c00uf01_fmt7.eps

7

Literacy Practices

Think of all the taken-for-granted ways in which reading and writing saturate our daily lives. Even if we put aside schooling, the most obvious realm in which literacy plays a central role, an average day in the life of a person living in the United States or any number of other countries in the twenty-first century will most likely involve more interactions with written texts than can be counted. “[M]ost social interactions in contemporary society,” David Barton and Mary Hamilton proclaim, “are textually mediated” (Barton and Hamilton 2005:14). From cereal boxes, billboards, and newspapers to the internet and words written on clothing, many people engage more frequently with the written word than they realize. And even when people are alone while reading and writing, they are engaged in social activities because reading and writing are enacted and interpreted in culturally and socially specific ways. Moreover, these activities are also bound up with social differences and inequalities. Patricia Baquedano-López writes: “Literacy is less a set of acquired skills and more an activity that affords the acquisition and negotiation of new ways of thinking and acting in the world” (2004:246). And since the social world is not composed of neutral, power-free interactions, James Gee notes that we should therefore not expect this to be true of literacy practices: “The traditional meaning of the word ‘literacy’ – the ‘ability to read and write’ – appears ‘innocent’ and ‘obvious.’ But, it is no such thing. Literacy as ‘the ability to read and write’ situates literacy in the individual person, rather than in society. As such, it obscures the multiple ways in which literacy interrelates with the workings of power” (Gee 2008:31).

Because of the socially embedded nature of reading and writing, these activities present ideal objects of inquiry for linguistic anthropologists. And yet, relatively few linguistic anthropologists have chosen to study literacy. There are of course exceptions, and some of this work will be summarized later in this chapter, but it is fair to say that more linguistic anthropologists have focused on orality rather than literacy – that is, on the ways in which the spoken word reflects and shapes social relations rather than on the ways in which the written word does so. Ideally, scholars should explore both orality and literacy because in almost every instance they are intertwined; written texts directly or indirectly influence many conversations, and verbal interactions can lead eventually to reading or writing of some sort. Consider the following examples in which both orality and literacy are involved:

Given the centrality of literacy in many social interactions around the world, closer attention to reading and writing as forms of social action would enrich the research of many cultural and linguistic anthropologists and other social scientists. This chapter presents an overview of some useful concepts in the study of literacy and a summary of some of the most interesting studies that have been conducted on literacy practices from an ethnographic perspective.

Literacy Events vs. Literacy Practices

Two useful concepts in the anthropological study of reading and writing are “literacy events” and “literacy practices.” Shirley B. Heath straightforwardly defines “literacy events” as “occasions in which written language is integral to the nature of participants’ interactions and their interpretive processes and strategies” (Heath 2001[1982]:319). The specific examples provided above that interweave orality and literacy are all examples of literacy events. The concept of “literacy event” stresses the situated nature of literacy – literacy events always take place in specific social contexts.

Literacy events should not be studied in isolation from the social relations and cultural norms that prevail in a given society, however. As Heath notes, “literacy events have social interactional rules which regulate the type and amount of talk about what is written, and define ways in which oral language reinforces, denies, extends or sets aside the written material” (1983:386). To analyze these more general “rules” about the significance or interpretation of particular texts in the social contexts in which they are found, the concept of “literacy practice” is very useful. David Barton and Mary Hamilton define literacy practices as “the general cultural ways of utilising written language” (2000:7). They go on to contrast “literacy events” and “literacy practices” as follows: “Literacy events are activities where literacy has a role. Usually there is a written text, or texts, central to the activity, and there may be talk around the text. Events are observable episodes which arise from practices and are shaped by them” (2000:8). Literacy practices, unlike literacy events, are not specific, observable occurrences but rather general norms regarding how written texts tend to be produced, interpreted, or discussed.

Literacy events and practices must be studied together and must be situated within the overall context of social and cultural practices in general. “You can no more cut the literacy out of the overall social practice,” James Gee writes, “or cut away the non-literacy parts from the literacy parts of the overall practice, than you can subtract the white squares from a chessboard and still have a chessboard” (Gee 2008:45). This relationship between literacy events and literacy practices is very much in keeping with the emphasis placed on practice from the very beginning of this book; indeed, “practice” was one of the four key terms defined in chapter 1. Just as specific social actions emerge from more general social practices and norms, then recursively loop around to either reinforce or reshape those very practices and norms, so too do literacy events arise from more general literacy practices, which are then either strengthened or reconfigured by those events. In other words, the distinction between literacy events and literacy practices is entirely compatible with practice theory and an approach that views all types of language use as forms of social action.

