conflicts. This has been the case of
Northern Ireland, Chad, and Lebanon. Warfare among factions has
been marked by ethnic boundaries in Burma, Bangladesh, the Sudan,
Nigeria, Iraq, and the Philippines. Ethnic cleansing grounded on
historical rivalry has characterized the conflicts in Somalia,
Cypress, Uganda, Syria, India-Pakistan, Burundi, and Indonesia.
Even terrorism has been ethnically revived for centuries among
the Sikh, Basque, and the Palestinians. The expulsion of Chinese
from Vietnam, of Asians from Uganda documented by Horowitz
(1985:3) anticipated the cruelties of ethnic cleansing in Eastern
Europe and Russia.
Racial problems and debates in Europe seem to repeat
history. The lower intellectual capacity attributed to some
races still persists in England (Tomlinson, 1989), and the idea
that some groups are "unassimilable" (as the mainstream Americans
thought of some ethnic groups at the turn of the century) is now
appearing in Belgium (Suarez-Orozco, 1991:102-103).
Lack of equal opportunity resulting in higher unemployment
and underemployment rates (particularly among youths)...;
conditions of domestic poverty, disparagement form the
majority population, generational conflict, the emergence of
peer reference groups fostering a countercultural identity
among youths, high minority dropout rates from school, high
grade "retention" rates..., and delinquency rates (Suarez-
Orozco, 1991:103).
Belgium, a country of 10 million people has a very large
population of immigrants.
(20%) which were recruited to work in the mines and other jobs
that the Belgians did not want to do. The latest available
figures (1984 census, cited in Roosens, 1989:127-128) indicate
that there are 270,521 Italians, 119,083 Moroccans, 70,033 Turks,
and 55,952 Spaniards. In a relatively small territory, where the
historical division between the Walloons and the Flemish has ben
reflected in the legislated use of French in some areas and of
Dutch in others, the use of other languages either for public
instruction of for services can create serious political
problems.
Contrary to policies adopted by the United States and
england, most European countries permitted policies that excluded
minority groups from social and educational benefits bestowed to
common citizens. thus, the resulting institutionalization of
segregation practices perpetuated underachievement and isolation
of many minority children. In clear contrast with Western
democracies, the Chinese government has, since 1949, recognized
56 minority groups or nationalities, and allowed them to control
their resources. China has a total population of 1,133,682,501.
The mainstream population, the Han, has 1,042,482,187 (92% of
the total population); they settled in the north where the lower
Yellow and Wei Rivers spread the cradle of Chinese civilization
and speak Mandarin as well as other languages. The 56 officially
recognized nationalities have a total population of 91.2 million
(8% of the total population) and control 68% of the natural
resources. The nine largest nationalities are (in millions): the
Zhuang 15.5; the Manchu 9.8; the Hui 8.6; the Miao 7.4; the
Weiwuer 7.2; the Yi 6.6; the Mengu 4.8; and the Zhang 4.6 (Posted
in the Museum of the Central University for Nationalities,
Beijing, October, 1992). Altogether these nine groups comprise 70
million (or 76% of the total minority population). The rapid
modernization and increasing democratization of China is expected
to raise minorities' self-consciousness and economic power in the
21st century.
The Hmong in China (called Miao or Meo) are now prominent
in their academic accomplishments and well represented among the
faculty of several universities, while the U.S. Hmong are still
struggling to adjust and succeed. The Miao are originally from
Mongolia and encompass a number of groups living in the mountains
of South and Southwestern China in the provinces of Guizhow,
Hunan, Sichuan, Hubei, Guangxi and Guangton and especially in
Yunnan. Yunnan is a multinational province with around 35 millon
ethnic minorities. Yunnan is also one of the poorest provinces in
China, in spite of its abundance of natural resources of gold,
copper, iron, nickel, zinc, coal, tungsten, etc., and in spite of
its excellent land for the cultivation of rice, maize, wheat,
cotton, barley, potatoes and tobacco. Its agricultural output is
below the average in China (Haberer, 1989:54-59). Slash-and-burn
cultivation is prevalent in the area, and the inconsistent
agricultural policies imposed on the people have created serious
economic problems. What happens in China is truly relevant to the
rest of the world. The Hmong people in America, for example, are
Miao and speak a language still used in Guizhou, China. They are
one of the most recent immigrant groups and comprise about
190,000, located primarily in California, Minnesota, and
Wisconsin. They came as a result of the Indochinese wars in which
they fought for the Americans. It is calculated that at least
another 50,000 are still waiting in refugee camps in Thailand.
