One of the things that we discussed in last week class was the exclusionary nature of Western education. As I was reading the Ingold reading, there were a few things that stuck out to me in particular. The first, was that a Western education creates a road to civility, and the further we travel along such a path the more enlightened we become as an individual. The enlightened, the academic, the intellectual are perhaps synonymous words. Each create boundaries between people, often isolating individuals and creating harmful power dynamics. As a side note, I do wonder what the power of these words are in the context of our anti-intellectual age.
When I think of the word civilized, I think of words such as discipline, restraint, rigour, and silence - I understand that these words come from my education as a liberal arts student that critiques colonialism. My main point is, that the term makes me uncomfortable. The thought of education as a civilizing agent makes me uncomfortable.
Yet, I am experiencing tension because I do feel that education is important, it is something I value. I began to meditate on educational experiences that have not had a transmissive quality embedded within them. I began to think of family, even though I understand sometimes families are not supportive. However, in Ingold’s paper he wrote on the study of human kinship, the differences between social and individual learning of observing and imitating. He writes on the concept of inheritance. In order to illustrate his point, he uses the metaphor of following a recipe, of making food.
Last year, a dear friend of mine and fellow undergraduate student wrote a paper on how foodways are integral to the human identity. She talked of her mother’s cornmeal muffin recipe that she grew up with - how the taste is embedded with memories and how her mother does not have a specific recipe for the muffins, it is simply an inherent skill that her mother has mastered, that she is slowly learning. There were different dimensions of muffins. The recipe is not only teaching her how to nourish herself, but it is also a way into her family history as she reconnects with her Bengali and Ukranian roots - the muffins encapsulating both. Here, information is being passed without the severity of “civilizing” anyone or anything, it is simply an exploration of taste, nourishment, and ancestry. I felt that this example worked well with Ingold’s use of a recipe in the text.
A gorgeous example. Yes, it's never against education, but *for* education, for the force of what else it can be to know, for the challenge of knowing together differently. Angela Davis today interrupted her interlocutor to remind her that the abolitionist work she's done with respect to prisons was never her work alone, that it is an academic tendency to speak of concepts and achievements as though they belonged to one person alone. Work is done in the practice. And that is the education I am striving toward, the education that happens all the time but is too rarely called education, too rarely valued as knowledge.
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