As an example of how a specific literacy event can influence, and be influenced by, general social norms and literacy practices – culturally acceptable ways, in other words, of using reading and writing – here is a description of a literacy event from my fieldwork on literacy and marriage practices in Nepal in the 1980s and 1990s.1

Pema Kumari’s letter

When Pema Kumari’s marriage was arranged in 1988, she was in the ninth grade, the next-to-last year of high school in Nepal at the time. She and the other young women in her class, all of whom I taught when I was a Peace Corps teacher in their village, were by then the females with the most formal education in the village. The ideas to which Pema Kumari was exposed and the literacy skills that she gained at school turned out to be very influential because they helped her to transform a culturally acceptable practice in which arranged marriage brides were allowed to “resist” their marriages through ineffectual tears and verbal complaints into an action that was unique in the village’s history.

Upon learning that she had been given away in marriage, Pema Kumari retreated crying to the attic – the expected token resistance of a soon-to-be arranged-marriage bride. Once there, however, she composed a letter to her father threatening to have him put in jail if he made her go through with the marriage – an act unheard of in Junigau.2 Others who were there at the time recounted to me how Pema Kumari’s father cried as he read the letter aloud to the assembled guests at the pre-wedding feast, after which he reportedly went upstairs to the attic and pleaded with his daughter not to throw away the family’s honor. According to differing versions of the story, she either agreed to drop her threat to have her father jailed for marrying her off without her will, or her father proceeded without such an assurance. One woman maintains that it was her own reminders of the inauspiciousness of such actions that convinced Pema Kumari to relent. In any case, the wedding went forward on schedule.

As a teenager, then, Pema Kumari was married to a man who was in the Indian Army. What no one told her at the time, fearing that she would become even more upset, was that he was about to be sent to fight in Sri Lanka. Within a year of her marriage, he was killed in battle there, and Pema Kumari was a widow. Recalling the scene at Pema Kumari’s pre-wedding feast, many villagers remarked that she had brought her own bad luck (karma) upon herself by using her literacy skills to bring dishonor (beijjat) to her family.

After the customary six months of mourning, Pema Kumari was unwilling to remain any longer in the extremely subservient role allotted to her as a widow in her husband’s extended family home.3 She moved back to her parents’ home and, without consulting either her parents or her in-laws, she informed the Headmaster that she would be returning to school. Pema Kumari subsequently passed the School Leaving Certificate exam and enrolled in classes at the Tansen campus of Tribuvan University. After she earned her bachelor’s degree, she obtained a job in a bank. She continues to live alone in Tansen, supported by her salary and the generous pension provided to her by the Indian Army. Once a year on the anniversary of her husband’s death she returns to her husband’s home to perform rituals, but otherwise she has almost no contact with her in-laws and very little more with her own parents.

Although Pema Kumari’s “literacy event” – the writing of a letter of complaint to her father – did not succeed in preventing her arranged marriage from taking place, through a confluence of factors she did manage to use her literacy skills in a completely novel way, one that drew upon existing social practices that allowed arranged marriage brides to express opposition to their marriages. In the process, she challenged the practice of arranged marriage as no actions before ever had, thus demonstrating how cultural transformation can occur.

Notice how impossible it is to describe this literacy event even as briefly as I have done here without situating it within the context of more general literacy practices in the community and alluding to the broader cultural norms and social practices concerning gender, marriage, and education in Nepal during these years. There is much more that could be said about Pema Kumari, but the inherently social and potentially political nature of an act as simple as writing a letter should be clear from the brief description provided here.

