Backward countryside, troubled city: French teachers' images of rural and working‐class families

French primary school teachers criticize both urban working‐class and rural families, but often for different reasons. Their discourse about families reflects conflicting themes in French culture—the romanticization of rural life and the idealization of the bourgeois family model. Our analysis shows that the dominant ideology of the family in France is not coherent, and that teachers make use of ambiguous symbols and images of the family in order to privilege the “rationality” of the middle classes over the “irrationality” of the lower classes. We argue that more attention must be placed on such “everyday uses of domination” so that the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in dominant ideologies may be better understood. [education, ideology, France, social class] 1991 American Anthropological Association