A Bit of History

In Argentina, for almost 150 years schools were fundamental instruments for the construction of the nation-state. In the last quarter of the 19th century, local statesmen used schooling as a privileged tool with which they sought to form a national consciousness. In 1884, the 1420 law of Common Education (Ley 1420 de Educación Común) guaranteed mandatory, free, organized education in grades and secular primary school for all children between ages 6 and 14 (Puiggrós, 2002). As in large metropolitan countries or in the rest of Latin America, where similar processes had been implemented, great hopes were invested in universal schooling and its expected results, ranging from the homogenization of cultural difference between migrant communities to the social mobility of those who had been schooled (Neufeld, 2014). Throughout the 20th century, this gave way to an acceleration in research within emerging disciplines, which together complemented pedagogy: sociology and psychology. Initial research usually evaluated the abilities of learners and the benefits of educational resources, and proposed new methodologies for teaching; in general, these approaches either fell within the parameters of quantitative sociology or incorporated methodologies typical of experimental psychology.

The 1960s generated significant change within the field, with increased acceptance of qualitative approaches and accelerating interest in what would come to be called the “anthropology and ethnography of education.” As a precedent, we remember that within Anglophone anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski and others in Great Britain at the time of Franz Boas, as well as his students in the United States, had developed ethnography, characterized by prolonged, personalized, and participatory work in the field, led by researchers with the goal of achieving a description that would reconstruct the “totality of social life” or “culture” of the community, recovering the “point of view of the natives.” Thus, in the first half of the 20th century, an empiricist approach with little interest in historicizing the situations described dominated the different theoretical fields which were part of the anthropology of that period. The situations they studied were generally located in societies that formed part of the colonized extra-European and North American world (Neufeld, 2010).

Within this context, North American cultural anthropology was the initial place of development for ethnographic research on education. At the beginning of the 1970s, the expansion of this type of research extended general understanding of what happened in classrooms and demystified the role of school as an equalizer between social classes. This took place simultaneously with the emergence of theoretical critical trends toward “pedagogical optimism.” These critiques, referred to as “critical reproductivism,” were found in the different interpretations of Marxism tools for rethinking the role of educational institutions in capitalist societies.

At the same time, in Great Britain, the “new sociology” of education also advanced with the development of qualitative research having an ethnographic approach. In addition, the functionalism (or structural functionalism) that had initially dominated anthropology had been incorporating elements of symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, sociolinguistics, Bourdieu’s structuralism, Gramscian Marxism, and the “new history” of Great Britain. Clearly, from the beginning, this practice of “description,” as ethnography was called, was the product of theoretical reflection. (Levinson & Holland, 1996)

Moreover, Latin American researchers actively participated in these developments. In the middle of the 20th century in the majority of Latin American countries, there were university research centers in sociocultural anthropology, initially tied to the metropolis later acquiring its own profiles, and in some cases a perspective strongly critical of its origins (Neufeld & Wallace, 1999). By 1980, an interest in educational issues arose in tandem with important anthropological developments in Mexico and increasing interest in urban development, politics, health, or the peasantry. In the 1980s, the Mexican American researcher Elsie Rockwell, the field’s initial mentor, began conducting ethnographic research in rural and urban schools employing an original “historical-ethnographic” focus. At the same time, she also trained a broad range of researchers and popularized her approach (Rockwell, 1996). Within Latin America at this time, the political conditions in Mexico were somewhat atypical. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, several countries, including Argentina, endured long periods characterized by dictatorial governments, which impacted the freedoms and the lives of their citizens and put a pause on the possibilities for research. The founders of the subdiscipline of sociocultural anthropology, in Argentina known as “anthropology and education,” lived through these years of dictatorship and began their work as researchers when political conditions in their respective countries made it possible (Neufeld, 2011). Mexico, between 1975 and the end of the 1980s, was the country of refuge where exiled Argentines engaged in educational research, such as María Saleme de Bournichon (1919–2003) and Justa Ezpeleta, whose work on teachers of rural schools in the province of Córdoba established an important precedent for educational research that considered the daily life of schools (Ezpeleta, 1991). In Argentina and Chile, the Chilean psychologist Rodrigo Vera founded the “educators’ workshops.” These workshops functioned within the limitations imposed by the dictatorships and brought together social research and self-reflection from teachers on their own work. Elsie Rockwell and her team at the Direction of Educational Research at the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico, supporting their colleagues in Latin American countries under dictatorships, organized a training workshop on the anthropology of education and created a network of qualitative research on school reality that helped to facilitate an exchange between Latin American researchers interested in critical research on education that had an ethnographic approach (Batallán, 1999). Two of the first researchers—Graciela Batallán and Elena Achilli—participated in these exchanges and training activities. Others, such as María Rosa Neufeld, were able to take advantage of the fact that in 1982, the beginning of the end of the dictatorship in Argentina, the Facultad Latinoamericana en Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) reopened its graduate program in Education and Society. The sociopolitical conditions that had been developing in Argentina constitute a social and political environment that researchers shared with teachers, families, and others whose lives and work they were researching and writing about. This explains the central role of political and economic moments and state effects in the research (which, in the analyses, are not treated simply as external “context” but as an integral part of local situations).