While there are a number of subgroups with unique linguistic
forms and cultural characteristics, all Hmong share common
cultural traditions, folklores, animistic religion and ancestor
worship, a distribution of labor within the family according to
age and sex, a social structure based on kinship ties through
patrilineage and clan systems, a patrilocal pattern of residence,
and most of all a long common tradition of statelessness and
migration from southern China to the United States and other
Western countries (Trueba, Jacobs & Kirton, 1990: 21-25).
In the United States, thousands of immigrants and refugee
families from Russia, China, Africa, the Middle East, and Central
America will soon face painful dilemmas about cultural values,
and crises in their own ethnic identity. In spite of their best
efforts to pursue the American dream, poverty (which binds them
to other minorities) strikes many of them. Indeed, poverty for
many families (especially African American) is becoming a
permanent abandonment by social institutions and a daily
degradation. The loss of the home language occurring in the lives
of immigrant and refugee families, is always accompanied by
changes in the home culture. The Spanish spoken by Latinos in the
United States becomes as unique as their English, and their
lifestyle evolves to become distinct from their homeland and from
mainstream populations.
Most of the poor in the United States are also victims of
xenophobia which has many expressions and reflects a profound
racism of white America. The fear of ethnics has motivated Neo-
Nazis to organize vigilante raids, conservatives to advocate for
monolingualism and monocultural policies (through the English
Only Movement), the Ku-Klux-Klan members to infiltrate political
parties which exclude certain individuals on the basis of color
or race, the members of the Moral Majority to impose moral codes
and protect them through political organizations, and other
radical movements of the right to restrict speech and freedom of
expression viewed as offensive to some, and to sponsor a highly
militant organized membership to restrict public services to
ethnics on the grounds that ethnic groups do not contribute their
fair share to the cost of such services. In their view, the
funding of education in the home languages of ethnic groups who
do not speak English is unjustified. Also, in the view of right
radicals ("conservatives"), the use of affirmative action
criteria to implement fair employment policies (policies that
reflect the ethnic composition of the labor force), or to provide
remedial mechanism for ethnic students, is equally unacceptable.
There are many other instances of ethnic (often racially
motivated) hatred. Kozol, voicing the stereotypic remarks of
racist America, states:
When they hear of all these murders, all these men in
prison, all these women pregnant with no husbands, they
don't buy the explanation that it's poverty, or public
schools, or racial segregation. They say, "We didn't have
much money when we started out, but we led clean and decent
lives. We did it. Why can't they?"..."They don't have it."
What they mean is lack of brains, or lack of drive, or lack
of willingness to work. "This is what they have become, for
lots of complicated reasons. Slavery, injustice or
whatever." ...And they don't believe that better schools or
social changes will affect it very much. So it comes down
to an explanation that is so intrinsic, so immutable, that
it might as well be called genetic (Kozol:; 1991:192).
The flat and direct statement "They don't have it" is the
most emphatic return to a biological determinism, perhaps under
the cover of a new cultural determinism. this is important to
consider in the light of the most popular literature regarding
low achievement of minority groups, described as "cast-like." I
contend that there is a return to another type of determinism.
Following the refutation of last century's biological determinism
(based on "unilineal cultural evolution") which was led by Boas
and his colleagues, anthropology saw a kind of psychological
determinism creep in and then by refuted. Is this new "cultural"
determinism creeping once more in our theoretical discussions of
differential minority achievement?
Cultural Ecology and Differential Minority Achievement
One of the prevalent theoretical constructs that attempts to
explain the behavior of low achieving minorities (the "caste-
like") is that they were subject to the process of castification.
This means that minorities, understood not in the numerical sense
but in terms of their scarcity among power-holders, that is,
groups controlled by the ruling dominant society, have been
ascribed to the status of underclass, as incompetent and
unreliable. Indians, for example, since the time of conquest,
were viewed by the Europeans as "gente sin razon" ("people
without reasoning ability"), meaning, people not having
sufficient intelligence to perform certain cognitive tasks
required in school; and Blacks were called "lujuriosos
descontrolados" ("uncontrolled lascivious"), meaning people who
could not be trusted with tasks requiring moral integrity.
