States, where whites have traditionally formed the majority of the population), I use
various terminologies; when the word “minority” is used, it is to be read as having a
bracketed meaning.
Part II
- Levi, Introduction, 3–4.
- Williams, Alchemy, 164.
Chapter 4
- Turow, One L, 47–49.
- Angel, “What It’s Like,” 809–813.
- In similar fashion, one might begin the study of a particular religious ritual by
examining a canonical version from which specific performances of the ritual in different
times and places is likely to vary. Of course, this gives rise to a number of interesting de-
bates and issues; for example, are individual performances simply renditions or “versions”
of the canonical form, or is the relationship more complex? Barbara Hernnstein Smith has
argued compellingly against an approach that deems many renditions of folk tales to be
mere versions of some underlying, canonical story (the “Cinderella” story, perhaps).
Hernnstein Smith, “Narrative Versions.”
Another set of concerns: Does it matter that the priest or shaman works from a rich
and complex symbolic understanding of what is happening if that model is not shared by
the bulk of the people participating in the ritual? What is the relationship between expert
knowledge and folk knowledge in such matters? One tradition in anthropological studies
of religion has focused on expert knowledge, as if religious experts were the key source of
cultural understandings of religious practices. Indeed, anthropological work focusing on
expert religious understandings at times relied on single members of a society to translate
the “religious system” of an entire group. See, e.g., Reichel-Dolmatoff, Amazonian Cos-
mos. This can be problematic for those who approach the religious system as something
that is shared and social and differentially understood. Thus, some anthropologists have
insisted on understanding the way religion is translated by the people on the street, exam-
ining the refraction of religious lore and canon through the practices of these people. See,
e.g., Jean Comaroff, Body of Power.
In this case, we deal with a genre (Socratic method law school teaching) as it is per-
formed in practice, and so we are observing an intersection of the expert knowledge of the
“high priest” (in this case, forgive the metaphor, the professor) and the lay understanding
of the congregation (the students) as they come together in a jointly produced performance.
Although some of the classrooms in this study approximate the standard Socratic style,
even in these classes we find some variation from the canonical approach (hence my use
of the label “modified Socratic” to describe them). One of the classes in the original pilot
study for this project did come very close to the prototypical Socratic style, and so I use
transcripts from that classroom to illustrate the prototype in action. (Because we did not
tape an entire semester for the pilot classrooms, we cannot determine to what degree even
the teaching in this class might have begun to diverge from the standard image over time,
just as we cannot really be sure that any actual class ever completely conformed to the leg-
end, as we’ll see in Chapter 7.) - Bauman and Briggs, “Poetics and Performance,” 67.
- Id., 68.
Notes to Pages 41–45 241