anthropology of education

Using Visual Stimuli in EthnographyGEORGE SPINDLER

Stanford University

In this article, the work of George and Louise Spindler is reviewed with visual stimuli rangingfrom the Rorschach technique and Thematic Apperception Technique to inventions of theirown, the Cross-Cultural Sensitization Technique, the Instrumental Activities Inventory, andthe Cross-Cultural, Comparative, Reflective Interview Technique. The sites of the variousresearches, the methods of application, and a brief analysis of the results are included. [inter-view techniques, culture and personality, ethnography and education]

Biography

George Spindler started practicing educational anthropology before WWII, andhis first publication in the emerging field was in 1946, “Anthropology May Be theAnswer.” For 50 years, he and his wife, Louise Spindler, developed a shared career inpsychological and educational anthropology. Their involvement in education acceler-ated auspiciously in 1954 when they organized a four-day conference in Carmel Valleyunder the auspices of the Department of Anthropology and School of Education atStanford University and the American Anthropological Association (Spindler 1955;with support from the Carnegie Foundation). Since then, he and Louise, and he aloneafter her death in 1997, have published widely in educational and psychologicalanthropology. Their major emphasis has been on comparative interpretations amongNative American cultures and hinterland populations in Europe and the United States(collected in Spindler and Spindler 2000; summarized in Spindler 2000). His mostrecent contributions can be found in two books: one edited by Spindler andHammond (2006), the other by Spindler and Stockard (2006).

My aim as an ethnographer is dual: (1) to offer selective descriptions of humansituations, and (2) to determine what psychological and cultural resources individualsuse in their adaptations to these situations. I have pursued these aims in the companyof my wife, Louise Spindler, among the Menominee Indians of Wisconsin; the BloodIndians of Alberta, Canada; the Mistassini Cree of Quebec; German villagers and theirschools; California teachers and their schools; and rural Wisconsin teachers and theirschools.

It is my intention in this article to discuss the second of my aims as an ethnogra-pher: to determine what psychological and cultural resources individuals use in theirbehavior in the situations selected for study; and to determine, within this generalcategory, the perceptions they bring into their understanding of the situation. This isa narrative account, designed to trace in brief compass the evolution in the use ofaudio-visual stimuli from the Rorschach projective technique, through various othertechniques, to the Cross-Cultural, Comparative, Reflective Interview Technique(CCRIT) in our research across 50 years. I take the opportunity afforded by thisnarrative to discuss certain advantages and disadvantages of the ethnographer as

Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 39, Issue 2, pp.127–140, ISSN 0161-7761, online ISSN 1548-1492.© 2008 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI:10.1111/j.1548-1492.2008.00012.x.

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expert versus ethnographer as collaborator, an issue that has developed as a part ofthis trip through time.

This article is not contextualized in the expanding literature on the use of visualstimuli in anthropology. It is intended to be a personal narrative. As an introduction,I briefly scan each of the research sites.

The Menominee Indians, Wisconsin: This tribe of approximately 3,000 people innortheast central Wisconsin (when we worked with them) was attractive to us becauseof its active lumber industry employing several hundred Menominee and producingincome that created several levels of socioeconomic and acculturative status.

We documented a division of the tribal community into five groups: the “native-oriented,” the Peyote/Native American church, transitionals (in between traditionaland acculturated), lower-status acculturated, and elite acculturated. The native-oriented people were a small minority but the most interesting to us. They carried ontraditional ceremonies, spoke Menominee at all ceremonial gatherings, and lived inthe woods near Zoar, the center of the conservative element on the reservation, in thenorthwest corner of the reservation. The Peyotists were members of the NativeAmerican Church and frequently held meetings. They were also of great interest to us.The rest were vigorously studied but were somewhat less interesting because theywere more similar to us. We administered Rorschach tests to a sample representingeach of the groups and established a group “case” that included the Rorschach and avariety of observations and ethnographic data on each person in the case file. Weworked with the Menominee every summer from 1948 through 1954, and visitedthem many times after that. Of all the peoples we have worked with, we felt closest tothem and felt that we identified with them. Lorie Hammond (my partner) and Ivisited them during the seasonal rites of the Nemehetwin (Dream Dance) ceremony in1998 and were rewarded by finding them using Dreamers with Power: The Menominee(1971, 1984) as a guide to the ceremony.