“Autonomous” vs. “Ideological” Approaches to Studying Literacy

Literacy scholars have not always situated acts of reading and writing in terms of broader social and cultural practices in the way I advocate here. Indeed, some researchers and educators still espouse a view that considers literacy to be a neutral technology separate from any particular social context and entailing the identical social or cognitive results. A theoretical debate has been taking place as to how literacy should be defined and studied, and while most linguistic anthropologists consider the debate to have been resolved, it is instructive to review the main issues here, as they shed light on various scholars’ and nonscholars’ language ideologies regarding the nature of reading and writing.4

On one side of the issue are scholars like Jack Goody, who was an early proponent of what Brian Street has called the “autonomous” model of literacy (Goody 1986, 2000; Goody and Watt 1963). Goody and other supporters of the autonomous model maintain that the advent of literacy in a society will cause the same social and psychological effects, no matter which society is being studied. These scholars “conceptualise literacy in technical terms, treating it as independent of social context, an autonomous variable whose consequences for society and cognition can be derived from its intrinsic character” (Street 1984:5). Walter Ong, another proponent of the autonomous model, asserts boldly that “without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations. In this sense, orality needs to produce and is destined to produce writing” (Ong 1982:14–15). Ong, Goody, and others who espouse the autonomous model see a “Great Divide” separating “oral” societies from “literate” ones – a gap similar to the one turn-of-the-century anthropologists used to claim existed between “primitive” and “civilized” societies. Most linguistic anthropologists, including myself, find this approach to studying literacy untenable. Moreover, as we saw in chapter 4, scholars such as Scribner and Cole (1981) found no single, overall effect of illiteracy or different types of literacy among the Vai of Liberia but instead showed that each type of literacy was embedded in a set of very different social practices that led to different cognitive effects (1981:234).

Opposing advocates of the “autonomous” model of literacy are those scholars, such as David Barton (Barton and Hamilton 1998; Barton et al. 2000), Keith Basso (1989[1974]), Mike Baynham (1995), Niko Besnier (1995), Jonathan Boyarin (1993), Tamar El-Or (2002), Ruth Finnegan (1988), James Paul Gee (2008), Mastin Prinsloo (Prinsloo and Baynham 2008), and Brian Street (1984, 1993, 2003) who favor an “ideological” model for studying literacies. Besnier describes the goals of this approach as follows: “Rather than seeking an overarching and context-free characterization of the cognitive and social consequences of literacy, proponents of the ideological model focus on the activities, events, and ideological constructs associated with particular manifestations of literacy” (Besnier 1995:5). Scholars advocating this approach examine the specific ramifications of the advent of literacy in each society and claim that there are no universal attributes of so-called literate societies. Advocates of the ideological view of literacy maintain that it is impossible for literacy skills to be acquired neutrally. Many, in fact, speak of “literacies” instead of “literacy” because they want to emphasize the importance of studying the specificities of different literacies. Mike Baynham writes:

It is important to study from a linguistic base, as the analysis of texts, but we also need the further dimension of literacy as strategic, purposeful activity in social interactions. Beyond this we need to understand literacy as social practice, the way it interacts with ideologies and institutions to shape and define the possibilities and life paths of individuals. (1995:71)

This sort of situated approach to the study of literacy has produced many rich ethnographies over the past few decades.

Some Examples of Situated Literacy Research

The following researchers are some of the many who treat literacy as social practice, just as Baynham advocated. Individually and collectively, they have changed the way many scholars and on-the-ground educators understand social interactions surrounding written texts.

Preschool literacy practices in the southeastern United States

Shirley Brice Heath’s long-term ethnographic research in the 1960s and 1970s in the Piedmont Carolinas area in the southeastern United States resulted in one of the most important and widely cited articles on literacy practices, “What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School” (Heath 2001), originally published in Language in Society in 1982 and later expanded into a book, Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms (Heath 1983).5 Echoing the insights of scholars such as Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin, who were working on language socialization (see chapter 3) at around the same time, Heath applied the same approach to literacy practices, stating that “ways of taking from books are as much part of learned behavior as are ways of eating, sitting, playing games, and building houses” (Heath 2001:318). Heath therefore considered it essential for researchers to study the many different ways in which preschoolers and adults interacted surrounding written texts in order to understand how these different ways of being socialized into reading and writing had an influence on children’s subsequent performance in school.

