The Cultural Practice of Intelligence Testing: Problems of International Export

Competence is defined by a culturally constituted system of representation. Its presence or absence in a given individual is construed in emergent ways through interpersonal interactions, which in turn are informed by a system of meanings shared among the coparticipants and their various audiences (Jenkins, 1998; Serpell, 2001). The cultural practice of intelligence testing falls within this framework as an institutionalized network of recurrent activities, scripts, artifacts, roles, and social functions. In this chapter we seek to situate the technology of intelligence testing within the system of meaning that informs professional practices and guarantees their sociocultural legitimacy. Many of the assumptions underpinning the legitimacy of the practice in American society are much less widely shared in contemporary African societies. As a result, we argue that the process of institutionalizing intelligence testing in Africa threatens to distort important aspects of