The castification of certain immigrants, refugees and other
"minorities," as discussed by anthropologists ("cultural
ecologists," led by Ogbu, 1974, 1978, 1987, 1989, 1991 and 1992;
Gibson and Ogbu, 1991) consists of two complementary powerful
forces, one rooted in the social structure of the dominant
society, and the other in the cultural matrix of the values and
beliefs of the minority groups. Typically, "caste-like" minority
persons (also called "involuntary") who are forced to live in a
White society against their will, see themselves as inferior in
comparison to the Whites, and consequently, develop
"oppositional" self-identities. That means, for example, that
caste-like persons reject White Values, such as school success,
and fail because their own cultural perspectives force them to
reject mainstream values. Ogbu views as caste-like Mexicans,
African Americans, Hawaiians, American Indians, and others. In
contrast with these minorities, there are successful ethnic
groups (the "voluntary" or "model" minorities such as the Chinese
and European immigrants) who manage to keep their independent,
not oppositional, self-identity by retaining their home country
cultural values, and thus are motivated to succeed based on such
values. Cultural ecologists has been attacked because of their
lack of empirical evidence, their cultural determinism, and its
stereotypic consequences of their arguments for entire groups
without considering intragroup differences (social, economic,
historical, etc.). Indeed, they may explain some failures of
minorities, but they do not explain the success of many who,
belonging to the caste-like groups, manage to succeed in school
and society (Trueba, 1988; Foley, 1991).
It is important, however, to understand these arguments, in
order to assess their impact on educational reform movements.
Castification occurs through a process Ogbu calls "cultural
inversion" which he explains as follows:
Cultural inversion is the tendency for some members of
one population, in this case involuntary minorities, to
regard certain forms of behavior, certain events,
symbols, and meanings as inappropriate for them because
they are characteristic of members of another
population (e.g., white Americans; at the same time,
the minorities claim other (often opposite forms of
behaviors, events, symbols and meanings as appropriate
for them because these are not characteristic of white
Americans (Ogbu, 1987:323).
Cultural inversion leads involuntary minorities to develop
oppositional identities, while voluntary minorities are capable
of using their home cultural frame of reference as the
foundations their new "immigrant" ethnic identity; consequently,
home cultural values become the source of achievement motivation
to succeed in school and in other social institutions. While
cultural ecologists raise important questions, they leave many
unsolved problems: Why can't involuntary minorities use their
own ethnic culture as a source of achievement motivation; or what
is the difference between the cultures of "caste-like" and those
of "voluntary" minorities? Is this difference anchored in the
"willingness" or voluntary character of some versus the
"involuntary" character of the other? One may suspect that there
is an implied cultural deficit in the conception of cultural
inversion, and consequently, a kind of "blaming the victim"
syndrome. One can reject certain domains of a new culture and
not others. One could reject school (for a number of reasons)
and yet feel part of the country's labor force, and thus become
motivated to succeed. Besides, rejection of a mainstream culture
can be shown not only by failing in academia, but also by
excelling. Why can only voluntary minorities cross cultural
borders and confront a new language and cultural values while the
so-called involuntary (caste-like) minorities cannot? Is it
because involuntary minorities are viewed as deprived of certain
cultural properties, are their cultural values of lower quality?
If so, one could not explain the success of many "caste-like"
persons, whatever the definition of success may be. How do we
explain the fact that some minorities retain their home culture
as a point of reference and still fail in school. One may
suspect that cultural ecologists have overextended their
inferences beyond the power of their empirical evidence. In the
ultimate analysis, as we attempt to explain academic failure of
disempowered minorities and its significance as a sign of their
overall failure to adapt to American society, we are asked by
cultural ecologists to leap back into the past, and without much
documentation, make assumptions based on psychological grounds.
Here are some of the assumptions we must make if we defend
cultural ecology:
(1) Castelike minorities in the U.S. are here against their
will.
(2) They fail in schools because they feel and are incompetent.
(3) They are incompetent because they develop oppositional
identities in opposition to White mainstream population.
(4) School success is perceived as a "White" cultural trait.
(5) The oppositional identity of caste-like minorities is the
result of what happened to their ancestors many years ago
(perhaps several hundred years ago: slavery, oppression,
etc.).
(6) Within group differences of these "caste-like," or
"involuntary," or "nonimmigrant" groups in socio-economic
level, exposure to American culture, family literacy level,
and first and second language development, are
inconsequential for their current academic achievement.
