Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Human beings have over the ages developed a series of media to express or represent features of the social and natural world or to translate one medium into another through culturally-acceptable analogues: drum beats experienced as if spoken words, Asian contour graphics or Western notations representing musical performance, hand gestures carrying cognitive meaning, cartography representing spatial relationships. Writing is just one of these culturally-developed forms. It is true that it is currently an extremely widespread and highly-valued medium, but seen in comparative perspective it is no more transparent or ‘obvious’ than any other communication *technology. Nor can we assume that the elusive relationships between writing and what it ‘represents’—is it really ‘visible speech’ for example?—are necessarily the same in all cultures.
One common model of ‘literacy’ is the type well-known in recent centuries of Western history: phonetically-based alphabetic writing, tied to the concept of a linear text, often with the (unspoken) connotations of something validated through high *culture and, at the same time, rightfully open to mass use. But there are other writing systems too. These include—to follow one standard typology—pictographic, ideographic and †phonetic (syllabic or alphabetic) forms; manuscript as well as print; and a number of different materials: stone, clay, papyrus, parchment, paper, computer screen. These varied forms are not just of antiquarian interest—merely precursors of the alphabetic achievements of Western civilization -but represent differing ways in which human beings have developed technologies which expand human control over time and space, and built these into their cultural institutions.
Literacy in this wider sense is not confined to Western societies or the recent past.
Writing has been around a long time, whether in Chinese, Arabic, the alphabetic scripts of Western European languages, or Maya hieroglyphs (Boone and Larson 1994). As †J.Goody put it:
As Goody also points out, we cannot assume mass literacy either, for ‘restricted literacy’ is a common pattern too. Furthermore, the presence of literacy in a society does not mean that everyone participates in literate practices in the same way or to the same extent—these may (or may not) be quite marginal to people’s everyday lives. Similarly there is little evidence that literacy automatically ‘drives out’ oral forms: on the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that the two interpenetrate (Finnegan 1988).
The recent Western paradigm of literacy is of a symmetric process, with reading and writing ‘naturally’ going together. But they can also be split or, at the least, differentially developed. Historians have, for example, analysed ‘signature literacy’—people sometimes signed their names on, say, marriage registers, but did not necessarily read or write otherwise. Indeed it is sometimes to the advantage of rulers to encourage their subjects to read but not to master more active writing, skills. Literacy turns out to be not so much one undifferentiated thing as a cluster of skills which people deploy differentially, more, or less, fully, and in a series of different ways, depending both on their own individual situations and the culture within which they live.
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