Roger Harker, Beth Anne, and California Teachers and Schools: In 1950, I became a newmember of a Stanford University research and consultation team headed by ProfessorRobert Nelson Bush. The team was devoted to studies of teachers and administratorsin three communities within commuting distance of the university. I was the onlyethnographer on the team; only my studies were conducted ethnographically,although the sociologist on the team had ethnographic leanings. Our objective was toimprove the professional competence of the people who volunteered to participate inthe study; most of the personnel in the schools we approached volunteered. RogerHarker and Beth Anne were two of my first respondents. I worked for two years withthe “Stanford Consultation Service,” but in the second year I began to teach courses atStanford as an acting assistant professor, to be followed by an appointment as assis-tant professor of education and anthropology the following year. This work in the BayArea and at Stanford was carried out while we were in the midst of our most intenseperiod of work with the Menominee. Sometimes our identifications got in the way ofeach other, but it all turned out well.

The Blood Indians, Canada: Louise and I began fieldwork with the Blood in thesummer of 1959. We chose them because, like the Menominee, they had enoughincome (from ranching, hay cutting, and wheat) to have developed several levels ofacculturation and socioeconomic status. Our idea was to administer Rorschachs andcollect case data and run statistical and ethnographic comparisons as we had donewith the Menominee. We worked intermittently from 1959 to 1973 with them, accu-

128 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 39, 2008

mulated all the necessary data, but never finished the study. We wrote a couple ofarticles and used the data in several more. Perhaps someday I will finish the study.

Roseville, United States of America, and Schoenhausen, Germany: In the fall of 1959 wewent to the Stanford campus in Germany to teach one quarter at the German campusand to travel the rest of the academic year. Little did we know then that studies inschools and communities in Das Remstal (the Rems Valley) would preoccupy us mostof our remaining academic years. I did not even speak German, although Louise did.(She had been a teacher of German and English literature and drama in high schoolsfor three years before we were married.) I learned German “aus dem Mund desVolkes” (out of the mouth of the folk), which may account for my Swabisch accent andmy incorrect grammar. But I learned it well enough to conduct interviews withteachers and children and carry on reasonably well in interactions with the peoplewith whom we mingled for nine sessions of study in Germany. The Stanford campusclosed in 1975, but we continued our German fieldwork through 1985.

Schoenhausen (pseudonym) was the Remstal community that we concentrated on.It was a village of about 3,000 in the Remstal and was surrounded by other commu-nities, bigger and smaller, that were becoming satellites of Stuttgart. It had undergoneexpansion from an “ausgesprochene Weinort” (outspoken, dedicated wine village) toa community twice its prewar size and housing about 1,500 migrants from the formereast zone and areas of prewar Germany in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Russia. Westarted out studying ethnographically the relations between newcomers and natives,but through the years shifted and turned as we adapted our studies to the local andregional developments to which the schools had to adjust as well.

It was some time after 1959 when we first chanced on the idea of comparingschooling in Schoenhausen, the German community, with that in Roseville, the U.S.community in Wisconsin only about seven miles from the northwestern border of theMenominee Reservation. We had become well acquainted with Roseville and knew itwas comparable to Schoenhausen in size, rural setting, population, and predominantethnicity. So we went there ostensibly to take videos of teachers and their classroomsto show to our German teacher–colleagues. Of course, we started doing ethnographyin Roseville and its elementary school and thereby embarked on a journey that tookup the last few years of our trips to Germany: the comparison of the two schools andtheir communities.

The Mistassini Cree, Canada: Interacting with the Mistassini Cree was more of anadventure than field research. We went there to help a graduate student start on hisdoctoral research, to do work for McGill University, and to test out the possibility ofpreparing an Instrumental Activities Inventory (IAI) in a new society before we hadstarted fieldwork. All of these ends were accomplished in the month we spent there,and it was worth the trip to experience the extreme north at a Hudson Bay post wherethe Cree were living during the summer before the trapping season that started inSeptember. We installed our camp on an island about a mile across the bay to the post,and proceeded to our administration of the IAI the next day out of a rented tent-cabinat the post. It went well, and we packed up 30 days later to negotiate the 18 miles ofopen water to return to Chibougima, the last outpost of modern Canada, where wehad left our car before leaving for the Hudson Bay post.