(7) Differential quality of schooling prior to arrival this
country, as well as the quality of schooling in this
country, are clearly irrelevant or secondary to their
current academic achievement.
(8) The fundamental factor explaining achievement is the
intrinsic cultural characteristics of minority groups and
its response to that of the host country.
(9) There is, therefore, a deterministic element in cultural
ecology that "forces" "caste-like" individuals to exhibit
certain behaviors (leading to failure) over which they have
no control.
(10) In turn, the "voluntary" minorities ("model minorities")
must succeed through the same deterministic cultural forces,
regardless of personal merit.
(11) This determinism absolves policy makers and practitioners
from any responsibility to attempt to help "caste-likes" or
from playing an important role on the success of the others
(the "model" minorities).
The above assumptions are unacceptable because they are
either clear leaps in reasoning, or reflect inferences made
without specific and substantial empirical evidence, at least
evidence for each ethnic, racial and minority group in question.
The theoretical assumptions or inferences are faulty or gratis
(non-demonstrable historically) especially when applied
indiscriminately to large groups over a period of time, such as
to the Latinos in the U.S. during the current century. Waves of
immigration from Mexico to the U.S. have differed drastically
from each other socio-economically, and consequently have
exhibited different paces of acculturation, academic achievement
and the acquisition of English as a second language.
The inadequacy of the term "involuntary" and nonimmigrant"
when applies to Hispanics, for example, is immediately detected
by studying Hispanic groups, by observing them across the
country, and by examining their ethnohistory. Those individuals
who have crossed the border illegally many times, and have been
deported, only to try again and finally find a way to obtain
documents for legal residency, are a clear example of the
complexity of decision-making and the relative willingness to
establish their permanent residence in the U.S. Their
willingness is genuine, but based on economic and social needs.
They take a calculated risk of losing their lives, of being
abused and exploited, of not finding a job, of being deported, of
losing their families, or worse, losing their language and
culture. Yet, survival, physical, economic and emotional,
provides them with an incentive to seek a better life in the
United States. It is not easy to place them all in any single
category, and certainly, they are genuine immigrants and they are
not involuntary. There is definitely a wide range of adaptive
responses to the cultural conflicts confronted by people coming
to the United States (see Trueba, Jacobs & Kirton, 1990, and the
recent study of Asian Americans in California by Trueba, Cheng &
Ima, 1993; and the success story of Chicanos in Woodland, Trueba,
Rodriguez, Zou & Cintron, 1993).
The strictest version of cultural ecology has not only
theoretical problems (rigidity, lack of empirical evidence, and
lack of heuristic value), but it has serious political and social
implications. It lends credibility to those who want to
stereotype and discredit minority communities. The myth about
"model minorities" distorts the reality of the lives of many
Asian Americans, and the myth of the "castelikes" stereotypes and
demoralizes Hispanics, American Indians, Hawaiians and Blacks.
And both, the "model minority" and "caste-like" minority become a
form of defamation. For the Asian "it comes easy, it is their
culture" (therefore "don't bother offering them any support, they
will take care of themselves"). For the others, the castelikes,
"it is their fault, their culture" (another version of blaming
the victim syndrome).
There are many good reasons why we should get rid of
terminology that is confusing. The confusion in cultural ecology
stems from the diverse meanings attributed to the terms
"immigrant" and "nonimmigrant" or "voluntary" and "involuntary."
Strictly speaking, all those who do not qualify as "immigrant"
should be considered "nonimmigrant." On the one hand, ALL
Americans, in some sense, including the American Indians, came
from somewhere and could be called "immigrants." How long (over
how many generations) do we retain the status of immigrant? On
the other hand, all Americans who are born in this country are no
longer immigrants. Which one of these two notions is used? By
implication, who is left on the other category as "nonimmigrant"?
The uses of "voluntary" and "involuntary" is more complicated.
Is it possible to be and involuntary immigrant, or a voluntary
nonimmigrant? It really depends how we understand a "voluntary"
action, or "willingness" to do something. If this term is
applied to families (let alone communities), who speaks for the
children, for women? Or, how voluntary is the person who in
order to survive physically has no other alternative but to leave
his home country? It is not only a theoretical, but a
methodological problem. The difficulty of providing and
empirical basis for imputing "willingness" or "unwillingness" to
persons (let alone families or communities) in coming to this
country is a Herculean task. The willingness of other
"involuntary" groups to remain in this country is still a
difficult issue to resolve. For example, African Americans, if
they are asked whether they want to go somewhere else, would
reply "no." They are definitely nonimmigrants; they may be
fourth, sixth or tenth generation American, born in this country
from an African slave family, but they have, for generations,
become an integral part of America and American culture, and they
feel so, in spite of economic problems or racism in American
society.
