Literacies, Global and Local (AILA Applied Linguistics Series (Aals), Volume 2)

Literacies, Global and Local

AILA Applied Linguistics Series (AALS) The AILA Applied Linguistics Series (AALS) provides a forum for scholars in any area of Applied Linguistics. The series aims at representing the field in its diversity. It covers different topics in applied linguistics from a multidisciplinary approach and it aims at including different theoretical and methodological perspectives. As an official publication of AILA the series will include contributors from different geographical and linguistic backgrounds. The volumes in the series should be of high quality, they should break new ground and stimulate further research in Applied Linguistics.

Editor Jasone Cenoz

University of the Basque Country, Spain

Editorial Board Jean-Marc Dewaele

Rosa Manchón

Gabrielle Hogan-Brun

Anne Pakir

University of London, UK University of Bristol, UK

University of Murcia, Spain National University of Singapore, Singapore

Nancy Hornberger

University of Pennsylvania, US

Volume 2 Literacies, Global and Local Edited by Mastin Prinsloo and Mike Baynham

Literacies, Global and Local Edited by

Mastin Prinsloo University of Cape Town

Mike Baynham University of Leeds

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Literacies, global and local / edited by Mastin Prinsloo, Mike Baynham. p. cm. (AILA Applied Linguistics Series, issn 1875-1113 ; v. 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Literacy. 2. Sociolinguistics. 3. Language and culture. 4. Written communication. 5. Language and education. I. Prinsloo, Mastin. II. Baynham, Mike, 1950P40.5.L58L58    2008 302.2'244--dc22 isbn 978 90 272 0518 6 (Hb; alk. paper)

2007051558

© 2008 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Renewing literacy studies Mastin Prinsloo and Mike Baynham

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Part I. Literacy and power: Aligning literacy learners with dominant discourses and practices 1. Globalised literacy education: Intercultural trade in textual  and cultural practice Peter Freebody and Jill Freiberg

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2. To seem and to feel: Engaging cultural artefacts to “do” literacy Lesley Bartlett

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3. Being a new capitalist mother Kathy Pitt

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Part II. Local and global: Taking hold of literacy 4. Habitus in children’s multimodal text-making: A discussion Kate Pahl 5. Fateful literacy: New meanings, old ideologies, and some unexpected  consequences of Nepali love letter writing Laura M. Ahearn 6. Children’s games as local semiotic play: An ethnographic account Mastin Prinsloo

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93 117

Part III. Research tools: Conceptual resources for literacy study 7. Learning in semiotic domains: A social and situated account James Paul Gee

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Literacies, global and local

8. Assembling “Skills for Life”: Actor-network theory  and the New Literacy Studies Julia Clarke

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Part IV. Literacy practices in time and space 9. Elite or powerful literacies? Constructions of literacy in the novels  of Charles Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell Mike Baynham

173

10. Beyond “here’s a culture, here’s a literacy”:  Vision in Amerindian literacies Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza

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Index

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Acknowledgements

The volume had its origins in the series of meetings that the AILA Scientific Commission on Literacy organised from 1999 to 2004. All the authors participated in at least one of various seminars and conferences held in Tokyo, Campinas, Leeds, Santa Barbara, Singapore, Cape Town and Ghent. We are grateful to the colleagues who co-organised these meetings with us, including Marilda Cavalcanti, Dave Baker, Brian Street, Judith Greene, Allan Luke and Ronald Soetart. We invited the authors in this volume to revisit and update aspects of their work presented at those meetings and we are thankful for their generous participation on the project. The chapters in this volume were all sent out for peer review. Our thanks to Cathy Kell, Allan Luke, Pippa Stein, Christopher Stroud and Lucia Thesen who reviewed up to three papers each and gave helpful comments and directions for revision. Janet Maybin reviewed the volume as a whole after the first set of reviews had been received and revisions made, and gave helpful editing advice. We would like to thank Jasone Cenoz who, as Series Editor for John Benjamins’ AILA Applied Linguistics Series initially invited us to compile the volume and Kees Vaes for his publishers’ help. And finally, thanks to Catherine Haworth who ran the ‘authors’ website’ to which various drafts of the chapters were posted as work-in-progress. 

Mastin Prinsloo and Mike Baynham

Introduction Renewing literacy studies Mastin Prinsloo and Mike Baynham

Literacy has emerged strongly in recent times as an applied linguistic research focus, exemplifying in many ways the expanding scope of applied linguistics. There is now a network of literacy researchers from many parts of the world who are engaged in the empirical and theoretical study of literacy practices in a wide range of settings and social contexts. The AILA Scientific Commission on Literacy has contributed to the international networking that has brought together these scholars, furthering collaboration through international seminars, colloquia and conferences, that started in Tokyo in 1999, and has continued in Campinas, Brazil, Santa Barbara, USA, Leeds, UK, Cape Town, South Africa, Singapore, Ghent, Belgium and Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Papers given at these events have been published in journal special editions and elsewhere (Baynham and Prinsloo 2001; Baynham and Baker 2002; Luke and Baynham 2004) and in this volume we have invited researchers involved in the AILA literacy meetings both to revisit their work and to present fresh contributions. The invited articles presented here provide a range of perspectives on literacy studies, rather than a single focus, but they all draw on or relate to a body of work that has become known as the ‘New Literacy Studies’ and has brought an ethnographic focus to the study of literacy. The collection offers a body of empirically and theoretically based papers on literacy ethnography as well as providing engagements with critical issues around literacy and education. They offer multiple, diverse but complementary perspectives on research and theory in literacy studies. The studies presented here expand the earlier focus on literacy as text to include attention to image and other semiotic forms, as well as multi-modal texts that include visuals and sound. Originally introduced in the early 1990s in the work of Gee (1990) and Street (1993), the term New Literacy Studies (NLS) has been associated with the work of literacy researchers from a range of disciplines. They have studied literacy in everyday social practice, on the understanding that literacy practices are always and already embedded in particular forms of activity; that one cannot define



Mastin Prinsloo and Mike Baynham

literacy or its uses in a vacuum; that reading and writing are studied in the context of social (cultural, historical, political, and economic) practices of which they are a part and which operate in particular social spaces. Literacy, from this perspective, is a shorthand term for the social practices of reading and writing which can be ethnographically studied in particular contexts. Barton and Hamilton (2000: 1–15) helpfully summarised the characteristics of an NLS perspective on literacy as follows: – Literacy is best understood as a set of social practices; these are observable in events which are mediated by written texts. – There are different literacies associated with different domains of life. – Literacy practices are patterned by social institutions and power relations and some literacies are more dominant, visible and influential than others. – Literacy practices are purposeful and embedded in broader social goals and cultural practices. – Literacy is historically situated. – Literacy practices change and new ones are frequently acquired through processes of informal learning and sense making as well as formal education and training. – The ways in which people use and value reading and writing are themselves rooted in conceptions of knowledge, identity and being. Research in literacy studies has contributed to the development of grounded and research-focused approaches, concerned with the study of literacy as situated practices embedded within relations of culture and power in specific contexts. Researchers have shown that literacy-related skills and practices are often distributed amongst co-participants, and that literacy in use is closely linked with other communicative modalities, most obviously speech but also image and gesture. They have shown the complex varieties of text-mediated social practice that characterise various sociocultural settings, both across different societies and within specific societies. As regards education they have contributed important ways of understanding low school achievement and the failure of large sections of children and adults to benefit from schooling. However, this work has not been without its problems, and the papers presented here address various of these problems and try to take the work forward, in ways that we go on to describe.



Introduction

Literacy events and practices A key term in the study of literacy in social context, since the work of Heath (1983, 1982), has been that of literacy events, “occasions in which written language is integral to the nature of participants’ interactions and their interpretive processes and strategies” (Heath 1982: 50). Literacy events, in Heath’s conception included those moments when inscription or decoding of text featured in any way, but not necessarily centrally. What was central was the configuration of action, talk and text, in multiple and socially varying ways. Such a focus, drawing from sociolinguistic research broadened the focus in literacy studies by taking account of the role of texts in social interaction. Subsequent research has shown the extent to which texts change social interaction in ways that have not before been generally recognised, in sociolinguistics or in sociology (Barton 2001). Baynham (1995) examined the way that people shift between text and talk in social interaction referring to this process as mode switching. Bilingual talk around monolingual text in school and community settings is characteristic of most multilingual social contexts (Martin-Jones and Jones 2000). As Barton summarised it, “much talk is about texts. Much of the ‘language as spoken by ordinary people in their everyday lives’, the focus of most sociolinguistic research, is in fact talk about texts” (Barton 2001: 100). Subsequent work in literacy studies to that of Heath (1983), starting with Street (1984), added the concept of literacy practices, to provide a further analytical dimension. Where events involve the particular doings with texts, literacy practices are the more general sociocultural framing that gives significance to particular acts (see Street 1984; Barton 1994; Baynham 1995, for discussions). Researchers have thus used the term literacy practices to refer to those understandings about and orientations towards literacy that people bring to a literacy event; that shape the way they use and respond to literacy on that occasion. The concept of literacy practices incorporates literacy events as empirical occasions to which literacy is integral and analyses them in terms of the models or preconceptions that make people decide who does what, where and when it is done, as far as reading and writing is concerned. At an epistemological level, the concept of literacy as a social practice provides the frame for an analysis of meaning making. Methodologically the approach has been grounded in linguistic ethnography and has drawn on discourse analysis as well as sociocultural models of cognition and various strands of sociolinguistics and social theory for its analytical work (see Gee 2000 for an overview). Typically, researchers have observed or recorded particular literacy events at their site of research and then tried to understand the wider discursive framings and social practices that cause such events to take their particular form and shape. ‘Literacy events’ have thus provided the empirical units of analysis in the study of





Mastin Prinsloo and Mike Baynham

literacy, whereas ‘literacy practices’ have provided an analytical frame that includes both activities and conceptualisations of reading and writing. The ‘first generation studies’ of literacy of Street (1984), Heath (1983) and Scribner and Cole (1981) which set the frame for this work were followed by a substantial number of ‘second generation studies’, in the 1980s and 1990s, including Baynham (1995), Barton and Hamilton (1998), Besnier (1993), Kulick and Stroud (1993) and Prinsloo and Breier (1996), amongst a much larger range of studies carried out in Madagascar, Morocco, Ghana, India, Namibia, Peru, Australia, the USA, the UK and elsewhere. These studies generally followed the same methodology of recording literacy events and making sense of them by enquiring what the relation was between particular acts or events of communication and wider social categories, cultural understandings, and forms of social organization. The concept of literacy practices was used to enquire what habitualised ways of making meaning gave shape to specific literacy events, and situated individual acts and interpersonal relations. It also opened up the space to examine the power dimensions that underlay particular uses of reading and writing and to ask how these were shaped by relations of inequality, struggle and resistance across class, language, gender, ethnic, educational and other kinds of social cleavages in contexts of social inequality.

The ethnographic perspective Most work in the NLS tradition has tried to avoid the pressure to impose preconceptions of what counts as literacy in particular contexts and how that literacy works. The starting point has generally been that literacy practices can be studied ethnographically, through asking the question: “What’s going on here?” Studies of literacy as situated social practice have paid attention to the range of multiple contexts in which persons who are engaged in reading and writing and other forms of communicative activity and identity processes are situated. Literacy practices are thus studied as variable, contexted practices which link people, linguistic resources, media objects, and strategies for meaning-making in contextualised ways. Scribner and Cole (1981) showed, through their study of literacy and cognition in Liberia that cognitive skills commonly associated with literacy varied dramatically according to the wider social practices within which literacy was embedded. Heath (1983) showed the distinctive ways that three local communities in one town in the USA socialised their children into language and literacy practices. Street’s (1984) research in an Iranian village showed that there were multiple literacies, including a school literacy, a religious literacy associate with Koranic study centres, and a market literacy, which was an adaptation of



Introduction

the Koranic literacy. Barton and Hamilton (1998) provide a detailed study of the role of literacy in the everyday lives of people in Lancaster, England, where the researchers used in-depth interviews, complemented by observations, photography and the collection of documents and records, a door-to-door survey in one neighbourhood and detailed case studies of people in a number of households in the neighbourhood, where the researchers observed particular literacy events and asked people to reflect on their practices.

Charges of ‘localism’ There have been several concerns expressed in recent times that the ethnographic focus of research in the NLS tradition has contributed to a bias towards localism in that such research cannot see beyond the immediate context of its research focus. Rampton (1998) criticised the ethnographic focus on local culture and speech community for working with a relatively small number of informants and producing detailed portraits of internally differentiated but fairly coherent groups. Such work outlined the cultural integrity of distinctive literacy and speech practices, as well, sometimes, as the ways they are transmitted intergenerationally, he argued, but because of its focus on boundaried identities, did not to look at lines of social differentiation across such boundaries. Similar charges have subsequently been made about the localized ethnographic focus of NLS research, its inattentiveness to the larger social processes that shape the local and from which local events can be read translocally (Luke 2004; Brandt and Clinton 2002; Collins and Blot 2003). As Brandt and Clinton argued, “... if reading and writing are means by which people reach – and are reached by – other contexts, then more is going on locally than just local practice” (Brandt and Clinton 2002: 338). Luke (2004: 331) described the claim that literacy has social meaning as only a partial step and argued that ethnographic accounts need to be set against broader accounts of political economies of literacy, information and image. The study of local literacy needed to engage with how the local is constituted in relation to the flows and ‘travelling cultures’ of globalisation. Several papers in this collection address the limits and constraints of the ethnographic perspective and examine how the work of the NLS can be taken forward under conditions of globalisation and multilingualism in specific contexts. They follow recent work that has started to do that (e.g., Hamilton 2001; Kell 2001; Blommaert 2005; Pahl and Rowsell 2006). On one hand, the focus on literacy practices in the NLS has been sharpened by renewed engagement with theories of social practice from sociology and sociolinguistics, for example, with the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Bruno Latour, Dell Hymes, Norman Fairclough and Basil





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Bernstein, amongst others. In this collection, Bartlett and Pahl draw on Bourdieu, and Clarke engages with Latour and Actor Network Theory, while Pitt applies arguments from Bernstein and draws on Fairclough in her analysis. What these various perspectives have in common is their efforts to conceptualise and analyze the inter-relations between individuals and groups, agency and structure, personal and institutional processes. While they are concerned to retain the emphasis on the complexity of communicative action which has been the hallmark of work in the New Literacy Studies, in its focus on acts and events in their social, ecological settings, they are also concerned to apply fresh analyses on how particular acts or events of communication and literacy connect up with wider social categories, cultural understandings, and forms of social organization.

Literacy practices and habitus Pahl and Bartlett, make particular use of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which is about the conditions that pertain in individuals’ experience, and in collective history. These conditions are seen to dispose individuals in certain ways, rather than others, both enabling them and constraining them along particular lines. Habitus reflects those possibilities and resources, as well as their limitations, which people tacitly draw upon in their actions and interactions. Bourdieu describes them as durable, transposable dispositions, or embodied history internalized as second nature and so forgotten as history, that people draw on (Bourdieu 1991: 12). Habitus also refers to a person’s competence as a strategic player in a social field, and how such personal resources are continually being sanctioned by relative successes and failures in social interaction. A notion of social practice that draws on the concept of habitus sees language and literacy production not as the outcome of static norms or pre-given social and cognitive techniques, but rather the effects of the positioning of individuals within social/political economies of language, literacy, information and communicative practices. Habitus thus outlines a mechanism of regulated behaviour as well as for structured creativity on the part of individuals. It offers a useful resource for enquiring about literacy practices both in relation to identity processes and at the level of social practices, where the attention is on embodied identity in practice.

Materiality and multi-modalities in literacy practices While earlier emphases in NLS research have been on social practice as what people do, the materiality and technological dimensions of such practices has re-



Introduction

ceived renewed attention in ways that have enriched literacy studies. In particular, Kress’s work (Kress 1997; Kress and van Leeuwen 1996) redirected attention to the ‘stuff ’ of literacy, its materiality in the writing, the objects, artefacts and drawing systems that are part of literacy practices, as well as the visual, and multi-semiotic dimensions of writing and drawing. Bartlett’s attention in this collection to the artefacts of literacy is a case in point. Bartlett and others in this collection are influenced by actor network theory, particularly Latour’s (1987, 1993) analysis of networked social practices, where the role of material things in sustaining social practices is emphasised, and this approach is discussed in detail in Clarke’s paper in this collection. Latour’s ‘symmetrical anthropology’ suggests an approach to the theorization of the material as artefacts, as ‘things’ which are necessary components of social networks or ‘practices’. This approach encourages us to study ethnographically the resources that are mobilized to produce established ways of ‘doing’ reading and writing: the configuration of people, devices, texts, decisions, organizations and inter-organizational relations that contribute to sustained networks of practice, in varying degrees of extensiveness and complexity. A feature of such networks is that they usually draw local actors into broader configurations not of their making, and which play out away from the local scene.

Literacy, social goods, interests and norms An overview of how such an analytical perspective on projects of social ordering might apply to literacy studies was provided by Freebody (1999: 5) where he referred to the four ways in which the sociality of any given literacy practice is constituted. First, he says, each literacy practice has a material history, which is found in the writing materials and systems and the material traces they leave. Secondly, literacy practices are social through the interactional histories through which they have evolved. A third sense relates to their institutional histories. A fourth sense in which literacy practices are social, says Freebody, is that these material, interactional and institutional histories are themselves shaped by ideological considerations. Yet, as Freebody (2001) pointed out, and Freebody and Freiberg discuss in their paper in this collection, literacy very often appears in policy discourses and schooling practices as an apparently inevitable and almost natural ‘compacted concept’, i.e., literacy comes to be seen as apparently self-evident, uncontentious and useful, its substance and validity confirmed and endorsed repeatedly by statistical correlations with one or other social good. Freebody and Freiberg in this collection are concerned to enquire what gets delivered to school children under the rubric of ‘literacy’ in educational settings. They see what counts as literacy in schools as a particular ‘compacted concept’,





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streamlined for administration and for measurement, and tied to particular reasoning practices that teach children to attach layers of significance to the material objects of literacy, to ‘see through’ books and to make messages and texts of particular kinds. They show teachers teaching children what counts as reading, and setting up interactive practices which draw in children as collaborators in confirming what the appropriate ‘line’ through the text is that constitutes a classroom lesson. They suggests that this ‘line’ is also about aligning individual identities with public interests and structures, and emphasise the links to wider social processes as to how global dynamics are played out in particular settings. Pitt’s study in this collection makes a similar case about the intentions of a family literacy initiative that she studied. She examines the teacher training films as examples of a literacy pedagogy that targets women with limited formal education as particular kinds of mothers and adult learners. Drawing on Bernstein’s constructs of regulative and pedagogical discourse she argues that the family literacy pedagogy of the interventive programme constructs mothers as prioritising their children’s learning while also becoming particular kinds of ‘lifelong learners’ who are recruited onto adult education programmes. She sees these dynamics as simultaneously rewarding and persecuting: through being co-opted into their children’s education, through their desire to be ‘good mothers’ and through their recruitment into ideas about ‘reflexive adult learning’ and certification processes, attitudes that are shaped through new capitalist ideology. Pitt draws on Fairclough’s (1992) analytical approach where discourse is studied as text, as discursive practice and as social practice, focusing on the nexus of language/discourse/speech and social structure. Her study echoes Bartlett’s account of ‘literacy shaming’ in this collection and Freebody and Freiberg’s account in that they all develop perspectives on the way that literacy dynamics are tied up with identity processes under socio-political constraints, where individuals must act as authors and subjects of their own conduct, while they are subject to social constraints that shape their choices. In Foucault’s terms, it is through the inculcation of social norms as personal attributes that the individual performs in self-policing, and attitudes to literacy play no small part in these processes, because of the links of literacy to educational institutional practices. Bartlett is also concerned with the intensive social work required to ‘do literacy’. She too develops an account of the ways in which individuals position themselves through literacy practices in social and cultural fields but focuses on social dynamics beyond the family. She argues that ‘doing literacy’ is largely about developing facility in literacy practices that are recognized as ‘legitimate’, rather than about mastering a code. Through a close examination of her interview and observation data from a northern Brazil town, she describes what she calls ‘literacy shaming’, where individuals feel bad, and are made to feel bad by others, about



Introduction

their inability to read or write something and also about the ‘uneducated’ way in which they speak. Doing literacy in that context is tied up with ‘feeling literate’ and ‘seeming literate’, which in turn are tied into socially sanctioned behaviours and personal identity work under these social constraints. Bartlett pays close attention to the role of what she calls ‘cultural artefacts’ in such literacy processes. She refers to both material objects like books and to cultural categories such as ‘good girls’ and ‘bad boys’ as cultural artefacts, and shows how they serve to produce ‘figured worlds’ which are, as she says, evoked, grown into individually, and collectively developed. Gee, in this volume, talks in a related way about ‘models’ (cultural models, discourse models) which he describes as resources which help people act and interact in situations where they apply, or seem to apply; for example, how to talk, act and write as a young man who is propositioning a woman. Ahearn’s study in this collection presents a complex narrative about Nepalese social and cultural change, seen through the lens of changing gender identities and the interactional dynamics of romantic love letters. She argues that the new practices of love-letter writing in Junigau, Nepaul in the 1980s and 1990s signal and facilitate a shift from arranged and capture marriage. She shows that this practice draws on a discourse of romantic love that has become respectable in more recent times because of its western or modern connotations. She examines the uneven and unanticipated consequences of these new practices as they provide expression for but also set limits on women’s independence and freedom in those social settings.