What we learned from the administration of the IAI to 22 teenage boys and girlswas that Cree males at this outpost elected activities available on and through thepost—hunting, trapping, living in plastic tents on the trapline, fishing, all traditional

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activities. However, girls preferred activities available only in towns and cities, suchas working as secretaries or nurses, going to shows, eating and living in apartmenthouses, and driving cars on city streets—all activities that demanded giving uptraditional activities and adopting the white (European American) way. This is thesame conclusion we drew from our administration of the IAI to the people of theRemstal and the Blood, and it played a role in the interpretation of male and femaleadaptations to the impact of modernization.

The Rorschach: Louise and I began with the Rorschach, the inkblot projective tech-nique. As we used it, the technique consisted of ten inkblots standardized in clinicalusage, with a scoring and interpretive procedure developed by Bruno Klopfer. Wewere stimulated to its use by the work of A. Irving Hallowell and his associates withthe Ojibwa of Canada and the related Chippewa of Wisconsin and Minnesota (1946,1952, 1954; collected in Hallowell 1955; see also Hallowell 1976; and Mead 1978). Ifthey had any opinion at all, most anthropologists would probably regard this workas at least misguided. The purpose of Hallowell and his associates was to determinethe effect of modernization and radical culture change on the core personality of theOjibwa at three different levels of acculturation (this term is problematic, but conveysthe general meaning intended). Our research was similarly directed, but involved fivedifferent levels of acculturation and complex ethnography at each of the levels(Spindler and Spindler 1992b). What the Rorschach did for us was identify a person-ality structure for the most traditional group that appeared to characterize most tribalgroups in the far north of Native North America and to trace the outlines of thispersonality structure throughout the acculturative groups of the Menominee until itwas lost in the most acculturated population, whose personality structure as revealedby the Rorschach was indistinguishable from the white male control group living onthe reservation and married to Menominee women. To accept the findings of bothHallowell and ourselves, one has to accept the Rorschach as an appropriate techniquefor the analysis of psychological process in non-Western cultures, in other words,to accept the Rorschach as something more than a culturally limited (and limiting)instrument. Most anthropologists do not so accept disbelief. My major professor atWisconsin said, “You can throw away all of your Rorschach analysis and present onlyyour ethnography for your dissertation.” However, my University of California, LosAngeles (UCLA), major professor felt that my careful statistical analysis made ituseful.

My experience with the Rorschach was apparently different than that of many ofour colleagues. I regard the years spent working with it as productive of somenoteworthy insights and the raising of significant and still unanswered questions. Inour work with the Menominee, we found that Rorschach results correlated well withsociocultural measures and in their contradictions still raised important questionsand shed light on the depth of psychological adaptations made by individuals invarious sociocultural groups delineated in the Menominee community (Spindler1955, 1962; Spindler and Spindler 1971, 1984, 1992b). We also found it to be a helpfuljustification for spending time with people, observing them, and interviewing themabout much more than their responses to the Rorschach. At this last level of analysis,one does not have to believe in the powers of the Rorschach as much as in theingenuity of all people to make the most of anything put in front of them.

This work is mostly unknown to educators interested in contemporary ethnogra-phy, but we used the Rorschach in our research with teachers and others in California.


The signature case studies of Roger Harker and Beth Anne, as shown later, utilized theRorschach to good effect (Spindler 1955, 1963, 1974a; Spindler and Spindler 1982,2000). Whatever its merits, the Rorschach is a kind of abstraction from reality, and itproduces responses that are a kind of abstraction from reality. It produces a profile ofpersonality (translate as perceptual) structure that requires interpretation to make ituseful, and this requires an analyst with special training. (Louise and I had thatspecial training for two years with Bruno Klopfer, the dean of projective techniquesat UCLA.) We turned to more reality-oriented research techniques, such as the The-matic Apperception Technique (TAT), and created a series of techniques that weremore reality centered than the Rorschach. In response to perceived needs arising inour field research, we generated: the Cross-Cultural Sensitization Technique (CCST);various forms of the IAI; and the CCRIT. I devote the rest of this article to a discussionof these techniques, all of them “invented” by us to meet the needs generated in thesites just described. I discuss first the TAT as a step in the right direction.

The TAT: Although anthropologists had used the TAT in their research on variousnon-Western peoples, few had used it in research with middle- and upper-middle-class Americans for anthropological purposes. The TAT consists of 30 pictures (some-what ambiguous in respect to visual structure) of interactions in Western culturalsettings: a mother figure and a “son,” a farming scene, a young boy seated andlooking at a violin, a bare-breasted woman in bed with a man standing before herwith his hand to his head, and so forth. The respondent was requested to tell whathappened before the scene occurred, what is happening, and what will happen. Fromthese stories the analyst infers attitudes and perceptions.

