Pedagogy of the Oppressor?

These past few days I have been reading (listening by way of audiobook) to Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (1968). It is a Marxist work aimed at revolution through co-education. The idea is that there are people who oppress and other people who are oppressed. The oppressed, together with a teacher or on their own, must come to realize their state of oppression. They must have their consciousness raised. They need to gain critical consciousness – conscientização – in order to become aware of their state of being oppressed. That is the intellectual precondition of revolution.

The book is essentially aimed at the potential teacher or the oppressed person who is self-taught and happens upon this book. The strong caution is that any teacher or revolutionary leader must not forget to collaborate with the oppressed people and make them agents in their own liberation. While it warns the teacher or the revolutionary leader not to become oppressors themselves by short-cutting the process of including 'the people' in the intellectual and planning processes, it is a bit short on recognizing that most oppressed people are also, themselves oppressors of a lower-still class.

As with much Marxist literature, it simplifies social structure into just that: a class of oppressors and a class of oppressed. Reality, of course, is more complex. An effort to approach reality is to view a situation from as many sides as we can, or at least as many sides as it practicable. Also, as with much Marxist literature, the work is steeped in Marxist jargon, which makes it difficult for the non-Marxist to wade through. It is aimed narrowly at the professional Marxist revolutionary-intellectual, and thus seems to partially defeat its own purpose of educating the lay reader.

Below the fold, I hope to look at the book from multiple angles without falling into the trap of using my own jargon as too much of a shorthand, thus oppressing you as the reader in the way that Freire oppresses the non-Marxist reader. The point of doing so is to exercise the analytical muscle – using the four perspectives of political science, economics, sociology, and cultural anthropology – in order to strengthen that muscle. Furthermore, those who want to put such a pedagogy into 'praxis' can be helped by having a more targeted understanding of the barriers to liberation. Employing the four different perspectives help with acquiring the right target.

From Many Cultures to Much Culture

Over the last months, I have been devouring audiobooks, given their easy accessibility through my formerly-local public library. Since I am still working on the 'culture' section of my research, these books mostly deal with what I think of culture and notions of its contours – or, rather, the lack of such contours. In particular, I have been reading/listening to books about the histories of Islam and Muslims, largely focused on the Middle East.

A departure from that is the book that I am currently reading: Gods of the Upper Air (Charles King, 2019). It dovetails perfectly with the idea of culture's contested contours. Essentially, the point that I raised in the previous post – Indiscrete Culture – can be illustrated by the work of Franz Boas, one of the central figures of early cultural anthropology. It is, however, illustrated by doing to his discipline's subject what he did to physical anthropology and eugenics in his day.

Below the fold I take ideas from my current reading – about Boas, from Ruth Benedict (whose Patterns of Culture I read last November), and drawing on my readings about the history of Islam – to continue building the case against cultures on behalf of culture. In short, I argue that culture is too multi-faceted, and those facets are too poorly aligned with one another, to make any typological sense. It should therefore not be used as a concept that can be divided into particular groups. Doing so is only a latter-day reification of physical anthropology's race theories. That's not to say that making distinctions cannot be useful, but it should be done carefully.