Paper short abstract:

Scholarship on education promises to have direct, practical application in communities. Does this help explain its centrality in Indigenous and Pacific Studies, and its relative marginality in anthropology? An argument for alternative anthropologies of learning.

Paper long abstract:

Is it a coincidence that studies of learning, schooling, and education are foundational in fields including Indigenous Studies and Pacific Studies, but marginal in the global discipline of anthropology? In her recent call for an integrative anthropology of learning, Susan Blum reflects on why “mainstream anthropology” pays little attention to learning. Potential reasons include a disinclination to study our own teaching practice, a general devaluation of teaching as a vocation, and “an enduring preference for theory over practice” (2019, 644). Conversely, the fact that scholarship on learning promises to have direct, practical application in communities might help to explain why so many Indigenous scholars seem to gravitate toward the study of learning, schooling, and education. Rather than seeking to attract the attention of elite scholars, journals, and institutions, might we instead try to develop an alternative anthropology of learning that calls attention to scholars on the margins of the academic discipline and adds value to on-the-ground work? I’ll think through some of these questions with reference to recent work on Pacific education and collaborative work on vernacular language education in Solomon Islands.