We applied the TAT to a large sample of Stanford students to acquire data forclasses in Social Foundations of Education and Psychological Foundations of Educa-tion. I used the data to discuss relevant attitudes toward sex, authority, gender, andother features of the students’ everyday life as they would affect their behavior asteachers. I actually dittographed (this was before Xerox copiers were invented)selected portions of their responses to share with students in the discussion. Thediscussions were quite amazing and really got “down and dirty” in a hurry. Anumber of students dropped the course, but those remaining (the majority) becameuniformly enthusiastic about it. I started to write up the experiment, but gave it up infavor of more pressing demands for publications of a more recognizable anthropo-logical type.

We did not use the TAT in our research with the Menominee or with the Blood, forwe felt that the TAT duplicated already established findings, and besides, there was aquestion as to whether we could legitimately use the pictures included in the tech-nique with a non-Western population. Anthropologists had experimented with TATsredone in native dress and accoutrements, but none of them seemed satisfactory to us.This was not an issue with the Rorschach, because the latter used inkblots without anyspecific cultural content.

We did use the TAT in our case study research on California teachers and admin-istrators and found it useful. Both Roger and Beth Anne gave complete responses thatwere quite revealing. Roger, for example, gave many responses that indicated apositive bias toward females, and he produced other responses that showed that hisrelations with his father were troubled. This correlated nicely with what our classroomobservations showed and what his expressive autobiographic interview revealed (atechnique developed by Louise in her study of Menominee women). The TAT


enriched our understanding of the psychological depth and texture of these attitudeson Roger’s part. In Beth Anne’s case, this little girl, subjected to great pressure to beperfect from the adults in her life, showed in her responses to the TAT picturescomplex evidence of the strain it was causing her and how her defenses were activatedby this strain.

The virtue of these data was that the responses were revealing without the respon-dents knowing that they were, and this is the virtue to be found in any projectiveresponse. All classes of projective techniques, and all the techniques discussed in thisarticle may be considered projective techniques, share this virtue. The CCCRIT is theleast projective, in the sense that it does not evoke emotional responses in the samedegree the others do, because it is aimed at the perception of pedagogical issues.(I further discuss the CCCRIT below.)

Because all projective techniques do share the virtue of revealing more than therespondents realize, there may be questions about the ethics of their use. Extremecaution must be exercised in their application. There are knotty questions involvedthat I cannot treat in this article. I must say that to be worth the effort, if the purposesof the ethnographer are similar to ours, ethnographic research must deal with morethan the informant knows and can discuss. The ethnographer, to draw inferencesabout what the informant does not explicitly know and is not articulate about, mustknow himself or herself to avoid projective interpretations. One of my recently pub-lished papers explores the question of how to find out what informants don’t know(Spindler 2002) and another explores the relationship between certain psychoculturalprocesses and the “situated” selves of the researchers (Spindler and Spindler 1992a).

The CCST: The CCST is not, strictly speaking, a research technique, as we used it.Our purpose was to demonstrate to students in our classes how their cultures wouldaffect their cross-cultural perceptions. To do this, we used 14 colored slides mostly ofscenes in Germany, with two slides of the Kapauku Papuans. Student respondentswere asked to write down what the slides seemed to be showing. No hints weregiven, but they were told that the slides were of German scenes, with the exception ofthe two of the Kapauku, a Papuan people studied by Leopold Pospisil, who furnishedus with the pictures. We told them that these two were of a Stone Age people, whichthey were (Spindler 1974b, 2000).

After the administration, the slides were gone over, one by one, giving the correctinterpretation. For example, an ordinary BaurenHaus was shown. It was often inter-preted as a large suburban house because of its large size (it contains animals andhumans, hay, and farming implements). Or we showed an older woman pruning andespaliering grapevines in a stooped position and we asked respondents to tell whatshe was doing. We also asked them to tell how she would feel at the end of the day andwhat she would be thinking. Their response was usually that she would be very tired,her back would ache, and that she would be thinking about that. It was explained thatto the contrary that she would feel good, that the aches would actually feel goodbecause it was good, hard work that made her back ache, and given the deep workethic of German workers of the grape (Weingartners), this is the way she wouldexperience it.

