About

Hervé Varenne is a professor associated with the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. His work focuses on culture theory, particularly as it relates to culture production in history, and he has interests in anthropology and education, including issues related to Corona. Varenne's expertise encompasses discourse and conversational analysis, ethnomethodology, and the intersections of anthropology and education, with a particular emphasis on America in the United States and around the world. His activities include engaging with topics on anthropology, education, and culture through various platforms such as a blog, and he is involved in teaching courses related to these fields. His research and professional activities reflect a deep concern with understanding cultural processes, educational practices, and their historical contexts.

Research topics

• Sociology
• History

Selected publications

• America According to Margaret Mead

  Berghahn Books · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • History
  • Sociology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Animals Instructing Humans Instructing Animals

  2019-04-17

  book-chapterSenior author

  In most human contexts, changing others always involves much talk (symbolic action, discourse). This is true, maybe even particularly true, of academic, disciplined, analytic efforts to say something new about humanity. Snackers made problems for humans. Snackers had been orphaned and lived in the “Foal Barn” of an institution call “Equine Healers.” The foal barn was made of corrugated steel siding wrapped around a rectangle frame of 2 × 4 wood beams. Snackers was making a mess for the humans who had, of course, made the occasion for the mess by building barns and fenced pastures. Bateson once wondered what a cat says when it makes certain sounds as a human opens the refrigerator door. Bateson suggested that humans could translate the sounds as “something like ‘dependency, dependency, dependency.’” Somewhere in Colorado, there is a place call “Equine Healers” where some humans, mostly women, practice what they call “equine-assisted psychotherapy.” For a few months Van Tiem conducted ethnographic fieldwork there.

  PublisherDOI

• Normals, Emerging, and Diverging

  2019-04-17 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter aims to develop the grounds for the rationale for paying close attention to the temporal unfolding, or emergence, of order. It explains the grounds for the argument that maintaining an order, repairing an order, or establishing a new order requires not only instructions or injunctions, but also a much broader set of activities that can be well summarized as “education.” The world of experience, the one we live in, is mostly ordinary, normal—in the most common sense, routine, normal meaning of the word “normal”. That the world of our experience can appear so ordinary, normal, has been a problem for the social sciences that emerged in the late 19th century. Sorting out how a particular normal arises is difficult. Only the most determined efforts of specialists can reveal the properties of any normal, and particularly the mechanisms that allow for it to appear normal, stay normal, and keep appearing normal for some time.

  PublisherDOI

• Teachers, Educating Themselves About Their School

  2019-04-17

  book-chapterSenior author

  Between September 2011 and March 2013 Jill Koyama explored immigrant and refugee networks somewhere in the United States. That study traced the emergence and morphing of service institutions designed for refugees and other newcomers who were caught, more or less willingly, into their nets. Wayside Elementary School had come to be known as a “Persistently Low Achieving School.” This, by itself, only tells about a local identification by a State agency. Koyama entered Wayside Elementary School soon after the first imposition was performed. She left in 2013, before any consequential evaluation of the implementation. Koyama attended two meetings in the spring 2013. She listened to ESL teachers, refugee parents, their caseworkers, and several members of the religious organizations that supported refugees. They articulated complex explanations of their objections to the turnaround plans in general, and the Curriculum in particular.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  2019-04-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  “Education,” most conventionally, is equated with training embodied all but unconsciously, and with schoolings that redirect habits. It is an old cliche to say that people live in a world human beings produced. By educating themselves about physics, chemistry, biology, human beings make new worlds for themselves that then become facts, but not destiny either, for future life. Language in its authentic reality is born and lives and is like a perpetual combat and compromise between the desire to speak and the necessity of silence. Silence, ineffability, is a positive and intrinsic factor of language. The people who have authorities over schools are themselves entangled with other people and institutions, from “departments of education” controlled by politicians, to billionaires who befriend politicians and fund this or that reform—not to mention people from Somalia or Bangladesh who are now active neighbors.

