Variations on Diversity and the Risks of Bureaucratic Complicity

Abstract

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On the irrelevance of ethnicity in children’s organization of their social world

“…It is necessary to detach ourselves from the point of view of school bureaucracy and its objectives in order to acquire a wider perspective of the social processes that take place at school (Díaz de Rada and Jiménez, 2011). First, it is limited to what happens in bureaucratic school fields.…”

“…These processes are interpreted by teachers as something that is undesirable, and they usually call them bad influences . It is necessary to detach ourselves from the point of view of school bureaucracy and its objectives in order to acquire a wider perspective of the social processes that take place at school (Díaz de Rada and Jiménez, 2011). The school is not just a spectator that is independent of the course of these phenomena but one of the main actors in the drama.…”

“…In other words, we are adopting a bureau-centric perspective (see Díaz de Rada and Jiménez, 2011). For this reason, most studies describe and classify subjects in ethnic terms: we study anthropological issues with Mexican 1 children, Gypsy children, Peruvian children and so on.…”

“…Thus, when we start our studies about children by classifying them into ethnic groups, we are reproducing the bureaucratic discourse but we are not taking the children’s perspective into account. In other words, we are adopting a bureau-centric perspective (see Díaz de Rada and Jiménez, 2011). From this point of view, I provide a critical reflection on theoretical frameworks and methodologies based on the idea of ‘ethnic groups’ as a starting point for doing anthropological research.…”

“… 7. I use the notion of bureaucracy as it is exposed in the classical work by Weber (1984 [1922]), and in the way the bureaucratic dimension of school has been analysed in anthropology of education (see, for example, Bourdieu and Passeron, 1985: 99, in reference to Weber; Díaz de Rada and Jiménez, 2011; Eddy, 2005 [1975]; Harper, 1965; Katz, 1971). …”