Comments on Tobin’s Contribution to Comparative Research in Anthropology and in Education - Hervé Varenne

Oct 15, 2026

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Examines Tobin’s contribution to comparative research in anthropology and education by highlighting how his work moves beyond simple cultural difference toward “meta-culture” and “meta-ideology,” where culture and ideology are produced about culture and ideology. Argues that Tobin demonstrates systematic, deliberate meaning-making across contexts, showing how people from different polities deliberate responses to similar issues and thereby shape historical change. Connects this perspective to broader traditions in cultural anthropology and policy borrowing debates.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages5

Reading Time13 min

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Tobin’s Comparative Study and Meta-Ideology

Culture About Culture: Production and Uncertainty

Collective Deliberations and Cross-Polity Constraints

Links to Classical Anthropology and Policy Borrowing

Comments on Tobin’s Contribution to Comparative Research in Anthropology and in Education Hervé Varenne Teachers College, Columbia University Tobin’s work has been groundbreaking. Famously, he and his team put together a sophisticated comparative study of three ways of doing pre-school—in Japan, China, and the United States (1989) . As such, this study has precedents in anthropology. What is unique in Tobin’s work is that he got people from one place to comment on what they saw people from“other” places do, including what these Others said about Them. This is not only a study about cultural difference but, more significantly, a study about what might be called “meta-culture” or “meta-ideology,”culture about culture, ideology about ideology. Anthropologists have wondered about this but have rarely, if ever, published research that is powerful evidence for the reality that people, even non-anthropologists, can produce culture about culture. Tobin shows that human beings can confront, systematically and deliberately, the grounding of what they do, apparently mindlessly. Much has been written about people acting as if their way was the “natural”way, as if it were a matter of fact that things ought to be done this way rather than another way. There may be many who say such things to interviewers. But Tobin tells us again about something that many anthropologists and other comparativists keep forgetting.“Culture,” this most powerful of concept, is not about people becoming blind to the source of their imagination or practices, it is also about the deliberate production of something that responds to an uncertainty (“how are we to teach our young children?”) . But all answers are soon challenged. Whether through internal struggles or through its interaction with other people (because of travel, migration, war, etc.) conditions change and new questions keep arising (“should we amend how we teach our young children given what we see elsewhere?”) . New productive work is needed, including the work of attempting to maintain what one has been doing. And so history gets made. I have talked about this process as one of “difficult collective deliberations’ (2007), but, in that paper, I was focusing on the uncertainties faced by one set of people, under political controls that make them significant to each others, as they attempt to figure out, often antagonistically, what these controls are and what to do next about them (Varenne & Koyama, 2011) . What Tobin has done is show us what can happen when people from different polities, who must work in their daily lives under different kinds of constraints, find themselves having to deliberate about the responses other polities give to similar issues. If a child hits another child in a pre-school, what should their teacher do? If the teacher has not intervened, is this a problem that those in authority (principals, etc.) should be concerned with? Tobin kept asking such questions, and the people kept answering. Now, this concern with meta-ideology is not exactly new in cultural anthropology, though it has rarely been phrased in this manner. Ruth Benedict (1932) expanded the still developing Boasian paradigm by wondering how it could be that neighboring peoples could have quite different rites of passage even when they knew very well what their neighbors did: “When a loved one dies, how should one display one’s grief?”“Should we do anything different if we find out that our neighbors grieve differently?” In principle, this is a version of the questions that concern many in the fields of Comparative Education, for example in Gita Steiner-Khamsi’s © 2014, Current Issues in Comparative Education, Teachers College, Columbia University. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Current Issues in Comparative Education 16 (2), 43-‐‑47. Hervé Varenne work on the processes of policy borrowing (2000, 2012) . This is also a version of what Claude Lévi-Strauss meant when he wrote about bricolage and refused to ana

FAQs

What makes Tobin’s work distinctive in comparative research?

Tobin brings people from one place to interpret what people in “other” places do, framing the focus as meta-culture and meta-ideology rather than only cultural difference.

How does Tobin’s approach show that people can create culture about culture?

The text argues that people can confront the grounding of their practices systematically and deliberately, producing culture that responds to uncertainty and evolving conditions.

How is Tobin’s perspective connected to earlier anthropological ideas?

The passage links it to Boasian concerns, Benedict’s questions about grief rites, Lévi-Strauss’s bricolage, and discussions of hybridity and educational policy as deep play.

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by jayni