Semiotic domains Gee draws broadly on related arguments and broad theoretical insights to those describe above to develop an account of how literacy happens within semiotic domains, where domain members share a set of practices, a common language, genre or register (what Gee calls a social language), a set of common goals or endeavours and a set of values and norms. His examples include video games, theology and midwifery, but could equally included school literacy classes, ‘family literacy’ meetings or love letters. Within a domain, words, symbols, images, and/or artefacts have meanings and combine together, thanks to what Gee calls the design grammar of the domain, to take on complex meanings. These meanings are situated meanings, not general meanings that can be defined once and for all, Gee suggests, in ways that are related to Bartlett’s concept of ‘figured worlds’. Gee says that in order to understand any word, symbol, image, or artefact (or combination thereof) in a domain, a person must be able to situate the meaning of the word, symbol,



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image, or artefact (or combination thereof) within (actual or mentally simulated) embodied experiences of action, interaction, or dialogue in or about the domain. Ahearn’s study shows strongly how localised practices reshape the attitudes to and uses of literacy. In this, her work aligns with earlier NLS studies (particularly the ‘cross-cultural’ studies collected in Street 1993) on how people locally ‘take hold’ of literacy, in ways that produce surprising and unanticipated outcomes. Pahl, in this collection, is similarly concerned to examine what she refers to as the more durable, long-term cultural resources that families bring to oral and written texts, using habitus as a lens to look at the communicative practices, firstly of a Turkish family in London, and secondly at the family resources, practices and identity-processes that show up in map-making activities at a school in South Yorkshire. She shows how family resources and embodied history show up in the multimodal literacy practices of young children. She suggests through this work that the notion of habitus might be more flexible and productive and less deterministic than is sometimes claimed, particularly when new fields of practice, such as western school literacy, are encountered by migrants from elsewhere in the world. Prinsloo, through his study of children at play, also takes the multimodal turn and is concerned to show them taking hold of the range of semiotic resources available to them from home and school, and reshaping them in creative and novel ways. In his examination of the semiotic resources brought into play in children’s games in Khayelitsha, he shows how many of the cognitive abilities said to underpin literacy development are abundantly present and unrecognized in these games, how the games incorporate self aware, parodic routines derived from school activities, demonstrating a critical meta awareness of the practices of schooled literacy and how ultimately there is a distressing gap between the multimodal exuberance of the resources deployed in play and the ‘narrow band’ focus on writing in schooling. This leads him to endorse Kress and Gee’s call for an expansion of the semiotic resources in the school curriculum. Prinsloo shows how the socially situated focus on NLS work can be turned back onto a consideration of schooled literacy. Baynham turns to 19th century literary sources in English (Dickens and Mrs Gaskell), asking what these can show us about how literacy operates as a social and semiotic construct in the fictional worlds evoked, thus how they might count as evidence of historically distant literacy practices and how these might enrich understanding of literacy practices in contemporary times. He shows how NLS constructs such as ‘events’, ‘practices’, ‘institutions’ and ‘discourses’ can be used as analytical tools to uncover elite and powerful literacies, in novels written at a time when the universal penny post was dramatically expanding the semiotic opportunities for communication and a push for mass literacy was gaining momentum.



Introduction

As such the chapter invokes the historicity of literature. While the bulk of work in the NLS has been anthropological or sociological in orientation, this papers points to the potential relevance of NLS work in the disciplinary areas of literary studies and history. De Souza, finally, with his emphasis on place of enunciation and asymmetry of power brings the literacy researcher into the picture in an interesting and provocative way, pulling apart accepted and taken for granted theoretical assumptions in literacy research which may, he suggests, turn out to be new versions of the autonomous, decontextualizing intellectual tendency that Street spotted so productively in the early 1980s. Again, the modal shift is in evidence in de Souza’s focus on vision and the visual in of Amerindian writing practices. Exploring concepts such as vision, perspective and relationality, de Souza evokes a landscape of ontological, epistemological and indeed ethical assumptions which have been systematically misunderstood by generations of investigators who have been unable ultimately to step out of a universalizing mindset. Exploring these assumptions gives de Souza the possibility of re-visiting and reconfiguring Kress’s notion of reading images, pointing to the dynamic interrelationship of visual and scriptual, not the visual as a simple accompaniment to the verbal (written) text. De Souza takes us deeper than is perhaps usual into the culturally situated construction of reading and by extension writing practices. His study is an apt closing perspective in a collection that starts with Freebody and Freiberg’s analysis of the currently dominant perspectives on what counts as literacy in (western) educational settings. De Souza takes on the dominant Western Cartesian perspective which asserts itself in non-Western contexts and suggests there are coherent ontological/epistemological/ethical alternatives. We have grouped the chapters in this collection under four headings. The discussion in individual chapters overflows such boundaries, their themes overlap and criss-cross. Nonetheless, for reading purposes we have grouped the chapters under these broad headings: I. literacy and power: aligning literacy learners with dominant discourses and practices; II. global and local: taking hold of literacy; III. theoretical developments in the study of literacy as situated social practice; IV. literacy practices in time and space. Together, the chapters in this collection provide an account of the current issues and approaches that are shaping the study of literacy as situated social practice.

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References Barton, D. 2001. Directions for literacy research: Analysing language and social practices in a textually mediated social world. Language and Education 15(2–3): 92–104. Barton, D. 1994. Literacy: An introduction to the ecology of written language. Oxford: Blackwell. Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. 2000. Literacy Practices. In Situated Literacies, D. Barton, M. Hamilton & R. Ivanic (eds). London: Routledge. Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. 1998. Local Literacies: Reading and writing in one community. London: Routledge. Baynham, M. 1995. Literacy Practices. London: Longman. Baynham M. & Prinsloo, M. (eds). 2001. New directions in literacy research. Language and Education 15(2–3): 83–91. Baynham, M. & Baker, D. 2002. ‘Practice’ in literacy and numeracy research: Multiple perspectives. Ways of Knowing 2(1). Besnier, N. 1993. Literacy and feelings: The encoding of affect in Nukulaelae letters. In CrossCultural Approaches to Literacy, B. Street (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. 2005. Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Brandt, D. & Clinton, K. 2002. Limits of the local: Expanding perspectives on literacy as a social practice. Journal of Literacy Research 34(3): 337–356. Collins, J. & Blot, R. 2003. Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gee, J. 1990. Social Linguistics and Literacies, 2nd edn. London: Falmer Press. Gee, J. 2000. The new literacy studies: From ‘socially situated’ to the work of the social. In Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context, D. Barton, M. Hamilton & R. Ivanic (eds), 180–196. London: Routledge. Fairclough, N. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. London: Polity Press. Freebody, P. 2001. The writing-out of reading as social practice in homes and schools. Closing plenary address. International Literacy Conference: Literacy and language in global and local settings: New directions for research and teaching, 13–17 November 2001, Cape Town. Freebody, P. 1999. Assessment as communal versus punitive practice: Six new literacy crises. In AILA Scientific Commission on Literacy: VIRTUAL SEMINAR 1. M. Baynham & M. Prinsloo (eds). Downloaded in March 2001 from http://education.leeds.ac.uk/AILA/VirtSem. Hamilton. M. 2001. Privileged literacies: Policy, institutional processes and the life of the IALS. Language and Education 15(2&3): 178–196. Heath, S. 1983. Ways with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heath, S. 1982. What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society 11(1): 49–76. Kell, C. 2001. Ciphers and currencies: Shifting knowledges and literacy dilemmas. Language and Education 15(2–3): 197–211. Kress, G. 1997. Before Writing. London: Routledge.



Introduction

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. Kulick, D. & Stroud, C. 1993. Conceptions and uses of literacy in a Papua-New Guinea village. In Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy, B. Street (ed.), 33–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. 1987. Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Luke, A. 2004. On the material consequences of literacy. Language and Education 18(4): 331– 335. Luke, A. & Baynham, M. (eds). 2004. Ethnographies of Literacy. Special issue of Language and Education 18(4). Martin-Jones, M. & Jones, K. (eds). 2000. Multilingual Literacies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pahl, K. & Rowsell, J. (eds). 2006. Travel Notes from the New Literacy Studies. Instances of Practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Prinsloo, M. & Breier, M. (eds). 1996. The Social Uses of Literacy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rampton, B. 1998. Speech community. In Handbook of Pragmatics, J. Verschueren, J. Östman, J. Blommaert & C. Bulcaen (eds), 1–34. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Scribner, S. & Cole, M. 1981. The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Street, B. (ed.) 1993. Cross-cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Street, B. 1984. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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part i

Literacy and power Aligning literacy learners with dominant  discourses and practices

chapter 1

Globalised literacy education Intercultural trade in textual and cultural practice Peter Freebody and Jill Freiberg Freebody and Freiberg enquire what gets delivered to school children under the rubric of ‘literacy’ in educational settings. They see what counts as literacy in schools as a particular ‘compacted concept’, streamlined for administration and for measurement, and tied to particular reasoning practices that teach children to attach layers of significance to the material objects of literacy, to ‘see through’ books and to make messages and texts of particular kinds. They suggests that this ‘line’ is also about aligning individual identities with public interests and structures, and emphasise the links to wider social processes as to how global dynamics are played out in particular settings. In turning attention to the issue of globalisation and literacy, they argue that it is this ideological, culturally specific compacted concept of ‘literacy’ that gets ‘globalised’, through materials and training programs.

The argument: ‘Export-quality literacy’? Globalised literacy is not a new idea. UNESCO’s Experimental World Literacy Program in the 1970s was a massive and, apparently, an unequivocally good thing. Its spectacularly public failure drew this comment from the former Director of the Literacy Secretariat of UNESCO: While UNESCO had promoted what it called the ‘mass literacy campaign’ approach in its early years, it turned to a more targeted strategy, called ‘functional literacy’ programmes in the mid-1960s and early 1970s. When learners in these latter programmes discovered that the only ‘functionality’ involved was to make them better workers, the majority of these experiments failed. That UNESCO’s approach since the period has been to provide technical expertise and advice according to specific needs in specific contexts, is an indication of the world community’s pulse in recent years. No single solution can be applied across countries. Programmes and strategies must emanate from perceived needs within individu(Limage 1993: 23) als and their communities. 

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This is a puzzling account when you think about it. Why did people not want to be ‘better workers’? Is there something wrong with that? As Gowen (1992, 2001) has shown in a series of contrastive case studies in work sites, the literacy programs she studied were actually not about being ‘better workers’ as far as the participants were concerned. Many of the workers who engaged in work-based literacy education programs in Gowen’s study did so for domestic or civic reasons (communicating with distant family members, helping their children with homework, reading newspapers and magazines, and the rest; that is, they did not enroll as workers). It was simply unclear to them (and to Gowen) that the jobs they had would be meaningfully made easier or more efficient by their learning to read and write better. So, as with enrolment, the resistance and eventual drop-out rates in these programs were not even about being ‘better workers’ at all. Further, Gowen showed how some of the workers with apparently the lowest ‘literacy levels’ were in fact those whose other communicational and networking capabilities made them crucial players in the workplaces. It was, in those instances, simply management’s view that their efficiency was about their enhanced literacy. So for Gowen, the questions became: How might the work in some employment sectors be improved by enhanced literacy? More broadly: How do the cultural logics of literacy learning (‘literacy’ as enacted in the UNESCO program, for instance) connect with the practicalities of workplaces and the cultural and relational reasoning practices of the sites into which it is implanted? And more bluntly: How do ruling ideological and industrial discourses recruit ‘literacy’ as a self-evidently legitimate way of intervening in industrial relations and ideologies. In turning attention to the issue of globalisation and literacy, the argument we put here is that what becomes ‘globalised’ under the rubric of ‘literacy’ includes particular reasoning practices that relate textual objects to the moral and relational orders of a culture. In the end, the most significant aspect of globalisation in literacy may be the deployment of those reasoning practices – compact institutionalized concepts, tailor-made for bureaucratic administration, for measurement, and for potential deployment in other kinds of political, ideological or industrial fields. Ideologically based concepts of literacy and the reasoning practices that produce them can be not only sold as ‘literacy’ to the people in the countries where they were developed, but through materials and training programs, sold back again globally, as efforts to spread literacy proceed apace. The export of literacy is at the same time the export of pedagogies and, more precisely, of ways of relating to other people and via that to knowledge of the culture, and the knowledge-valuing processes and contents of that culture. Recognitions and measurements of accurate, meaningful and purposeful reading and writing involve recognitions and measurements of cultural understandings and



Globalised literacy education

culturally endorsed social relationships, themselves sensible only within a particular ideology of domestic, vocational and civic life. The extent to which the singularities recognised as ‘reading’ in Western culture remain the durable facts of literacy education for us is simply a reflection of how thoroughly we are, as a culture, convinced both by the orderliness and by the appropriateness of the orders they afford our family, work and civic lives. The sensible-ness of practices relies on the cultural processes that make them effective, but these cultural processes are relational, and they have particular, situated evolutionary histories. Other kinds of societies have different kinds of histories and have evolved different ways of conducting the practical business of community. A range of communicational strategies and customs, and the particular relationships that both attend and shape them, constitute the cultural formations of that society (Barton & Hamilton 2005). Grafting on ‘export-quality-literacy’ does not simply place something new alongside situated cultural formations that can remain incidental to them. Rather, it inserts and affords new forms of relating to people. It is less about new knowledge and more about changing traditional ways of formulating and managing knowledge. Institutionalized western literacy brings with it normative western ways of seeing through objects toward messages, toward texts and toward culture. These norms are acted out in literacy teaching and learning events that appear to us to be utterly mundane and natural, but they are in fact enactments and reconstructions of relational, cultural, ideological and moral patterns. These patterns function to endow the material world with layers of significance, rendering it ‘readable’ and ‘write-able’ in particular ways. Despite this, literacy is persistently characterised as comprising ‘natural,’ neutral technologies and skills, and ‘naturally-assessable’ ways of being and doing things. The deception provides the means whereby literacy exporters can judge and characterise, yet again, whole communities or even nations as ‘failing at literacy’, not wanting to be better workers, better citizens, or, in the end, better people. The reasoning practices that are made available through and form part of literacy education in minority countries (sometimes referred to as ‘developed nations’) have been criticised in those countries as only marginally relevant to the literacy demands people face outside of educational institutions (Rowsell 2006). But these practices are not accidental slippages; their durability indicates that they are held in place by the industrial and administrative logics of schooling and public accountability, within the terms of a modernist conception of literacy and the economics of human capital – more literacy means more productivity means more material and social capital. A more refined exploration of literacy and globalisation, however, calls for more than a description of the nature of literacy beyond seeing it as a platform

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for access to skills, decision-making and material resources, or as a distinctive market commodity. If the analysis is to connect with material conditions, it calls as well for some theorisation of the effects of globalisation more generally. To begin a sketch of such an analysis, we draw on models of globalisation that have been developed to account for and predict its effects on economic equality. Most approaches to this question have shown that the nature and consequences of globalisation need to be considered in different ways for different kinds of countries and economies. Drawing on Stewart and Berry (1999), for instance, we can describe how the effects of globalisation within minority, ‘developed’ countries relate to uneven access to capital, land, skills, decision-making, and the risks involved in increasingly rapid and unpredictable flows of capital, ideas, and people. The removal of internal market controls (restrictions on the movement of goods, money, and labour) tends to enhance further the return to high socio-economic groups and lessens return to poorer sectors whose main commodity is their labour (including their literacy labour). In majority, ‘developing’ counties, the picture is more complex. Stewart and Berry argued that, for purposes of exploring globalisation effects, we can discern four distinct kinds of economic conditions that currently characterise these nation-states: 1. Manufactured-goods exporting producers (able to penetrate world markets with labour-intensive manufactured goods); 2. Primary-goods exporting producers (non-industrialised and specialising in primary production by peasant farms); 3. Mineral exporters (non-industrialised and specialising in mineral exports produced by large often multinational companies); and 4. Import-substituting, industrialising countries (urbanised employment sectors with primary products as the main exports). Stewart and Berry made the case that countries in the first two of these categories may enjoy some benefits from economic liberalisation and globalisation in terms of the equity of resource distribution, whereas those in categories three and four would likely suffer less equitable patterns of distribution as globalisation picked up in pace and extent. But their more general point is that a generic scenario that predicts consequences for all countries or even all majority countries cannot be reliably constructed. The economic conditions sustain and are sustained by highly variable relations among socio-economic and cultural groups. A similar point can be made about literacy education in globalized conditions: At the most general level, we can ask: What kinds of different literacy skills, if any, would enhance the economic, domestic and civic lives of workers in the various



Globalised literacy education

configurations itemized by Stewart and Berry? What social practices would they variously find both functional and enriching? What would they read and write? Why? From, to, and for whom? Into what new relationships of solidarity and ruling will the technologies of printed and electronic communications draw and embed people? And will some documentation, analysis or understandings of these considerations motivate and guide the exporters of literacy education?

Inheriting ‘compact’ concepts The idea that ‘literacy’ is a knowable, unitary, portable, and thus readily testable property of individuals has been passed on to generations of educators and community members as an unremarked aspect of cultural inheritance, generally untroubled by descriptive or normative doubts. We can know, and can know comprehensively and in common, what literacy is, that it is good, and why it is good. We can talk about ‘literacy and (more usually) illiteracy rates,’ ‘literacy levels,’ a ‘literacy audit,’ and so on. Questioning the value of the spread of literacy is like questioning the value of water. The counter-argument is that the version of ‘literacy’ as a unitary, portable and thus readily testable property of individuals, while it may be a version that does the work of bureaucratic administration in some countries, severely restricts understandings of what people do with literacy in the various aspects of their lives even in those same countries, let alone others. This version simply has very limited empirical purchase, despite the disproportionate endorsement it enjoys within institutionalized research and curriculum programs (Street 2006). The claim is that different literacy practices in turn have consequences for the ways in which people can live their lives. This means that literacy practices and capabilities cannot be understood in terms of absolute levels of skill, but are relational concepts, defined by the social and communicative practices with which individuals engage in the various domains of their life world (Hamilton and Barton 2001: 217). When the various enactments of literacy in school systems, job training sites and homes are studied and documented (e.g., as in Barton and Hamilton 1998; Pahl 2002; Street 1984, 1995), the contrasts among these sites make it clear that a compact, singular concept of ‘literacy’ is not only evident in the work of publicly managing the state or a school system. The skills, dispositions and reasoning practices that are on display in such events demonstrate that traces of administratively amenable notions of these skills, dispositions and reasoning practices have been, however successfully and thoroughly, ‘sold back’ to teachers, trainers, parents, employers, and so on. Ideas about literacy have institutional histories, tailored to the management needs of those sites. They can be discursively produced

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as normative expectations, against which teachers, trainers, parents, employers and ultimately whole communities can be held accountable. Professional educators and community members alike, along with material investments in certain forms of literacy education, also have investments in certain ideas and practices about what literacy and literacy education are, what they should be, and how they can be productively investigated. It is generally not possible to be an acculturated member of a literate society without having developed, as part of that cultural apprenticeship, ideas about what counts as adequate literacy and how it might best be passed on from generation to generation. Some of these conceptual investments have material correlates: literacy researchers and practitioners have careers invested in certain theories, research methods and methodologies, and norms of practice. These investments connect with and buttress ideological formations, a set of views about ‘the literate and thus good society’ and the various ways it can and should distribute its capabilities, goods and services, to others and to ‘us’. This is the force of Jayyusi’s point (1984, 1991) that categorizations of persons (e.g., ‘an illiterate’) and practices (e.g., ‘teaching and learning literacy’) are never solely descriptive in their consequences: rather, they hold in place a singular, preferred moral order that organizes social relations. As Smith (1987) has similarly commented: [we have] a consciousness that looks at society, at social relations, and people’s lives as if we could stand outside them, ignoring the local places … a mode of ruling that involves a continual transcription of the local and particular actualities of our lives into abstracted and generalized forms … forms of knowledge that enter them into relations of ruling (pp. 2–3)

This process of ‘continual transcription,’ transporting, re-applying and re-naturalising preferred moral orders, applies to most forms of publicly accountable activity, but its significance, particularly for activities that seem so obviously and naturally beneficent and beneficial (such as ‘teaching and learning literacy’) rests on a robust public compact concerning its inherit-ability from generation to generation, and its export-ability from site to site.