Anthropology and Education in Argentina: Toward a Theoretical and Methodological Focus

As clarified by Elsie Rockwell (2009), a historical-ethnographic focus is “something that unites theory and method, but does not exhaust the problems of either” and implies constant dialogue between theoretical reflections and intensive fieldwork. As a theoretical and methodological framework, it proposes to describe, analyze, and interpret everyday life events. It works to reveal the complexity of social issues and their contradictory and conflictive nature. At the same time, it articulates daily contexts with a holistic view of society (Heller, 1977). This strategy proceeds by “documenting the undocumented” and working to reconstruct “the informal logics of real life” within historically determined structures (which is the main difference between this perspective and earlier naturalist and structural-functionalist ethnography). In one of the oldest texts of Justa Ezpeleta and Elsie Rockwell, Escuela y Clases Subalternas (School and the Subaltern Classes), the authors emphasize that

Each living social form, each institution, is (. . .) accumulated history, rearticulated. It is (. . .) a synthesis of practices and conceptions generated at different moments of the past, whose present appearance is neither coherent nor homogenous. In order to make the present intelligible, one must look to the past for the meaning of those traces.

(Ezpeleta & Rockwell, 1983, p. 76)

The adoption of a relational perspective seeks to connect different dimensions and articulations of the problem being studied, which Elena Achilli argues (2005) constitutes “nexuses of reciprocal conditioning.” In the words of the anthropologist Eduardo Menéndez (2010),

We should think about reality through articulated levels, so, even if we focus on one of the levels because of the specific problem we are considering, we must recognize that only the articulations between these levels will facilitate a comprehensive reading of the problem (to observe the structural processes in the behavior of people, and vice versa).

What’s more, those who carry out their research in educational institutions should account for the fact that these places are incorporated as any other social space to the daily social experience. Everyone, including researchers themselves, has been educated in these institutions (schools) and the majority of them continue to belong to these places, making the anthropological work of denaturalization especially important.

The text of this article is divided into two parts, following a periodization that considers legitimate local level temporalities: These phases are recognized as significant by important sectors within Argentine society and relate to political and economic moments that have impacted the lives of different social groups. The first part, 1983 to 2001: Links between families and schools: studies of social inequality historicizes an era in which research documented the ties between families and schools, the ways in which schools approached diversity and inequality, and the impact of the neoliberal policies of the 1990s in the daily life of schools. This era also began generating interest in the educational situation of children coming from bordering countries, members of labor migrations, and indigenous populations. The second part of the text, “2001–2017: Socio-Educational Policies and the New Subjects of Education,” demonstrates continued interest in the central themes of the first period, together with increases in the number of researchers as well as diversification of the themes addressed. Some of these new themes included socio-educational policies (in and out of school), the impact of compulsory school attendance throughout the school cycle on the lives of families and members of the education system, and popular themes during this era, that is, interculturalism and inclusion. The subjects of these ethnographic studies—children and youth, indigenous people and migrants, inhabitants of slums or members of prominent families—are being studied through different forms of qualitative research that have been developing since the 1980s.

It is significant to note that in this article we make reference to research projects located primarily in the National Universities of Rosario, Buenos Aires, and Córdoba, which are responsible for an important part of the production in this field, although not all of it, and which integrate the network of researchers in anthropology and education (RIAE). There exists another working group in the Institute of Social and Economic Development (Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social, or IDES) that also develops academic meetings and activities within another network. The members of both groups share daily work spaces (Milstein, Fernández, García, García, & Paladino, 2006).

