Overview

""We Are All Equal"" is a full-length ethnography of a Mexican secondary school in English. Bradley A.U. Levinson observes student life at a provincial Mexican junior high, often drawing on poignant interviews, to study how the school's powerful emphasis on equality, solidarity, and group unity dissuades the formation of polarized peer groups and affects students' eventual life trajectories. Exploring how students develop a cultural ""game of equality"" that enables them to identify - across typical class and social boundaries - with their peers, the school, and the nation, Levinson considers such issues as the organizational and discursive resources that students draw on to maintain this culture. He also engages cultural studies, media studies, and globalization theory to examine the impact of television, music, and homelife on the students and thereby better comprehend - and problematize - the educational project of the state. Finding that an ethic of solidarity is sometimes used to condemn students defined as different or uncooperative and that little attention is paid to accommodating the varied backgrounds of the students - including their connection to indigenous, peasant, or working class identities - Levinson reveals that their ""schooled identity"" often collapses in the context of migration to the United States or economic crisis in Mexico. Finally, he extends his study to trace whether the cultural game is reinforced or eroded after graduation as well as its influence relative to the forces of family, traditional gender roles, church, and global youth culture. ""We Are All Equal"" should be of particular interest to educators, sociologists, Latin Americanists, and anthropologists.

Full Product Details

Author:   Bradley U. Levinson
Publisher:   Duke University Press
Imprint:   Duke University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 2.90cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.862kg
ISBN:  

9780822326991

ISBN 10:   082232699
Pages:   456
Publication Date:   12 July 2001
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Awaiting stock  
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Table of Contents

Introduction - questions and methods for a study of student culture; a short introduction to the methods and fieldsite; historical contexts - the adolescent, the Nation, and the secundaria, 1923-1993; educating adolescence - the Mexican secundaria; politics, ideology, curriculum - a brief history of the Mexican secundaria; escuela secundaria federal in regional and local context; beginnings - an anthropologist, a city, a school; San Pablo - class, culture, and economy in regional and historical perspective; social class and secondary schooling; setting the ethnographic stage - the summer of 1990 and the new school year; institutional contexts - the school students encountered; entered ESF - the students' view; the grupo escolar - competition, solidarity, equality; by day, week, and year - school spaces, rituals, and routines; curriculum, pedagogy, and teachers' practice; gender regimes; Somos Muy Unidos - the production of student culture in the grupo escolar; my way into the grupos histories and cycles of the grupo escolar; grupos and focal students; the play of culture - student appropriations of equality and solidarity; sites of social difference and the production of schooled identity; sites of difference and subjectivity - San Pablo and environs; school identification and schooled identity; friendship groups, youth culture, and the limits of solidarity; music, media, and the cultural centre at ESF friendship groups and social distinctions within and across the grupo escolar; the play of gender in the configuration of difference; political economic change, life trajectories, and identity formation - 1988-1998; Mexico, San Pablo, and ESF - the intervening years; how focal students fared; what young lives can tell; games are serious - final reflections on Mexican secondary student culture; the institution and the playful practice of student culture; the fields beyond school - identity and aspiration unfolding. Appendices: structure, culture, and subjectivity - a way of feeling and thinking; theoretical and ethnographic precursors; concepts for a critical analysis of student culture; focal student profiles.

Reviews

Levinson shows us how to think in a different way about studying youth and identity construction in a particular socio-historical context. This first-rate and innovative ethnography will establish him as one of the best newcomers on the scene. - Douglas Foley, author of The Heartland Chronicles An important conceptual, theoretical, and methodological work on a crucial topic. We Are All Equal will open important avenues not just for education scholars but for those of us interested in ethnographic approaches to a wide variety of topics and across a multiplicity of disciplines. - Mary Kay Vaughan, author of Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1934-1940

Author Information

Bradley A. U. Levinson is Assistant Professor of Education and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University.

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