Three kinds of ‘translucence’ So what can be said about literacy practices from outside this compact? How can we step back from ‘literacy’ as an administrative affordance, and try to view its nature and significance for globalisation? Here we can take the case of ‘teaching and learning reading’ to develop the discussion. At its most minimal analytic



Globalised literacy education

level, reading can be seen as involving three forms of ‘seeing through’: To be a reader is to see through the material object toward an understanding that it contains a representation of some sort, to see through that representation toward an understanding that it is a textual representation, and to see through that textual representation toward an understanding that it embodies and affords cultural practices (adapted from Heap 1979, 1985). Teaching reading, therefore, involves, again minimally, using culturally familiar educational practices to distribute these particular ways of ‘seeing through.’ Over the years, researchers have shown the various ways in which these ‘seeing through’ processes can routinely be brought off by experts and novices. Snow and Ninio (1988), for example, showed how very young children may chew on a book or throw it at a sibling; but, through (non-throwing) interactions with others in the family, they progress to an orientation that demonstrates an appreciation of books as important because they have a message. Many studies (perhaps beginning in earnest in Wells 1981, 1985) have shown the ways in which exchanges with young children around books orient to children’s partial knowledge of the textual, discursive nature of the message, exchanges such as in Example 1, with Mother ‘reading’ with her 20-month-old son William (from Freebody 2003): Example 1. 3. Mum 4. Will 5. Mum 6. Will 7. Mum 8. Will 9. Mum

This one? What’s this one? (1.5) ((points to word; W is holding book)) Say it. Colour (.) one ((starts leafing through book))= =coloured one (1) but what is it? (1) Caterpillar? ca/h/pilluh Yes it 'tis too. What does it say? ((William points to a picture of an apple)) A/h/pool (1.0) It’s an apple (.5) but what does it say? (2.0) ONE DAY ... ((M begins reading the book))

Saying it, in this event, is not the same as describing the colours or naming the object pictured. So, having not produced an acceptable answer to ‘say it’ in turns 4, 6 and 8, William will now hear what is ‘says.’ These two people together, through their interactions, come to bring off an event that shows William how to look through the object to the message, and that the bit that counts as reading means, here and now, that the afforded message is linguistic and continuous in a set sequence, rather than pictorial, episodic or random. William is being shown that the messages are discursive.

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The procedures we see for reading with older children may take a different shape altogether. Example 2 shows a transcript of a ‘reading session’ at home with a Father and child, Cary, aged about five years. Example 2.   1. C NOW THERE WAS A BIG //   2. F //No no no. This part here says /b/eaut/   3. C BEAUTIFUL   4. F Beautiful that’s right.   5. C NOW THERE WAS A BIG ( )   6. F Sound the letters. /c/   7. C COLOURFUL   8. F No. /c/all/d/   9. C CALLED 10. F What’s this? 11. C 's' 12. F Yeh 's'. 's't' says? 13. C /st/ 14. F /st/ what’s that letter? 15. C 'r' 16. F 'r' it doesn’t sound like an 'r' it doesn’t say /r/ it sounds different sound here but look at these letters here 'r'a'w' what would ... how would that sound? “Raw”, so /st/[raw//b] 17. C [berry] 18. F Berry yes. So what is it? 19. C STRAWBERRY ROAD WITH 20. F No not with. 'c'h' on the end. /k/ which 21. C WHICH WENT OVER THE HILL AND DOWN TO THE TOWN. 22. F Mmhmm 23. C IT HAS HOUSES 24. F No no 25. C IT HAD 26. F Had 27. C HAD HOUSES ... ((reading continues))

This reading session is not the same as Mother and William’s above in that F does not simply take over the reading activity, nor do he and C work to construct any continuity of message from the text. This session has a different point, apparently evident to both participants, since it progresses smoothly and without any protests or indications of trouble or puzzlement from either party. Together, F and C render the signs into individual words, into episodic word-by-word representations.



Globalised literacy education

Throughout the entire session of over 130 turns C’s interactional options consisted of attempting to read and sound letters out. F continued with the kinds of interventions sampled in this segment – asking, sounding and blending. These interventions were precise and immediately contingent on the displayed problem at any given moment. While that contingency and attention to correctness have been criticised in many approaches to early reading teaching, and whether or not those criticisms are somehow justified, the fact that the process seemed to disrupt the meaning of the text, as connected and meaningful discourse, seems thoroughly irrelevant to both of the participants. This particular apprenticeship experience, regardless of how effective we may consider it, is clearly about ‘seeing through’ the graphic objects toward known words. Similarly, as Heap (1991) has pointed out, an analysis of literacy lessons in school shows that they are at the same time lessons in the logic of the culture (see also Baker & Freebody 1989), working with and working up culturally-shared propositions, procedures and norms that are taken to be preconditions for participation in conventional schooling, indeed through ‘conventionalising’ common cultural knowledge into school-literate ways. We see examples of additional aspects of teachers’ and students’ concerted moral orientations in their collective reading practices in a secondary Year 9 English class, where 15 year-old students discuss the moral attributes of characters in the novel Z for Zachariah (O’Brien 1987): 81. S1 Well she’s very independent. She’s kind and caring. I guess he’s creative in a way (.) able to umm you know cooking and that 82. T OK (.) Anne? Can you add something? 83. Anne She’s got lots of courage and// 84. T // lots of courage, how do we see that? 85. Anne umm like she keeps herself alive and she thinks there’s no one else around on the earth 86. T She keeps herself alive when there’s no one else around. Good. Yes (.) Shirley, can you add to that? 87. Shirley Umm she’s very soft-hearted. She like (.) she thought Mr Loomis was bad but she (.) when he got sick she looked after him 88. T Yes.

In this example the teacher is weaving students’ contributions into the canonical text for the lesson, and the students, in order to count as participants, not only need to contribute, and to contribute as representatives of the cohort; they also need to display that they are of one mind, one orientation to the essential ‘morality’ of the question at hand, and one moral sensibility, with their fellow students. They are asked to add to and develop the interpretive line started by their peers.

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But the obligation is not to the interpretive authority of the fellow student whose contribution is to be added to or developed (as in turns 82 and 86); through an assertive interruption in 83–84, the teacher signifies the preferred format for subsequent contributions: attribute plus substantiation from the storyline of the novel. This is achieved, in that it passes without subsequent modification or requests for elaboration, in turn 87. So the responsibility for the student is to attend to the teacher’s preferred moral logic both for the classroom task at hand, the intellectual, linguistic and social-configurational forms that logic may take on any given occasion, and for judgments about the (fictitious) people-characters shown in the novel. For the teacher, the reciprocal responsibility is to sequence and distribute turn-taking opportunities such that the learning event is evidently a learning event for the entire cohort, paying close attention to the content and format of each student’s contribution and, where judged intellectually, linguistically and social-configurationally appropriate, reworking a given contribution into a more productive component of the lesson. What is evidently important for the participants, and what they regularly display to one another (and what is consistently striking to the analyst) is the rapidity and tightness of the reciprocation, the closeness and near-perfection of the concertedness of the exchanges, and the depth to which contemporary schooling is predicated on the mutual acknowledgement, moment-to-moment, of these moral rights and responsibilities, as they together ‘see through’ the book to the text to the moral tale.

The ‘mannerisms and debris’ of literacy learning and teaching In a landmark study of reading, reported almost a century ago, Edmund Huey worked away at the important point that the events in which learning to read and write occur are shaped by organisational imperatives and institutionalised relationships. Huey did not use these terms, but his observation was that, to understand these events, we need first to understand the ways in which homes, schools and workplaces organise themselves through particular ways of relating, then ask how these events, such as literacy teaching and learning, happen not just in but as instances of the workings of these settings. Reading and writing are learned in the service of what the children are doing as a social community. Reading is not made an end in itself, and does not gather the mannerisms and debris of technique that accompany reading done for its own sake in school.  (Huey 1908: 300)



Globalised literacy education

The “mannerisms and debris of technique” evident in the school settings are not random or unreasoned; they are, rather integral to and constitutive of those events as school lessons. Their durability derives from their capacity to organize materials and activities such that the movements and attention of a group of children are regulated in recognizably classroom-like ways, both products of and producing the categories Teacher and Student/s. We can see how the procedures of classroom life give shape and consequence to learning to read. Example 3 documents a section of a reading lesson in a year three classroom, with students about seven years old: Example 3. 527. T 528. Arthur 529. T 530. Angie 531. T 532. Eddie 533. T 534. S 535. T 536. S 537. T 538. S 539. T 540. S 541. S 542. T 543. S 544. T 545. S 546. T 547. Aisha

I’ve got two sentences here. Two separate sentences. Arthur, do you want to read the first one? HELEN WAS RUNNING LATE Angie, and what’s the second one? SHE MISSED THE BUS I can actually join those two sentences up. And make one big long sentence. But I need something special to help do it. Eddie? And? Um, it’s a word I need, yes, it’s a word I need, not necessarily ‘and’, but what do you call that word? But? Well it might be a ‘but’. Yes. So? Ehh?? So? Might be ‘so’? Do you know what they’re called, those words that you’re telling me? They’ve got a special job. Finishing off? In the middle? Yeh, they’re right in the middle. Joining letters? Joining ... ? Words? Good boy. Joining words. Because what they do, they’ve got a special job. They join, one sentence onto /\ (.8) another. To make a one big long sentence. So in the end, it would look like this. HELEN WAS RUNNING LATE. That’s where the joining word’ll go. SHE MISSED THE BUS. Who thinks they know what the joining word, should be there? Aisha? And?

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548. T HELEN WAS RUNNING LATE AND SHE MISSED THE BUS 549. S No 550. T That could be right. There’s one that’s just a bit better. 551. S //It’s on the back ((of the card held up by the teacher)) 552. T Nahn? 553. Nahn So? 554. T That’s right. ‘So’, and I put the little answer on the back there so that you could check that you were right. OK HELEN, let’s read it together with that joining word 555. Ss+T HELEN WAS RUNNING LATE SO SHE MISSED THE BUS 556. T Well Helen ((turning to a student in the class whose name is Helen)), you shouldn’t run late so that you don’t miss the bus// 557. Helen //I don’t catch the bus.

The interactional activities with which the students are familiar can systematically lead them away from even the most basic learning about language use. In the early part of the phase, the students indicate that they are trying to answer the question of ‘what word’ rather than ‘what kind of word?’ This ‘language-in-use’ approach does not seem in this instance to provide a direct route to the level of talk about language that the occasioned question seems to call for, and that we, and the students, later find to be the preferred level of answer. By trial and error, the teacher and students achieve “joining words” as the preferred answer in 546. In 551, a student indicates that the “better” joining word is to be found on the back of the card held up by the teacher. The prevalence of commonsense talk cutting across the language learning that is apparently on offer is seen in 556–557 (Helen does not catch the bus). Again, we can notice how the students respond as if they are dealing, with equal salience, with talk about the everyday world, the logistics of the pedagogy and the task (the answers on the back of the card), and the language learning that is successfully on offer only through the co-ordination of a particular relationship with the teacher. It is important to emphasise that these are not intrusions by the students or instances of interactive incompetence; rather, they are hearings that are regularly credited by the teacher in her interactions. For instance, the teacher solves the problem of right answers by referring to the instructional expedience of checking on the back of the card to allow the group to collectively decide on an answer. Part of the problem presented to the students here, as in many other lessons, has to do with the cultural resources they are (or are not) offered to complete language and literacy tasks, and with precisely what it is that they were asked to ‘see through’ and toward (apart from through the card toward the answer on the other side). Answers appear to come from general cultural knowledge (e.g., about



Globalised literacy education

the relationship between lateness and missing buses) and, from pedagogical devices (e.g., on the back of the card), or from what generally seems to ‘sound right’. The reliance on task activity and questioning seems to provide only a tenuous cultural base for the students from which to apply some portable principle they have learned. These three ways of ‘seeing through’ – from the object to the text to the culture – are reasoning practices that are produced, reproduced, adapted, distributed and exchanged in everyday literacy learning settings, and in generally unremarked ways. We have documented them at work in homes and schools as part of a study literacy practices in the first three years of schooling (Freiberg & Freebody 1995). One of the components of that study was that we left the recorders with families. We briefed them on our interests and the purposes of the study and asked them to record anything that went on in the home that they thought we would be interested in with respect to school generally and language and literacy in particular. Example 4 shows part of a transcript from a home site, where very young students put on display their knowledge of the ‘mannerisms and debris’ of teaching and learning literacy. Naomi (N) has attended school for only a few weeks; at home in the afternoon, she has set a book as a display, open on a chair. The book is one that she has previously read through with her mother. Her younger sister, Anna (A), is sitting in front of her. Naomi has cut out and placed little yellow paper stickers to conceal some words on the book. Example 4. 26. N 27. A 28. N 29. A 30. N 31. A

Look at the young flam-flamingo. Flamingo, is that ( ) I like these birds, don’t look at them. Sit down in one place. ( ) and this is a pink flamingo, I like these. Me too Anna what did I say about ‘me too’? White fronted geese. They might be duck ( ). And this is a South, Southern ( ) or something.  Ooh this looks like a ( ). Hawaiian Goose. Hawaiian Goose.

((a little later)) 36. N 37. A 38. N 39. A 40. N

A LABRATOR DUCK. A LABRATOR DUCK. WHY IT BECAME  EXTINCT REMAINS A MYSTERY. Can they fly? Now the thing is that they came extinct. But can they fly? Umm, yeh, no. A ghost ( ) swan ((continued reading))

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42. N ... it has only recently become extinct, so you know what extinct means Anna? That means they’re dead, and lots of years ago the Pink Headed Duck ( ) 43. A Where did they live? 44. N Umm they lived in there I don’t know what it’s called. A Shoveller Duck. Anna you’re not supposed to look at them. Shoveller Duck. A Shoveller Duck back, it’s outside .. wonderfully soft feathers. 45. A They’re a nice one. 46. N SCREAMER, IT’S WINGS ARE EQUALLY WITH HORNY ( ) or something, EGYPTIAN VULTURE, back, CRACKS OSTRICH EGGS OPEN WITH STONES. Oh, that’s a good one. A CRONED HOOKED EAGLE, BACK, AFRICANS MOST FURIOUS RAPTURE. Anna what are you eating? What-are-you-eating? 47. A ( ) 48. N Give me it. Where’s the rest, give me it.

It is clear that after just a few weeks at school Naomi already knows a lot about the uses of the ‘mannerisms and debris’ of classroom practices. She constructs a kind of mock classroom in which Anna, who has not yet been to school, needs constant instruction in proper conduct. Naomi’s actions document her knowledge that schooling involves certain logistic ceremonies, such as the sticking on of the yellow post-its over the key words, and that lessons have a particular set of logistic procedures that students need to know how to participate in. She shows that she understands that reading for school involves ceremonial activities that are about reading-as-pedagogy, the management of materials, and the construction of events through the use of these materials and the logistic procedures of classroom pedagogy. Crucially, these ceremonies embody a distinctive relationship, specifically a relationship of authority and compliance over attention, movement, eating, and over the singular message of the text. We can also see that Naomi already knows that one of the things about becoming a student and about focusing on an activity such as reading in this particular setting, is that part of the teacher’s job is to regulate attention by regulating the student’s body, her movements, her attention and her activities: “sit down in one place”, what she can touch and what she can’t touch. One thing she can’t touch is the little yellow stickers; she can’t look at the words because the actual sequence of events that are to constitute this lesson depend on a particular ceremony for the sequential use of those materials. It is the sequence that indexes the knowledge to be learned, and the lesson, as Naomi enacts it, depends on the teacher’s management of that end-in-view. The student is micro-managed in ways appropriate to the administration of a lesson to a cohort of students, even though in this instance



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she is the only one. Her engagement with the materials is carefully mediated via the relationship with ‘the teacher’, and that relationship in turn is built and legitimated via the task these two set themselves – school-reading. We also see though, particularly line 38, that part of what constitutes a lesson is not just some general free floating engagement with this text. Of all of the things that we could do with this book and that could be said about this text about birds becoming extinct, there is a particular pedagogical line of relevance that constitutes ‘a classroom lesson’: the thing is... So part of focusing the attention and the micro-management of the body is also the micro-management of the particular set of propositions that are, for here and now, made pedagogically relevant. Willes’s (1983) studies of early classrooms show that teachers spend a lot of time with students in their first few months of school focusing them on the fact that there is that particular line, a particular ‘cut’ through this materials, messages and textual readings, and that a lesson is constituted by there being a ‘resumé-to-be’ about cultural practices, for which the students can be held accountable from this event on. What counts as a reading, procedurally, is whatever parties to a setting are apparently justified in believing to be the case about what reading it is, what the skills of reading are, and how well any of the interactants performed. An interactant learns what reading is, how it is done, and what counts as reading, criterially, by paying attention to what counts as reading, procedurally … Unless we attend to procedural definitions and how teaching and learning activities are organized to produce them, we can never know whether our uses of reading the theories are appropriate to the interactional contexts of their application. Those theories, in their flawed ways, tell us what reading is, and how it is done, supposedly in context-free terms. But students’ knowledge of the what and how of reading is culturally and socially mediated through interactions with other persons. We simply do not know how such mediations define reading to the reader.  (Heap 1982: 20, 24)

These procedural understandings are thus made available within activities managed and co-ordinated socially. They are, in Heap’s (1982: 20) terms “just those things which reading theories do not address.” In and as practice, there is no such thing as ‘essence-of-literacy’ that can be put on offer somehow independently of the ‘mannerisms and debris’ of relationship management. Literacy learning and teaching activities, as we have seen in all of the examples, both draw on and put in place certain kinds of relationships.

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Conclusions The issue that opened this chapter is how the globalisation of literacy education necessarily entails the distribution of particular reasoning practices, not just the exported work-up of neutral technical skills. Contemporary studies in literacy call for more rigorously empirical research as the driving engine of theorizing, teaching and making policy about literacy. The ‘durable objects’ that the New Literacy Studies has inserted into current debates about literacy relate to everyday practices in homes and schools (Freebody and Freiberg 2001); it privileges diversity and particularity as a way of foregrounding the powerful disciplinary and ideological work that certain versions of literacy perform in contemporary societies, and a fuller understanding of the cultural consequences of that work. The codes of individualization, collective solidarity, or ruling relations are reshaped and legitimated through literacy-learning events with print. That reshaping is by now so deeply inherited, professionally and communally, that exporting it to new sites and cultures seems not only possible, but actually benign. Market globalisation of educational commodities affords a moment to re-introduce a distinctive ‘literacy’ – an open-textured collection of sociocultural practices, and to assert the fundamental analytic point that those practices reflexively reflect and rebuild anew, particular cultural, moral, and relational orders. Our argument in this piece has been to expand on the proposition that literacy entails more than technical training, and to locate the lines of that expansion in the current global and globalized market for export-literacy. Literacy capabilities and dispositions are consequential for people’s ability to engage actively in the vocational, civil, domestic and social, community life of their societies, in particular those societies becoming more literacy- saturated. Such active engagement clearly calls for more than ‘basic’ technical proficiency in script recognition and production. Acculturation and apprenticeship into a full repertoire of relevant literacy capabilities and dispositions calls both for a motivation to look for and build system and pattern out of the surfaces of everyday social, cultural, and economic experience, and for an appreciation of the ongoing, generative value of that motivation. Active participation in a literacy-saturated society involves an understanding of literacy’s special role in socialization, that is, in the particular ways in which a society strives systematically to amalgamate private, individual interests, motivations and concerns with public, organizational and administrative interests and structures (Freebody 2008). Encountering the texts around them, therefore, involves, among other things, drawing individuals and communities into relations of ruling and being ruled, and aligns their interests, with varying degrees of agency, with particular formations within social organization. This understand-



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ing of literacy at least opens a way for more sophisticated two-way exchanges of socio-political insights between literacy importers and exporters.

