Overview

Written by world-renowned social anthropologist, Jean Lave, with an afterword by Brazilian anthropologist Ana Maria R. Gomes, this book weaves together ethnographic accounts of work and learning, apprenticeship and everyday life, through a critical theory of practice. Each chapter explores in different ways the proposition that learning is a collective, transformative process of change in the historically political complex relations of everyday life. At the same time, the book demonstrates the changing character of Lave's own research practice over two decades. Lave addresses work practices and everyday life and discusses the problem of context and decontextualization. Analyzing two decades of ethnographic studies of craft apprenticeship, she explores teaching as learning and examines the reciprocal effects of theories of everyday life and learning.

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9781108727433

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Reviews

'In this extraordinarily good book, Jean Lave takes us on a journey to make sense of what it means to learn in - and as - changing practice. Against patronising or static conceptions of everyday life and against educational psychologists' abstractions of the mind, Lave questions the conflictual, changing and contradictory ways in which people become apprentices to their own changing practice. In so doing, she points to the conditions of possibility for revolutionising practice, developing a particularly powerful understanding of the potential within a dialectically framed philosophy of praxis.' Alex Loftus, King's College London 'Jean Lave is back - if she ever went away! The author of Cognition in Practice has influenced fields as diverse as science and technology studies, critical psychology, and ontological anthropology with her uncompromising critique of the intellectualist theories of cognition at the heart of the social sciences. In these essays, a new generation of readers can learn from her cunning practice of learning as it has transpired from the 1980s to the present.' Peter Skafish, College de France 'In this original, quintessentially Lavian collection of essays, Jean Lave's commitment to explicating her own participation in an ongoing/changing scholarly practice is an integral thread, woven elegantly throughout the text. The result is an invaluable synthesis of Jean Lave's unique anthropological contribution to learning as everyday practice.' Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University 'In this extraordinarily good book, Jean Lave takes us on a journey to make sense of what it means to learn in - and as - changing practice. Against patronising or static conceptions of everyday life and against educational psychologists' abstractions of the mind, Lave questions the conflictual, changing and contradictory ways in which people become apprentices to their own changing practice. In so doing, she points to the conditions of possibility for revolutionising practice, developing a particularly powerful understanding of the potential within a dialectically framed philosophy of praxis.' Alex Loftus, King's College London 'Jean Lave is back - if she ever went away! The author of Cognition in Practice has influenced fields as diverse as science and technology studies, critical psychology, and ontological anthropology with her uncompromising critique of the intellectualist theories of cognition at the heart of the social sciences. In these essays, a new generation of readers can learn from her cunning practice of learning as it has transpired from the 1980s to the present.' Peter Skafish, College de France 'In this original, quintessentially Lavian collection of essays, Jean Lave's commitment to explicating her own participation in an ongoing/changing scholarly practice is an integral thread, woven elegantly throughout the text. The result is an invaluable synthesis of Jean Lave's unique anthropological contribution to learning as everyday practice.' Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University

Author Information

Jean Lave is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a social anthropologist and critical theorist. Her books include one of the most cited works in the social sciences Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (with E. Wenger, Cambridge, 1991) as well as the prize winning Understanding Practice (with S. Chaiklin, Cambridge, 1993).

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