“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

“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