1983 to 2001: Links Between Families and Schools: Studies of Social Inequality

Following the final period of dictatorship (1984), a subdiscipline known as Anthropology and Education emerged within the National Universities of Rosario, Buenos Aires, and Córdoba. This development took place primarily in the closely related departments of Anthropology and Educational Sciences, both of which adopted an ethnographic approach and a wider perspective on educational challenges that were not limited to the school. At the National University of Córdoba (where a bachelor’s degree in anthropology was later created in 2010), this research approach to educational challenges was headquartered in the School of Educational Sciences and the Center for Advanced Studies. Funding provided by the state universities and CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas) mobilized the organization of the first research teams. Maintaining ties with Elsie Rockwell and other Mexican researchers in the same field was significant, given that their approaches meshed well with the perspectives of local anthropology, which had returned to the National University after the dictatorship with a critical eye toward anthropological approaches from the past.

In 1988, a research project led by M. R. Neufeld and J. A. Thisted was among the first located in the Institute for Anthropological Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires. This project focused on the articulation between family dynamics and the schools of Delta Bonaerense. This ethnographic study was based on information gathered over long periods of living with teachers and children in a rural school, together with visits to the families who sent their children to the school (Neufeld, 1988). On the other hand, Graciela Batallán continued in the UBA her line of investigation into teaching as work, power, school governance and its democratization, and the political participation of children and adolescents (Batallán & García, 1988).

At about the same time in 1991 at the Center for Anthropological Studies in Urban Contexts (National University of Rosario), Elena Achilli began to direct the first research projects in schools and neighborhoods in the city of Rosario. These projects focused on social relations at schools, and particularly on the “practices of the teachers” at different sociocultural contexts (Achilli, 1988). In these initial research projects, we can see some theoretical and methodological characteristics that, with some modifications, endure to the present day (2019). For example, research on the schools in Buenos Aires Delta (a rural area very close to Buenos Aires, situated in the delta formed by the mouths of the Paraná and Uruguay Rivers) explored the role of formal education in the strategies of the families that were part of the communities in the delta. In the case of this study, reflection on the fieldwork made the research problem significantly more complex. The research on what was termed the “island schools” (the category in use at the time, or the “native” category within the educational system and local populations) had departed from the accepted knowledge of specialized bibliographies, which, due to a lack of research on schools in rural Argentina, grafted characteristics derived from research in other Latin American environments onto these communities. These writings emphasized the “expelling” nature of “the” rural school (in that it was preparing students for migration to the city) at the same time that it sustained a disconnection between these schools and their teachers as a result of the urban model they were trying to implement. What’s more, they assumed a profound disinterest on the part of the rural population regarding the education of their children yet used the term “community” to refer to the group of families that sent their children to each of these schools (Borsotti, 1984).

The ethnographic documentation of the daily life at the island schools (ethnography that implied “permanence,” meaning the fact that the teachers lived at the islands Monday to Friday) and the house visits to the families broadened the perspective of the researchers, allowing them to look beyond the schools and to perceive the contradictions and complexities of the relations between the populations and the schools. Simultaneously, that experience enabled researchers to revise each one of the many ideas that were starting points (many of which were revealed to be assumptions, bolstered as much by preconceptions as by scant existing literature). The island communities did not resemble the idyllic representation of harmonious communities living in the middle of a peaceful rural region. In fact, far from a disconnection between school life and the environment, in different ways the teachers appeared to be involved in the daily practices of the local communities (many of them lived in the area). The data generated by living with teachers and parents for longer periods of time allowed the researchers to detect other relations and significant actors: the place of “janitors” and cooks, the existence of “catechists” in secular public schools, ties to local governments and the church, the strong association between education and “self-improvement,” as well as the potentials for urban work. This fieldwork allowed the researchers to name and unpack complicated dynamics within the schools beyond simply the act of teaching; for example, in many schools groups of parents organized what they call a “cooperative” for the school. These “spaces” turned out to be spaces in which power relations played out at a local level. And parents, landowners, and day workers alike, far from being disinterested in whether children were educated, were deeply invested in the possibilities for their children’s education, sometimes employing different criteria than teachers. The approach of “historicizing the present” allowed the researchers to retrace from “clues” provided by ethnographic data the historical evolution of certain local debates over the quality of schools. This historicization of the present made use of life stories, in some cases reconstructed from fragmentary data about everyday life given by witnesses and participants in events that occurred over half a century before, and in some cases gathered through formal interviews. The local Delta newspaper (founded in 1932) helped to reconstruct the local history and identified who had a voice and who didn’t. This historicization helped researchers unpack the persistence, between 1940 and the time of their research 40 years later, of two opposing positions: those who defended the idea that there should be “a multigrade school by each river” and those who desired a “nucleation of schools,” implying a centralization of several schools that would be well provided for with teachers and equipment. This latter position had been held in 1940 and was expressed in the Delta newspaper by local farmers (European immigrants and their sons). Historically, the teachers had resisted this idea, advocating instead for the importance of the social function of small schools.

