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  • Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice by Jean Lave, and: Returns to the Field: Multitemporal Research and Contemporary Anthropology Edited by Signe Howell and Aud Talle
  • Erin Jessee
Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice. By Jean Lave. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 198 pp. Softbound, $27.50.
Returns to the Field: Multitemporal Research and Contemporary Anthropology. Edited by Signe Howell and Aud Talle. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. 275 pp. Softbound, $24.95.

Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice and Returns to the Field—while valuable anthropological texts in their own right—offer a number of relevant insights for oral history practitioners. In their efforts to highlight the value of long-term ethnographic engagement with host communities and individual research participants, the authors reveal the importance of the bonds that form between researchers and their subjects over extensive periods of time for influencing fieldwork and subsequent analysis; the value of documenting the researchers’ changing relationships to their discipline and to their research participants, as well as their own personal lives, over time; and the value of a deepened understanding of cultural resilience, continuities, and transformations as garnered through sustained, firsthand ethnographic documentation and analysis.

That ethnography—the keystone of cultural anthropological fieldwork that relies upon “direct and sustained contact with human agents within the context of their daily lives (and cultures), watching what happens, listening to what is said, and asking questions” (Karen O’Reilly, Key Concepts in Ethnography [London: Sage Publications, Inc., 2009, 3, emphasis in the original])—can be used to enhance oral historical practice and analysis is by no means a new observation, as evidenced by the plethora of oral historians who regularly rely on ethnographic methods to supplement their research methodologies (for a recent example, see Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki’s edited volume, Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice [New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013]). Beginning with Lave’s Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice, readers enjoy a thorough analysis of one ethnographer’s long-term efforts to comprehend how Vai and Gola tailors in Liberia maintain and reproduce their specific skill sets. In doing so, Lave addresses three interrelated themes. First, the book offers an in-depth overview of Vai and Gola tailoring apprenticeships from 1973 to 1978. Second, the book documents Lave’s shifting theoretical, ethical, and methodological frameworks to reveal a second kind of apprenticeship—the anthropologist’s process of learning how to build relationships with interlocutors, conduct fieldwork, and analyze the data that results. Finally, the book advocates critical ethnographic practice whereby ethnographers undertake fieldwork with the intention of pursuing some form of activism against social injustice, broadly defined. [End Page 166]

As the book progresses, Lave shifts from a positivist theoretical framework to a critical ethnographic practice aimed at promoting an appreciation and respect for indigenous modes of transmitting knowledge outside formal institutions, such as schools. Her introduction critiques Western tendencies to privilege “formal education”—that which was learned in schools—over “informal education”—that which was embedded in everyday activities and learned via socialization, a form of knowledge more common among nonliterate cultures (16–17). In doing so, Lave identifies the underlying purpose of her original fieldwork in Liberia as based in “a desire to pursue change in the theory and practice of research on learning and thinking, the bailiwick of experimental psychological research,” and then proceeds to “lay out a (long, slow) process of breaking with a commonsense positivist problematic and moving toward relational social practice theory” in which the perspective of the researched could be presented with equal authority (32, 33). Lave then introduces Happy Corner, her fieldwork site, and the social conditions that influence tailoring apprenticeships, describing the apprenticeship system that underpins the institution of tailoring and the lengthy learning processes through which apprentices become masters. Learning transfer is revealed through a series of experiments she designed to evaluate the effectiveness of informal education models practiced among tailors when training their apprentices. Lave’s penultimate chapter delves further into arithmetic problem-solving processes common among tailors, using the example of a shared transaction in which several tailors worked together to create a suit and then divided the profits according to division of labor and...

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