To compound the problems of cultural ecologists, they have
interchangeably used the concepts of "involuntary" and
"nonimmigrant." This has logical and theoretical problems as
well; these concepts are simply not mutually exclusive. But even
if the concepts were compatible and mutually inclusive, the use
of dichotomies to help understand such complex processes of
adaptation and change would reduce social science research to
speculation and a game of words, ultimately devoid of heuristic
value (dichotomies must divide the entire universe into two
parts). In conclusion, we can discard neither the broad
structural and historical explanations (the macro-sociological
forces) nor the intermediate institutions of family, language and
pre-arrival experience in our attempt to explain educational
success or failure. The functional significance of intermediate
agencies such as the extended family, community organizations,
pre-arrival traumas and health condition, and others, affects
immigrants' response to influences of more recent origin such as
adaptation to their new country's schools, diet, industrial pace,
and working environments.
Deconstructionism and Modern Anthropology
The goals of cultural anthropologists in the mid 20th
century were very ambitious. The indictment against genetic or
biological determinism of behavior remained strong, and the
recognition of the relationship between language, culture and
cognition was emphatically established by the ethnographers of
communication (Gumpertz & Hymes, 1964, 1972; more recently used
by Hornberger, 1988a, 1988b) and ethnoscientists such as Frake
(1964). The ethnographic methods were clearly enriched by the
use of linguistic analysis and the sharpening of procedures for
"ethnographic" interviews (Spardley, 1979). While the following
years saw an increasing tendency to recognize the linkages
between culture and cognition and the redefinition of culture in
terms that cognitive codes were viewed as crucial in determining
behavior, according to Spindler (1978:13-15) and other scholars
(Suarez-Orozco, 1993), psychological reductionism began to appear
as a danger and as an oversimplification of the complex
psychodynamics of behavior and achievement motivation. The
reaction to these currents in the 1980's and 1990's has gone
beyond the "psychophobia" alluded to by Shweder (1991, as well as
in Suarez-Orozco, 1993:2). Indeed the reaction of more recent
anthropologists has been one of despair and rejection of all
theoretical frames, and even one of rejection of plain skepticism
about scientific research resulting in the accumulation of
knowledge over time. As Suarez-Orozco eloquently states:
The very fundamental anthropological grand idea that we can
study, understand and explain other cultures is now rejected
by many in anthropology. Melford Spiro has noted that many
contemporary anthropologists have rejected this vision "as
either arrogant, misguided, or futile, if not all three.
Arrogant, because it is an expression of Western, hegemonic,
phallocentric, patriarchal discourse; futile, because non-
Western cultures and peoples are "Other," opaque in
principle to Western investigators, however well-informed,
fair-minded, or emphatic they might be" (Spiro, 1992:ix).
It follows the, that the idea of comparison, a key tenet in
cultural anthropology until very recently, is also suspect among
many contemporary anthropologists. Even the "ethnographic
fieldwork approach" that triumphantly defeated the "armchair
anthropology" of yesteryear is under assault by many as futile on
epistemological grounds... or immoral on political grounds
(Suarez-Orozco, 1993:3). The strong case made by Suarez-Orozco
in discussing Renato Rosaldo's Culture and Truth (1989) and the
work of other contemporary anthropologists, leads the readers to
believe that there cannot be "objective" approaches to the study
of political processes or behaviors associated with such
processes:
Upon close scrutiny, Rosaldo seems to reduce the
problem of "objectivity" in social analysis to the
(power) "positions" of various subjects in a given
field. By framing the problem along and outside/inside
axis, the analysis is sustained by (and reproduces)
unfortunate cliches: that those promoting an
objectivist discourse believe that only the"Outside"
ethnographer (armed with self-deluding fantasies about
being "neutral," "impartial" and "apolitical") can be
"objective." The other side of that worn coin is the
equally vacuous notion that according to
"objectivists," the "insider" informant can only be
hopelessly subjective and biased, the proverbial fish-
in-water paradigm (Suarez-Orozco, 1993:19).