The validity of this debate meant that when the last military government closed schools and talked about school concentration as a form of control over the local population and teachers, there were several parents who agreed with the closing of these schools. In reality, they read this proposal for school concentration within their historical perspective on the problem and were unable to perceive the different intentions of the military authorities (Neufeld, 1992).

Other researchers followed similar paths: Elena Achilli focused on the everyday relations between school, families, and urban poverty. She carried out her studies in the city of Rosario and its periphery, documenting the family and school lives of the Creole and indigenous toba qom who migrated to the city of Rosario. Together with her ever-growing team, she focused on the pluricultural contexts of urban poverty in the 1990s, documenting the close ties between dense interculturality and the effects of the processes of deindustrialization and unemployment (Achilli, 2010). In their work, she historicizes the very notion of school, which is significant because this category presupposes multiple sociocultural configurations (e.g., the different ways in which unequal access to education or the sociocultural conditions of families impact the educational experiences of their research subjects). Their research describes the working conditions of teachers in the last decade of the 20th century (the 1990s): Achilli tracks in the foundational moments of the educational system traces of the structuring and meanings acquired by schooling when it was geared toward poor children and immigrants at the end of the 19th century and follows the evolution of those traces to the 1990s. In so doing, she identifies several core problems of the cultura magisterial (its “missionary,” “vocational,” and “practical” meanings), all interwoven with the local environment of poverty and state policies for educational change. She also analyzes the processes of teaching and learning in schools impacted by the conditions of poverty associated with the peak of neoliberalism in the 1990s: In these schools she analyzes what is understood in these local environments as “school-specific knowledge” and its relationship to the “extracurricular.”

These early investigations also include Elisa Cragnolino at the National University of Córdoba, who studied educational strategies within a group of rural families in the north of Córdoba. With a theoretical framework markedly influenced by the work of Bourdieu, she analyzed the daily social mechanisms of reproduction in order to explain from the perspective of her subjects how teachers and students act within specific historical and social contexts in order to produce and reproduce their conditions of existence. Cragnolino studied four generations of relatives, methodically tracking the progress of the children from primary school up until the final generations who managed to completed the [school] cycle (Cragnolino, 2006).

The years after the dictatorship began with the presidency of Raúl Alfonsín (1983–1989), followed by Carlos Menem, who was also democratically elected but who adopted a neoliberal agenda that avoided state responsibility for education, health, and social welfare. Educational reform during this period modified the school cycles but diminished the historical centrality of the national state as a guarantor of education (Grassi, Hintze, & Neufeld, 1994). It is important to note that the deterioration of socioeconomic conditions was a central aspect of the daily lives of families and schools that served working class, rural, and urban communities; ethnographic research recorded and documented the hardships of these families, the efforts on the part of educators to meet the needs of children and adolescents, and the disruption that these conditions generated within the daily operations of schools.

As noted, families in school and the sometimes complicated relationship between parents and teachers regarding children’s education were the central themes of the early research that contributed to demystify assumptions about the supposed disinterest of working-class families in the education of their children. The literature we have cited demonstrates that schools in disadvantaged urban or rural areas have been built through parental involvement and initiatives and that in both the Delta and in the rural areas of Santa Fe and Córdoba, parents sought to have a voice and to influence the curriculum and operations of schools. Additionally, these studies documented the ways in which growing poverty and inequality impacted educators as well as the families of the students (Montesinos & Sinisi, 2003).

