Divs-poole

INTRODUCTION 

1983; Spindler 1959; Varenne & McDermott 1998; Waller 1965; Willis [1977] 

1993; Wolcott 1967). With some influential work in the field (Lave & Wenger 

1991; Levinson et al 1996), however, anthropologists are once again investigating 

education in the broader context of socialization processes.  

One aspect of education that has not yet been adequately addressed by 

anthropologists is “noncompulsory schooling,” such as postsecondary education. 

Although there are a few studies of universities (Bourdieu 1988; Bourdieu et al 

1994; Moffatt 1989; Nathan 2005), for the most part higher education and other 

forms of adult schooling has not been investigated with nearly the same rigor as 

has pre-, primary, and secondary schooling. Like Gumperz and Gumperz (1994) 

suggest in their description of recent anthropological approaches to language and 

education, this study supports neither a functionalist nor neo-Marxist analysis, but 

focuses rather on an interpretative and discursive approach to analyzing 

professoriate construction of “work” at the university.  

For example, to explain such interaction by following the dichotomous model of 

formal/informal education, kyōiku (education) at a Japanese university, this 

category of noncompulsory, school-based education can be further dichotomized 

into academic and nonacademic learning. Professors’ view of Japanese university 

education is focused on a considerable amount of informal, nonacademic learning 

for students. Inculcating the “college life” involves the learning of skills as well as 

sociocultural norms and roles. After a rather structured high school culture, 

students are said to be learning the important norms of the culture of working 

adults (shakaijin

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) by participating in, for example, off-campus seminars with 

professors (zemi gasshuku), part-time jobs, independent living, club activities, and 

drinking parties. In addition to this nonacademic, informal educational mode, there 

is the academic, informal mode of the ubiquitous “seminar” (zemi

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) classes 

themselves, where students practice group-based research projects and apprentice-

like learning.  

Therefore, to paraphrase Lave (in Pelissier 1991, pp. 88–89), although students 

and professors are in a formal, contractual relationship through university tuition 

fees, it is not teaching and learning that organize activity, but the activity of college 

life that organizes teaching and learning. Both students and professors are focused 

on the activity of college life, which in turn provides opportunities for learning, not 

the reverse. This fits also with Lave’s (1991) concept of Limited Peripheral 

Participation (LPP), which focuses on the idea that learning an identity is as 

important as learning a skill. At least one scholar of Japanese education admits that 

it is “a reasonable argument that identity formation, especially in terms of social 

identity and social maturation, is very significant at the Japanese tertiary level” 

(Cummings 2003). 

Additionally, I would like to consider the Japanese university in this era of 

reform, the activity of college life, as a locale not only for studying students’ social 

identity but that of the professors. Not only has much of the anthropological work 

focused on compulsory schooling, but it is largely concerned with either the 

processes of social reproduction in education or the recipients themselves, the 

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INTRODUCTION 

students. Historically anthropologists have focused on studying “the weak” in both 

nonwestern, small-scale societies as well as postindustrial states (Moore 2005, p. 2; 

Nader 1972). In the study of education as well, anthropologists have tended to look 

at the culture of the nonelite, the children or students, often minorities, in a 

hegemonic system. When “the powerful” groups are considered, it is often an 

analysis of the hegemonic power of bureaucrats and intellectuals, rather than an 

actual case study of the elite within a particular educational community (Bailey 

1977; Bourdieu 1988; McVeigh 2002b; Strathern 2000a). The study I have 

undertaken, though, investigates the social identity of the professoriate—the 

perspective of professors on noncompulsory schooling, education at a university in 

Japan.

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Analyses of the global reforms of HE as a bureaucratic, business-like 

phenomenon of an “audit culture” potentially conflates the categories of thought 

that are critical to a proper contextual understanding of the various HE systems in 

industrialized societies. Though there is much to be said for constructing models of 

reform to describe similar practices of university reform across societies, much of 

the literature has taken Euro-American organizations as the starting point 

(Strathern 2000a). I focus more on the construction of these educational 

organizations by the actors themselves. I argue that in fact if we attempt to 

deconstruct the keywords and cultural debates that categorize noncompulsory 

schooling in a nonwestern society, we will ultimately be more effective in 

understanding our own cultural categories.  

Admittedly, such analyses have not always been feasible through participatory 

ethnographic methods at institutions of formal education. Ogbu excuses this lapse. 

“Although ethnographers of education cannot establish a long period of residence 

among their subjects [sic], as in classical ethnographic research, they do maintain a 

long period of association with the school populations” (Ogbu 1996, p. 373). In my 

case, I have been able to establish both a long period of residence and a long period 

of association not only as a researcher but also in my role as an employee under 

contractual obligation. 

CULTURAL TRANSLATION 

The translation of internal cultural categories of one society into concepts 

understandable in another has long been considered a defining project of the field 

of social anthropology (Beidelman 1971). Such translation becomes especially 

critical in cases where terms appear to have a linear gloss across two languages, 

but the cultural reality describes quite different meanings. This is the case for 

higher education in Japan, where the cultural categories of daigaku, kyōju, kyōiku, 

and kenkyū, for example, carry quite different meanings from the terms into which 

they are typically translated—”university,” “professor,” “education,” and 

“research.” Throughout this book I will be exploring such cultural constructions in 

search of the meanings behind the cultural categories of the Japanese daigaku. 

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