"In Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools, Cati Coe examines the social and political consequences of overlapping systems of knowledge production in contemporary Ghana. This is an engrossing study that raises many compelling questions about educational processes, state-society relations, nationalism, cultural pluralism and cultural policy, the production of knowledge, and the production of citizens."

Kelly M. Askew | Kelly M. Askew

“Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools explores the problems of competing discourses on culture in Ghana, involving state representatives, traditional chiefs, and born-again Christians. Cati Coe carefully unpacks the genealogy of state and church discourses on culture and how attempts to mobilize culture for the sake of national identity or development paradoxically depend on alienation from culture as a lived reality. This book combines a vivid ethnography of how culture is taught in schools with a critical analysis of processes of cultural reification. Resisting being caught up in the opposition of tradition and modernity that underpins calls for a cultural revival throughout Africa, she offers a substantial contribution to our understanding of the complex dynamics of contemporary cultural politics in Africa.”--Birgit Meyer, University of Amsterdam

Birgit Meyer | Birgit Meyer

“[The Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools] draws on fieldwork in the city of Akropong in a study of how local traditions are transformed as they are taught in Ghanaian schools.”

Chronicle of Higher Education

“Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools sets out to interrogate the many ways in which ‘culture’ has been locally delineated, naturalized, and subsequently transformed in relation to the Ghanaian state. Central to the production of Ghana’s national identity, the book argues, has been the role the state’s educational apparatus has played in fostering an ideological landscape in which differences—ethnic and religious, regional and class-based—are subsumed under the totalizing auspices of ‘national culture’ . . . . [The book] signals an engaging anthropology of education whose implications should resonate beyond the boundaries of that subdiuscipline.” —Brian Goldstone, Anthropological Quarterly

Brian Goldstone | Anthropological Quarterly