In the Kapauku case the image is of a group of men, naked but for penis sheaths,carrying bows and arrows, standing around one man who is cross-legged on theground counting out shell money to pay off lineage debts and compound interestaccumulated over a six-month period from another lineage. He calculates the interest


using a grid drawn in the sand. No one sees the grid, and no one interprets the sceneas having anything to do with paying off debts. (Stone Age people don’t have debts,or money, and certainly would not be paying off compound interest!)

Every one of the pictures causes incorrect interpretations that clearly project per-cepts drawn from the cultural experience of the respondents. For those who are notWestern, as among some Asian students, particularly Mien, Hmong, some EastIndians, and so forth, the situation may be complicated by their cultural background,but by the time they get to college they have been so heavily exposed to Western, U.S.culture that they use this knowledge as a source of percepts, at least in a situation ofthis kind.

We have used the CCST as part of the introduction to every class we have taught,because all of our courses involve understanding behaviors and ideas cross-culturally.The first step in cross-cultural understanding is to be able to see how one’s ownculture affects perceptions of cross-cultural behavior or material circumstances.Various permutations of the technique are possible. The pictures may be drawn fromany context. The CCST can be used for research purposes wherever cross-culturalinterpretations are a part of the process.

Under ideal circumstances, it is possible to use the CCST as a means of correctingwhat your respondents are telling you, by detecting the possible bias in their remarksstemming from their own cultural determinations. This does not, of course, deny thevalidity of their stories. In a special ethnographic sense, anything any informant saysis true, even if intended as a falsehood.

The IAI

When we were well into the Blood Indian research, we tired of the ambiguity andabstraction of the Rorschach and desired something more concrete, less ambiguous,and more realistic. Except for Goldschmidt and Edgerton’s (1961) picture choicetechnique, there were no techniques that approached our needs in a satisfyingmanner, but neither the theory behind it nor the style of administration or interpre-tation of results was entirely appropriate for our purposes. It supplied a motivationalpush in the right direction.

We started with the Blood but also applied the technique to the Mistassini Cree andused it in the German research. We used slides we had taken of the Blood as modelsfor the drawings of the IAI applicable to the Blood, and likewise drawings for the Creeand the Remstal from our slides in these contexts. The IAI drawings vary, but thecategories of process revealed by it remain the same—traditional activities: curingby a shaman, traditional dancing, and so forth for the Blood; the traditional grapeharvest, drayage using oxen or large cows for the Remstal; activities within thereservation context or the local community, “bronc busting,” haying, or cattle han-dling for the Blood; modern methods of espaliering grape vines, using tractors fordrayage for the Remstal; for modernization and urbanization, being a doctor, marry-ing a white person, driving a car in the city for the Blood; being a lawyer, or living ina modern single family dwelling or an apartment for the Remstal.

We used drawings as stimuli, because we found that photographs stimulatedresponses related to details that were irrelevant to our purposes. For example, aphotograph of some machinery lying neglected in a field stimulated responses such as“Oh, that’s Joe Two Head’s disk. He never takes care of anything,” whereas a drawing


of the same kind would elicit a response, “That’s somebody’s machinery lying outwhere it will rust. When he wants to use it there will be problems.”

Gerald Tailfeathers, a noted Blood Indian artist, drew 37 pictures, using our slidesas models, depicting situations in which the activities occurring were expressive oftraditional culture, reservation culture, and mainstream Canadian culture. We admin-istered these pictures to 48 males and 34 females between 18 and 87 years of age andrepresenting the major sociocultural categories our research up to that time indicatedas present in the Blood population. Of these 72 respondents, 50 were already “cases”in our files.

The results exceeded our expectations. From them, we were able to deduce severalmajor categories of perception:

Autonomy: No one has the right to tell anyone else what to do. One is answerable only for hisor her own actions.

Activity and Health: An active, vigorous, outdoor life is good. It keeps one young andhealthy.

Pride in Physical Appearance: The body should be kept intact and unmarred. Appearance aswell as function is important.

Low Tendency Toward Stereotypic Thinking: Each situation is to be judged on its own merits.Avoid sweeping generalizations.

Immediacy and Practicality: It is good to have skills because they can be used on the spot tokeep things running well, and not for distant goal-oriented achievements.

Literality: What is, is. What will be no one knows. Choices are limited by reality. Conditionalthinking is out.

Practicality for the Elite: It is the characteristic of the socioeconomic elite. The difference isthat the elite put their practicality in a long-range perspective, but it is still practical.

