Divs-poole

INTRODUCTION 

What are faculty views on education and pedagogy? In a formal sense, though 

there is much concern about the basic abilities of EUC students, there is a tacit 

understanding that these students do not come from the most privileged 

backgrounds, have not had the best high school educations, and most are struggling 

with their intellectual development. In the front-stage formal forum (such as a 

special meeting on the freshman seminar class), there is a push to standardize and 

consolidate and otherwise “audit,” the instruction of basic writing and research 

skills for all first-year students. Again, there is conflict between an “agreement” 

that most freshmen do not have the proper skills to “succeed” at university and an 

“academic pride” that a university professor should have the autonomy to teach the 

way he/she sees fit (Marshall 1994). In a comparative light, Reid (1986) points out 

that in Britain, “like sexual activity, teaching is seen as an intimate act which is 

most effectively and properly conducted when shrouded in privacy,” and this 

privacy includes concern for autonomy from peers as well. 

Most classes, especially those in the curriculum that are requisite for graduation, 

are large lectures. Some have upwards of 400–500 students, which is interesting 

since the largest lecture hall at EUC only has seating capacity for about 300. Of 

course such “overbooking” assumes that many students will not attend the lectures 

or drop out of the class. 

In an entrance ceremony speech, the university president observed that chatting 

during lectures is endemic in these classes (though some professors purportedly do 

not have much of an attention problem in their classes, which points to a diversity 

of experience and teaching styles). Attendance is rarely part of the assessment for 

lecture courses

, 

where for the most part the grading depends totally on a year-end 

examination either with high “reliability” (i.e., usually a multiple choice test) or 

high “validity” (e.g., short essay test

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), but rarely both. On the other hand, 

computer, bookkeeping, language, and seminar-based courses usually include 

attendance and participation as part of the year-end assessment. Language classes, 

for example, tend to be smaller—anywhere from a handful of students to no more 

than 40 or so—and assessment is often more “valid,” but less “reliable” (e.g., 

spoken assessment through short interviews). 

THE ETHNOGRAPHER 

There is a recent tendency in ethnographies—whether they describe fieldwork 

carried out in a “home” society, a “foreign” society, or a multisited combination of 

both—for the anthropologist to reflexively discuss his or her own role in the 

research. As a full participant and player at my field site, I feel it is imperative to 

state at this introductory juncture that, as with any ethnographic account, this 

project is inherently biased inasmuch as a description of social reality as 

constructed from the perspective of the describer. My voice is that of observer, 

participant, and player (and not always in this order). 

Since my field site choice was made out of personal interest in addition to a 

basic theoretical concern, rather than familiarizing the exotic, as is often the case in 

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INTRODUCTION 

anthropology, I was struck by the uncommon challenge of exoticizing the 

familiar—my everyday experiences at my field site—of having to think of my 

Japanese university field site, EUC, as the analogue of an aboriginal community in 

the outback of Australia. The difficulty of viewing a familiar social environment in 

an “unfamiliar” way is not to be underestimated. I grappled with an inner battle to 

separate my three roles—the personas of Greg the anthropologist, Greg the jokyōju 

(associate professor), and Greg. A collision of these personas was, alas, inevitable 

at a few frustrating moments, and during this project more than once I came face to 

face with my own expectations and prejudices.  

It is one problem to learn to adapt to a new workplace (which I had done fairly 

well), but quite another matter to step back from this workplace in order to conduct 

fieldwork and write an ethnography based on these professional workplace 

experiences. The one advantage I did have is the fact that I am writing this 

ethnographic account about Japan for an English audience. If the university had 

been in London or Boston, for example, I believe the cultural translation would 

have been more difficult to exoticize. If this account sounds plausible and 

“normal” to my informants, that perhaps would be an indication of success.  

Certainly there may be alternative readings to the ethnographic material, 

analyses, and conclusions that I present below, depending on the referential point 

of the reader. Although I have practiced a certain vigilance in seeking out a variety 

of voices by speaking to older professors, younger professors, women, part-time 

lecturers, administrative staff, and students, the reader may legitimately ask to what 

extent the writer is shackled by his own beliefs as a full-time, male professor in his 

forties. If the writer was a sixty-five-year-old veteran at the university, might not 

he come up with an entirely different interpretation of events and alternate analysis 

of social reality at EUC? Such a question, of course, has been posed, and debated, 

in sociocultural anthropology (e.g., famously, Freeman 1983; Lewis 1951; Mead 

1928; Redfield 1930). 

“STUDYING UP” AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF HIGHER EDUCATION  

The inherent capacity for humans to learn, a capacity that arguably defines the 

limits of anthropology (Riley 1988, pp. 19–20), is a social process that has always 

been a concern central to anthropology. This concern has not always been applied 

explicitly to educational studies. Kroeber’s inventory for ethnographers (Kroeber 

1953) failed to list education as one area of application of anthropology. Though 

anthropologists often described socialization, the result of education, the process 

itself was not always investigated fully as “teaching” or “learning” or “education,” 

per se.

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 Indeed, as Roger Goodman (2001a) points out, educational anthropology 

is certainly at the core of the anthropological agenda, even though fifty years later 

educational anthropology “has yet to create … a niche for itself as a separate 

academic discipline.”

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Much of the classic work of sociologists and 

anthropologists in the field has focused on the social worlds of schools and formal 

education (Bourdieu & Passeron 1977; Lacey 1970; McDermott 1993; Rohlen 

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