References Baker, C. D. & Freebody, P. 1989. Children’s first school books: Introductions to the culture of literacy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. 1998. Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community. London: Routledge. Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. 2005. Literacy, reification and the dynamics of social interaction. In Beyond Communities of Practice: Language, Power and Social Context, D. Barton & K. Tusting (eds), 14–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freebody, P. 2003. Qualitative Research in Education: Interaction and Practice. London: Sage. Freebody, P. 2008. Critical literacy education: On living with ‘innocent language’. In Encyclopedia of Language and Education, B. V. Street & N. H. Hornberger (eds), 107–118. Heidelberg: Springer Scientific. Freebody, P. & Freiberg, J. 2001. Re-discovering practical reading activities in schools and homes. Journal of Research in Reading 24: 222–234. Freiberg, J. & Freebody, P. 1995. Analysing literacy events in classrooms and homes: Conversation-Analytic approaches. In Everyday Literacy Practices in and out of Schools in Low Socioeconomic Urban Communities, P. Freebody, C. Ludwig & S. Gunn (eds), 184–361. (Report to the Commonwealth Department of Employment, Education and Training, Curriculum Corporation). Gowen, S. G. 1992. The Politics of Workplace Literacy: A Case Study. New York NY: Teachers College Press. Gowen, S. G. 2001. The nature and uses of text in the workplace. In Difference, Silence, and Textual Practice: Studies in CriticalLliteracy, P. Freebody, S. Muspratt & B. Dwyer (eds). Cresskill NJ: Hampton Press. Hamilton, M. & Barton, D. (eds). 2001. Editorial: Broadening the study of reading. Special issue on Literacies in Homes and Communities. Journal of Research in Reading 24: 217–221. Heap, J. L. 1979. On Wittgenstein, Criteria and Reading [Occasional Papers]. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Heap, J. L. 1982. Word recognition in theory and in classroom practice. Paper presented to the Ethnography in Education Conference, March, Philadelphia. Heap, J. L. 1985. Discourse in the production of classroom knowledge: Reading lessons. Curriculum Inquiry 15: 245–279. Heap, J. L. 1991. A situated perspective on what counts as reading. In Towards a Critical Sociology of Reading Pedagogy, C. D. Baker & A. Luke (eds), 103–139. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Jayyusi, L. 1984. Categorisation and the Moral Order. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Jayyusi, L. 1991. Values and moral judgement: Communicative praxis as a moral order. In Ethnomethodology and the Sciences, G. Button (ed.), 227–251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Limage, L. J. 1993. Literacy strategies: A view from the International Literacy Year Secretariat of UNESCO. In Knowledge, Culture , and Power: International Perspectives on Literacy Policies and Practices, P. Freebody & A. R. Welch (eds), 223–234. London: Falmer Press & Pittsburg PA: University of Pittsburg Press. O’Brien, R. 1975. Z for Zachariah. New York NY: Atheneum. Pahl, K. 2002. Ephemera, mess and miscellaneous piles: Texts and practices in families. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 2: 145–165. Rowsell, J. 2006. Family Literacy Goes to School. Markham: Pembroke Publishers. Smith, D. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Snow, C. E. & Ninio, A. 1988. The contacts of literacy: What children learn from learning to read books. In Emergent Literacy: Writing and Reading, W. H. Teale & E. Sulzby (eds), 116–138. Norwood NJ: Ablex. Stewart, F. & Berry, A. 1999. Globalisation, liberalization and inequality. In Inequality, Globalisation and World Politics, A. Hurrell & N. Woods (eds), 150–186. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Street, B. V. 1984. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Street, B. V. 1995. Social literacies: Critical approaches to literacy in development, ethnography and education. New York NY: Longman. Street, B. V. 2006. Understanding and defining literacy: Scoping paper for EFA global monitoring report 2006. Paris: UNESCO. Willes, M. J. 1983. Children into Pupils. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

chapter 2

To seem and to feel Engaging cultural artefacts to “do” literacy* Lesley Bartlett This chapter examines the centrality of cultural resources or artefacts in the social process of “doing literacy.” Cultural artefacts are objects or symbols inscribed by a collective attribution of meaning. Engaging Vygotsky’s notion of semiotic mediation, Bartlett argues that humans use cultural artefacts – e.g., images, narratives, labels, or memories of past events – to manage their own feelings and actions and to challenge socially prescribed, “positional” aspects of identities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, she shows how youth and adult literacy students use cultural artefacts in their efforts to perform literacy. People employ cultural artefacts to “seem” literate, or to be seen as literate by others, and to “feel” literate, that is, to develop a sense of themselves as literate.

Introduction Eva and I sat chatting in her home made of cardboard and tarp, where she lived with her brother and his two children. The family was part of the ‘occupation’ of public land by the Landless Movement (Movimento Sem Terra) in the João Pessoa neighbourhood where I was living. As soon as the families erected their makeshift dwellings and began the long wait for the municipal government to give them the legal right to the land, the local Freirean NGO set up evening literacy classes * This chapter originated with a presentation prepared with Dorothy Holland for the 2001 Literacies and Numeracies conference in Leeds, England, which later resulted in publication (Bartlett and Holland 2002). I thank Dorothy Holland for that fruitful collaboration; I also thank the organizers and participants of that conference, especially Mike Baynham, Mary Hamilton, and Brian Street, for their feedback on that paper. The chapter has further benefited from the perspicacious comments of my colleagues in the Center for Multiple Literacies and Languages, Ofelia Garcia, Jo Anne Kleifgen, Fran Vavrus, and Hervé Varenne. Finally, I wish to thank Mastin Prinsloo, Mike Baynham, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions.

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for youth and adults on one of the plots. I met Eva in one of these classes. As dusk settled and we waited for the bell to ring signalling that class would begin, I asked Eva, who attended the nightly basic literacy classes despite her fourth grade education and facility with reading and writing, why literacy mattered to her. She explained: E: LB: E:

If someone introduces me to so-and-so, ... [and I speak] with education, and so-and-so is a studious person, he will know that I am a regular person. Regular? Normal – that I’m someone with a little knowledge, that I’m not illiterate. I know how to converse, I know how to read and write. I know something, I spent some time studying. (22 July 1999)

Like so many of the youth and adult literacy students I interviewed during fieldwork in Brazil, Eva thought of literacy as intimately linked to appropriate forms of social interaction and to respectability. In this chapter, I discuss the intensive social work required to ‘do literacy’. I develop insights from New Literacy Studies, sociohistorical theories of identity formation, and practice theories of language interaction to argue that “becoming literate” requires critical inter- and intra-personal identity work accomplished through engagement with cultural artefacts. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, I show how youth and adult students use cultural artefacts in their efforts to avoid literacy shaming and to ‘become literate’. In conclusion, I discuss the potential of sociocultural theories of identity formation for the field of literacy studies.

Conceptual framework Drawing on sociocultural studies of literacy, in this article I emphasize that literacy is something one actively does, in concert with other humans (who may or may not be physically present) and the material, social, and symbolic world. I avoid the notion of ‘being’ literate, because literacy is less a state of being and more an ongoing, continual accomplishment. Though I occasionally talk about ‘becoming’ literate, by that I do not wish to signal into a developmentalist narrative; instead, I emphasize that we are all continually ‘becoming’ more literate. Blackburn (2003: 3) discusses ‘performing’ literacy, in which people “read and write words and worlds such that any one performance is among innumerable other performances, each of which is both similar to and different from all of the others, both confirming and disrupting one another”. While Blackburn posits that these disjunctions open the possibility for literacy to contribute to social change,



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here I adopt her term to highlight the important social work done as one attempts to ‘seem’ and ‘feel’ literate, which are fundamental to ‘doing’ literacy.

Situated identities and literacy practices Contemporary literacy studies have come to rely upon the concept of identity to think about the purposeful ways in which individuals endeavour to position themselves through (and/or in conjunction with) literacy practices in social and cultural fields. By ‘identity’, social scholars of literacy are not suggesting anything fixed or unified; instead, they are referring to an ongoing social process of selfmaking in conjunction with others through interaction; in other words, “individuals make claims about who they are by aligning and contrasting themselves with others” (McCarthey and Moje 2002: 230). Identity construction, or self-making, occurs through continuous processes of identification (Hall 1996). Sociocultural studies of literacy have established that literacy practices and social identities develop through mutual interaction. Gee (1996, 1999) showed how socially situated identities and ‘social languages’, or (spoken or written) ‘ways with words’ that include different styles, registers, vocabularies, and grammars reinforce one another. Ferdman (1990) revealed how people’s cultural identifications and their views of literacy inform one another. Furthermore, it has become clear that social interaction constitutes a key context for the development of literacy practices. Indeed, as Matthews and Kesner (2003: 211) state, “[b]ecoming literate is as much about the interaction one has with others around oral and written language as it is about mastering the alphabetic system”. Moje (1995) demonstrated that teacherstudent relationships are critical contexts for the teaching and learning of content-area literacies. Such interactions matter, in part, because doing literacy is not merely about mastering a code, but largely about developing command of literacy practices that are recognized as ‘legitimate’; that is, situationally defined, arbitrarily sanctioned forms of reading or writing with (real or implied) legitimate audiences (Bourdieu 1991; Heller 1996). For example, Moje (2000) discussed her informants’ intricate, complicated, and unsanctioned graffiti literacy practices – practices which earned them the admiration of their peers, but only vilification from others (including their teachers); Finders (1997) found that girls in junior high school worked to display ‘legitimate’ literacy to their teachers through their academic writing and to their peers through the books that they carried (but didn’t read). Thus, doing literacy necessitates crucial social work to seem like a legitimate person practicing literacy in a legitimate context for a legitimate audience. In other words, performing literacy requires extensive interpersonal political manoeuvring and

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impression management. McDermott and Varenne (1995) refer to this process as ‘passing’ as literate;1 I think of it as learning to ‘seem’ literate. Yet “seeming” alone is not sufficient. One must also learn to ‘feel’ literate in order to do literacy. McCarthey (2001) showed how students’ perceptions of their own literacy abilities, and their sense of the perceptions held by their parents and teachers of those same abilities, influenced their broader sense of self. Through an intensive case study, Mahiri and Godley (1998) revealed how one woman’s sense of herself, her intelligence, and her relationships with family and community shifted radically when a physical disability made her unable to write. Though she was still technically literate, she didn’t feel herself to be literate any longer. In this article, I argue that doing literacy involves active and improvised identity work on two levels: the interpersonal (seeming) and the intrapersonal (feeling), in which one works to convince others and oneself that one is the ‘kind of person’ who knows how to read and write. Both levels are social because they imply symbols, images, storylines, collective and individual histories, and other fully social elements. Thus, the never-ending process of learning to read and write exceeds interaction with letters, syllables, words, or texts; it involves critical, social interactional identity work as well. Drawing on theoretical work by Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain (1998), I argue that cultural artefacts function as important tools in this identity work.

The role of cultural artefacts in performing literacy Doing literacy involves an ongoing, improvisational process of identity work in social interaction. Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain (1998) draw upon Bourdieu, Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and actor-network theory to theorize the central role that cultural artefacts play in the process of improvisation. Cultural artefacts are objects or symbols inscribed by a collective attribution of meaning. An artefact can assume a material aspect (which may be as transient as a spoken word or as durable as a book) and/or an ideal or conceptual aspect (such as a label, like 1. McDermott and Varenne tell the story of a group of men who worked for many years as exterminators for New York City housing. To become fully licensed, they had to pass an exam written on an eleventh grade level; until then, they faced lower pay and the threat of losing their jobs. In this example, a specific written test became a hurdle to being ‘literate’ and, more importantly, being ‘an exterminator.’ Yet these men were struggling to answer written questions about knowledge they used everyday on the job. The men passed the test only when other exterminators who had already succeeded taught them the test ‘grammar’. In this case, the city arbitrarily sanctioned test literacy as legitimate language, and in order to pass as legitimate workers the men had to master the test.



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‘good girls’ and ‘bad boys’). Artefacts are constructed as a part of and in relation to recognized activities and figured worlds, or socially produced and culturally constructed “realm[s] of interpretation in which a particular set of characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others” (Holland et al. 1998: 52). Examples of cultural artefacts include the poker chips and life stories significant in Alcoholics Anonymous, the crucifix adopted by many Catholic faithful, high heels and Doc Martens, or labels like ‘gifted and talented’ or ‘slow reader’ in classrooms. Such artefacts ‘open up’ figured worlds; they are the means by which figured worlds are evoked, grown into individually, and collectively developed. These cultural resources are social constructions or products of human activity, and they in turn may become tools engaged in processes of cultural production. Cultural artefacts are essential to identity work.2 According to Vygotsky’s notion of semiotic mediation, such artefacts are central to humans’ abilities to modulate their own thoughts, behaviour, and emotion. From a Vygotskian perspective, through this process of ‘heuristic development’ – a sort of opportunistic, symbolic bootstrapping – humans achieve a modicum of control over their own behaviour and thus some degree of agency. Holland et al. (1998) extend Vygotsky’s idea of semiotic mediation to the development of identities in practice. People use objectifications of social identities – e.g., images, narratives, labels, or memories of past events – to manage their own feelings and actions on a broad scale. The authors suggest that people use material and/or conceptual cultural resources, which are themselves tied to figured worlds such as “storylines, narrativity, generic characters, and desire” (125), to develop the figured aspects of their identities. In some instances, people engage these figured aspects of identity to challenge socially prescribed, “positional” aspects of identities, which “have to do with one’s position relative to socially identified others, one’s sense of social place, and entitlement” (125). In this way, Holland et al. unite a cultural and a social approach to the question of identity formation. They emphasize figured worlds as spaces of practice wherein actors form as well as perform. Particular persons are figured collectively in practice as fitting certain social identities and thereby positioned in power relations. Over time actors grow into such worlds, figuring themselves as actors in those worlds and gaining a sense of their position in the relations of power that characterize the particular community of practice. Recently, Holland and I adapted this framework to address the intersection of self-making and literacy practices (Bartlett and Holland 2002). We argued that 2. Leander (2002) calls these ‘identity artefacts’, and he analyzes classroom discourse to show how students and the teacher employ identity artefacts to ‘stabilize’ a particular interpretation of one student.

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students’ efforts to become literate – and teachers’ efforts to make students literate – could be best understood in relation to the figured world of ‘the educated person.’ In this article, I extend that argument to show how students used cultural artefacts – objects, images, symbols, discourses – to modulate their actions and emotions in order to seem and feel literate.

Using cultural artefacts to do literacy in Brazil In this section, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in two Brazilian cities, I examine how the youth and adult literacy students I interviewed used material and/or ideal cultural artefacts in their efforts to perform literacy. First, I discuss the methods used to collect the data presented in this chapter, and I present relevant background information on the cultural and social context within which students engaged in literacy practices. Next, I provide concrete examples to demonstrate how these students employed cultural resources in their efforts to seem and feel literate.

Methods The data for this chapter derive from a larger study which focused, in part, on the following research question: How do social and cultural factors affect the acquisition and use of literacy among youth and adult students in basic literacy programs in Brazil? As part of this study, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in adult literacy classrooms in two Brazilian cities, during which I divided my time primarily between three public school classrooms and two NGO programs. In 1995–96, I lived in the North Zone of Rio de Janeiro. In 1995, I spent six months in two public school classrooms of a state-funded, supletivo school. I observed classes four nights a week, and I interviewed nine students enrolled in the public school. In 1996, while still living in Rio, I shifted my focus to a nearby adult literacy classroom in an NGO called St. Mary’s,3 a Catholic school run by a congregation of nuns that offered night-time classes to female domestic workers. In addition to observing in the adult literacy classroom over a period of six months, I also interviewed ten St. Mary’s students. In 1999, I returned to Brazil to complete the comparative ethnographic research. I elected to work in João Pessoa, a state capital in the Northeast, which 3. Following anthropological conventions, all formal names of people and organizations used in this article are pseudonyms.



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is the region with the highest levels of illiteracy. For most of that year, I lived in Cruz, an extremely impoverished neighbourhood. Over the course of six months, I dedicated one night per week to participant observation in the state public school’s night classes in adult literacy; I interviewed ten students studying there. I dedicated the other weeknights to observation in the seven literacy classrooms offered by VIDA, the neighbourhood NGO sponsored by European Catholic priests; I also interviewed twelve students enrolled in VIDA.

Data management and analysis Each interview was recorded and transcribed in Portuguese; excerpts from interviews reported in this chapter were translated by the author but also checked for accuracy by a native Portuguese speaker who is fluent in English. Fieldnotes were recorded in notebooks during observations and then entered into a computer that facilitated elaboration on a daily basis. To analyze the data generated by observations and interviews, I employed an inductive, iterative data analysis and interpretation strategy derived from grounded theory. Every two months, I read the data from that period, noted emergent themes, wrote theoretical memos, and then indexed and coded the data. At six month intervals, I re-read all the data and the memos, drew initial conclusions, searched for negative cases, and then developed data displays to model the developing analysis.

Relevant social and cultural contexts It is important to recognize that in Brazil literacy, and education more generally, are unequally distributed along regional, racial, and class lines. The South and Southeastern regions enjoy much higher rates of education than do the North and Northeast. Though the various regions are by and large monolingual, in 1997 the rate of illiteracy in the Southeast was nearly 9 percent, while in the Northeast it hovered near 29 percent (Haddad and Di Pierro nd). Indeed, though the Northeast has only 26.8 percent of the nation’s population, it is home to almost half of the nation’s illiterate population. While literacy rates for white Brazilians topped 91%, rates for ‘blacks’ and ‘browns’ was 78% (IBGE. PNAD 1998; Haddad and Pierro nd; Hasenbalg and Silva 1990). Poorer students in Brazil are much less likely to have access to basic education than are wealthier students: for example, in rural areas, children from families in the poorest quartile have completed, on average, 1.7 years of schooling, while those in the highest quartile have completed 5.4 years; in urban areas the numbers are 3.9 and 10.3 years, respectively (Haddad

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and Piero, nd). This skewed distribution is related to a number of factors, including, but not limited to, availability and quality of schooling, family income and the opportunity cost of schooling a child, the child’s comfort in the school, and the child’s school readiness. In my work with youth and adult literacy students in Brazil, those who appeared to have at least a lower middle class income, had lighter skin, and were from the South or Southeast were often presumed to be literate, while those who had darker skin, were poorer, and/or came from the North, the Northeast, or rural areas were often presumed to be illiterate. On several occasions informants expressed their surprise upon learning that a person of ‘good appearance’ who ‘spoke well’ did not know how to read. By ‘good appearance’, they meant a lighterskinned person who was dressed in clothing that indicated at least a lower-middle class income. By ‘speaking well’, they meant that the person spoke something akin to standard Portuguese. In short, those who reflect a comparatively advantageous class and race status seem literate, and are often given the benefit of the doubt. Over the course of interviewing the 41 adult literacy students, I consistently heard elaborate, poignant narratives of the shaming they had experienced because they didn’t know how to read, write or speak correctly (see Bartlett 2007). These narratives were usually prompted by a single question in the interview: What difficulties have you encountered as a result of not being able to read and write? In response to this question, one young man discussed his terror as a boy of being called upon by the teacher to read in front of the class; several explained their shame over having to leave their thumbprints rather than being able to sign their names during an election. One man discussed how embarrassed he was to admit to the clients in the hair salon where he worked that he could not read and the strategies he used to ‘pass’ for literate. Informants described their unease being in banks, health clinics, or other environments with complex bureaucratic literacies. Moreover, their shame narratives extended to oral events. Despite the fact that the question asked about problems resulting from not being able to read or write, people regularly responded with comments about their speech, rather than (or in addition to) reading and writing. They talked at great length about the shame of speaking in unfriendly circumstances, when their speech patterns exposed them to ridicule. Informants avoided interacting with and speaking in front of others so as to avoid shaming, or they modified their speech in order to fit in. As one woman reported, “There’s always someone correcting you, calling you out, ‘You’re wrong, you’re talking incorrectly.’ Others hear that, and they think it’s funny to make fun of you. That makes you feel ashamed, and you learn to talk like others talk” (Vera April 1996).