Heath compared the ways in which parents “socialize their preschool children into a literacy orientation” (2001:323) in three communities:

Preschoolers in the three communities were introduced to, and socialized into, literacy in ways that differed substantially. The Maintown children Heath studied were encouraged to give attention to books almost from birth on. Their bedrooms often contained bookcases, and their parents read to them regularly, frequently pausing in their reading to ask simple questions about the pictures or story of a book. Adults also talked about books with their preschool children outside of the actual reading time, making links to stories they had read and encouraging their children “to suspend reality, to tell stories that are not true, to ascribe fiction-like features to everyday objects” (2001:321). Well before they entered formal schooling, Maintown children learned formulaic openings for stories and typical narrative tropes, which they used in their own storytelling. They also learned how to be patient listeners as they were read to by adults, speaking up only to answer questions. “A pervasive pattern of all these features is the authority that books and book-related activities have in the lives of both the preschooler and members of their primary network,” Heath writes (2001:321). Given this socialization into the specific form of literacy that is so highly valued in most formal educational contexts, it is easy to see that Maintown children entered school well prepared to learn and interact with written texts in the ways that would be expected of them in school.

In Roadville, the white working-class community, Heath found that babies were brought home from the hospital to rooms decorated with “literacy-based stimuli” such as ABCs and nursery rhymes. Adults used books to instruct their children, teaching them labels for items such as balls, dogs, and trucks. Young children were expected to answer simple questions correctly regarding these labels, but then, once children could talk at around age three or so, they were prevented from participating any longer in the reading process and expected to learn to listen quietly. Older preschoolers were given workbooks to practice answering questions about stories and to learn the alphabet, with the emphasis on facts, skills, repetition, and rules. Unlike adults in Maintown, Roadville adults did not extend the content or the habits of literacy beyond bookreading and did not make connections for their children between books and the real world. “Any fictionalized account of a real event is viewed as a lie; reality is better than fiction … Thus, children cannot decontextualize their knowledge or fictionalize events known to them and shift them about into other frames” (2001:330; emphasis in the original).

When Roadville children started school, Heath discovered, they usually performed well initially. They often knew some of the alphabet, colors, and shapes, and had acquired other basic skills. They were able to listen quietly to a story and to answer simple questions. They would also do well on workbook exercises that asked them to identify words or letters. But whenever they were asked for their own opinions about a story, or for counter-factual analyses (such as, “What would have happened if Billy had not told the policeman what happened?”), Roadville children most often shrugged their shoulders (2001:330). This inability or unwillingness – more like a culturally based unfamiliarity, Heath argues – with this sort of exercise meant that Roadville children tended to fall behind after the first few years of school. Heath explains:

Thus their initial successes in reading, being good students, following orders, and adhering to school norms of participating in lessons begin to fall away rapidly about the time they enter the fourth grade. As the importance and frequency of questions and reading habits with which they are familiar decline in the higher grades, they have no way of keeping up or of seeking help in learning what it is they do not even know they don’t know. (2001:331)

In contrast to both Maintown and Roadville children, children in Trackton, the black working-class community, were immersed from birth in almost constant human communication, both verbal and nonverbal – but not written. Trackton parents did not read to their children, and their homes did not have any reading materials especially for children. Instead, adults rewarded children for attending to and imitating the verbal and nonverbal behaviors of others, which led children to develop creative and complex abilities to play with language through rhyming and storytelling. Trackton children were left to figure out connections between situations and stories on their own, since their parents, like those in some of the communities described in chapter 3, felt it was unnecessary and inadvisable to simplify their language for them. As a result, the children developed rich verbal repertoires on their own.

When Trackton children started school, they faced totally unfamiliar types of questions and interactions. A few adapted and learned the interactional literacy skills called for in school, but, Heath notes, the majority did not:

[T]he majority not only fail to learn the content of lessons, but also do not adopt the social-interactional rules for school literacy events. Print in isolation bears little authority in their world. The kinds of questions asked about reading books are unfamiliar. The children’s abilities to link metaphorically two events or situations and to recreate scenes are not tapped in school; in fact these abilities often cause difficulties, because they enable children to see parallels teachers did not intend and, indeed, may not recognize until the children point them out. (2001:336; emphasis in the original)

In sum, Heath discovered that the ways in which children in these three communities were socialized into both orality and literacy had profound influences on their subsequent school performance. What we learn from Heath’s groundbreaking work, Collins and Blot assert, is that orality and literacy cannot be separated. Moreover, they claim, “[T]here is no universality to literacy; instead, there are many literacies. To describe only one set of uses and functions (those associated with school or essayist literacy) is to miss the myriad other uses and functions found among the literacies of communities throughout the world” (Collins and Blot 2003:44; cf. Scribner and Cole 1981).