Moreover, ethnographic research documented the relationships between inequality and diversity present in everyday situations. In the 1990s, a significant amount of migration from other Latin American countries took place as well as from countries such as China and Korea in addition to internal migrations, and during this time period these populations were often discriminated against. Researchers documented the xenophobic outbreaks directed toward foreign migrants and workers that accompanied growing rates of unemployment. The presence of “foreigners” was magnified and exaggerated, the perception of otherness giving rise to ethnocentric formulations within the official discourse of the 1990s. This distortion was accompanied by immigration legislation enacted during the years of the dictatorship, which touched daily life within schools. Paradoxically, concepts like diversity, multiculturalism, and interculturalism topped the lists of “categories in use” both by functionaries and the press. In schools, these concepts were incorporated into pedagogical knowledge (saber docente) and served to explain the differences between children (Neufeld & Thisted, 1999). But the condition of belonging to migrantes, the connotations attributed to their places of origins, and their ethnicity continued to construct and perpetuate social inequalities. Idyllic discourses regarding respect for diversity were replaced and discredited in everyday situations by what scholars referred to as uses of diversity.

In the neoliberal era of the 1990s—even when the state was supposedly “absent”—these studies were concerned with documenting how politics became a part of everyday life. This problem encouraged graduate and postgraduate theses that analyzed different facets of this process: the application of the so-called structural adjustment in Buenos Aires schools; the participation of parents within these schools; the changes that educational reform introduced to daily scholastic life; and the implementation of policies focused on schools selected through poverty indicators (Padawer, 1992; Gessaghi, 2004).

2001–2017: Socio-Educational Policies and the New Subjects of Education

In 2001, the advance of policies inspired by neoliberalism brought forth a crisis that included repression, deaths, looting, and the resignation of the president. Working-class populations responded to the effects of high-risk financial speculation, unemployment, and growing prices with forms of protest such as roadblocks, picket lines, and different forms of collective organization. Social movements led by the unemployed occurred, rooted in their neighborhoods, as well as popular assemblies and cooperatives of workers from failed companies, which supported their operations. All of these strategies sought to confront challenges related to basic nourishment, housing, and the care and education of children. The members of these movements began to interact with the state, which, for its part, had also begun implementing social policies such as distributing food or financial payments. Additionally, social organizations, militant student groups, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) developed popular soup kitchens and school supports. Between the years 2001 and 2003, the housing and educational situations for children in difficult situations were very complicated.

In the period directly after (between 2003 and 2015, spanning the presidencies of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina F. de Kirchner), national policies attempted to confront the difficult social and economic situation by expanding the labor market and growing consumption as well as by adopting laws intended to protect human rights and legalize migration from bordering countries. At the same time, significant changes in the orientation of social and educational policies were introduced in an effort to reframe their mission. These were initially focused on “power indicators” toward more universal criteria. The socio-educational policies of the 1990s had been internalized as part of the educational system. These policies were enacted both inside schools and outside of them (one of the best known was the Zones of Prioritized Action—ZAP—in the south of the city of Buenos Aires).

In 2006, the National Educational Law No. 26.206 was approved, mandating at least 13 years of schooling, from the age of 5 through the end of secondary education. In the documents from this period, the term “inclusion” is employed repeatedly (Diez, García, Montesinos, Pallma, & Paoletta, 2015). This term was incorporated in to the design of different policies named as inclusive, targeting vulnerable populations, and at the same time, it could also refer to an inclusive education, with equal learning opportunities for all. The impact of this new, normative legal framework was inescapable in the ethnographies produced during those years. These ethnographic surveys documented the daily practices of teachers and civil servants as well as the local interpretations of normative national policies. At times they emphasized the persistence of neoliberal criteria. For example, programs that emphasized “equality” continued to target schools in neighborhoods and locations selected by the indices of Unsatisfactory Provisions of Basic Needs and financed projects tied to specific improvements but did not work to resolve structural problems, such as a lack of school buildings (Cerletti, 2008).

Beginning with the National Educational Law, mandatory school attendance was enforced as a “must” for administrators and teachers as well as for families and students, and researchers’ attention turned to both extremes of the school cycle producing this expansion. A historical ethnographic focus allowed researchers to track this changing sense of obligation as well as to reconstruct different appropriations of this sense in diverse local environments. For example, in juvenile detention facilities, attending school has traditionally been treated as a privilege bestowed upon a few. This new legislation mandating a full cycle of primary and secondary school made access to education a right (Gómez, 2017).