To seem and to feel

The students I interviewed thought of speech patterns as intimately tied to literacy abilities, and they thought that learning to read and write more proficiently would also help them learn to ‘speak correctly’. The large majority of the 41 students I interviewed described without prompting moments when other people tried to shame them about their inability to read or write something and/or about the ‘uneducated’ way in which they spoke. Literacy shaming in this context functioned as a potent, and in many ways, debilitating form of symbolic violence, which is Bourdieu’s term for the denigration of a person’s bases for claiming social value (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). Such denigration reflected negatively on the person’s social standing and ability to command respect, and therefore on his/her capacities to either ‘seem’ or ‘feel’ literate. The students I interviewed suggested that literacy shaming made ‘doing literacy’ feel risky, because one was essentially staking a claim for respect. They detailed elaborate strategies that they used to avoid reading, writing, or speaking in front of people that they didn’t trust. In these situations, cultural resources seemed to provide important tools that students could use to manage their feelings of shame (or the anticipation of shame) and perform literacy. In what follows, I provide several examples from observations and interviews to illustrate how students used objects, labels, or other symbols in their efforts to seem and to feel literate. The first set presents more obvious examples of material objects; the second set includes a discussion of how students cultivated a particular sense of self in order to do literacy.

Material cultural artefacts Not surprisingly, students often used artefacts related to reading and writing to develop a sense of themselves as readers and writers. During informal observations with the students I interviewed, I noticed that they often carried pencil cases, printed matter such as the Bible, or other materials, even at times when they did not need or use these materials. Other items were even more specialized. For example, one woman liked to carry small religious bookmarks that she would give as gifts to people; she told me that these bookmarks made her feel closer to the word of God and to being ‘educated’. During a visit to the home of a student named Dalva, I saw that she had tacked a blackboard to the wall in her kitchen. As we sat at the kitchen table chatting, Dalva’s daughter started to use the blackboard to ‘play school’. Dalva interrupted our conversation to warn her daughter not to erase the word “trabalho,” which Dalva had written in the corner of the board. “Trabalho,” or work, had been the theme of discussions and lessons in literacy class that week. When I asked Dalva why she didn’t want the word

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erased, she said, “Because looking at it makes me feel less stupid” [literally, ‘less animal’]. Dalva went on to explain how knowing that she could write her name on the blackboard had helped her when she had to sign her name on an official document at work. Items that signified student status were also important to the people I interviewed. One woman told me she rarely left home without her pasta, a plastic folder students used to carry papers. When I asked her why, she said it was so that others would know she could ‘read a little’. One man told me he liked to wear his school t-shirt not only because it allowed him to ride the bus for free, but so that others would know he was studying.

Non-physical cultural artefacts In other instances, students used a more abstract sense of self to enable their literacy practices. In this section, I provide two extended examples of the ways in which students used such a sense of self to perform literacy. In the first example, Graça told me why studying in a Freirean literacy program helped her to perform literacy in public; in the second example, Eunisa explained how her sense of herself as a religious woman helped her face the scorn she expected to receive from a bureaucrat and sign her name.

Graça Graça is a self-identified negra, or black woman, who grew up in a poor rural area of Minas Gerais (a large, mountainous state bordering Rio de Janeiro), where her family worked as sharecroppers. As a child, she was never allowed to attend the school, located two miles away, because her household needed her labour from her earliest years. During our two hour interview, she talked about the prohibition, as a poor black, against speaking to the landowners in the region, unless in response to a direct question. Graça explained that, when she turned 14, her parents sent her to the city of Rio de Janeiro to work as a maid. In a South Zone apartment facing the famous beaches of Leblon, she worked from 5 AM until 11 PM single-handedly cooking, cleaning, and caring for two parents and their four children, the oldest of whom was two years her senior. Graça told me that she vividly remembered one moment from her time with that family. In the midst of cleaning the room of the younger children, a particularly colourful book caught her eye, and she wandered over to pick it up. Just at that moment, her patroa, or boss, walked in the room and started yelling, “Don’t touch that! I forbid you to



To seem and to feel

touch their books! You don’t have time for that. Besides, what would you learn for?” Graça complied, hurriedly replacing the book on the shelf and returning to her chores. Years later, during our interview, she reported, “Those words stayed in my head. What would I learn for? Why would a person like me study? I was never going to get out of that life of slavery. I felt sad and absolutely isolated.” Graça told me that, for many years, she was haunted by those words; she felt she wasn’t the kind of person who deserved to know how to read or write, and so she didn’t seek to learn. However, many years after she had stopped working for the family mentioned above, she met a woman at church who was attending St. Mary’s, the Catholic NGO in Rio. At this woman’s invitation, Graça too began to attend. Gradually, according to Graça, she started to think of herself as the kind of person who could and should learn to read and write. At the time of our interview, Graça had been attending St. Mary’s for three years, and she was still at the first grade level; in other words, she had not developed rapidly in the traditional sense of becoming literate. However, when I asked her, “How are you different now that you are studying here?”, Graça replied: I talk more with people. I’m happier. I used to be ashamed to enter places. For example, if there was a party, I wouldn’t go, because I thought since I was black I couldn’t mix with whites .… For us, being black, and not knowing how to speak, and not knowing how to read a word, you are isolated. Because you don’t know how to speak, other people don’t pay attention to you, because you don’t know how ... to converse with people. Now it’s different. I arrive in any place, I know how to talk, I know how to buy things, I don’t have that shame to look at people. I have confidence. I know that I will arrive [in a store] and people will wait on me.

In other words, Graça felt that being enrolled in the Freirean literacy program had helped her feel that she was the kind of person who could inhabit commercial and social spaces and expect respect. Before attending the literacy program, the weight of anticipated racism combined with prejudice against those who do not know how to read had prevented her from risking participation in diverse social spaces; she felt that the instruction at St. Mary’s had helped her master speech routines and interaction patterns that made her presence in those public spaces viable. In this case, Graça’s sense of self as a person worthy of respect functioned as what we might call a cultural artefact – a tool that allowed her to risk talking, writing, and reading in front of others.

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Eunisa During fieldwork, adult literacy students related to me stories that suggested that they used such cultural artefacts in order to assert their literacy. For example, consider the following statement by Eunisa, a dark-skinned woman of African descent who self-identified to me as morena – a very flexible racial category in Brazil that includes people with brown hair and a wide variety of skin shades. At the time of our interview Eunisa was 33 years old, married, with no children. She was living in the poorest area of a poor neighbourhood in João Pessoa, where I worked and lived for a year in 1999. As a child, Eunisa had gone to school for only one year before having to drop out and take care of her younger siblings. As an adult, she had studied one year in a neighbourhood-based Freirean literacy program before matriculating at the public adult night school. In her adolescence, Eunisa worked as a maid, but at the time of the interview she had been unemployed for years. The year I knew her, Eunisa was heavily involved in one of the evangelical churches that had sprung up in the neighbourhood. During one of my visits to her home, and at my request, Eunisa was discussing the limitations placed on her life by not knowing how to read and write. When I asked her to give an example, she offered the following story: One day I went to get my Voter’s Card (titulo de eleitor). This guy took us for free. ... He’s a town councilman. Poor thing, many times he runs for office and doesn’t win. He came to get us, a group of us, in a car ... to get our documents for free. When we arrived, there were a lot of people.... So we got in line, a lot of us, and a man said, “Whoever is going to sign, sign here.” And the girl beside me, Betânia, she also later studied at [the NGO], but then she quit. The man said, “Who’s going to sign?” And Betânia said, “Me, but I’m not going to sign, I’m going to use my fingerprint.” And the man said, “Here’s the ‘father of the donkeys’” (pai dos burros), which was the pad of ink to wet your finger and put in on the [document].4 And I got so ashamed, my God, you know?... I knew how to write my name, but I had forgotten. My husband, when I would go to do any document, he would write my name on a sheet of paper for me to copy the length of the page, so I could remember. This was before I went back to school. ... [So I prayed,] my God, God help me; help me sign my name because I don’t want to be embarrassed. [Betânia] had already finished, and he said to me, “Come, here’s the ‘father of the donkeys’.” I felt so ashamed, and I thought, my God, I’m going to sign my name, one way or another. I said, “Look, I don’t know how to sign well, okay? But I want to try.” Because he had already said that to the other woman, and I felt ashamed... He said, “Do it slowly, that’s fine, no problem.” Another guy showed up and said,

4. ‘Donkey’ is a common insult applied to people who don’t know how to read or write.



To seem and to feel

“No problem, don’t hurry yourself.” So I picked up the pen and signed. My name was kind of crooked but it came out.

The experience of registering to vote is a famously painful one for people who have difficulty signing their names. The inkpad has become a powerful (and for some dreadful) artefact in bureaucratic literacy events. It is collectively imbued with meaning. The ‘father of donkeys’, when proffered to Betânia and Eunisa, positioned them as illiterates. Eunisa wished to instead position herself as someone who knew how to sign her name, and she prayed to God for help. Eunisa’s identity as a devout member of a charismatic Protestant sect helped her manage her sense of shame and ‘do literacy.’ In this instance, Eunisa’s capacity to sign her name was not in question. She had done it literally hundreds of times before in the privacy of her home. However, her identity as a literate person was in jeopardy. She didn’t ‘seem’ literate – the literate official assumed that she was incapable of signing her name. Nor did she ‘feel’ literate – her feelings of shame almost overwhelmed her literacy abilities. But Eunisa relied on a cultural artefact – her sense of herself as a person of God, with whom all things are possible – in order to engage in literacy.

Discussion and implications Identity work, conducted with and through compelling cultural artefacts, is central to doing literacy. The students adopted a variety of cultural artefacts – some of them obvious (a blackboard, writing implements, books, student folders, bookmarks) and some of them less obvious (a sense of self as a person deserving respect; a sense of self as a religious person). None of these artefacts ‘made’ students literate. Instead, students adopted cultural tools that would help them seem and feel literate. Students used cultural artefacts to manage their own feelings about the threat of being considered ‘illiterate’, and in many cases to risk asserting themselves as literate. For example, Dalva used the visual image of words on her chalkboard to remind herself that she was capable of writing; Graça used her sense of herself as a student, and perhaps the discourses about equality she had heard in a Freirean classroom, to have the courage to occupy social and commercial spaces where she might be called upon to read or write; Eunisa used her relationship with God to counter the threat of being positioned as illiterate and to sign her name. These students used images, narratives, labels, memories of past events, and material objects to challenge socially prescribed, positional aspects of identities and to ‘do’ literacy.

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The data presented here reveal the important role played by cultural artefacts in the ongoing processes of becoming more literate. While artefacts undoubtedly play a role in all literacy practices, they may prove particularly important for those whose literacy legitimacy or literacy performances are under particularly intense scrutiny, as was the case with these women who lacked formal education and could not read or write in any dominant literacy register. This chapter contributes to sociocultural studies of literacy in several ways. By demonstrating the intense inter- and intra-personal work involved in engaging in literacy practices, the data serve as a healthy reminder that efforts to study or instruct ‘basic’ literacy students should not neglect the critical social dimension of literacy practices. Furthermore, this ‘person-centered’ approach opens the possibility for a fully psychosocial analysis. Given the chasm that exists between psychological and sociological approaches to literacy (e.g., Luke and Freebody 1997), this thread of investigation might prove useful to the field. The concept of cultural artefacts offers particular promise to the field’s ongoing fascination with the concept of identity, since cultural resources are key to self-making. Studies of literacy and identity could profit from attending to other elements of Holland et al.’s sociocultural approach, and some scholars have initiated these efforts. Blackburn (2003) uses three concepts from Holland et al. – figured world, positionality, and space of authoring – to analyze one young woman’s efforts to make space for herself as a lesbian, which she does in part through literacy practices. Blackburn’s linkage of identity studies to discussions of space and place offer one promising route for development in literacy studies. Further, the concept of cultural artefacts helps to address two key criticisms levelled at work in New Literacy Studies: the charge that scholars have focused too exclusively on the ‘local,’ with insufficient attention to larger social processes (Brandt and Clinton 2002; Collins and Blot 2003); and Luke’s (related) argument that New Literacy Studies should pay more attention to the materiality of literacy (2004). First, cultural artefacts, by their nature, evoke broad figured worlds, or “realm[s] of interpretation in which a particular set of characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others” (Holland et al. 1998: 52). These figured worlds, which develop historically, surpass the local but, as Wortham (2006: 8) argues,5 only “take effect as they are successfully applied in events of identification”. Second, many cultural artefacts have a material aspect; the concept draws specifically from actor network theory as developed by Latour and colleagues, who have emphasized how material objects shape social practices. Analyzing the role of cultural artefacts in 5. Instead of the notion of ‘figured worlds’, Wortham uses the concept of ‘sociohistorical models’.



To seem and to feel

literacy practices reveals the impact of material resources on ‘doing’ literacy and also the ways in which these objects draw actors into broader material and symbolic configurations. In these and other areas, the perspective that I have developed here – a personcentred, social analysis of continuously becoming more literate through reliance upon cultural resources – holds potential to enrich the field of literacy studies.

References Bartlett, L. 2007 Literacy, speech, and shame: The cultural politics of literacy and language in Brazil. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 20(6): 1–17. Bartlett, L. & Holland, D. 2002. Theorizing the space of literacy practices. Ways of Knowing Journal 2(1): 10–22. Blackburn, M. V. 2003. Losing, finding, and making space for activism through literacy performances and identity work. Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education, 1(3). http://www. urbanedjournal.org/articles/article0008.html Blackburn, M. V. 2003. Exploring literacy performances and power dynamics at The Loft: Queer youth reading the world and the word. Research in the Teaching of English 37 (4): 467–490. Brandt, D. & Clinton, K. 2002. Limits of the local: Expanding perspectives on literacy as social practice. Journal of Literacy Research 34 (3): 337–356. Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J. C. 1977. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage. Collins, J. & Blot, R. 2003. Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ferdman, B. M. 1990. Literacy and cultural diversity. Harvard Educational Review 60(2): 181– 204. Finders, M. J. 1997. Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High. New York: Teachers College Press. Gee, J. P. 1996. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses (2nd ed.). London: Taylor & Francis. Gee, J. P. 1999. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. London: Routledge. Haddad, S. & Di Pierro, M. C. n.d. Satisfação das necessidades básicas de aprendizagem de jovens e adultos no Brasil: Contribuições para uma avaliação da década da Educação para Todos. São Paulo: Ação Educativa e Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo. Hall, S. 1996. Introduction: Who needs ‘identity’? In Questions of Cultural Identity, S. Hall & P. du Gay (eds), 1–17. London: Sage. Hasenbalg, C. A. & Silva, N. d. V. 1990. Raça e oportunidades educacionais. Estudos Afro-Asiaticos 18: 73–89. Heller, M. 1996. Legitimate language in a multilingual school. Linguistics and Education 8 (2): 139–157. Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. 1998. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Leander, K. M. 2002. Locating Latanya: The situated production of identity artefacts in classroom interaction. Research in the Teaching of English 37: 198–250. Luke, A. & Freebody, P. 1997. The social practices of reading. In Constructing Critical Literacies, S. Muspratt, A. Luke, & P. Freebody (eds), 185–225. Creskill NJ: Hampton Press. Luke, A. 2004. On the material consequences of literacy. Language and Education 18 (4): 331– 335. Mahiri, J. & Godley, A. 1998. Rewriting identity: Social meanings of literacy and “re-visions” of self. Reading Research Quarterly, 33 (4): 416–433. Matthews, M. & Kesner, J. 2003. Children learning with peers: The confluence of peer status and literacy competence within small-group literacy events. Reading Research Quarterly, 38 (2): 208–234. McCarthey, S. 2001. Identity construction in elementary readers and writers. Reading Research Quarterly 36: 122–151. McCarthey, S. & Moje, E. 2002. Identity matters. Reading Research Quarterly 37 (2): 228–238. McDermott, R. & Varenne, H. 1995. Culture as disability. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 26: 343–348. Moje, E. 2000. To be part of the story: The literacy practices of gangsta adolescents. Teachers College Record, 102: 652–690. Moje, E. 1995. “I teach students, not subjects”: Teacher-student relationships as contexts for secondary literacy. Reading Research Quarterly 31 (2): 172–195. Wortham, S. 2006. Learning Identity: The Joint Emergence of Social Identification and Academic Learning. New York: Cambridge University Press.

chapter 3

Being a new capitalist mother Kathy Pitt This chapter analyses the pedagogic discourse of ‘family literacy’, a type of education that works on the literacy development of both mothers and young children. Pitt looks at the strand concerned with adults’ literacy in a UK programme, focusing in particular on a series of television programmes promoting ‘family literacy’. She argues that the pedagogy presented there aims to construct the participants as reflexive but unquestioning learners, ready to accumulate qualifications; and as mothers whose time is constantly available for their children’s cognitive development. The ideal mother is seen to prioritise her children’s learning needs over her own, whilst at the same time being a reflexive but unquestioning student of formal education. These proffered identities are, Pitt suggests, simultaneously ‘rewarding and persecuting’.

Introduction In this chapter I explore the construction of a target group of women as particular kinds of mothers and learners, within teacher training videos of a literacy pedagogy. I base my analysis on Basil Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device. He describes this as dominated by regulative discourse, which he defines as: “(a) moral discourse which creates order, relations and identity” (1996: 46). This regulative discourse contains the model of what the student should become, and Bernstein maintains that this model “contains ideological elements” (1996: 49). The instructional content of pedagogy is embedded within this more powerful regulative discourse. I argue that the representation of family literacy pedagogy I analyse here sets up a vision, through the regulative discourse, of the ideal mother as prioritising her children’s learning needs over her own, whilst at the same time being a reflexive but unquestioning student of formal education. Both these identities can be said to be simultaneously “rewarding and persecuting” (Rose 1989: 152) and are, I suggest, shaped through new capitalist ideology. The videos I examine were produced to introduce a literacy pedagogy called family literacy, which originated in the USA and has been disseminated to other

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post-industrial countries, such as the UK (see Pitt 2001). In England and Wales pilot programmes were set up by the Basic Skills Agency (BSA, then called the Adult Literacy Basic Skills Unit or ALBSU) in 1994, with government funding. Following the success of these initial programmes, and the development of this pedagogy through promotion of materials and through specific funding, this new form of literacy programme has become an established part of adult literacy provision. Most family literacy programmes work with both mother and pre-school or primary school child and are built around three strands. One of these involves basic skills teachers working with the adults to improve their literacy. A second is separate work by the early years teachers with the children. In the third strand adults and children come together in a joint activity related to the children’s understanding and use of reading and writing. The adult strand, which I focus on here, is concerned with both imparting knowledge to the adults about children’s early literacy development, and developing the adults’ own use of the written language. The main data for my analysis are four thirty minute television programmes entitled Developing Family Literacy, produced by the BSA with the help of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and screened by BBC Select; the first programme being shown during a week of events promoting family literacy organised by the BSA in February 1995. The television programmes were designed to be recorded by viewers and used as part of teacher training activities and they draw mainly on the pilot demonstration family literacy programmes in England and Wales. They were produced from within what Bernstein describes as the official recontextualising field of pedagogy, and there are interesting differences in how families are constructed in alternative versions of this pedagogy such as Sheffield University’s film ‘Early Literacy Education with Parents: A framework for Practice’ (see Pitt 2001). The BSA videos provide detailed information on curriculum and organisation for teachers new to the pedagogy, as well as explanation of the need for a new form of literacy teaching. They are made up of edited interviews with students, teachers, headteachers and other educational experts, interspersed with scenes of activities actually taking place on the pilot programmes. These scenes are linked together by a female voiceover with the aid of graphics and music. I also bring into the analysis other texts on family literacy that are related to these training texts. The aim of the official version of the literacy programme that I focus on here is to recruit from the ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘socially excluded’ sectors of the population. The targets are both mothers and fathers with few, if any, qualifications. In the video texts the adult participants are always referred to by the authors as parents, a representation they follow through in both visual and linguistic modes of their promotional leaflets about the pedagogy. However, the visual track of these multimodal texts show us that it is mainly mothers of young children who



Being a new capitalist mother

took part in the pilot programmes. Of the fourteen ‘parents’ who are interviewed, only two are fathers and the classrooms filmed are full of women with an occasional lone man among them. The literacy teachers are also women. Although the discourse reaches out to include fathers, family literacy is shown to be mainly a world of women. In the analysis that follows I first explore how the video discourse constructs these mothers as learners able to evaluate themselves, and then I examine the model of the mother that these learners are also to become. I concentrate here mainly on what the participants in the texts say, although elsewhere I have explored how the images contribute to the discourse (Pitt 2001). I want here to make it clear that this is not an analysis of actual family literacy pedagogic practices and their outcomes, which take place in the myriad of classrooms, libraries and other sites across England and Wales. I focus here on a dominant vision of these practices which is aimed at the teachers in these sites. My analysis here aims to make visible some of the assumptions and contradictions woven into these multimodal texts. How these are taken up, resisted or modified by teachers and learners is a complex process and a subject for research in its own right. I refer to the four television programmes as Video One, Video Two, Video Three and Video Four respectively in my discussion of them that follows. In the introduction to each video in these training texts, the voiceover defines the two main objectives of the pedagogy for the adult participants: “(family literacy) offers their parents a chance to add to their own skills and learn more about supporting their children’s language development”. In this section I examine what the BSA mean by add to their own skills and trace the ideological shaping of these texts’ version of the pedagogy.