  PublisherDOI

• The Question of European Nationalism

  2019-03-08 · 4 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In any event, at the height of classical European nationalism, from Co. Clare on the West Coast of Ireland, and for a long way eastward, "nationality" was a matter of local concern. For nationalism, particularly in that part of the world where it originated and was first inscribed in history, is not only an academic question for social scientists wondering about its applicability as a model of or for human behavior, in Europe or anywhere else. It is also a political question among those who wonder whether they should struggle for the further institutionalization of Europe. The positive side of the absence of the major symbols of a triumphant European nationalism is that it leaves room for the constituent nations of Europe to continue to symbolize themselves as different and independent on a universal stage.

  PublisherDOI

• Designing, Animating, and Repairing a Suitable Do-it-Yourself Biology Lab

  2019-04-17 · 4 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  The idea of contemporary Do-it-Yourself Biology (DIYbio) may have appeared in the 1950s. In the many tellings of its origin myths, the DIYbio, movement surfaced with the new century. Within a few years, iterations of DIYbio labs appeared in New York, Boston, Manchester, and Paris. There is much variation in their actual organization, but the principal movers and advocates acknowledge each other even as they continue to debate where the movement should go. In the everyday life of the lab, design matters only surfaced when decisions had to be made as to what objects to get into the warehouse. Everything had to be made suitable for the particular type of DIYbio lab this was going to be seen as. The design language, once embodied in tables and cabinets, was a statement to the audiences of the lab but perhaps most specifically to the “visitors”: schoolchildren, investors, the national media, and the State.

  PublisherDOI

• Educating in Life: Educational Theory and the Emergence of New Normals. Routledge Research in Education.

  Routledge research in education · 2019-04-23

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Educating in Life: Ethnographies of Challenging New Normals

  2019-04-23

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This volume investigates the ubiquitous education of everyday life as people contest the normal, settle on a new convention, and deal with the difficulties that arise. By documenting adolescent Dominican girls, young men in Silicon Valley, successful venture capitalists, and others imagining, explaining, and challenging the status quo, this book presents evidence that the proper starting point for education is struggle and play within and around institutionalized social and cultural conditions. Through a development of Varenne's earlier research at the intersection of anthropology and education, this book highlights transformative work that constructs new cultures, and it presents a revitalized theory of culture, difference, and education

  Publisher

• What Next? Keeping Life in Education

  2019-04-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Most of the literature on “education” is driven by disputes about properties, mechanisms, and root causes but whether one ends with “class,” “race,” “gender,” or the intersection between them, one has blinded oneself to the reality that all involved are alive. In much of the popular social sciences, people facing the difficult and dangerous are presented as “poor.” The poor may be peasants in quasi-feudal societies, factory workers in industrial economies, slaves or quasi-slaves. The poor may be people who fled pogroms, starvation, war, and moved across oceans and deserts. By emphasizing action, including intellectual action, as statements in call-and-response sequences started before any of the participants joined in, and that have no experienceable ending, have emphasized not only temporality, but also uncertainty, activity, and thus, for, “education” as a matter of fundamental deliberation without which no human life proceeds.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ray McDermott

  Stanford University

  5 shared

• Jill Koyama

  Arizona State University

  4 shared

• Michael Scroggins

  University of California, Los Angeles

  4 shared

• Sarah Wessler

  Fairfield University

  4 shared

• Jennifer Van Tiem

  Iowa City VA Health Care System

  3 shared

• Daniel Souleles

  Copenhagen Business School

  3 shared

• Sunanda Samaddar Corrado

  3 shared

• Juliette de Wolfe

  3 shared

Education

• B.A.

  Université d'Aix-Marseille

  1968

• M.A.

  University of Chicago

  1972

• Ph.D.

  University of Chicago

  1972

Awards & honors

• George and Louise Spindler Award for lifetime achievement fr…