However, new uses of diversity appeared, generating new stigmatized figures precisely in the spaces in which an expansion of rights should have been enacted (e.g., questions of whether secondary school “would be made for those youngsters”). In this sense, selective representations continued (Sinisi & Petrelli, 2013).

During this period, several factors contributed to growth in the number of researchers and in the formation of research teams. First and foremost, this growth was tied to significant support for scientific research, manifested as scholarships for masters and doctorate programs, as well as more stable funding for research teams. Additionally, the themes of the research diversified, spanning the relationships between different subjects who populated schools and neighborhoods: parents, teachers, children, and youngsters. In this second era, the initial concerns maintained their primacy. The recognition of inequality relations in the situations under study had not been an isolated topic of investigation but rather a shared concern. When talking about inequality relations, one refers to a historical process that transcends economics and encompasses different dimensions: the ideological, the political, and the educational, all of which should be conceived of as social relations (Manzano, Novaro, Santillán, & Woods, 2010). While the majority of research has turned to the educational challenges facing those in poverty and the working classes, pioneering researchers focused on the opposite end of the spectrum. While Victoria Gessaghi (2013) contributed to the relational analysis of inequality with an ethnography of formative work within the upper classes in Argentina and the place of education in this process, Silvia Servetto (2015) historicized the relationship between the state, Córdoba society, and the Catholic Church, while also documenting the respective trajectories of a group of young students in these traditional schools.

The relationship between families and schools continued to attract attention: In this case, the abundance of historical-ethnographic research had permitted scholars to reconstruct how this relationship had been constructed as a social problem. In order to do this, researchers identified different relationship levels, such as daily practices and the interactions between subjects tied to the education and schooling of children. They also worked to historicize the changing role assigned to parents within the educational process. According to researchers Santillán and Cerletti (2011, p.11):

The historical register helps us, together with the recreation of daily life, to denaturalize the interactions between both . . . (and) to problematize the natural character of these assumptions and attributes that are presented to us (. . .).

Since the 1990s, these researchers had already integrated the anthropology and education programs’ research teams. During these years, Laura Santillán (2014) began a long-term ethnographic project in the working-class settlements in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. She described local organization efforts that took place at the interstice between family groups and the school, addressing issues with schooling and education and sharing and supporting the task of raising and caring for children, together with their families.

Laura Cerletti (2015), for her part, addressed the diversity of meanings that educators, fathers, mothers, and women from a neighborhood in the city of Buenos Aires attributed to everyday concerns such as the selection of schools, discipline, and school tracking. She historicized educational policy from the 1960s to the 1970s, a moment that coincided with incursions on the part of the Catholic Church into the sphere of education and schooling as well as the massive spread of “psy” discourses (social discourses based on the popularization of psychology and psychoanalysis). These developments took parental obligations and responsibilities to a new level, which, according to the author, reinforced a hegemonic mode of representing the relationship between families and schools (Cerletti, 2015). Nemcovsky (2013) also contributed to this process of reconstructing ideas that circulated within school environments about working-class families, focusing on the memories that former residents of the city of Rosario had of their educational and working lives.

Educators were always an object of study: In her anthropological work, Lucía Petrelli furthered the early research of Graciela Batallán and Elena Achilli, and we can see influences of the historical-ethnographic approach in her work. She problematized the structuring process of educational work, the ways in which educators are initiated at their “professional practice” and in aspects of teacher training. Through her extensive research, in this case working with two schools, she identified different dimensions that intervened in these processes: among others, the participations of parents in the school environment; institutional projects of the schools where the educators worked; and state presence (the role of state forces in the school, which transcended the physical presence of state workers or curriculum decisions). She distanced her work from categories such as “roles,” and she approached others as experience that, according to Rockwell, allowed her to better grasp the different components of educational labor (Petrelli, 2014).

