Programs in Anthropology are excited to share Professor Hervé Varenne's newest publication, 人类学、比较与教育_埃尔韦·瓦雷纳 ("Anthropology, Comparisons, Education"). This is Dr. Varenne's first article published in Chinese. The full article can be found at this link in the Journal of Comparative International Education, Volume 6 (2025).

Of all the social sciences implicated in the discipline, anthropology is assuredly the one founded on a comparative perspective on human activity in general and on education in particular. In this paper, Varenne address three aspects of the anthropological perspective on comparison. First, it is essential that any statement about humanity take into account the surprise people experience when they travel away from where they were born and raised and discover that the people "over there" do the most common things in very different ways. Second, it is also essential to take seriously the evidence of wide variations among the people who might initially appear to be similar, whether on the basis of technology, ecological implementation, language, etc. This involves comparing how people organize themselves to survive in the Amazonian jungle to how other people organize in Central Africa and develop what is usually put as "their culture." And it involves comparing the way the people of, say, Europe, India, or China, deal with the evolution of technologies from the beginning of the iron age to our own. The third, and by now most significant aspect of anthropological comparison, is the insistence that any comparative statement face the multiplicity of the ways people within one population, particularly a large one, seek to organize themselves, as well as the extent to which they succeed, or not, in institutionalizing what I call their "new normal." This third form of comparison may be the more significant if only because it obliges us, the experts, to face the ongoing work of all to imagine and implement alternatives to what they may have been encultured into. This third type of comparison is the one that will move the field of comparative education.

在众多涉及教育学科的社会科学中,人类学无疑是建立在人类活动普遍性比较视角之上的学科,尤其在教育研究领域体现得尤为显著。首先,任何关于人类的论述都必须重视当人们在离开自己出生和成长的地方,发现“那边”的人以截然不同的方式处理寻常事务时所产生的文化震撼。其次,我们必须严肃对待表面相似群体内部深藏的多样性。无论是技术应用、生态适应,还是语言实践,比较研究需要跨越地理界限:从亚马逊丛林原住民的生存智慧到中非部落的文化建构;从欧洲、印度和中国冶铁技术的演进脉络到不同文明对工业革命的差异化回应。再次,我们需要考察不同群体尝试制度创新的各种路径,观察他们如何建立所谓的“新常态”,以及这些尝试最终是否成功实现制度化。第三种比较形式或许更具重要意义,因为它促使研究者去面对所有人持续开展的工作,即去构想并实施那些与他们被文化熏陶而形成的观念不同的替代方案。正是第三种比较形式,将推动比较教育研究的发展。