Drawing on an ethnographic study of a remote community in the Auvergne, Dr. Reed-Danahay challenges conventional views about the operation of the French school system. She shows how parents subvert and resist the ideological messages of the teachers, and describes the ways in which a sense of local difference is sustained and valued, even in the official educational discourse. A significant contribution to the anthropology of education, this book offers fresh insights into the ways in which French culture is transmitted to the coming generation. Dr. Reed-Danahay also provides lucid and critical discussions of sociological theories on education, including those of Bourdieu.

Deborah Reed-Danahay is Professor of Anthropology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She is author of Education and Identity in Rural France: The Politics of Schooling (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Locating Bourdieu (Indiana University Press, 2005), and editor of Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social (Berg, 1997), and (with C. Brettell) Citizenship, Political Engagement and Belonging: Immigrants in Europe and the United States (Rutgers University Press, 2008).

l. Introduction: journey to Lavialle; 2. Theoretical orientations: schooling, families, and power; 3. Cultural identity and social practice; 4.Les notres: families and farms; 5. From child to adult; 6. Schooling the Laviallois: historical perspectives; 7. Families and schooling; 8. The politics of schooling; 9. Everyday life at school; l0. Conclusions: persistence, resistance, and co-existence