ABSTRACT
Doing the ethnography of schooling is nearly as interesting as doing the ethnography of the Menominee, the Kanai (the Blood Indians of Alberta, Canada), or the Mistassini Cree hunters (near James Bay, Quebec). We have “done ethnography” with the first two intermittently for several decades (and intend to do more) and with the last one for a season. Our task in all these studies was complicated by the necessity of making the strange familiar. We observed and tried to understand behavior that seemed unusual, different, exotic, and at first inexplicable. We tried to make the strange familiar to our readers, as we translated our observations into logic and expressions understandable to them. We did a cultural translation. In the pro-cess, we did some violence to the
cultural knowledge we had gained in our fieldwork.1 That is, we used our cultural categories, such as “religion,” “ritual,” “social organization,” “kin terms,” “acculturation,” “psychological adaptation,” and so forth, in translating our informants’ cultural knowledge as they expressed it and practiced it into the language and cognitive categories of: (1) anthropology, (2) the English language, (3) the Euro-American culture. If we had used their language and their categories of thought and interpretation, no one would have understood us except those Menominee, Kanai, or Cree who spoke their own language and lived the traditional way of life. Making the strange familiar is the usual task of ethnography.