Bridges and stepping stones: The path to qualifications These texts are full of talk about getting certificates and further study. In the introduction to each programme, for example, the voiceover says of the adult strand, “parents to improve their own basic skills and work towards qualifications”. No reason is given here for including qualifications; they are represented as without need for justification, as ‘natural’ to this pedagogy. However, near the end of the last programme, the producers do provide a reason within a discourse of self development: “In order to give a sense of progress and achievement for parents and children, some form of credit for work accomplished has to be built in to the programme” (voiceover). The use of the obligation modal has to refers out to the conditions imposed on those organisations applying for BSA funding for family literacy: offering an accreditation scheme is one of the conditions for funding. In

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this utterance both adults’ expectations of the literacy work, and the ability of accreditation to provide the vehicle for these expectations, is presupposed, leaving no room for alternatives. The teachers in the videos focus on learning as the developmental goal for the mothers. Here are two teachers in Video Two talking about the adult students: 1. The parents that start the course often start the course as a parent who’s come to help their child learn, but emerge from the course as an adult who’s a learner, who’s a potential student for all sorts of other things. 2. I know twelve weeks isn’t long enough to fix all of the problems. We can identify them. We can show them where to go to next. I think one of the most encouraging things about these courses up to date has been the fact that they have seen me for what I am which is simply a stepping stone to further education. And it was nice to see a hundred percent of the parents in the last course all going on to further education. Both teachers talk about the pedagogy of the programme as constructing a student identity. The first teacher talks about this process as if it were an impersonal, ‘natural’ force; a metamorphosis (start as – emerge as). There is no specific attribution of agency and the course is seen as a transforming space for the parents’ consciousness. Whereas the first teacher does not specify the end uses of this new identity, the second teacher explicitly describes the course as a channel into institutionalised education, in line with the absorption of Adult Basic Aducation (ABE) into Further Education (FE) colleges in the UK. Here, the educator’s implicit definition of achievement (and it was nice to see) is acceptance on another education course. This teacher uses the metaphor of the stepping stone; for her the pedagogic discourse is there to guide the parents to follow a specific path. This overall aim of the adult literacy component is repeated by another teacher in the same video and she uses a similar metaphor of a bridge: This scheme has the great advantage of bridging the gap between adult education classes that parents would normally shy away from. These may be people (who) have always said, “that’s not for me, that’s education with a capital E”, and by encouraging parents to come here, if you like under the guise of, “Well you can help your child and help yourself ”, they see that as a very informal and non threatening situation.

Here the teacher recognises the potential negative image of institutional education for ABE students, and sees her role as adapting the students towards it. Like the first teacher quoted, she represents the official aim of family literacy: for parents to learn how to support their child’s literacy, as not the ‘real’ pedagogic aim.



Being a new capitalist mother

For the first teacher it is a starting point; for this teacher it is a false aim (under the guise of), a ruse to entice these untamed subjects (shy away from). In Video Three an example of another teacher articulating the goal of the course as further study shows how widespread this discourse is in these texts, and again how it varies slightly according to the individual styles of each teacher: Some of the women have actually gone onto other courses because in (name of town) there are a lot of bilingual courses going on, and after having done this they felt they could go on to other courses. Like one woman is doing a childcare course and another one is doing a business admin course. And it’s wonderful to feel that they’re progressing like that. And we don’t want the women to feel after the twenty weeks that’s it it’s over you know. We want them to feel they can go on to do other things.

Here there is no striking metaphor, but progress, like achievement, is seen as the take up of further education and here the teacher names two specifically vocational courses. She also indicates a need to legitimate the courses and provide tangible aims in their face to face contact with mothers recruited onto the courses: “And we don’t want the women to feel after the twenty weeks, that’s it, it’s over you know.” Much money and time is invested in the mothers on these intensive family literacy programmes, and they are not just there to work on their children’s literacy, they are also working on their own, so legitimisation for this work is required. How is all this attention and expertise justified? The teachers’ answer, as represented here, is to give them a certificate and also urge them to continue using their literacy through formal study.

Learning to be reflexive This discursive shaping of a learner identity is not just present in the teacher talk about the course, it is also present in the filmed representation of some of the practices. In Video One we see a group of mothers watching a video about children’s reading and discussing it. Part of this scene is also inserted into Video Two on writing. Here the editing puts emphasis on the literacy task the parents are engaged in whilst watching the video. The section starts with a frame of the teacher’s instructions to them and this is followed by a reformulation of the task in the voiceover summary of the whole section: Teacher: What I’ve done on this sheet is I’ve made a list of a few points that the video picks out. So if you could just maybe write next to it the sorts of things that you think the messages that the video is trying to put across.

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Voiceover: In (name of city) family literacy activities around writing are planned for separate and joint work. Whilst children are involved in early writing their parents practice note taking and letter writing which can lead to accreditation.

The parents are taking notes on a handout prepared by the teacher to guide them into recording what the teacher thinks are the main points of the text; an interaction with a TV text that is generally found in the classroom and lecture hall. This is summed up by the voiceover as practice note taking, and linked to qualifications. So, although the content of the text is children’s literacy and part of their general learning about early literacy, the mothers’ activity, imposed by the teacher, is also situated by the voiceover, as part of general study practices. Other practices are talked about by teachers, rather than filmed in process, and are relevant here as they are pedagogic practices concerned with explicitly shaping the adults’ learning. In Video One there is film of a flipchart in one classroom listing course aims and activities and linking them with the accreditation scheme, WordPower, which is widely used in ABE: Camera focuses on flipchart on which, hand-written, we can read 23/11 Early Reading. By the end of this session you should: 1. understand how to encourage a child’s early reading skills 2. be able to: a. Take notes from a video 12.2 b. Take part in a discussion 10.1/10.2 c. write a letter 9.1. d. use the wordprocessor 6.2 e. make a leaflet 9.1 f. get information from an advert 7.1 3. feel confident and prepared for the joint activity

The numbers on the right refer to units within the WordPower scheme. In Video Four a teacher explains how such a text is brought into the action of the classroom: At the end of the session I think it’s important that we make time, usually about ten minutes, for the parents to look back at the aims and discuss them. See if they feel that they have learnt a bit more about the theme, say early reading, and that they do feel more confident that their skills have improved.

Here the teacher is asking the adults to engage in reflexivity about their own learning; a practice that is now common throughout secondary, further and higher education fields in the form of self evaluation exercises, statements of learning



Being a new capitalist mother

outcomes and feedback forms in which the student is first invited to reflect on their own learning before evaluating the teaching. In Video Two a teacher on another course refers to a similar practice, but this time involving adult writing: Teacher: We evaluate every session by starting with the parents. The parents have a record sheet which they fill in at the end of the session, and they record what they have achieved during the time they’ve spent with us and they also write down their comments; how they felt about the activities that they’d accomplished, and how they felt about the way the activities were presented to them. So they will evaluate themselves. If they feel happy to feed that back to me and in most cases they do, then I will obviously take their comments on board and that will form a large part of my evaluation.

This extract shows how these reflexive practices about learning become part of the regulative discourse of the pedagogic device, as represented here. The parents are asked to keep a record of not just the official course activities, but their feelings about them (how they felt), and the teacher words these activities as achieved and accomplished, constructions that contain strong positive and emotional force. The practice is represented by the teacher as serving as an on-going evaluation; a way for the parents to contribute to the course. Yet, the form of the dialogue is imposed and structured by the teacher. Such strong framing suggest that this practice is more about the parents learning to recognise and record the legitimate activities and feelings, as reflected in the teacher’s utterance “So they will evaluate themselves”; that is, they will not need the teacher to assess their performance as they are learning to do it themselves within the discourse.

Doing is studying So far I have focused on the teachers’ participation within this discourse, but the extracts from interviews with the parents on these courses also present those who have agreed to be interviewed as recognising and realising the rules of this discourse (Bernstein 1996: 31–32). Within the introduction to the first film (Video One) there are extracts from interviews with three mothers participating in the courses, presumably responding to a question about the effect of the family literacy course: 1. I haven’t actually achieved very much in my life and to actually be able to see that I have a City and Guilds certificate um, well that gives me more confidence in myself.

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2. It makes me get up to go and do something, because before this course I wasn’t doing nothing. [it’s helped give?] more encouragement to go to another course when this one finish. 3. I thought about an English course, GCSE or something, ’cos I always liked English at school but I didn’t take any exams or anything. But it gives you the confidence to get out there and do it. The first mother here talks about achievement as gaining a qualification, which accords with the teachers’ discourse and practice as analysed in the previous sections. The other two mothers also talk about their future within the terms of the discourse; they now see themselves as learners. For the second and third mothers, do(ing) something is defined as taking a course. In Video Two another mother echoes those above on the effect of the course: Before the course I wanted to go to college but I never got round to it and this has made me even more determined now. It’s put, it’s planted it back in my head and I will go for it.

Interestingly, with respect to her use of the impersonal actor (it) and passive voice in it’s planted it back in my head she repeats the expression of the process as a natural force in the same way as the teacher who described the course as a space of transformation, attributing the force of this pedagogic discourse as above the level of the individuals. They both give voice to the normalisation process (as defined by Foucault 1984) as a social process that is both beyond individual agency and yet produced through the actions of individuals (I will go for it). To sum up, the producers present the gaining of qualifications as cultural capital, the teachers talk about the adults being transformed into successful and reflexive students through the course practices, and adults endorse this discursive shaping by defining future action as some form of study. The way the teacher plans the course and instructs the student, and talks about, and to the student, is what Bernstein calls framing. Framing encompasses the delivery of both the instructional and regulative discourses, but it is the regulative discourse that, for Bernstein, controls the official communication of a pedagogy, and attempts to regulate identity: First, the rules of social order refer to the forms that hierarchical relations take in the pedagogic relation and to expectations about conduct, character and manner. This means that an acquirer can be seen as a potential for labels. Which labels are selected is a function of the framing. Where framing is strong, the candidates for labelling will be terms such as conscientious, attentive, industrious, careful, receptive. (Bernstein 1996: 27)



Being a new capitalist mother

As I have shown, the labels for the adults in this model of family literacy concern being studious, self evaluative and receptive to accreditation tasks. This representation of the student can be seen as part of the relocation of ABE into the field of FE. It can also be seen as part of the wider colonisation of ABE and FE by the new capitalist ideology, as I go on to argue. The need for the individual and the company to adapt to the inevitable forces of the globalised market is a dominant ideology in the last decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first, in post industrialised countries. It shapes government policies on education and employment, as the following extracts from a New Labour government consultative document show: Investment in human capital will be the foundation of success in the knowledge based global economy of the twenty first century …. To achieve stable and sustainable growth, we will need a well educated, well equipped and adaptable labour force. To cope with rapid change and the challenge of the information and communication age, we must ensure that people can return to learning through(The Learning Age, a Department and Employment out their lives …   consultative document, 1998, cited in Fairclough 2000)

Learning is represented here as a key activity for employees, linking with Tony Blair’s (the New Labour prime minister at the time) slogan of ‘education, education, education’. In other government texts at this time adult education is often referred to as lifelong learning. The BSA situate themselves within this ideology in a leaflet they produced when they started the campaign on family literacy in 1994. It is a promotional leaflet designed for a wider audience than the training texts under analysis here. It was sent to all primary schools and FE colleges, but also given out to the media and at conferences. On a page entitled “Literacy: the need” they say: Basic skills are the cornerstone of education and training. They are increasingly important as jobs become more complex and international competition more intense. Poor basic skills are estimated to cost British industry more than £4.8 billion a year.  (ALBSU 1994) . The concept of lifelong learning has long been part of ABE discourses, originating in the struggle within this practice to legitimate adults’ needs to continue formal learning and counter the representation of these needs as due to deficit and individual failure. Mary Hamilton, for instance, uses lifelong learning in her historical account of the field of ABE, to signify, “the right of individual adults to a basic education” (Hamilton 1996: 163) and locates the origin of the concept in OECD and UNESCO reports in the early 1970s (Hamilton 1996: 152). Within new capitalist discourses, however, this concept has been appropriated to signify a necessity for workers to go back to the classroom and update their knowledge, rather than the right of all individuals.

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In this text the social acts of reading and writing are condensed into the nominalisation basic skills and are represented as the key to individual and national survival in an ever changing capitalist workplace. Basic skills becomes the major actor in this short story about the British workplace threatened from both within and without. Indeed, the BSA based their model of family literacy on programmes in the USA, which the following extracts illustrate were situated within what has been called new capitalist ideology (Fairclough 2000; Gee et al. 1996). One of the articles in the BSA special edition of their journal on family literacy was written by an American educator and consultant, Thomas Sticht. In it he reports on a US government initiative called The Workforce Education and Lifelong Learning (WELL) Strategy for Education and Economic Reform. Here are some of the goals of the version of family literacy from this initiative: Adults themselves need to be highly educated so that as parents they may prepare their children for learning in school. They need skills and knowledge so that they can individually compete for well-paying jobs and serve as members of a worldclass workforce that can compete for high wage jobs in the new world economic order. (Sticht 1993: 11)

Adult roles are here restricted to those of parent and employee, as they are in the BSA model of family literacy. As well as supporting the school system as parents, they are constructed as individuals struggling within a taken-for-granted globalised market, and the role of government structures and agency are not part of the story. In addition, Sticht’s depiction of a world-class workforce also only describes one section of the workforce. It leaves out the mass of low-paid workers in the expanding service industries and manufacturing sectors; often now located in countries where labour is cheap and has little legal protection. These workers are also essential for the market to function. (See Freebody and Freiberg, this volume, for a discussion on distinct kinds of economic conditions and labour conditions that characterise nation-states in the global economy.)

Presences and absences As Bernstein (1996: 47) argues, “every time a discourse moves from one position to another, there is a space in which ideology can play”. As this new family literacy pedagogy has brought together the different pedagogic discourses from early years education and ABE, it is this new capitalist ideology that has occupied the space created in this official film version. Reading and writing for family literacy mothers is represented in the social practices of mothering, learning specific



Being a new capitalist mother

study practices and gaining qualifications. This is a narrow selection of the possible social practices in which literacy may be salient in the lives of such parents and an ideological selection reflecting the instrumental education of adults to fit the needs of the market.

Disappearing the local community One element of this ideology is the centring of social responsibility exclusively on the individual citizen. This element is part of many American family literacy texts. For example, in the article by Sticht I have already referred to, the writer goes on, in the extract I quoted above, to name another educational goal: “And they [adults] need to constitute a social community that controls violence, drug abuse, and is conducive to learning both in and out of school” (Sticht 1993: 11). Here the writer moves from the individual’s responsibility to better themselves through education and work to their membership of specific communities. Literacy education is linked to a moral discourse; education becomes the solution to a limited selection of social problems. Although there is seemingly a shift from individual to collective in the use of the term community, agency is still attributed to the private individual; the state is absent from this community and specific social problems are implicitly associated with lack of education. Associating a lack of literacy with social problems is absent from the BSA texts. Indeed, in one article on family literacy, the deputy director explicitly dissociates the BSA from this moral discourse: We have tried to avoid some of the more inflated claims, found in some American programmes, which suggests that family literacy has the capacity to effect wider social and economic change. (Hemstedt 1995: 10)

Difficulties with reading and writing are not demonised by being put alongside street crime or drug addiction. Nevertheless, the ideological emphasis on individual self development and lifelong learning remains. There is no trace of the communities of the adult students in the talk and practices of these texts, apart from those implicit in their regional accents. Only the ‘community’ of FE courses and primary schools, are actively part of this representation of adult literacy education. The material presence of the local communities of the pilot programme families is richly documented in the visual text of these videos. We see small terraced houses and a variety of council estates; the dwelling places of those in UK society who earn the lowest incomes. But the lives of these families in these streets do not enter into the talk and action of the teacher training texts produced to inform

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teachers about family literacy. This pedagogic separation of the adult from the complexity of their lives outside the course may be an attempt to avoid the explicit representation of family literacy with political and economic issues to be found in the USA, but exclusion of community as a space where mothers use the written language is as powerful an act as inclusion.

Introducing speaking Although this pedagogy is labelled as a literacy course, the producers and teachers present activities centred around the adults’ spoken as well as written language, an element of language previously not part of ABE literacy education. This element enters the discourse of family literacy through the centralised WordPower scheme produced by the BSA; which is defined as a communication skills certificate in the texts. Speaking becomes an item to be assessed, along with reading and writing. And it is placed alongside talk about child language in Video Three, in the same way as the reading and writing of the two groups are intertwined in Videos One and Two. We can see the differing ways talk is constructed as a pedagogic topic by three of the teachers While they’re having the talk with (name of a teacher) obviously they have to listen to her, so they’re developing those listening skills and then there is a discussion afterwards in which they have to participate

and, also in Video Three, but from a different family literacy course, another teacher describes a similar pedagogic practice in which an activity concerned with early literacy is legitimated through its underlying purpose to develop the adults’ communicative abilities: The activity involved the students in, um, a lot of collaborative work. It was an exercise in which they needed to share ideas, to articulate their opinions. They had to listen to others in order to put the story together.

Whereas, earlier in the video a third teacher described a practice purely designed around the adults’ spoken language: In planning the session I try to devise a range of activities that will develop speaking and listening skills. I included a brainstorming session where there was feedback involved from the students. We also had small group work which fed back into the whole group.



Being a new capitalist mother

The first two teachers presuppose the value of listening to others. The second teacher’s description stresses the adults’ positive action in oral activities more than the first (articulate their opinions as opposed to participate). The third teacher emphasises her own agency as educator, and the adults’ actions are backgrounded through nominalisation of the form of the activity (feedback, small group work). This is similar to the first teacher’s construction of their action through obligation to the structure of the task (have to participate). The second teacher chooses to word the actions in terms that connote the flat hierarchies of new capitalism, as discussed by Gee et al. (1996: 29) (collaborative, share, put together). The pedagogic discourse here can be seen as aiming to promote the kind of communication valued in the new capitalist workplace, and indeed, in democratic societies. However, the overall social relations of this pedagogic discourse in these texts are more hierarchical than democratic, more like the first and third teachers than the second, and paying attention to the way people interact in the workplace can be seen as part of the increasing technologisation of language (Fairclough 1992); discursive practices such as team work are subject to scrutiny and training, part of the shaping of the individual for the workplace. Cameron (2000) has explored how pervasive (in both public and private spheres) is advice and training on how to communicate in face to face interactions. Her research illustrates contemporary practices that attempt to govern the interaction of individuals. There is no explanation for the inclusion of speaking as part of adult literacy education. It is taken as a ‘natural’ extension of emergent literacy pedagogic concerns over child language and literacy development. However, subjecting the adults’ talk to assessment presupposes some level of standardisation, and therefore potential criticism of deviation from this, much as Bartlett describes with regard to the Brazilian context, in her chapter in this collection. Such pedagogic instruction, or correction of the way an adult speaks, is not represented in the practices we see in the texts and the producers and teachers’ talk about adult spoken language contain contradictions as I now show. In Video Three the voiceover twice introduces speaking as a part of the course: “Meanwhile, parents develop their own oral skills in the next room” and, “Whilst parents develop their own oral skills”. Nevertheless, in the middle of the film, in a conclusion to a section on children’s language development through nursery rhymes, the voiceover says: Parents often feel relatively confident with their speaking and listening. Family literacy can help to build on this by maximising opportunities for a wide variety of talking and listening with their children.