Love-letter writing in Nepal

Beginning with my years as a Peace Corps teacher in Nepal (1982–1986), and throughout my dissertation fieldwork (1992–1993), and during many subsequent follow-up trips to Nepal, I have always been fascinated by the ways in which literacy practices intersect with emotion, agency, gender, and social change (Ahearn 2001a, 2008).6 When I first arrived in the village of Junigau in the early 1980s, almost all boys were being sent to the local school for at least a few years, and almost all men could read and write in Nepali at a basic level, either from the formal schooling that they had received or from informal instruction that they had been given as Gurkha soldiers in the British or Indian Army. Among girls and women, however, the situation was very different. Most women in the village were illiterate, and only some families were sending their daughters to the local school. There were evening female literacy classes for teenage girls and married women, however, so by the 1990s most girls and women under the age of 30 or so had at least some ability to read and write.

In my research on this “incipiently literate” community (cf. Besnier 1995), I was very interested to learn what would happen as girls and women acquired literacy skills. How would pre-existing social norms and cultural practices influence how these girls and women used their new skills, and how would the application of their new skills in turn potentially influence these broader norms and practices? What I discovered was that many young, newly literate women in Junigau in the 1990s chose to use their literacy skills in an unanticipated way – to engage in love-letter correspondences, many of which resulted in elopements. Since most marriages up until that time had been arranged by parents, this was a dramatic change.

Because it was not considered appropriate for Junigau men and women to date or spend time alone together, love letters provided them with a way to keep in touch with their sweethearts (see Figure 7.1). They also prolonged courtships, enabling the participants to get to know each other better. Moreover, the mere sending and receiving of love letters marked someone as a particular kind of person – what villagers called a “developed” (bikāsi) as opposed to a “backward” (pichhyāDi)7 individual, someone who was capable of creating a particular kind of companionate marriage with a “life friend.” Together, the two would try to create a future made brighter by love and by “life success.”

Figure 7.1 Nepali love letter (with all identifying features removed).

Source: Reprinted from Ahearn (2001:5). Laura M. Ahearn, Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.

c07f001.tif

Junigau women’s literacy practices did not just facilitate a shift away from arranged marriage toward elopement, therefore, but also reflected and helped to shape the new ways in which villagers thought of themselves. Along with these changes, however, came some reinforcement of pre-existing norms, especially in the area of gender relations. While it might seem to readers used to having the right to choose their own spouse that acquiring such a right would inevitably improve someone’s life, in fact, the opposite was true for some Junigau women who eloped after love-letter correspondences. In cases where their husbands or in-laws turned out to be abusive, the women found that they had no recourse and no support from their own parents. If they had encountered these kinds of problems after an arranged marriage, most could have returned to their parents’ home or expected their parents to intervene on their behalf. Such was not the case for most women who had eloped. Indeed, because most of these women ended up moving into their husbands’ extended households as low-status daughters-in-law, their social positioning and daily lives were virtually identical to those of women whose marriages had been arranged – except that they did not have the same recourse if things went poorly. In some respects, therefore, the women’s new literacy practices created new and different opportunities and identities, but in other respects, long-standing gender inequalities remained or were even exacerbated.

And literacy practices have continued to shift in Junigau in recent years. For example, during a trip I took to Nepal in early 2010, Junigau residents told me that beginning in 2009, when mobile phones became available to villagers who could afford them, young men and women started talking (but, unlike in the capital city of Kathmandu and many other places in the world, not texting) via mobile phone instead of writing out love letters to each other. The implications of this new courtship practice in Junigau remain to be seen.

Instant messaging: more like speech or writing?

New communication technologies offer many exciting research opportunities for scholars interested in literacy. In particular, some of these technologies call into question even further than before the sharp distinction often drawn between verbal and written interactions. Even earlier researchers such as Ruth Finnegan (1988) who argued for the importance of studying orality and literacy in conjunction with each other still considered them analytically separable, albeit integrally interwoven. New communication technologies such as instant messaging, automatic transcription software, and text messaging on mobile phones, however, have blurred the line between speech and writing to the point that, in some instances at least, hybrid forms combining features of both orality and literacy seem to be emerging.