The question arises, did the Blood know what they were saying? The answer is not asclear as I would like it to be. They knew what they knew, and they knew, for example,that Blood males liked vigorous, risky activity. They did not know that this was mostcharacteristic of the more tradition-oriented respondents or that this perception fitinto a complex of interrelated perceptions produced by their experience in a socialenvironment heavily influenced by the traditional culture. These understandings arecreated by the researchers and do not in any way contradict what natives know. Thetechnique enabled us to collate and categorize their responses in ways germane to ourresearch purposes from a relatively large number of respondents selected for repre-sentation of major sociocultural categories.

This is not the same issue raised by the case study of Beth Anne being selected themost adjusted child in the school by the faculty. She turned out to have a personalityunder siege; she was troubled by high expectations and demands from teachers andher parents. They had projected their own values in her selection as “best adjusted.”Their “illusion” proved to be false.

For the Blood, the technique enabled us to advance our knowledge of the relation-ship between perceptions and the utilization of psychological resources in adapta-tions to changing conditions as determined by sociocultural experience and thereforecontributed to our closure in this particular research.

We also made major use of the IAI in our German research. We collected a samplein 1968 of all the children in the Schoenhausener Grundschule (elementary school),their teachers, the Rektor (principal), and those parents attending a PTA meeting in1968. We collected another sample from the same sources in 1977. The samples wereparticularly revealing in their comparison.


Most startling was the difference in the female part of the sample. In 1968, the girlschose instrumental activities available in the urban mainstream more frequently thanthey chose activities that were available in the traditional community. This was insharp contrast to the male sample, which chose more frequently the traditionalactivities. This was the same relationship we had found among the Blood and theCree, so we thought we had a generalization emerging. But the 1977 sample upset ourgeneralization. The girls reversed their choices, choosing more frequently the tradi-tional activities. In some instances, for example, choosing between a quiet eveningmeal at home versus a meal in a loud, boisterous tavern, they completely reversedtheir choices. In 1968, they had overwhelmingly chosen the boisterous tavern. In 1977,they all chose the quiet evening at home. To be sure, one reversal does not unseat anapparently secure generalization in which the tendency for females to choose from theurban mainstream choices was present in all choices. What we concluded was that itdepended on the stage of adaptation to the emerging urbanization and modernizationof the area (Spindler and Spindler 1990). When the girls felt that their secure futuresin the traditional frame of reference were being threatened by increasing urbanizationthey began to choose the traditional activities more frequently. This resistance tolosing the traditional culture is expressed in nativistic movements in traditionalsocieties around the world when modernization threatens the existing culture. It isexpressed in modern contexts when political developments threaten establishedvalues, as in the 1990s in the United States (Spindler and Spindler 1998).

What does all of this have to do with education? Louise and I tended to work onwhat most educators would regard as background factors and not the relationships inclassrooms and schools. But can what goes on in schools be understood withoutunderstanding the “background” processes? We think not.

Some of the implications of this research do have a direct bearing on what goes onin the school. Of course, our work with individual cases, as with Roger Harker andBeth Anne, is directly from the school, although we brought in life-history factors andthe ethnicity and socioeconomic status of the children and the teachers for explana-tions of behavior that took place in the classroom. Further afield than that, the under-standings that the techniques used in the Blood and Menominee research producedare less directly relevant. If teachers are informed about the psychological depth of theattitudes and perceptions that native children bring into the classroom, they can adapttheir teaching styles and techniques to them much more knowledgeably.

In the German case, all of the research was done in conjunction with work in theclassroom and the school and with all related personnel. Our core work was to dothorough ethnographies of the classroom. Everything else was supplementary. TheIAI showed us that the teachers and children were conflicted about traditional valuesand percepts in relation to the new demands made by an urbanizing and moderniz-ing environment. This was not new information to us but the IAI showed specificallyhow the conflicts worked out and in what degree in different populations (students,teachers, administrators, and parents). When we administered the second IAI samplein 1977 in Germany, the Bundesregierung (federal government) had just finished anintensive decade of educational reform. New, young teachers had been hired, text-books had been completely revamped and the curriculum reorganized, class sched-ules restructured, and reading material completely reconstituted.