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Here, a difference between the parents’ representations of their language, and the educators is implicit. The authors do not directly challenge this, but word it with a verb relating to perception (feel) rather than the verb to be, thereby leaving it open to debate. Then, they over-ride it with the metaphor build on; the parents’ speech ability is not yet ‘complete’. They also use interaction with the children in the same way as they legitimate work on the adults’ reading and writing (developing this aspect will benefit their children). This attributed perception is modified by the word relatively but no explanation is given as to what this feeling of confidence is relative to. This lack of explicitness opens up a space for different interpretations; I read the gap created here as an implicit comparison with parents’ confidence in their reading and writing, but again it serves to hedge the BSA’s commitment to the truth of the participants’ perceptions. Nothing more is said on the videos about a difference in perceptions between educators and parents but the teachers show this is a sensitive area in their talk. One teacher emphasises the implicit structure of an activity in which mothers talk about the role of television in the home: “then there is a discussion afterwards in which they have to participate, so it’s done very very naturally.” and “They are not even aware that these skills are being developed”. She seems to be saying here that the pedagogic aims to develop speech are actually not made clear to the participants, in contrast with the explicit reflexive learning practices presented elsewhere in these texts. Natural here is opposed to strongly framed instructional discourse, and one implication is that the parents would object to this in some way. A little later she returns to this concept of speech development as a natural development, rather than the result of direct pedagogic intervention, and links oral ability with personality traits: When the parents first joined the course, very often some of them are very shy and withdrawn, and it’s nice to see them developing as the course goes on. They begin to join in, make little comments here and there and you don’t actually have to mention them by name anymore. They’re quite willing to join in on their own account and eventually as the weeks go on you can see they’re sitting and listening to other people. They’re taking on board their ideas before joining in with their own.

Here she juxtaposes a process of trust building, in which a person slowly drops a reserve on the expression of the self, with a communicative learning process (taking on board their ideas before joining in); so a shy person becomes one who does not know how to listen. This confusion is not part of the discourse of another teacher who in extract two at the beginning of this section describes the sound story activity as collaborative. She too, does not talk about the teaching of speak-



Being a new capitalist mother

ing; but constructs the activity as practising the oral skills, again, as if the participation somehow will provide the necessary environment for acquisition: The parents writing the sound story could lead to accreditation in a number of units and elements of WordPower. It was a good opportunity for practising the oracy element, the giving and receiving of information. It also involved the parents in reading and extracting information and of course a number of oracy skills in conversing with their children.

She juxtaposes this natural acquisition process with the school pedagogic discourse in which communication is presented as made up of segmented units. Finally, a clip of the interview with the third teacher, who constructed the speaking element within a strongly framed instructional discourse, is shown in Video Four in the section on accreditation. Here her description of the parents is at odds with her earlier stated pedagogic aim in Video Three to develop their speaking and listening skills: Every parent on this course is working towards stage one WordPower. They are articulate but they have all identified a need to work towards reading and writing and improving those skills.

This representation is similar to the voiceover’s, “Parents often feel relatively confident with their speaking and listening”, but here the teacher’s “They are articulate” is presented as fact rather than feeling. These contradictions sum up the tensions in these texts of including the speech of the adults as subject to the pedagogic discourse. Spoken language is accepted by teachers as part of the accreditation, but they are not shown instructing it. Rather, they construct it as a developmental process. My interpretation of the hybridity of their discourse is that they avoid the potentially face-threatening situation of being critical about an adult’s way of talking, whilst carrying out the imposed syllabus. These contradictory voices imply that the idea that an individual’s speech is subject to pedagogic norms is not yet explicitly accepted, both by teachers as well as adults on the programme. Yet, within new capitalist ideology, language is as much a commodity as literacy. Gee at al. (1996: 47) in their analysis of new developments in business organisation and expectations, cite Reich’s prediction of the development of two distinct categories of workers in the global economy; the elite symbolic-analytic and the more widespread routine production services and in-person services. The picture of active collaboration painted by the second teacher, above, fits in with the category of symbolic-analytic worker concerned with “problem-identifying, problem-solving, and strategic brokering activities”. Similarly, the learning practices that dominate the adult strand, are practices that are essential to the symbolic-analytic worker. Being reflexive about one’s learning, and successfully

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accumulating qualifications are two of the gatekeeping criteria for entry into this category. However, as I have shown in the analysis, the emphasis in these texts has been on adults learning to comply with accreditation requirements, evaluating themselves within the official discourse, and reading and writing texts that do not relate to their daily lives. Such social relations and practices fit in much more with Reich’s second category of literate but compliant workers, described by Gee et al. (1996: 46–47) as follows: beyond demands for basic numeracy and the ability to read, such work tends to call primarily for reliability, loyalty, and the capacity to take direction and, in the case of in-person service workers, “a pleasant demeanour”.

These texts are full of instances of parents taking direction from the teachers. Learning to listen and participate in discussion can also be interpreted as part of the demeanour necessary for workers in contact with the public, such as in the retail industry.

Being a good mother As I said at the beginning of this chapter, family literacy pedagogy has two objectives concerning the adult participants. The second one concerns their role in society as mothers: “(family literacy) offers their parents a chance to add to their own skills and learn more about supporting their children’s language development”. It is this part of the curriculum that dominates in these texts and the screen is full of mothers absorbed in making educational games and other literacy artefacts and reading stories with their children. As the analysis above shows, work on the mothers’ use of the written and spoken language is mostly grafted onto instruction about their young child’s learning and the parental role as “their children’s first teachers” (voiceover in the introduction to each video). For example, a teacher and mothers are filmed reading two typed letters, called by the voiceover agony aunt letters in Video One. The letters are from parents asking for advice about their young children’s reading, and this activity is shown to be part of a session with the parents about early reading. The letters have obviously been written by the teacher, rather than taken from a real text, as the content matches the concerns of the session on early reading exactly, and the letters are in a work sheet format, rather than a magazine or newspaper one. The mothers are then asked to reply to these letters in the role of the agony aunt, and the teacher explains how the letter activity links two pedagogic aims:



Being a new capitalist mother

The session that we did was about early reading and there were two purposes of it mainly. The first one was to make the parents more aware of the sorts of things they could do to encourage their children to develop these early reading skills. And the second theme of the morning was to get them to develop their own skills as well.

The mothers, in their replies, both explain how to select the right kinds of books for children, and practice letter writing. In another task, mothers make I can do books for their children, using computer word-processing. These activities carry within them specific norms on maternal behaviour in the home that come from a variety of sources. I have not the space to show all the intertextual links to the social science discourse of early literacy (see Pitt 2001 for this). Here I will focus on one influential piece of research which has contributed towards these norms as it vividly illustrates the kind of mother that this version of family literacy aims to produce. In this research the conversations in the home between fifteen middle class and fifteen working class mothers and pre-school children were recorded and analysed (Tizard and Hughes 1984). As a result of this analysis, what is praised by the researchers is the ability to turn any household chore into a learning and fun experience for the child. It is the role of the good mother to be constantly available for the child to develop: “The child’s mother is thus very salient to her, constantly available to answer questions, provide information and act as a conversation companion.” (Tizard and Hughes 1984: 250). Walkerdine and Lucey (1989) focus on this research and set out a differing interpretation of the data. Although the original researchers’ aim was to show how working class homes could equal middle class homes as sites of learning, Walkerdine and Lucey argue that the research pathologises working class homes by making middle class mothering practices the norm, and that the middle class mother’s home life is even more tightly regulated by such norms which add mental development to the list of desirable mothering duties. They label activities in the home in which the mother supports the child’s learning through involvement in housework as domestic pedagogy. Domestic pedagogy is certainly part of the BSA texts. For example, the practice of writing shopping lists with your child becomes part of the family literacy curriculum, as a teacher explains in Video Three: In this session we were looking at literacy skills around the kitchen, but in particular we were focusing on the speaking and listening skills that are involved as the child plays in the kitchen, does a certain activity in the kitchen or follows on from that and goes shopping with the parent.

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Here the teacher is focusing on the child’s mental development and agency in the domestic setting and the housework the mother might be involved in disappears. Brief extracts from interviews with mothers that begin Video Three, on Talking and Listening, can be seen as illustrating how such norms are transmitted through the pedagogy of family literacy: 1. Because of the course we talk a lot more now. He’ll explain things to me and I’ll explain things back to him. 2. If it’s raining, looking out of one of their bedroom windows and talking about what we can see, whether we can see any birds, whereas before it would be “it’s raining put the telly on that’s it sit there in front of a video”. 3. It’s just when people come round it’s sort of like, “you’ll have to excuse me, I’m playing”, whereas before I’d say to the children, “look mummy’s got to stop now, she’s got to make so and so a cup of tea”. All three women show they have learnt the lesson that talking and playing with your children is part of being a good mother. One and two say that before the course they did not interact a great deal with their children and that increased interaction is a good thing. The third mother, also has learnt that interaction with her children is a priority but she is extending a practice into time that she previously kept for herself in roles other than motherhood (look mummy’s got to stop now). These mothers are describing the model of a good mother set up in these texts.

Conclusion This representation of family literacy discourse therefore constructs the women who participate in these films as both mothers and learners. And these positions can be seen as paradoxically controlling and liberating. As mothers they are positioned as co-opting into their children’s education in particular ways, through their desires to be good mothers. Nikolas Rose has charted, from a Foucauldian perspective, how social scientists such as child psychologists have normalised specific mothering practices throughout the twentieth century. Knowledge about the mental and physical health of young children centred on the mother as a ‘natural’ key actor in the raising of the normal, healthy child. He argues that such norms are both “rewarding and persecuting” (Rose 1989: 152). Time shared with a young child can bring pleasure, contribute to their overall development and thus be rewarding, yet where do you draw the line between your children’s needs and your own? Being constantly available is also a persecution.



Being a new capitalist mother

And in the family literacy discourse of these texts these norms are articulated with a pedagogic discourse that works to produce the mother as a reflexive learner. Again, this model both rewards and persecutes. Achievement is constructed as becoming a student and gaining qualifications. Possession of qualifications opens the door to a choice of employment and is highly valued within the symbolicanalytic levels of new capitalist society, but only so far as they indicate an ability to cope with constant change within the knowledge base. The ability to question, problem solve and critique are also essential for membership of what Sticht (1993) calls a world-class workforce. However, in these films the social relations are predominately hierarchical. The mothers are filmed learning in teacher centred classrooms where tasks are imposed. They are constructed, through the editing, as parents, receivers of messages and learners, but not initiators or members of the local or wider community. Their spoken language is also presented by the authors as an unquestioned element of basic skills and subject to evaluation. The basic skills represented here are tailored more to provide an essential kit for the new capitalist service worker, rather than the elite knowledge worker. And the mother has to spend more of her time both studying and supporting her child’s development.

References ALBSU. 1994. Developing family literacy. A leaflet. London: ALBSU (BSA). Bernstein, B. 1996. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. London: Taylor and Francis. Cameron, D. 2000. Good to Talk? Living and Working in a Communication Culture. London: Sage. Fairclough, N. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fairclough, N. 2000. Language in the new capitalism. Language in the New Capitalism website. http://www.uoc.es/humfil/nlc/LNC. (12 July, 2000). Foucault, M. 1984. The means of correct training. In The Foucault Reader, P. Rabinow (ed.). London: Penguin. Gee, J. P., Hull, G. & Lankshear, C. 1996. The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism. St. Leonards NSW: Allen & Unwin. Hamilton, M. 1996. Literacy and adult basic education. In A History of Modern British Adult Education, R. Fieldhouse (ed.). Leicester: National Institute for Adult Continuing Education. Hemstedt, A. 1995. A good start for learning: Family literacy work by the basic skills agency. Reading 29(3): 10–14. Pitt, K. 2001. The Discourse of Family Literacy. PhD dissertation, University of Lancaster. Rose, N. 1989. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge. Sticht, T. 1993. Workforce education, family literacy and economic development. ALBSU Viewpoints 15: 9–15.

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Tizard, B. & Hughes, M. 1984. Young Children Learning: Talking and Thinking at Home and in School. London: Fontana. Walkerdine, V. & Lucey, H. 1989. Democracy in the Kitchen: Regulating Mothers and Socialising Daughters. London: Virago Press.

part ii

Local and global Taking hold of literacy

chapter 4

Habitus in children’s multimodal text-making A discussion* Kate Pahl This chapter provides a suggestive reading of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus that Pahl uses to examine how children’s texts were constructed in the home in relation to social practice and cultural identity. The chapter explores the processes by which everyday household practices become instantiated within texts, firstly through a study of the multimodal meaning-making practices of Turkish immigrant children in London, and secondly through the mapping activities of a child who spatially represents her family relations. The chapter shows such texts to be rooted in cultural resources from the home and family history in ways that contribute to the children’s acquired dispositions and creativity. Pahl examines the way in which texts sediment into practices in the home, and the way practices generate texts.

Introduction In this chapter, I make the leap from a focus on literacy as a social practice to sociological theory, and in particular Bourdieu’s practice theory, and his concept of habitus (Bourdieu 1990). I argue that this enables me to make sense of the ways in which long-term practices can be found instantiated or sedimented within texts. The New Literacy Studies provides a practice-focused account of literacy by describing the link between literacy and social practice. The ‘social turn’ in literacy research has been identified through the work of Gee and Street and many others (Gee 2000; Street 1993). The New Literacy Studies begins the trail from texts to practices to social processes, in that starting with the idea of literacy as a social practice enables new types of questions to be asked, such as: what are the everyday * This paper has drawn on the following previous papers: Pahl, K. 2002. Habitus and the home: Texts and practices in families. Ways of Knowing Journal 2(1): 45–53, and also Pahl, K. 2008. Tracing habitus in texts and practices. In Pierre Bourdieu and Literacy Education, A. Luke & J. Albright (eds). London: Routledge.

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iterative practices in households, and how do people live their lives? This then leads to a focus on ethnography as a methodology, which investigates the everyday, making the familiar strange (Agar 1996). Street, in his work in Iran, followed different kinds of literacy practices, and, following Scribner and Cole, started to map out different domains in which these practices were used (Scribner and Cole 1981; Street 1984). This work then lead to the studies of literacy such as Barton and Hamilton’s Local Literacies (1998) and Barton, Hamilton and Ivanic, Situated Literacies (2000). However, the initial focus on the domains of literacy has recently been considered anew. Following this focus on domains, the New Literacy Studies took a ‘spatial turn’ in problematizing settled notions of spatiality and theorists began to work with such constructs as third space theory and affinity spaces as new literacies such as blogging and digital literacies disrupted ‘folk’ concepts of space (Leander and Sheehy 2004). Identity was another construct which, following Holland et al. (2001) and Bartlett and Holland (2002), was increasingly related to social practice. This focus on the relationship between identity and social practice, through the lens of Activity Theory, led to considering the role of artefacts as a way of instantiating and mediating identities in practice (Holland et al. 2001). Identity was further problematized in a number of studies looking at on-line interactions (Adams 2005; Alvermann 2006; Merchant 2005). For example, Merchant identified, through his studies of children’s on-line conversations, a way of distinguishing between different forms of identity (Merchant 2005). His concept of ‘anchored’ identities described more settled identities, linked to long-term sedimented ways of being and doing, as opposed to ‘transient’ identities, linked to popular culture and playground interaction, helped to further define and describe identities in relation to literacy practices (Merchant 2005). The relationship between concepts such as identity and spatiality has also been problematized in recent research (eg Holland and Leander 2004). The relationship between artefacts and narratives in creating and upholding identities has been explored in, for example, Holland et al.’s work (Holland et al. 2001). The relationship between narratives of migration and artefacts in homes was described in ethnographic research work I carried out in homes in London between 1999 and 2005 (Pahl 2004; 2006a). These accounts relied on fine-grained analysis, carried out over time, with attention paid to the voices of participants, and required a focus on linguistic and multimodal texts. However, within all this theory, focusing on practices, spatiality, literacy, identity, artefacts and narratives, I would argue that Bourdieu’s practice theory, in particular his concept of habitus, still provides something different and useful for literacy research. While I primarily see Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a heuristic, that is, a useful way to find out more about literacy practices, I also argue that it manages to remain located both at the level of identity and at the level of practice.



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It demands a focus on intergenerational narratives and the crossing of practices across domains. It can also be improvised upon within different contexts. When combined with the concept of field, the habitus, when transported across diasporas, engages with new sites of power and resistance (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). As Bourdieu’s theory has been taken up in a number of domains, a key new aspect of the context for this theory is globalisation. One of the aspects of globalisation, as Appadurai has stressed, is the way in which people migrating across diasporas have had to improvise upon the habitus (Appadurai 1996). Habitus can be used to describe settled practices carried over diasporas. For example ways of being and doing in an original domain or site can be transposed and adapted to local conditions elsewhere. Field is still useful as a concept to enable a researcher to watch these practices change in response to new contexts. This article attempts to explain why the habitus concept is useful in analyzing children’s multimodal texts made at home. I argue that it is possible to draw on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus in order to describe the relationship between social practice, repeated or iterative practices in the home and literacy practices. I specifically analyse the relationship between texts made at home, and the habitus, drawing on two ‘telling cases’ of map-making at home by two young children (Mitchell 1984). I provide a suggestive reading of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus that enabled me to examine how children’s texts were constructed in the home in relation to social practice and cultural identity. This reading enabled me to examine the children’s texts, and then trace back the making of those texts, linking them to the habitus. In one of the cases a detailed ethnography enabled me to do this work. I argue that it is possible to focus on particular instances of children’s text making in which I claim that the habitus, the dispositions of the household, can be uncovered, and traced back to wider structural forces. The method of tracing back the habitus opens out a theoretical space whereby cultural identity, as embodied habitus, is explored.

The studies The two examples presented here can be seen as instances of practice, small accounts taken from much longer studies. The first example, Fatih’s bead map, comes from a larger dataset from an ethnographic study of three children’s communicative practices in the home lasting three years. (For more detailed accounts of this study see Pahl 2002; Pahl 2004; Pahl 2006a.) The second example comes from a two-year project, funded by Creative Partnerships in Doncaster, Rotherham and Barnsley, looking at the work of visual artists in enabling children and teachers to join up homes, school and community. In this study, I interviewed creative artists

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from an arts organization called Heads Together working in a school, in South Yorkshire, and interviewed teachers, children and parents, conducted participant observations in a Foundation and Year 2 classroom and used visual methodologies to understand the way in which a collaboration between visual artists and teachers enabled the spatial and cultural affordances of children’s meaning making to be extended (Pahl 2006b; Street, Lefstein and Pahl, in press). The particular instance I describe came from a study of an architect and a visual artist, working in a Foundation class (five year old children) to create a map of the playground, and to construct a new playground structure. This involved participant observation in the classroom and I collected multimodal texts by the children. The site was a two-form infants’ school in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, set in the outskirts of the town.

Habitus in texts Bourdieu’s concept of habitus offers the opportunity of looking at the relationship between identity, texts and practices. Habitus, defined here as embodied identity in practice, can be used to trace ways of being and doing. Habitus offers a powerful way of describing in a more durable, long-term form the cultural resources families bring to oral and written texts. The habitus concept offers an account of the relationship between the person making, acting, narrating, and the place within which these things are enacted. It describes both spatiality and, through the concept of improvisation, it offers the possibility of change within a space. It is subject to experience and can be transformed. In his discussions with Wacquant, Bourdieu argued of habitus that, “It is durable but not eternal!” (Bourdieu, in conversation with Wacquant, 1992: 133). Bourdieu’s concept of habitus encompassed both the social fabric of things and the agent within the social fabric. It allowed and analysed the way in which everyday life is taken for granted. Many commentators have seen Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as theoretically and methodologically generative. For example, Nash argued that habitus, and Bourdieu’s concept of historically situated habitus, “points to the need for historically informed ethnographic studies” (Nash 1999: 179). In a similar vein, Collins and Blot argue for Bourdieu’s social science as a way of informing detailed ethnographies of literacy (Collins and Blot 2003). Bourdieu’s concept of habitus could be associated with an implicit determinism which means that not much can be done to alter its shape. Jenkins, for example, argued that Bourdieu continued to reside within the fixity of structuralism, and did not open his work out into a more fluid account of structure and agency (Jenkins 1992). He argued that in the Kabyle House texts, Bourdieu’s ethnographic voice describes a static oppositional



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world of inside/outside, resting on a vision of the world which seemed to have a deterministic overlay, and, particularly in his early work, described habitus as a set of generative structures (Bourdieu 1977). My understanding is that habitus is both embodied and resides within household practices. It belongs to a group, and individuals draw on it to develop ways of being and doing. These ways of being are adapted to new circumstances. For example, migratory experience may be mediated by new spaces and experiences. I focus on the concept of improvisation within Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (Bourdieu 1977: 78). As a “system of open dispositions” (1992: 133) habitus could be open to improvisation and change. Migration is one way of studying the impact of improvisation of the habitus in relation to a new field of practice. By anticipating this improvisatory aspect, Bourdieu allowed for the modification of habitus. I argue that improvised habitus within households can be traced within texts. One key aspect of my interest was how habitus could be viewed within texts. Like Bartlett and Holland (2002), I was particularly interested in the way in which the habitus concept could be extended to consider text-making. While Bourdieu did allow for the concept of habitus to be modified (Bourdieu 1990) the relationship of habitus to texts was not fully explicated in his work. Holland’s focus on Bourdieu’s practice theory brought out the possibility of habitus in relation to cultural artefacts as well as identities in practice (Holland et al. 2001). In my work, I have explored the processes by which everyday household practices become instantiated within texts (Pahl 2004, 2006a). To do this, I draw on a tradition, coming from Williams (Williams 1958), which sees texts as informed by ordinary cultural practices. The relationship between Bourdieu and Williams was further described in a footnote written by Wacquant which argues that both focused on theories of cultural practice and a materialist theory of culture (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 80–81 n24). Williams’ project was to relate the cultural practices of the ordinary and everyday to more public and settled cultural representations, which he saw as linked through the expression “structure of feeling” (Williams 1958, 1989). By linking ordinary practice with cultural production, Williams was giving voice to the idea of cultural practices within texts and their connection to life, and its felt experiences. The theorising of the ordinary and everyday was shared by social practice theorists such as Smith, who likewise was concerned with the ordinary, “how to write the social, to make it visible in sociological texts, in ways that will explicate a problematic, the actuality of which is immanent in the everyday world” (Smith 1987: 106). Households and their inculcation was the consideration within Smith’s work, and like Bourdieu she focused on the takenfor-granted phenomena of the ordinary. De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life likewise considered everyday popular cultural practices, focusing particularly on ordinary people’s ability to subvert

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those practices through use of ‘tactics’ (de Certeau 1984). De Certeau’s reading of the habitus concept in relation to his interest in cultural practice was teasing and reflective. His reading of habitus was as a reader, who challenged and resisted the idea, and in that sense, he was using everyday ‘tactics’. De Certeau described the concept of habitus as a heuristic, as a point of departure and reflection and as a metaphoric chimera, which nevertheless, was generative of research (de Certeau 1984: 59). It occupies a space, but as a ‘hidden’ concept, invisible to those who inhabit it. De Certeau argues that the ‘other’ in the theory, the ethnological fragments which are supposed to provide coherence to the theory makes up the unseen part of habitus, and this ‘other’, It is indeed the dwelling, as a silent and determining memory, which is hidden in (de Certeau 1984: 58) the theory under the metaphor of the habitus. 