As an example of such hybridity, Graham Jones and Bambi Schieffelin (2009) present some interesting evidence that the examples of Instant Messaging (IM) they studied between 2003 and 2006 became progressively more like speech and less like writing stylistically over these years. IM correspondence takes place on the computer; participants write back and forth to each other in real time on a keyboard. Despite this clearly “written” medium, Jones and Schieffelin (2009:84–85) report that young people using IM regularly referred to their behavior metalinguistically as “talking,” “yelling,” “saying,” or “speaking.” This language ideology was evident even in 2003, but what these researchers discovered when they compared the tape recordings and transcripts from both face-to-face and IM conversations from 2003 through 2006 was that the data from 2006 IM exchanges contained many more examples of a certain kind of reported speech characteristic of informal spoken conversations than the 2003 IM exchanges did. “The language ideology that already framed IM as talk by 2003 helped shape the types of stylistic innovations users devised to constitute the activity as such; these innovations, in turn, reinforce the ideological association of IM with informal speech” (Jones and Schieffelin 2009:109).

1 wandawoman (10:20:21 PM): …

2 but my dad was like “OH GOOD I’M SO GLAD YOU

3 WANT TO PAY YOUR OWN RENT!” and I was like

4 oh… okay. :-P

All forms of quotatives (such as “she said …,” “I asked her …,” etc.) were more numerous in the 2006 IM data compared to the 2003 IM data (see Table 7.1), but the increase in the use of be + like was especially striking. This development, Jones and Schieffelin report (2009:78), “appears to be associated with users’ efforts to reposition IM on the continuum of writing and speaking.”

Jones and Schieffelin argue that the increase in be + like should be viewed as evidence of these young people’s creativity with a new form of communication. They also interpret this transformation in IM quotative usage as indicative of the way in which this speech community attempted to set itself apart linguistically as well as socially from other communities of language users. In their conclusion, Jones and Schieffelin argue strongly against language ideologies that hold be + like usage in contempt:

Table 7.1 ‘Be + like’ as a percentage of total quotatives in face-to-face and IM talk (2003 face-to-face n = 248; 2003 IM n = 35; 2006 face-to-face n = 468; 2006 IM n = 175; table created from data reported in Jones and Schieffelin 2009:88).

Type of interaction ‘Be + like’ as a percentage of total quotatives in 2003 ‘Be + like’ as a percentage of total quotatives in 2006
Face-to-face conversation 75% 67%
Instant Messaging 6% 50%

The patterns of language use that we have documented in IM do not support the view that users are ‘simplifying’ language to make communication easier or more efficient; in fact, users are less concerned with efficiency than with expressivity, seeking to make the language both look as well as ‘sound’ more like informal talk. To this end, they are mobilizing a collective creativity in accomplishing a specific style of communication. Negative stereotypes about current trends in youth language obscure the purposefulness, care, and artfulness with which young adults like those in our study constitute talk and sociality, while engaging in moral problem-solving activities. The use of be + like as a quotative marker in the context of Instant Messaging, far from indicating linguistic impoverishment, provides evidence of systematicity in both convention and style. (2009:109)

While the three studies summarized in this section are only a few of the many that treat literacy as a form of social practice, the research by Heath on preschoolers’ literacy practices, my own work on love-letter writing in Nepal, and Jones and Schieffelin’s study of the use of be + like in Instant Message exchanges all provide examples of how linguistic anthropologists approach reading and writing as situated, socially embedded practices.

The Not-So-New “New Literacy Studies” and its Critics

All of the scholars whose work was summarized in the previous section insist upon studying literacy as a form of social practice, an approach shared by scholars associated with “New Literacy Studies” (NLS). NLS was initiated by David Barton, James Paul Gee, and Brian Street, among others, and many of the NLS scholars are from the United Kingdom, South Africa, or Europe. For example, the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre, under the directorship of David Barton, is an interdisciplinary group of researchers at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. Another interdisciplinary group on the Anthropology of Writing is directed by Béatrice Fraenkel and located in Paris at CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), which is part of l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Relatively few NLS scholars at these institutions or elsewhere are anthropologists, and even fewer of them are trained in linguistic anthropology; most have degrees in fields such as applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, English, or education. Nevertheless, the ethnographic focus of their work, as evidenced by the fact that many call themselves “linguistic ethnographers,” is very much in keeping with contemporary research priorities in linguistic anthropology, making the dialogue that has begun to take place between NLS scholars and linguistic anthropologists mutually beneficial.

