Approaches To The Study Of Literacy

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Literacy Summary

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Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Approaches to the study of literacy

Literacy has long been a topic of interest, and more interdisciplinary than most. Thus there has been a series of both specific and wide-ranging studies by, for example, psychologists, sociolinguists, development experts, educationalists and, especially, social and economic historians. However, although anthropological voices are now increasingly heard, anthropologists actually got into the subject rather late—not surprisingly, perhaps, given their earlier focus on primitive or non-industrial society (for which read ‘non-literate society’), with written forms disregarded as intrusive and ‘non-traditional’. It was not really until 1968 that Jack Goody’s edited collection Literacy in Traditional Societies (1968) raised anthropologists’ interest in both general theories and ethnographic questions. Together with Goody’s later writings, this set the agenda for many sub-sequent studies of literacy.

There have been many approaches, by both anthropologists and others. The view of unidirectional progress upwards to the predestined Western pinnacle of alphabetic writing and, finally, print has been enormously powerful (even among anthropologists) and still appears in authoritative publications. Quantitative studies are also influential, particularly in educational and governmental contexts: counting how many people ‘are literate’ (sometimes in terms of UNESCO’s ‘functional literacy’) or linking it to other social or demographic characteristics like *age, *gender, wealth or status. In addition general questions about the effects of literacy have been pursued by historians, classical scholars, psychologists and, from 1968, anthropologists: while more historic or culture-specific studies have also been carried out by specialist historians and (particularly from the 1970s) by anthropologists.

Among these various approaches, some issues have been of particular interest to anthropologists.

(1) The consequences of literacy have drawn much discussion: its ‘impact’ either at a local level or in more general, even universal, terms. Its suggested effects (some more convincingly argued than others) have included: the requirements for empire; political and religious control; political and religious freedom; ‘modernization’; *rationality; secularism; religious obscurantism; history; *science; linearity of thought and expression; the ‘take-off for economic *development; innovation; a transition from auditory to visual perception; bureaucracy; *individualism.

The arguments around these possible effects have partly drawn on specific ethnographic and historical evidence (Heath 1983 and Graff 1979 being particularly influential). They have also brought in the familiar theoretical issues of the distinctions between sufficient and necessary conditions, or between possibilism and determinism, and the anthropological interests in both comparative and culture-specific studies (Finnegan 1988, Street 1993). Obviously not all the suggested consequences could be true in a generalized automatic way, not only because they comprise just about every social and cognitive characteristic that could be associated with Western civilization, but because several are mutually contradictory. Many would thus now regard the compendium of possible effects more as a useful checklist of the roles literacy sometimes fulfils—since, like any other set of practices, it is used in different ways in different situations—rather than as a set of predetermined consequences. They also prefer to speak less of ‘effects’ than of ‘implications’, some of which may perhaps be of particular significance (for example the role of literacy in extending face-to-face communication and transcending time and space). Single-factor ‘impact’ studies have anyway become less fashionable, especially those associated with the now-challenged earlier certainties about the mission of the West. In the 1990s the emerging anthropological consensus thus seems to be to emphasize the cultural context and, as with any other technology or form of communication, to see the manifestation and meaning of ‘literacy’ not as an autonomous cause but as intertwined with the constitution of the society or societies in which it is set: the cultural, economic, political, religious and symbolic features which both influence and are influenced by the accepted practices of reading and writing and other forms of communication. What it is to be ‘literate’ thus depends on local symbols and practices: on how it is distributed; on who is literate and for what purposes; on ideas about history or about the self; on educational and economic arrangements; on the sexual or social divisions of labour; and on local power relations and their interaction with literacy—all questions to which anthropologists are increasingly turning their attention in culture-specific ethnographies.

(2) Partly covering the same ground, but involving more extreme positions, is the cluster of arguments dubbed ‘the orality-literacy debate’. On the one side were writers like McLuhan and Ong (1982) (partially associated with Jack Goody’s early writings) who not only sharply contrasted ‘literacy’ and †‘orality’, but also envisaged the development of human civilization as a series of revolutionary leaps from orality, to writing, to print and finally to the electronic age. Each medium had its own consequences, leading to the ‘Great Divide’ between ‘primitive’ and civilized marked by literacy. Their opponents pointed to the ethnographic and theoretical difficulties of such uni-causal and sweeping explanations, their evocations of the older *primitive mentality arguments, and their underlying †technological determinism (Finnegan 1988, Schousboe and Larsen 1989, Street 1993). This debate may now have run its course within anthropology (it continues to be rehearsed elsewhere) as few anthropologists would by now see either literacy or orality in unitary or universal terms. But it was useful in drawing attention to the comparative study of literacy, in bringing influential anthropological insights to the (interdisciplinary) debate, and, ultimately, in stimulating detailed ethnographic investigations in both urban and rural settings.

(3) There has also been an increasing appreciation of the †ethnocentric basis of many approaches to literacy. Our concept of literacy is linked to cultural assumptions about language, education, and power: in many ways a folk rather than (as we too easily presume) a universal notion. It carries deeply-felt images about individual and Western identities and historical experiences, sanctioned by our Greek roots, the scholarly élite, Whig view of progress, expansion of Europe (bringing book-based culture and religion to ‘traditional primitive’ peoples), and the vision and industries associated with education and with ‘development’ both at home and overseas. For these reasons literacy can be analysed as a powerful folk symbol, as a ‘mythical charter’ or, as in Street’s ‘ideological approach’, as a reflection and mask of the current power relations.

(4) Consonant with other trends in anthropology, the 1980s and 1990s have also seen increasing emphasis on studying not the general ideals or formal structures of literacy but its detailed processes as actually practised on the ground, and the multiple ways in which these are manifested. Such aspects come out partly in crosscultural ethnographies, partly in detailed analyses of how different forms of communication—such as writing, reading, or speaking (and non-verbal media too)—are used and interact in actual situations (Basso 1974, Boyarin 1993, Keller-Cohen 1994, Kulick and Stroud 1990, Street 1993).

A sceptical approach to the older view of literacy as one unitary thing opposed to ‘orality’ or as having universal culture-free ‘consequences’ had thus by the early 1990s become the prevailing consensus among anthropologists (also many historians), with an interest in the social and cultural—rather than purely technological—nature of literacy. Ethnographic studies are increasingly unravelling the complex processes of local communication and the local understandings of these. Perhaps the next steps will be further work setting these ethnographies into a wider (most likely an interdisciplinary) framework: whether relating them to the expressive and communicative features of other human senses and media (rather than privileging the Western status of word/ text/writing), or linking the implications of the permanent and distance-communication qualities of literacy with recent interests in †globalization and the study of *complex societies (Hannerz 1992).

RUTH FINNEGAN