In a thread entitled "Updating the Anthropological Act for the 21st Century," I made the claim that there is a disjuncture between institutional frameworks and critical frameworks.

Currently, I'm working on a write-up for a survey that I've developed for a service offered at my small institution. Item 1 on the survey instrument is Status, and Item 2 is Class. So, I'm going along, bandying words around like class and status, by which I really mean full-time or part-time (status) and freshmen, sophomore, junior or senior (class).

It's interesting to see the differences between the vocabularies and between the ideologies in which they are embedded. From the critical framework of anthropology, I know class status to be something analogous to life chances: the agglomeration of conditions and opportunities that are afforded as a result of one's class standing. From the institutional framework, research done in university administrations, class status means full-time freshman, part-time freshman, full-time sophomore...

I don't believe that the two frameworks are mutually and inevitably inimical, but currently they do form two discrete discursive fields. I do think that institutional frameworks are largely resistant to critical frameworks at least for two reasons: first, institutions tend to be conservative in their operations, no really liking or seeking much change from operations that seem to work; second, advancing anything like a political stance seems to be anathema. I’m not saying that there are no political dimensions to institutional frameworks, but rather that they have a tendency to go unscrutinized, by preference.

Perhaps Huon evoked it best when she recently wrote:

As Peter Tosh put it so militantly:
‘Everyone is crying out for peace, yes
None is crying out for justice.
I don't want no peace
I need equal rights and justice.’"

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Comment by Joel M. Wright on June 24, 2010 at 5:46pm
Yikes! Thank you for the correction, Huon.
Comment by Huon Wardle on June 24, 2010 at 10:23am
Hi Joel, thanks - just to clarify - that was a quote was from Carolyn Cooper who is indeed female.

http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20100606/cleisure/cleisure3....

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