The distance placed between the researcher and the persons
understudy (the "Other") assumes that it is an epistemological
impossibility to understand any other person outside of one's
culture. More extreme deconstructionist want to argue that the
construction of "Others" exists only in the mind of the
researchers. consequently, there is no universal or shared
knowledge across cultures, because cultural systems are
inherently meaningless for other than the members of the cultural
group. Indeed:
According to this line of thought, there are no
universal continuities or shared human potentials, only
culturally constructed, radically discontinuous and
mutually incomprehensible systems of meaning. As
Melford Spiro has recently observed, "contemporary
anthropology argues that cultural diversity is of a
magnitude that renders every culture incommensurable
with any other" (1992:x). Hence, in today's literature
we have "Others," not "brothers" (Suarez-Orozco,
1993:3).
The politicization of research that resulted in the
rejection of other people's work, regardless of the evidence
behind this work, responds to the general trend to see research
as a "hegemonic" expression of power over others. Rejecting the
possibility of valid research is equivalent to a statement of
liberation, an emancipation from the yoke of intellectual power
holders. The fact that some research has been a reflection of
power structures and has overextended its evidence should not be
used to reject the possibility of conducting good research, or of
adjusting the inferences of research without making unjustified
claims. In fact, the many ongoing efforts in cross-cultural
anthropological research that seek to explain power differential
is a good reason to accept in good faith the possibility of
conducting valid research regardless of the cultural affiliation
of the researcher.
George Spindler and his colleagues were aware of the waves of
hatred in Europe fed by myths of unilineal cultural evolution and
Aryan superiority that resulted in the Jewish Holocaust of
Hitler's Germany.
The basic theme in the narratives of the nineteenth
century social evolutionary theories was the notion
that social change is directional, unilinear, non-
reversible and continuous. Social evolution is said to
proceed, according to this model, in teleological
fashion, evidently from "good" to "better" into "best."
Lewis H. Morgan, whose writing on "primitive" social
organization deeply impressed Marx and Engels,
summarized the development of humankind into a sequence
of social evolution from a state of "savagery" (pre-
pottery period) through an epoch of "barbarism" (the
ceramic stage), into "civilization" (the age of cities
and writing). Such reasoning resulted in an arbitrary
hierarchical ordering of cultures according to
increasing technological complexity. Such structural
ordering of cultures usually placed the British, German
and French elites on top of the hierarchy (civilized),
the peoples of native America, Oceania, and tribal
Africa at the opposite (savage) end, typically leaving
the peasants of Europe, the Middle and Far East
(barbarian), somewhere in between the civilized and
savage states (Suarez-Orozco, 1993).
As Suarez-Orozco points out, the political advantages of
advancing this view of cultural evolution was to justify the
colonial domination of 19th century European countries. This
rather repugnant theoretical ethnocentric position of last
century anthropologists explains the reasons why today modern
anthropologists tend to reject cross-cultural research.
Deconstructionism, therefore, comes in handy as a means to
examine in great detail, through critical analysis, the
assumptions (historical and political) behind research, and to
question such assumptions. But rather than throwing away all the
results from previous research, deconstructionists must, if
necessary, (1) correct the empirical record, the evidence on
which inferences are grounded, and (2) the interpretation of the
data gathered. Social scientists assume that there is an ongoing
process of reinterpretation of previous data gathered and
analyzed; indeed, they see the research process as a never ending
one, consisting of chains of understandings and interpretations
which can be modified when new evidence appears.
Alternative Approaches to Differential Achievement
Walking a fine line between extreme deconstructionism as
described and discussed by Suarez-Orozco (1993), and the cultural
determinism alluded to in the above pages, requires a flexible
and eclectic approach to the study of diversity. Indeed, there
are many options that accommodate our fundamental principles of
equality and respect for cultural differences. While determinism
(biological, psychological or cultural) oversimplifies behavioral
phenomena and offers reductionistic explanations of complex
processes (especially in the learning environments where
intellectual functions and learning outcomes are embedded in
power relationships), resorting to deconstructionism destroys
even the possibility of exploring any explanation of behavior
(reductionistic or of any kind). Besides, there is a measure of
reductionism in any generalization about human phenomena, for
example behaviors that are intrinsically non replicable (at least
not entirely replicable). What both extremes have in common is
an overdose of subjectivism. In deconstructionism, the only
reality is the world of individual ideas in the mind of each
person; in cultural determinism, the scientists that explain
behavior by cultural features that override any personal or
individual power, are also motivated by unique type of subjective
interpretation of behavioral phenomena, and do not accept any
disagreement from any other scholar. Cultural determinists
become dogmatic and arrogant.