Children, however, are obviously regarded as the recipients of educational activities, but research has not always been focused on them. In March of 2006, the Program of Anthropology and Education at the University of Buenos Aires held the Eleventh Symposium of Ethnographic and Educational Research, which, according to its own title, sought to make “children and adolescents, in and out of school,” the focus. This demonstration of interest allowed others to appreciate the importance of ongoing ethnographic research, such as that being conducted by Graciela Batallán and Silvana Campanini, which focused on the role of children and adolescents in the political sphere. They argued that despite their invisibility (as non-adults or noncitizens), their practices and reflections in many cases situate them as active participants in the public sphere (Batallán & Campanini, 2008). Another researcher, Noelia Enriz (2010), studied the games, knowledge, and experiences of the mbyá-guaraníes children from Misiones province, employing ethnographic research methods in classrooms and in domestic spaces. María Laura Diez (2014) conducted research in a school in the city of Buenos Aires attended by children recently arrived from Bolivia. She interviewed these students about their school trajectory, taking a biographical perspective. One of the characteristics of ethnographic research is a mixed-methods approach. Always working with children, Ana C. Hecht (2010) problematized the processes of socialization and the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and the ways in which the Q´om children (immigrants from Chaco province at the outskirts of Buenos Aires) used and represented the Toba (Q´om) and Spanish languages in their daily interactions. She found her research subjects by attending Q´om language workshops and by frequenting their neighborhoods and domestic spaces. Maximiliano Rua (2017) was interested in the ways in which children construct knowledge with respect to the social objects that surround them, including written work. Throughout his research, conducted by sitting through classes side by side with students, he documented the writing practices they developed in a school setting with their teacher, and he also recorded how the students deployed writing in extracurricular, everyday situations.

The works that we have grouped as focusing on issues regarding youth, like the research outlined characterized by relational and totalizing approaches, are concerned in these cases with the relationship between adults and members of this age group. They document the ways in which they confront problems with family, school, or their peer group, encountering limits and resources in institutional practices tied to normative legislation, such as mandatory secondary schooling or “experimenting” on their own with the options open to different sectors of society. One of these works, by Silvana Sánchez, described and analyzed the neighborhood life of the street youngsters at the corner in the enclaves of poverty in Rosario; she investigated the ties of brotherhood and sociability (among them, the bardo [hassle or fuss] or disruption of the rules of communal living), group outings to known territories, and a shared sense of “boredom” (Sánchez, 2005). Another of these ethnographies, authored by Mercedes Hirsch (2010, 2017), studied how teachers in a high school in a small city near Buenos Aires encouraged students to take certain paths and not others during their completion of secondary school. She highlighted the contradictory social pressure of approaching schooling as an instrument of social mobility. She worked to understand the decisions that adolescents and adults made in relation to their “working, professional, and domestic futures.” However, in contrast to the approaches that focused their analysis on expectations and aspirations, she posited that expectations and aspirations did not influence or determine actions; rather, these concepts evolved together with practices.

Other “school places” frequented by young people, such as the schools for adolescents and adults (CENS) and the popular baccalaureates, created by social movements, have also been the object of ethnographic study. Horacio Paoletta, a researcher who works on this topic, adopted a relational focus, considering both the experiences of adolescents (students) and adults (teachers, administrators, and students) who met in these secondary education centers (CENS). His fieldwork allowed him to reflect on the meaning that young people and adults, each through the social relations they have lived, attributed to age and the categories of “young” or “adult” in secondary education centers (Paoletta, 2017).

At the beginning of the 2000s, together with various state initiatives, popular baccalaureates emerged, organized by social movements, university activists, and teachers’ cooperatives. After their creation, most participants sought state recognition for their degrees in order to officially certify the completion of secondary school. Javier García, who has studied these experiences from their origins, notes that in the 1990s, these baccalaureates emerged as a reaction against what was characterized as an “absence” or a “withdrawal” of the state. His research emphasized the potential of ethnographic methods to reverse static images of “traditional schools,” often considered as a tool for reproducing domination and which, in that case, would be seen as the antithesis of “popular baccalaureates,” a generalized name for these educational experiences (García, 2017).

One of the most heavily researched areas during this era addressed the education and schooling of migrant and indigenous populations. Since 2004, Gabriela Novaro and her team have worked with migrants from Bolivia that live in different areas of Buenos Aires. Their research worked to identify and describe the processes of intergenerational knowledge transferal between first-generation migrants and subsequent generations. They found that the educational expectations of the families and organizations of Bolivian migrants at the same time created strong identity referents and the expectations of being included within the new society. What’s more, the long-term school experiences of these children revealed the inherent tensions between the contradictory discourses interculturally and the appeals from nationalist discourses that persisted in the schools (Novaro, 2014).

