John Ogbu

Anthropology at Berkeley

Anthropology Faculty

John Ogbu passed away on August 20, 2003. Please refer to his obituary for further information.
Research Interests

I am currently doing research in three areas: minority status and schooling in urban industrial societies, collective identity, and culture and intelligence or culture and cognition. I have actually worked in some of these fields for more than thirty years.

In the area of minority status and schooling I focus on immigrant (or voluntary) minorities and non-immigrant (or involuntary) minorities. A major theoretical issue in this research is why some minorities are relatively academically successful, in spite of discrimination against them and differences in culture, language, cognitive styles, etc. from the dominant group in society, while other minorities experiencing similar discrimination and differences in culture, language and cognitive style, etc. are not. Through comparative and ethnographic research over the years, I have developed a framework to address this question. Using this framework, I, along with my students and research assistants, conduct fieldwork not only in schools but also in minority communities. We also examine the historical treatment of these minorities in society at large both in social and economic domains as well as in education. My most recent studies were conducted in Oakland and Union City, California on African Americans, Chinese Americans, and Mexican Americans; and in an affluent suburban community in the Midwest. Another aspect of this line of research on minority status and schooling is computer application to the ethnographic analysis.

My research on collective identity centers around people's sense of who they are, the "we feeling"and "belonging." Collective identity may not be important to members of individualistic mainstream U.S. and Western European societies (including White American and European anthropologists). Contrary to Giddens' (1991) assertions about the demise of collective affiliation, essentialized identity has not been displaced by individualistic or non-essentialized identity among racial or ethnic minorities in these and other contemporary societies (e.g., Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the U.S., to name a few. Furthermore, essentialized identity also matters a lot to members of ethnic groups in plural societies based on ethnic or religious affiliation, such as Bosnia, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, and so on. Of course, group identity always co-exists with individual identity. I am particularly interested in the relationship between collective identity and cultural/language boundaries.

Generations of anthropologists have responded in several ways to Levy–Bruh's question about differences in the way different people think as well as to how the "scientific testing" of non-Western people as well as the testing of minorities in Western societies. My approach to this question is comparative. Using cross-cultural data I explore the influence of culture and culture change on cognitive skills or "intelligence." More recently, I have begun to examine what I call "cultural amplifiers of intelligence" (e.g., schooling, art involvement, and indigenous economic activities in indigenous cultures) and how they shape or reshape people's thinking.

I have published extensively in these areas of research. (See publications.pdf.) Listed below are a few representative publications.

Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and society In Late Modern Age. Cambridge:The Polity Press.
Representative Publications

2003. Black Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erllbaum.

2002. "Black-American Students and the Academic Achievement Gap: What Else You Need to Know." Journal of Thought, 37(4):9-33.

2001. Cultural Amplifiers of Intelligence (with P. Stern). In Understanding Race and Intelligence, J. Fish, ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

2001. Caste Status and Intellectual Development (with P. Stern). In Environmental Effects on Cognitive Abilities, R. J. Sternberg and E. Grigorenko, eds. Pp. 1-37.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

2000. Collective Identity and Schooling. In Education, Knowledge and Power, H. Fujita, ed. Tokyo, Japan: Shinyosha Ltd. (in Japanese).

1999. Beyond Language: Ebonics, Proper English, and Identity in a Black-American Speech Community. American Educational Research Journal (Summer) vol. 36,
no. 2.

1999. Cultural Context of Children's Development. In Children of Color: Research, Health, and Policy Issues, H. E. Fitzgerald, B. M. Lister and B. S. Zuckerman, eds.
Pp. 73-92. New York: Garland.

1998. Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities: A Cultural-Ecological Theory of School Performance with Some Implications for Education (with H. D. Simons).
Anthropology and Education Quarterly 29(2):155-188.

1997. Speech Community, Language Identity and Language Boundaries. In Language and Environment: A Cultural Approach to Education for Minority and Migrant
Students, A. Sjogren, ed. Pp. 17-42. Stockholm, Sweden: Botkyrka.

1997. Racial Stratification in the United States: Why Inequality Persists. In Education: Culture, Economy, and Society, A. H. Halsey, H. Lauder, P. Brown and A. S.
Wells, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1997. Understanding the School Performance of Urban Blacks: Some Essential Background Knowledge. In Children and Youth: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, H. J.
Walberg, O. Reyes, and R. P. Weissberg, eds.

1997. Foreword to Reconstructing 'Dropout': A Critical Ethnography of the Dynamics of Black Students' Disengagement from School by G. J. S. Dei, J. Mazzuca, E.
McIsaac, and J. Zine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

1996. Educational Anthropology. In Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology. vol. 2, Pp. 371-377. Henry Holt and Company.

1994. Culture and Intelligence. In Encyclopedia of Intelligence. R. Stenberg, ed. Pp. 328-38. New York: MacMillan.

1993. Differences in Cultural Frame of Reference. International Journal of Behavioral Development 16(3):483-506.

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