ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the discussion of theories of culture and their use in the ethnography of the American School by offering two brief examples from the literature on physical disability. It discusses two works from the classical period in anthropology. These are Erik Erikson's Childhood and Society and Oscar Lewis's The Children of Sanchez. Erikson studied how being a child in different cultures would lead to the development of different adult personalities and different "identities." The people Lewis had spent so much time with stopped being "in poverty"; they were now "poor"—on the same model as people in instituted blindness or learning disability become "blind" and "disabled" in the language of those who now wish to help them. In the process, Lewis highlighted the limitations of the culture and personality model. The chapter also considers current efforts by Shirley Heath and John Ogbu to deal with what they deem to be the learning problems of the disenfranchised.