In 2009, Ana Padawer began a study of rural populations where communities who defined themselves as mbyà-guaraní and as colonos (Creole populations descended from European immigrants and bordering countries) lived together. The formative activities of children and adolescents took place in school, but also through their participation in activities targeting activities within domestic groups. Although rural schools have historically recognized the importance of practical skills, Padawer’s fieldwork (2013) documents the ways in which the structures of educational institutions reproduce a social construction that puts practical skills acquired in familial contexts at odds with technical knowledge scientifically validated by and imparted within schools. She incorporates Lave and Wenger’s (2007) concept of legitimate peripheral participation in order to identify learning situations outside of school, where adolescents join communities of practice organized to take part in agricultural activities. Taken together, the work of these researchers contributes to the dialogue surrounding the uses of the category of interculturalism, which emerged as a key concept for the interpretation of the relationships between subjects belonging to diverse communities determined by ethnicity or nationality (Hecht, García Palacios, Enriz, & Diez, 2015).

In all of these cases, regardless of the specific themes addressed, this most recent period was also characterized by intense collaborative work with teachers and other subjects within the educational field. Additionally, there has been a growing articulation between research and “volunteer projects,” the latter of which has been considered enriching rather than as an obstacle, together with demands for increased self-reflection on the part of researchers.

Synthesis

In this article we sketch the distinctive features of one of the subdisciplines of Argentine anthropology, known as “anthropology and education.” This subdiscipline encompasses a significant number of specialists, visible in core working groups that meet at local and international conferences. They have participated in the development of a theoretical-methodological synthesis specific to Latin America that started in Mexico and found fertile ground in Argentina, beyond the limits of anthropology and education. In the course of this article, we highlight the characteristics of a historical-ethnographic approach (or socio-anthropological focus, to use Achilli’s terminology), perceptible in different research projects. Using the term “historical-ethnographic approach,” we synthesize a process of appropriation with a challenge to the traditions of Anglophone anthropology. We recognize with the second term—ethnography—the legacy of the initial anthropology (European and North American), and with the modifier “historical approach,” we clarify the primacy of historicity and temporality to social life. We have indicated, by following the main thematic threads developed since the 1990s, the diversity and variability of methodological resources being employed, together with the consistency of the core focus, which revolves around the possibility of producing knowledge about the social world through the constant dialogue between fieldwork and theoretical reflection. This approach implies an understanding of the conflictive nature of social relationships, the historicity caught in the fabric of everyday events, the denaturalization, and the reflection on the engagement of the researcher on doing fieldwork and having a willingness to approach new problems as they arise over time.

One characteristic that these research teams from the Universities of Buenos Aires, Rosario, Córdoba (as well as the Center of Buenos Aires Province and San Juan National Universities) share is their respect for collaborative work and exchanges between researchers who strive to transcend the rigidity of the “academic mode.” This does not invalidate the work of individual theses and articles, but rather contextualizes them within projects and programs that group projects. As we anticipated, working for these types of exchanges catalyzed the creation of the network of researchers in anthropology and education (RIAE), which unites a significant portion of researchers in the field of anthropological education in Argentina. This was preceded during the 1990s by training seminars and the direction of graduate theses that normalized exchanges between teachers and students, especially graduate students, within universities.

Between 2010 and 2018, four seminar workshops were organized in Córdoba, Rosario, and Buenos Aires, all opportunities for open exchange regarding research projects in progress and shared challenges. The Bulletin of Anthropology and Education, published every semester by the Program of Anthropology and Education at the University of Buenos Aires, produced a special edition in 2015 surveying the different debates that were held over the course of the 2014 workshops. The articles that were included were written by members of the different research teams of the Network of Researchers in Anthropology and Education (RIAE) who shared their perspectives on common problems, such as co-participation in ethnographic research with research subjects, how to conceptualize different temporalities and an understanding of history (or a historical dimension) in ethnographic research, and the possibilities for comparison in and between ethnographies (Luykx & Padawer, 2017).

The persistence of neoliberalism in Latin America and its implications for the living and working conditions of those who attend or work in schools means that its presence and impact will continue to be documented by ethnographic research. In other words, that which will eventually appear as contextual in this article will continue to challenge researchers. The fact that these researchers will continue to account for the effects of these policies in their own working conditions is a challenge that Argentina, once again, shares with other Latin American countries.