Anthropology, education and cultural conditioning: thinking the mediations in the school socialization process

Abstract

The present article addresses the path that the relation between anthropology and education in Brazil has taken, naming the anthropologists’ concerns towards the study of education. Research on this area has turned evident the change in the contexts of cultural diversity, which previously used to focus on subjects and on isolated or less integrated groups, and now points to a place of cultural diversity that replicates itself precisely through the integration of those very same subjects and groups to the model of Western development and on the institutional relationship in which the various categories of subjects are today conditioned. The purpose of such new situation, where cultural conditioning, which are traditionally formed in ways of life that hardly communicate, start to establish a speed economy of material and symbolical trades, is still on sketch. However, it is possible to presently discuss the character of the mediations at stake in the institutional relationship, trying to recognize the elements that are important for the analysis of new conditioning movements operating today on the school education. Following this line of thought, this article presents a review of the mediation category, according to Raymond Williams’ theory, in order to discuss the structural changes that contemporary society has endured, along with the unfolding in the socialization process (or institutionalization). Such review focus primarily on the changes that affect the effective mediation in this process for and through the school.