![]() While this position has softened over the years, the crucial link between literacy and consciousness was maintained as scholars emphasised the intrinsic benefits that a literate mind offered individuals and the societies in which they lived (Goody & Watt 19).īeginning in the 1980s, anthropologists began to reflect on the sociocultural underpinnings of literacy practices, with the scale of analysis narrowing to focus on local specificity and variation (Scribner & Cole 1981). Early interpretations treated literacy as a lens for analyses at the societal level, a framework that saw writing systems as a means for differentiating between cultures and their imagined evolutionary, cognitive, and socioeconomic development, which thus helped to frame literacy as an autonomous technology independent of its social contexts (Morgan 1878: 3, 11). In this entry, we track the progression of literacy through different eras of anthropological theory. While studies have included exploring the origins, use, and transmission of different writing systems, the central question remains: does giving a tangible form to the most fundamental aspect of humanity, namely our capacity for language, transform how we think about, perceive, and process the world around us? In essence, does literacy change who we are as humans? Understanding this has become all the more relevant as the rapid transition from analogue to digital technologies further complicates how people engage with the written word, and thus reshapes our sense of what it means to be literate (Jewitt 2006 Wolf 2017). As an area of interest, literacy has figured prominently in anthropological inquiry since the discipline’s inception, as scholars sought to make sense of what the ability to read and write means for us. ![]() Considering the perceived centrality of literacy to most contemporary human societies, and its continued absence from others, how has anthropology contributed to a cross-cultural understanding of literacy?īroadly defined as both a technology and a social practice, literacy has been characterised as communication through an invented system of visually decoded signs, rather than by oral or gestural modes (Besnier 1999: 141). In circumventing the constraints of the written word, such communities seek alternative ways of transmitting ideas, both orally and through other technologies (Finnegan 2012 Turin et al. ![]() However, there are communities for whom literacy can be a less integral, sometimes even inappropriate, means for documenting and communicating language (Debenport 2015). Literacy is often presented as an ability with such transformative potential that becoming literate leads to a fundamental redefinition of an individual’s identity (Riemer 2008 Ahearn 2004). Scholars have highlighted how, for many of us, literacy represents an essential pathway to development and personal liberation that has the power to cure almost any social ill (Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 382-3 Street 1997: ). Literacy is such a central part of most people’s everyday lives that its ubiquity can be taken for granted. The increasing prevalence of digital technologies in all aspects of daily life have challenged earlier notions of literacy, inspiring anthropologists to investigate how people draw upon multiple modalities to encode and decode meaning, thereby fundamentally reshaping our understanding of what it means to ‘read and write’. Coming to recognise the marginalising power of standardised literacy, anthropology turned its attention to education.Īnthropologists and educators have become partners in research dedicated to developing pedagogical practices that draw upon the unique linguistic resources and practices that students bring with them into the classroom to cultivate inclusivity and empowerment. This movement sought to understand how cultural logics and norms informed the development of localised literacy practices, thus creating variations of ‘literacies’ which were themselves embedded within ideologies and structures of power relations. Initially dominated by technologically deterministic assertions that literacy was a tool for sociocultural and cognitive development, anthropology would later embrace the more culturally relativistic perspective advanced by the New Literacy Studies movement of the 1980s and 1990s. This entry tracks the development of literacy as a concept. Understood to be both a technology and a social practice, literacy has been the subject of anthropological inquiry since the late nineteenth century, with protracted debates about its effects on human consciousness and social life. ![]() Literacy is a linguistic innovation characterised by the encoding and decoding of language into a system of visual signs whose relevance to daily life in most societies cannot be overstated.
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