What the comparison of the IAI results for 1968 and 1977 showed us was that bothstudents and teachers resisted this reform. Reforms appeared to be implemented but


essentially were not. The changes actually made were “substitute” changes. Forexample, reading books that dealt with Heimat (homeland) issues and themes werediscarded, and children read stories about faraway places like China, but the themeswere the same. Truly transformative change was neither initiated nor accepted.Perhaps this is the way it always is with schools, but it was extremely useful to havethis demonstrated with the IAI data in the German study. What we strove for in all ofour research was to have several sources of data converging on a single relationship.In the German study we had ethnographic observations, interviews, and IAI datatelling us what was happening in the school. When they agreed, all was well. Whenthe different approaches produced similar results, did not agree, we knew we hadmore work to do. In any event, the IAI increased the depth of the analysis andbroadened its scope.

The CCRIT: This technique is the most complex of those described here because itinvolves showing videos of teachers in action as teachers in their classrooms. U.S. andGerman teachers saw videos of their own classrooms and those of the other teachers.The videos were also shown to the children and administrators. The idea was borneout of the interaction of German teachers with videos that we had taken, at theirrequest, of teachers in classrooms of comparable grades and subject matter in theUnited States. They had already seen videos of their own classrooms, and theirresponse at seeing themselves was virtually volcanic. The school in Wisconsin wassimilar to the German one we were working in. It was semirural, preparing studentsfor an urbanizing and modernizing world, but with one foot in the traditional ruralsociety. It was largely attended by children of German ethnicity.

The response of the German teachers, children, and administrators to the U.S.videos was overwhelming. The German children were uncontainable and whoopedand hollered throughout, in sharp contrast to the highly disciplined, rather quiet andsubdued responses of the U.S. children. We could anticipate this difference becausewe had seen it many other times in many other contexts, and thereby hangs acomplex difference between an aspect of contemporary German and U.S. culturesthat I have no intention of voicing, because it is problematic and would distract usfrom our purposes in this article.

We found that although there were differences in the perceptions of both one’s ownand the “other,” there were underlying perceptions among children, teachers, andadministrators that were much the same among both the Germans and the Ameri-cans. This is the way social systems work, differences and commonalities function tokeep the system operating. The orchestration of differences is as important to thefunctioning of the system as the agreement on common themes.

The comments of two teachers, one German and the other American, seemed to tellthe whole story. The interviews took a form we came to call “Conversational,” in thatexperiences and opinions were shared between the interviewer and interviewee. BothFrau Wanzer and Ms. Schiller had seen the videos from their own classes and from the“other” school, German or American. A more complete accounting of the interviewswith teachers, children, and the administrator may be found in Spindler and Spindler(1993).

One of the by-products of our explorations in cross-cultural perceptions was thedevelopment of a procedure we termed “cultural therapy” in 1955 (Spindler 1963).Cultural therapy is the subject of a book that we did in 1994, and our version of it isexplained in our chapter (Spindler and Spindler 1994). It involves feeding back the


data collected in research to persons involved in the research, discussing it at length,and thereby gaining self-knowledge of one’s cultural participation. This began withthe sessions with Roger Harker in which I gave him a thorough rundown on what Ihad discovered about him as a teacher. My methods were a little too direct, and hisflight from the confrontation showed how he felt. Luckily he did return, and we wereable to finish the exposure.

Discussion

Today, anthropologists of education are exhorted to work as interactive, collabo-rative ethnographers: to encourage respondents to come to their own understandingof themselves and their contexts, to share the process of discovery with them, and toact as equals. Little of the data collection I did early in my career could be regarded asinteractive and collaborationist, although elements of this orientation occasionallyappeared. The underlying assumption of the Stanford research team was that wewould share the results of our research with our “subjects” to improve their profes-sional competence. There are places in the interaction between Roger and me in whichthe give and take resembles a collaborative interaction. The notion of cultural therapygrew out of this process and was itself interactive and collaborative. But essentially,we acted as experts who would work closely with our assigned cases, keeping theminformed as to what was going on, what we would ask them to do and to some extentwhy, but never in full disclosure.

