Gilbert Gadoffre: institutionalising cultural reproduction

Mary Douglas (1921-2007) published How Institutions Think relatively late in her career. The publication was based on lectures which she gave at Syracuse University in March, 1985. In her preface to the publication, she comments that this was the first book she ‘should have written after writing on African fieldwork’ . Instead, she wrote a series of notable books which ‘all should have appeared in reverse order, ending with The Lele of the Kasai, 1963’ . Her reasoning is that these books were all variant considerations of the fundamental issue finally explicitly confronted in How Institutions Think. Douglas summarises this issue in the following terms:

“A theory of institutions that will amend the current unsociological view of human cognition is needed, and a cognitive theory to supplement the weaknesses of institutional analysis is needed as well”.

Or, again:

The whole approach to individual cognition can only benefit from recognizing the individual person’s involvement with institution-building from the very start of the cognitive enterprise. Even the simple acts of classifying and remembering are institutionalized.

Douglas places herself firmly within a Durkheimian tradition. She suggests that the ‘rationality’ of the system-world should not be divorced from the impulses of the life-world. In particular, institutions are objectified manifestations of individual volitions which themselves are conditioned by prior institutional forms. There is an affinity between the position adopted by Douglas and that developed in the same period in France by Pierre Bourdieu. His Homo Academicus explored the process of constitution of the ‘academic field’ and his La noblesse d’état analysed the institutionalisation of the grandes écoles, reflecting on the extent to which they were the products of state authority or of the self-determination of staff. Much earlier, however, at the time when Douglas was carrying out her African fieldwork, Bourdieu (with Jean-Claude Passeron) was carrying out research on student experience within the French higher education system, culminating in their La reproduction in which they argued that the curriculum was the arbitrary construction and imposition of those possessing arbitrary social power – that the transmission of a dominant culture by the socially dominant necessarily led to the system excluding, or failing, those disadvantaged students who possessed valid, indigenous cultures.

Gilbert Gadoffre (1911-1995) was appointed to a chair in French at the University of Manchester, commencing in 1967, at a time when the British government was promoting an expansion in higher education following the Robbins report of 1963 – establishing ‘new universities’. He had been a ‘chargé de cours’ at the university from 1938 to 1940 and then a ‘maïtre de conférences’ from 1954 to 1963. Throughout his career, Gadoffre was involved in developing new institutional forms within which to transmit the humanist values which he found especially in French renaissance literature. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the dialectic between institutional and individual interest in his career and to consider the way in which his cross-cultural transfer of intrinsically French ideals impinged upon the English university institution with which he was associated in various ways for forty years (1938-1978).