Red Ties and Residential Schools. Alexia Bloch
Читать онлайн книгу.
to the experiences of Evenk individuals, we can learn how people negotiate power and interpret and reframe ideologies in their lives.
Schooling, False Consciousness, and Resistance
In my first trip to the Evenk District, in the summer of 1992, the Soviet Union had recently given way (in December 1991) to the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose consortium of many of the former republics belonging to the Soviet Union, and the Evenk District was now part of the Russian Federation. I spent the summer traveling to various reindeer herding brigades and villages in the Evenk District, meeting with people and listening to them as they began to make sense of the possibilities for political change and restructuring of economic and social life. The legacy of residential schools was one topic widely discussed. In this time of optimism and idealism, some Evenki thought that the schools should be shut down and students should be educated at home. One scholar suggested creating new practices of child socialization rooted in “traditional” family forms (Popov 1993).15 Others considered returning to the early Soviet practice of a roaming teacher who would visit reindeer herding brigades and small villages periodically; this would allow children to live in the taiga while not missing out on formal education so essential for social mobility (Shebalin 1990: 78).
By 1993, when I returned to conduct long-term fieldwork in the Evenk District, talk of alternatives to the residential school and other radical transformations in the local relationships to the federal structure had diminished. Federal financing for education was severely curtailed, and there was no money for fundamental reorganization. Money that did reach the regions was not going to be released by regional administrations and departments of education for any experimental projects. What could have been a radical departure from Soviet systems of schooling for indigenous peoples was stymied by bureaucratic channels. As examined in the chapters that follow, however, in the mid- to late 1990s, Evenki began renegotiating a relationship to the nation-state and turned to transforming existing structures such as the residential school to meet their needs.
Around the world, schooling has served as a critical element in state-building and molding citizens (Reed-Danahay 1996; Stambach 1996; Chatty 1996).16 Indigenous peoples in particular have been subjected to mass education as a key instrument of colonial domination and nation-state consolidation. In North America, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, a system of state-run boarding schools operated from the 1920s until at least the 1970s and sometimes the 1980s; numerous accounts exist detailing the pain of detachment from families and the trials of forced assimilation (Simon 1990; Haig-Brown 1991; Lomawaima 1994; Child 1998; Kelm 1996). In the case of western and southern Africa, a widespread system of boarding schools continues to operate as the legacy of colonial pedagogy is widely absorbed and transformed in the context of post-colonial administration (Stambach 1996; Bledsoe 1992). In the Middle East, and specifically Oman, compulsory schooling for many groups that were nomadic until recent decades only became established in the 1970s as oil profits expanded and the government sought to link nomadic populations into the world economy (Chatty 1996). Across the world, however, not only governments are involved in designing schooling. Indigenous groups are also becoming involved in designing systems of education to meet the needs of their communities and to replace old models of education that were tools for state hegemony (Battiste 1999; Regnier 1999; Thies 1987; Cojtí Cuxil 1996).
In the extensive literature on the anthropology of schooling, the portion of work addressing dynamics of power and concepts of difference within school settings is especially instructive in thinking about residential schooling in central Siberia (see Giroux 1981; Ogbu 1991; Gibson 1988; Wax et al. 1989). The discussion about types of consciousness, resistance to institutional structures, and the social reproduction of educational behaviors is particularly relevant. For instance, Ogbu’s work (1991) provides a compelling critique of the idea that educational “failures” of children in school contexts can be viewed as the result of a deficit in knowledge about the system, cultural capital, or language use. Ogbu writes about the types of cultural difference at stake in schooling and how cultural difference, along with active strategies, determines educational success.17 In this way, Ogbu’s work suggests that focusing attention on schooling as an instrument of the state also requires us to pay attention to the role cultural difference plays in the strategies families employ for interacting with school institutions.
In contrast to Ogbu’s focus on cultural difference and active family strategies, Willis’s work (1977) emphasizes how class structures are reproduced in schooling. Willis’s study, focusing on working-class boys in a British school, dissects the broad social relations of power maintained by and reproduced in school settings. While this ethnography of schooling remains unparalleled in its intricate detail of the social reproduction of class among young men, it denies the dynamism of cultural practices and appears deterministic. From Willis’s perspective, schooling is an instrument of dominant class sensibilities and the “false consciousness” of the “lads” prevents them from veering from the preordained confines of class.
This central concern in educational anthropology about the degree of agency people have in educational settings and in transforming their life worlds more broadly is at the crux of this book as well. The concept of “false consciousness” sits uneasily in a context in which the state is in crisis and people are engaged in rethinking structures of state power, such as schooling. While people do not necessarily redirect dominant power structures, they are not the mere cogs of preordained social systems. Tsianina Lomawaima (1994) makes a similar point about agency in her work with Lakota Sioux oral histories focused on residential schooling. She argues that while residential schooling for her consultants was generally a painful period when they were separated for extended periods from family and friends and subjected to the disciplinary and civilizing forces of missionary schools, these students were not merely oppressed. Lomawaima shows how these experiences did not preclude a range of effective resistances to the system; these efforts ranged from girls’ avoiding wearing the bloomers required by the school dress code to some students running away from the schools. Furthermore, Lomawaima demonstrates that there was a range of interpretations of the system, with some students who excelled in academics and sports recalling their time in the schools fondly. Lomawaima does not invoke “false consciousness” to explain this range of experience but instead concludes that the system imposed its grip unevenly, with some people in positions to accommodate it consciously or even resist it, while others were subsumed and transformed by it. In particular, Lomawaima suggests that girls in the residential schools were “domesticated,” while boys did not fall as severely under the purview of the institution.
Parallel to Lomawaima’s findings, the experience of indigenous Siberians suggests that the degree of interaction with the institution of the residential school is gendered. In the case of indigenous Siberians, it is widely recognized that girls tend toward success in secondary education while boys have more difficulty succeeding. For the Evenki, this pattern appears to be related to the ways in which the state transformed subsistence practices and instituted residential schooling. As is discussed further in Chapter 3, in the Soviet era women’s labor in reindeer herding was devalued while men’s remained more constant. The Soviet state’s ideology of emancipation of women, inspired by Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1972), attached social value to women as wage laborers employed outside the household; and in the context of the Evenk District, this Eurocentric valuation significantly shaped the gendered contours of Soviet structures of power. In the 1990s, girls were expected to complete twelve grades and go on for higher education, while it was socially acceptable, and even respectable for boys to leave school after grade nine and return to villages and herding. As discussed in Chapters 1 and 3, these collectives of herders were generally comprised of family members, but there was only one paid position for a woman as the “tentworker” in charge of domestic responsibilities; in effect the state’s reorganization of herding that was established in the Soviet period edged women out of the taiga.
Much of the literature on the anthropology of education focuses on the school contexts and glosses over community, and particularly family interactions with schools. As Reed-Danahay (1996: 37)