There are certain advantages to this research orientation. I would never have beenable to perceive Roger Harker’s characteristics as a teacher as I did if I had workedwith him in an egalitarian, collaborative relationship. I could see him with a certaindetachment I regarded as essential to the kind of understanding I wanted to obtain.The classroom observations, interviews with him, the children in his fifth-gradeclassroom, the superintendent, school psychologist, principal and vice principal andothers, the Rorschach and TAT, the survey of the community surrounding the school,and the documentary evidence all formed a pattern that showed he was teaching onlythe white, mainstream children in his class. I was free to draw conclusions and createinterpretations, which I eventually shared with him, and almost lost him in theprocess. He would never have come to the conclusions and interpretations I did. Hewas too well defended, and his defense was well founded, for the personnel of theentire school system shared the same illusion he did about his teaching and thepurpose of the school. They shared his illusion and he shared theirs. He was regardedas one of the most promising young teachers in the system. To work with him andconvey the results of my study of him to the broader educational community, I had totake what would be regarded today as an essentially autocratic position, speaking asan “expert.”

As any experienced anthropological field-worker can tell you, no modernistanthropologist enters into a relationship with his or her informants as an expert. Oneenters the field relationship as a student: “I am here to learn about your way of life. Iam ignorant and must be educated,” or words to that effect. And one stays in thatrelationship for as long as one is in the field, and for the duration of any follow-uptrips one takes to the field site. It is only when one comes home that one becomes an“expert.” The task becomes one of translating the exotic, the strange, into the familiar,


so that readers “back home” can understand and appreciate the way of life you havelearned. There is less of this task today.

Globalization and the general melee of cultures have reduced the task of “makingthe familiar strange,” but have also increased the complexity of analysis and inter-pretation. The “other” is no longer “out there,” because there is no “out there” in thetraditional sense. The task of the anthropologist has become more complicated. Wecame to understand what the strange becoming familiar can do to a research project.After some years working and living in the Remstal, the school and its communityhad become home. There were no surprises. When we started work in a school inRoseville, Wisconsin, the Remstal suddenly became strange again. The familiarity ofstructure and system in human communities worldwide can be deceptive. “Nothingis at it seems,” an anthropological adage of long standing, is well to keep in mind.Things happen that seem the same, but for quite different reasons.

It is assumed that now with literate persons, even anthropologists—increasinglyavailable from among heretofore subjects of anthropological scrutiny—there is noneed for this essentially outsider expertise. This is a moot assumption, for often thenative student of his or her own society has blind spots rarely filled in interpretations,and he or she will bring native conceptions of reality to the ethnographic process. Ofcourse, the outsider “student” also has blind spots. A thorough run-through culturaltherapy might help both.

Be that as it may, the CCRIT was more interactive than anything else we had doneusing visual techniques to stimulate responses relevant to our research objectives. Wesupplied videos of German classrooms comparable in grade and subject matter toU.S. teachers and vice versa, so both U.S. and German teachers saw their own class-rooms and behavior in the light of the “other” classrooms and perceived behaviors.How they interpreted what they saw and the influence of this on their own behaviorwas entirely of their own making. We left them “to their own devices,” so to speak. Wewere more recorders than managers. Of course, our roles and behaviors were notentirely one kind or another, but on the whole we were more interactive and collabo-rationist, and less managerial than we had been in our previous research.

The results were impressive, to us at least. Our interpretations go beyond theresults, as the teachers furnished them, as interpretations usually do. We relate theteacher’s interpretation of what they were doing to what we think are enduringGerman and enduring U.S. features of school practice and conceptions of the purposeof education, and, at the same time, to universal teacher–student “school” behavior.

None of our interpretations challenge conventional belief and knowledge in themeasure of our earlier research. Whether this is because the more recent research iscast more collaboratively is by no means entirely clear, although my bias is in thatdirection.

In any event, it might be well to assume a position that does not ascribe all goodto collaborative research or to research with the ethnographer as “expert.” Goodresearch, it seems, will be conducted by whatever means work best in the context inwhich the research is being done and in conjunction with its purposes.

Only one thing further needs to be said. The collaborationist approach does nothave quite the same objectives as the “expert” approach. The latter requires theethnographer to produce as little change as possible in the act of data collection. Thecollaborationist approach has as its purpose change, mutually and cooperativelypromoted. We had the same purpose in our early work, in that we counseled our cases


to improve their professional competence, but we did not assume parity in ourrelationships.

George Spindler is a professor emeritus of anthropology and education at Stanford University.Along with Louise Spindler, Solon Kimball, and Elizabeth Eddy, he founded the field ofeducational anthropology in the 1950s.

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anthropology of education

Documents

instrumental activities inventory

thematic apperception technique

american anthropological association

reective interview technique

cultural sensitization technique

hudson bay post

cultural resources individuals

major sociocultural categories