The alternative remains in the interpretive nature of social
science research and its eclectic (even opportunistic)
accommodation to different theoretical and empirical settings.
As long as ethnographic research remains grounded on empirical
evidence made available to others, even gross biases can be
detected and corrected by other scientists. Among the most
frequently used theoretical frames in current ethnographic
research focused on race and ethnicity, we find that the most
flexible approaches are the most helpful. For example, the work
conducted by Tomlinson among ethnic groups in England (1989) has
been most instrumental in providing a clear example of the
historical trends in minority achievement, and the public
perception of ethnic children's differential academic
performance. Her sociological or anthropological ethnographic
accounts include strong historical and library research
components, and a substantial personal first-hand data collection
efforts in schools. In contrast, the work of sociologists in
Uppsala (Bacal, Morner, or Alvarsson--all in Alvarsson and Horna,
1990), is primarily historical reconstructive and macro-
demographic; like other sociologists, they show a deep concern
for structural arrangements that seem to persist over time and
direct human behavior in certain direction. The work of George
and Louise Spindler in their efforts to explain the adaptive
strategies of the Menominee Indians to Western culture (G.
Spindler, 1971; G. & L. Spindler, with H. Trueba and M. Williams,
1990) opens up a number of both collective and individual
responses to cultural conflict, from a strong rejection of the
Western culture, through transitional stages of partial
commitment to the new values, to the extreme adoption of the
Western culture with rejection of Menominee culture. While there
is some mobility from one group to another, there tends to be
some long-term consistency in the mode of response.
The focus of the work by Moll and associates is most
interesting because it marries traditionally polarized
theoretical approaches, the ethnographic approach in documenting
community activities, and the Neo-Vygotskian approach to the
interaction patterns taking place in the community learning
environment. The center of the study is the community, which
becomes the repository of the "funds" of knowledge accumulated or
used through networks of family relatives and friends. The
reciprocal services provide a strong collective support and an
opportunity to learn how to succeed in social institutions.
Moll's approach is described in his most recent work (Moll, 1990;
Moll & Diaz, 1989).
There is a group of scholars that has adopted ethnographic
methods as a means to socialize teachers into a reflective mode
of teaching. Several scholars have over at least the last ten
years used ethnographic methods in group settings to assess
teaching effectiveness and differential observational skills in
future teachers. Their analysis of this inquiry-oriented teacher
education has been discussed in the recent literature (Tabachnick
& Zeichner, 1991; Zeichner, 1990, 1991, 1992; Zeichner & Gore,
1990). Reflective teaching, meaningful communicative exchanges,
and the mediating role of teachers in creating productive
learning environment for children, are all crucial to this
approach.
In conclusion, ethnographic research, as other qualitative
research methods, is essentially interpretive, anchored in field-
based observational activities, extremely eclectic and of great
theoretical plasticity. While it focuses on the cultural
explanations of behavior through diachronic and systematic
inquiry, it also links with historical contextualization of
phenomena as means to provide a richer explanation. Ethnographic
research depends a great deal on the documentation of
interactional contexts not only to mark event boundaries and
criteria for analysis of discrete phenomena, but as an integral
part of the interpretive process; without a clear understanding
of the context of interaction, the interpretation of behavior is
unwarranted. While the debates about the nature of culture have
continued for over a century, the most recent statements seem to
emphasis the relationship of culture to action, and its dynamic
nature that articulates language and cognition in the process of
cultural transmission. The work of G. and L. Spindler discussing
the interpretive character of ethnography (1987) clearly shows
that in their view ethnographic research is primarily an
intensive learning experience that permits the ethnographers to
immerse themselves in cultural processes; thus, ethnographers
learn about life, human and non human behavior, mental and
physical forces, the dynamics of motivation and achievement, and
finally, the rationale for interpreting the meaning of behavior
in ways that are socially approved by the members of the cultural
group under observation. As the new scholars come on board and
face the challenges of cultural determinism and of
deconstructionism, they will probably look back at the
ethnographic accounts written by the old anthropologists and will
decide about the value and credibility of those accounts.
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