Since the term “New Literacy Studies” was coined decades ago and the approach that considers literacy a social practice is even older, it seems a bit strange to continue calling it “new.” James Paul Gee makes the following comments in the third edition of his well-known book, Social Linguistics and Literacies:

It is a problem, of course, to call any enterprise “new,” because, of course, it soon becomes “old.” Were it not so cumbersome, it would be better to call the field something like “integrated social-cultural-political-historical literacy studies,” which names the viewpoint it takes on literacy. However, for better or worse, the term New Literacy Studies has become well known and widely used, so, reluctantly, I will continue to use the term. (2008:150)

As could be expected for any approach that has been around for a quarter of a century, NLS has attracted some criticisms from practitioners and nonpractitioners alike (e.g., Brandt and Clinton 2002; Collins and Blot 2003; Lewis et al. 2007; Maddox 2008; Reder and Davila 2005), the main ones of which can be summarized as follows:

To the degree that work by NLS scholars suffers from these weaknesses, the problems often stem, in my opinion, from the fact that these researchers often do not have a thorough enough grounding in social theory. This is not to say that the work is without value; on the contrary, many important theoretical insights and many more rich ethnographic descriptions have emerged over the past decades from studies that have looked at literacy events and literacy practices. Moreover, this research has had an extremely valuable impact on educational policy and practice around the world.

Moving forward, however, there is room for research in literacy studies to incorporate the work of certain social theorists while still remaining ethnographically rich in ways that deepen our understanding of literacy. Some long-time NLS scholars (e.g., Barton and Hamilton 2005; Gee 2008; Street 2003, 2007) have been at the forefront of this move toward using aspects of social theory to illuminate local/global connections (and indeed to question the accuracy of conceptualizing local and global as dichotomous variables), the materiality of literacy objects, and the workings of power at the micro and macro levels of society. Two main theoretical avenues have been suggested as paths toward this goal: (1) actor network theory (ANT),8 and (2) post-structuralist thought. While this is not the appropriate place to provide overviews of these complex bodies of theory, let me say just a few words about the insights some scholars believe they have to offer the field of literacy studies.

Incorporating the insights of ANT as explicated by Bruno Latour (1998, 2005), Michel Callon (1986), and John Law (Law and Hassard 1999) into literacy studies, many proponents claim, would encourage scholars to pay greater attention to texts and other material objects as they circulate through different networks of interaction. Objects are accorded agency in ANT (Latour 2005:72), and some literacy scholars feel that such an approach would be fruitful to apply to their own field of study. ANT would also provide a way to trace the interconnections between local and remote contexts, these scholars maintain, and encourage attention to networks of power. In one form or another, ANT has been adopted (and adapted) by literacy scholars such as Barton and Hamilton (2005), Brandt and Clinton (2002), and Reder and Davila (2005).

An alternative source of theoretical illumination for literacy researchers, according to James Collins and Richard Blot (2003), is French post-structuralist thought. Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault all provide important analyses of the workings of power in society in ways that are especially apt for scholars interested in studying reading and writing. Drawing on these theorists, Collins and Blot attempt to provide something they argue has been lacking in NLS: “an account of power-in-literacy which captures the intricate ways in which power, knowledge, and forms of subjectivity are interconnected with ‘uses of literacy’ in modern national, colonial, and postcolonial settings” (2003:66). Lewis et al. (2007) draw upon some of these post-structuralist theorists as well as others to create a “critical sociocultural theory” by focusing on concepts such as “activity,” “history,” and “communities of practice,” which they claim help literacy scholars to incorporate a better understanding of identity, agency, and power into their research.

A final source of theoretical insight for scholars of literacy might be the key concepts introduced in the first chapter of this book – concepts that are themselves derived from various social theorists. Analyzing reading and writing through the lens of multifunctionality, language ideologies, practice, and indexicality would enable researchers to appreciate the complex and emergent nature of interactions surrounding written texts. From the perspective of linguistic anthropology, it is most essential to study literacy practices on the ground, in actual social settings, through ethnographic research.

Given the rich ethnographic work that has already been done and the new theoretical directions proposed by these scholars and others, the field of literacy studies has a promising future.