The Fax, the Jazz Player, and the Self-story Teller: How zyxw Do People Organize Culture? MARGARET EISENHART zyxwvu University of Colorado Theories of how culture affects socialization and the formation of persons have long been of interest to anthropologists of education. In most zyx of these theories, individuals are defrned, categorized, shaped, or determined by social practices that reflect cultural priorities. Until recently, few educational anthropologists have given serious consideration to conceptualizing how individuals actively and inventively contribute to cultural continuity or change. Using data col- lected during an 18-month workplace ethnography, zyx I suggest that one means by which individuals actively organize culture is through the “storiesof self” that they express or enact when they join new social settings. These stories are conceived ,as devices that mediate changing forms of individual participation (i.e., learning)in context. As such, stories of selfcontribute to identity formation and affect culture. ANTHROPOLOGY OF LEARNING, lDENTl7Y FOR- MATION, STORIES Since the early writings of Margaret Mead (19281, Raymond Firth (19361, and Meyer Fortes (19381, anthropologists have been interested in how culture is transmitted, reproduced, and changed. Years ago, Fred Gear- ing described the special province of anthropology and education as ”an array of research and intervention-research interests bearing on zy . . . the ways schools daily recreate themselves and change, on the patterning of behaviors that occur in and around them, and on the parts played by those behaviors in the transmission of culture to oncoming generations” (1974:1224). zyxwv As the quote from Gearing suggests, most of this previous work has focused on the means by which culture is presented to children or newcomers, and not on how culture is learned or affected by them. In the body of “transmission” research, attention has been directed to the images of personhood in the cultural code and to the ways these images are “brought home” to children and engaged by them in child-rearing practices, rituals, and schooling (see, for example, Fortes 1938, Spindler 1974, Whiting and Whiting 1975). This array of research examines ”how culture organizes individuals” and tends to disregard ”how individuals organize culture” (Eisenhart 1988). Transmission theories are crucial if we are ever to produce a cultural theory of education. However, transmission theories alone cannot fully Anthropology &+ Education Quarterly 26(1):3-26. Copyright zyx 0 1995, American Anthropological Association. 3