De Certeau wonders whether the ‘other’, the fragments of ethnography, which make up the dwelling, should not be the actual focus, rather than the rather slippery concept of habitus. In making this analysis, habitus disappears, under the weight of its expectations. However, I would also take from de Certeau a reading of habitus as a space where theorizing is possible. When taken together with the idea of improvisation, habitus enables a fluid and textual reading of literacy events and practices in the home. My particular focus was on the way in which the concept of the habitus enabled me to deepen an ethnographic analysis of home texts and practices. Habitus provided a theoretical space which enabled me to define the way in which ‘life’ is lived in relation both to the power structures in which households play out their lives, and to the ephemera, mess and miscellaneous piles created by family life (Pahl 2002). This work celebrates the complex, often hastily tidied up artefacts and objects that occupy home spaces. I focused on ordinary cultural practice in homes, which may often stray into the ephemeral and unrecognized. I was interested to find Wacquant in agreement with my configuration of habitus as ‘mess’, habitus is in cahoots with the fuzzy and the vague. As a generative spontaneity which asserts itself in the improvised confrontation with endlessly renewed situations, it follows a practical logic, that of the fuzzy, of the more or less, which defines the ordinary relation to the world.  (Wacquant 1992: 22)

The link between habitus as the wider social conditions and the detailed practices and strategies of everyday life was one I used when looking at the relationship between texts and practices in the home. Drawing on such theorists as Williams and Willis, I theoretically considered the concept that culture is ordinary (Williams 1989; Willis 2000). The making of culture from embodied identity in practice was something I observed within households.



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In the particular instances I describe below, I used habitus as a lens with which to look at communicative practices. In both case studies, Fatih’s map and May’s plan, I was able to trace back and be informed by the family’s habitus, and to look more closely at the relationship between the text and the practices that lay behind it. Ethnography, particularly in Fatih’s case, helped inform this lens. I was also seeing literacy, and text-making, as a social practice (Street 1993, 2000). By focusing on practice, texts ceased to be isolated within the domain of their form and function for that moment, but became linked to the traces of practice they represented. Below, I articulate this more clearly in relation to two examples.

Example 1: The prayer bead map Elif, and her two sons, Hanif (9) and Fatih (6) were Turkish, now settled in London. The household was situated in a new block of flats, overlooking a busy road, in an area of North London characterized by a number of different ethnic communities, and a high density of housing and shops. The family had been re-housed following incidents of domestic violence between Elif and her ex-husband. Elif was from a small village in central Turkey and was a devout Muslim. She wore a headscarf and dressed simply. Her home included a few images of mosques, and Islamic inscriptions on the walls. In the kitchen was the Islamic calendar, with praying times printed out. There was a large television which was usually tuned to a Turkish channel. The boys, Hanif and Fatih, were often found sitting on the floor of the living room watching television, or playing play station games. They also, intermittently, made things. Fatih made paper models of flags, birds and boats, and often drew images of characters from children’s popular culture including Pokémon and Super Mario. As part of the ethnography, I sat in Elif ’s home, and recorded instances of text making. In some cases, I took away texts by Faith, and in other cases, I watched and photographed text making. I gave a disposable camera to Fatih, which he used to record his activities in the home. This account is based on 30 field visits, over 2 years, together with a collection of over 200 texts and structured interviews with both Fatih and his mother, Elif. In addition, I visited Fatih’s classroom and conducted field visits there. The data contained many references to migration. Elif had come to England aged 14 from a village near Aksaray in central Turkey, about 3 hours by coach from Ankara. The family supported the Turkish football team Galiteceri. In the summer months, Elif, Hanif and Fatih visited Turkey. Elif used Turkish text books to help Fatih learn to read in Turkish. These selections from field notes provided the context for my discussion of Fatih’s texts. Elif said Fatih was keen to learn and could read Turkish on the calendar.

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She showed me a Turkish exercise book for school children. It had little stories – one was about the eclipse in San Diego, and lots of drawings of Kemel Ataturk and exercises – for Turkish schoolchildren to learn Turkish grammar, I suppose. She had got this free at the mosque. We talked about her visit to Turkey – two months. She is very excited about going back to see her parents – she said she would take a lot of pictures.  (Fieldnotes 7.5.00) Elif has 2 sisters both in Turkey, 4 brothers, 1 in Turkey one in Saudi Arabia and two in England (Fieldnotes 4.6.00)

Through numerous discussions and repeated visits, I picked up a sense of the family’s habitus, the way in which practices were generated and improvised upon, in relation to travel to, and emigration from, Turkey. Every summer, if she could afford, it, Elif visited her home village in Turkey, where the children talked of, … sleeping on the floor at Hanif ’s grandparents and the names he calls them. We talked of the journey – flying for three and a half hours to Istanbul and then the coach. ‘I like the coach’ said Elif. Then a bus journey to her parent’s farmhouse. They have cows, some chickens and a dog.  (Fieldnotes 28.2.00)

About half way through the two-year study, I interviewed Elif. This was a wideranging ethnographic interview exploring Elif ’s own schooling, her son Fatih’s schooling, and Fatih’s models and drawing. She was sad because Faith’s school progression was unsatisfactory. Fatih was excluded from school half of the day for the entire duration of the ethnography. In order to explore this further, I asked Elif about her school days, and she told me about her primary years, and then, here she started to describe her time at secondary school. Elif: My school finish class five its finish… one year no school and after make new building secondary school for 3 years. K: So you have to wait for it to be ready Elif: I waiting for it to finish with my friends. (laughs) K: So for one year no school. What did you do? Play? Elif: I can’t remember my …daddy my daddy he goes to Arabia, Saudi Arabia. K: He went to Saudi Arabia. Right Elif: Yeah. Long time maybe five years, six years. And…when I start secondary school my daddy go to…Arabia, Saudi Arabia K: He went um. So he was away for five whole years Elif: Yeah (Transcript 23/4/01)

In this excerpt, Elif waits for her father to come home for five years, and also waits for her school to finish. My question, “What did you do?”, gains the response, “I



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can’t remember my daddy”. Here the ‘rich point’ opens out. Elif described a period of waiting ‘five years’ while her father worked abroad (Agar 1996). Following this discussion, I explored with Elif the multimodal meaning making Fatih engaged with. We discussed together the range of objects and drawings that he made both at school and at home. I was especially interested in which objects Fatih made at home, and which at school, also in the processes of meaning making. Elif tried to explain this to me. Fatih had previously drawn a map of his home as part of a game played by him and his brother, Hanif. I was interested in whether there were any other examples of map making to be found in the home, and also whether these originated from home and school: My original question was, Are there other things he makes? School and home birds, he made, didn’t he?

After some discussion about what was made at home and what at school, Elif interrupted me to say, E: Do you know sometimes he…er just…er, for mine I explain… K: Show me (She gets some prayer beads and makes a shape.) E: (pause) Lots of these making these… K: Fatih makes? E: No! K: You make? E: No… playing this. K: Beads? E: After the prayer he making (laughs). He make it like this on the carpet. K: Yeah? E: Like any K: A shape? E: Which country. K: Ah I like that! E: I said Ireland he make it different like how Turkey like this. I said Turkey like this I said Turkey different very different I said England, Arabia I said, he make all! (laughs) (Transcript 23.4.01) (See Fig. 1 map)

I selected this account as it offered, in Agar’s terms “a gap … between two worlds” (Agar 1996). Elif breaks in to my questioning with the word “no!” then describes how Fatih, “after prayer” made shapes in the form of countries on the carpet. This account can be related back to Elif ’s account of her father’s experience of Saudi

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Figure 1.

Arabia – her brother was also currently working in Saudi Arabia. The bead map is interesting partly for the tools Fatih is using – his mother’s prayer beads, which combine with the concept of ‘map’. For Fatih to use these freely as a representational resource (Kress 1997) was interesting. There was a complex link between the meanings Fatih was generating, the tools he was using to make the meanings, and the context, the habitus of the family, caught between a number of different countries, which offered different conceptual possibilities. Elif showed me, for example, a video she made when visiting her relatives in Turkey, of her mother sending love to her children in the UK. Here, the narrative of migration and displacement is caught on video, in the case of Fatih’s bead map, the narrative is caught as he makes and remakes the shape of the countries, playing a game which echoes his family’s habitus, crossing countries to find work. The ‘field’ of employment creates this improvisation upon the habitus, as Fatih uses new tools, the prayer beads, to make meanings associated with migration. I was interested that Fatih was learning map-making at school, and that there was a link between the texts he was creating at home, and the texts he was making at school. However, the context, the meanings created by the bead map text echoes the family’s habi-



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tus. It is these points, the “rich points” (Agar 1996) where I located texts within the field notes, to descriptions linking to ways of being. An earlier photograph taken three months before, which formed part of a set of photographs by the family (I gave them a disposable camera to use at home), showed him doing exactly the same thing, making a map out of beads, but with a different tool, a curtain tie. The use of the curtain tie showed how Fatih employed different ‘tools’ to make the same set of shapes, playing at enacting the countries his family encountered. I saw Fatih’s making of a map using the prayer beads as a reflection of two different social practices: prayer and the describing of countries through shape making. It articulated two powerful social practices within the household, the regular cycle of prayer Elif participated in, and the narratives of migration described in videos, stories and conversations which I observed and recorded as part of the ethnographic study. What is interesting about this home practice is the glimpse it also gives us of migratory patterns. Fatih’s grandparents lived in a rural setting in central Turkey. Most of their children moved away, the majority to the UK, looking for work. Fatih’s uncle was working in Saudi Arabia. The ‘interest’ of the child as described by his mother, Elif, focused on these countries, England, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, as places overheard in conversations, and etched out in the shape of a map. Markers of cultural identity, they operated as articulations of the habitus, as the identity of a Turkish child growing up in London. The family’s habitus as it was played out in the fields of Turkey, London and Saudi Arabia is instantiated in the ephemeral text of the bead map.

Example 2: May’s plan of her house The second example comes from a study of relationship between the interventions of group of visual artists, Heads Together, on children’s text-making and teaching practice in a school in Barnsley. Drawing on 18 teacher interviews, and closely observed classroom practice, I watched the artists work with teachers on a number of different projects, including one which involved the teachers, an architect and an artist developing ideas with the children for a new play space in the children’s playground. This is the project discussed here. I watched an architect, Pete, who was working alongside a visual artist, Alice, and a group of five year old children making maps and plans of their playground, in order to encourage the children to draw maps of their play. They spent several sessions with the children finding out how they used the playground. They mapped the playground, and encouraged them to peg out the space it took to play particular games. A number of different activities took place, including drawing from different angles, and

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drawing from above. At the same time as this activity the teachers encouraged the children to do plans of the classroom, using squared paper. The school where the fieldwork was carried out, was situated on the outskirts of Barnsley, a town in South Yorkshire, in an area characterised by a settled while community, of mostly lower middle class and upper working class backgrounds. Many of the children had grandparents who had been miners and farmers, now the professions of the parents were more likely to be builders and white-collar workers. The school was a successful, thriving community with a strongly focused staff team. The town itself was characterized by a passion for football, and had been the home of the National Union of Miners. I visited the school for two years, collecting data about the children, their parents, the teachers and the artists who visited the school. The classroom where I carried out the observation was a large open-plan classroom where children aged four to five were taught, with two teachers and two classroom assistants. On the morning when I observed, one of the artists, Alice, was asking the children to draw using large sheets of paper. Pete, the architect working on the project was asking the children to draw what kinds of games the children liked to play. Alice: What we are going to do today is we have put some paper up in your wet play area, a little bit like sitting inside this, OK and you are going to be able to sit inside and write down and have a think about some of the things you could do in that space, … (Transcript February 2006)

Alice was asking the children to draw spatially the games the children liked to play at home and at school. At the same time the teachers had been encouraging the children to do map-making using squared pieces of paper. It was mentioned to me by the teacher that one child, May, had done a plan at home and she came up to me and showed me the plan. Almost immediately after Alice’s session with the pens on big sheets of paper, May came up to me, with a drawing (Fig. 2) and I recorded the following interaction as she described the drawing to me: Kate: May: Kate: May: Kate: May: Kate: May:

Is this your house? Yes. That’s the grass, that’s a fireplace, that’s a card and that’s a card. That’s your brother’s cards? That’s a beer bottle. That’s a box on top of t’fireplace, That’s a fire brush so we don’t get burned. And this is a chair, What’s this here? (pointing to calendar) Saturday 9 February What’s this bit there? That’s turns the tele off and change it over



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Figure 2.

Kate: Turns the tele off? May: Change if over, this is the aerial, that’s a juice bottle. That’s the tele. Kate: What’s this here? May: That’s two cupboards. Kate: Where is all this? May: Its daddy’s um (room). Its for t’weathers, and Kate: I see, I understand now that’s your calendar May: Yeah Kate: What’s this? May: A brush, it’s for weathers Kate: That was a pot. And that’s your brother’s cards. May: This is me brothers and this is me sisters. And they – it’s about the weather. Kate: Does it tell you the weather? That’s good. What’s this bit? (right hand) May: A table. Kate: What’s this say here? May: That’s SKIPS Kate: That’s SKIPS packets of SKIPS May: and this is… I don’t recognise this (looks at drawing) Kate: What’s this here? May: Smarties… … Kate: What gave you the idea?

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May: Kate: May: Kate: May: Kate: May: Kate: May:

My mum was drawing the plans. Why was she doing a plan? I don’t know. She was doing a plan because she wanted t’ house to be nice. Yeah. We are getting our kitchen made. Is she doing an extension? (louder) We haven’t got no builders. Our builders have gone to a different (unclear) Oh no! So me dad’s got to do it all by hisself!

This account is characterized by a number of different strands which can be related to specific social practices. For ease of analysis I have divided these into the social practice associated with the text and the domain from which it came. The domain is the ‘world’ from which is associated, while the ‘site’ is more specifically associated with the place, following Barton and Hamilton (1998)’s notion of domains of literacy together with Street Baker and Tomlin’s differentiation between sites and domains when analysing literacy practices (Street, Baker and Tomlin 2005). In this case, the practice is the creation of a multimodal text. Figure 3 sets out this distinction in relation to the concept of a plan of the house: Social practice

Domain

Site

Map making Drawing spatial games Drawing plans for builders

School School Home

School School Home

Figure 3.

The plan then, drew both on the work May had done in the classroom mapping games out, drawing plans and making spatial games, but also May had observed her mother draw plans. The plan describes her home, and the text can be understood as a representation of her family space. May was, in a sense, representing her identity spatially. Her family relations are instantiated within artefacts, for example the importance given to the TV remote control. Her description of food, the skips packet in the bottom right hand corner, and the large round objects, which are Smarties, reveal her own focus on her preferred food. Her spatial account of her family home is also crossed with other voices. When describing her text to me, these come into play. The voice of her mother is represented in the oral text, “we haven’t got no builders”, much as Maybin’s children echo the voice of their parents in her study of children’s talk (Maybin 2005). May describes her



Habitus in children’s multimodal text-making

brother and his cards, her father and his beer bottle. Relationships are conceived in terms of objects and the significance they have in the home. In a recent paper (Pahl 2004), I argued that artefacts in the home held important narratives of identity and here, May locates her social world within home objects, arranged spatially in a plan of her home. Here, the concept of identity in practice, from Holland can be drawn upon to analyze the relationship between these objects in the home, and May’s habitus (Holland et al. 2001). This text instantiates May’s settled way of being. It can be understood in relation to Merchant’s concept of ‘anchored’ identities, that is, those identities that are rooted in cultural resources from the home (Merchant 2005). Her ‘anchored identity’ is rooted in her habitus, her habitual ways of being and acquired dispositions, crossing generations, in her home (Merchant 2005; Pahl 2004). The habitus informs the text, as it is a description of the family’s habitus, including the father’s beer bottles, the child’s crisps (Skips) and the family’s builder crisis. The text in turn modifies the habitus, drawing on ways of doing from the habitus, but re-making and re-presenting this anew. The idea for the text came both from the map-making sessions at school, together with the artist and architect’s focus on drawing spatial accounts of play, but was combined with the idea of drawing plans from her mother, as she was watching her draw a plan of her new kitchen. The text itself can stand for an instantiation of May’s habitus. Her ways of doing and speaking, “me dad’s got to do it all by hisself!” echoing her parents’ voices, can be tellingly heard within the oral transcription, while the text itself can be seen as a representation of home, spatially arranged. The text reveals a ‘seepage’, in Marsh’ words, between home and school, a point of intersection, where the habitus of the home, drawn as a plan, is represented spatially and presented to the class teacher as an example of plan making (Marsh, in press).

Discussion In the case of Fatih, I was able to do a detailed ethnography which made sense of the bead map, in part, and which located the map-making episode within a wider chain of experience that included his uncle moving to Saudi Arabia, his experience of Turkey and England, and his mother’s interest in maps. In the case of May, I gathered the data in her classroom, and did not have access to her home. However, I argue that with both cases the notion of habitus in texts provides a ‘way in’ to reading and interpreting those texts. The ethnography that situated these selections of talk, images and writing, was able to describe in part, the habitus. This habitus in turn informed the practices within the household, which then sedimented into texts. I have developed a model, which operated as a heuristic for

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Habitus sediment into narratives sediment into iteration

Texts

inform generates

sediment into are instantiated within and sediment into

Practices

Figure 4.  Model

describing this process. The model begins with habitus, which generates practices. Practices in turn are instantiated within and sediment into texts. These in turn, can, through iteration, be shaped into narrative texts, much as Hymes observed narrative being shaped in his classic article on ethnography and narrative (Hymes 1996). In some cases, texts directly sedimented into the habitus. I would also observe how texts became drawn up in practices, and therefore was able to draw the arrows from texts back to practices. The model (Fig. 4) works to roll up the past into the present – drawing on the ethnographic historical past, it is offered as a heuristic to looking at the relationship between texts and practices in the home: As an example, Fatih’s bead map text is an example of how habitus generated practices which then were instantiated within texts. The family’s habitus, of prayer, and of migration and experiencing different countries, expressed through Elif ’s transcript and field notes, was instantiated in this text, in the temporary arrangement of the prayer beads into a map. Through repeated practice, it became more settled, a text which then drew on the family’s household practices and dispositions. Fatih made the map shapes repeatedly on the carpet. Texts can also sediment into household practices. The map became part of the family’s practices. The model shows how texts themselves became part of the habitus, particularly in the telling and re-telling, in the form of narratives (Pahl 2004). The process of iteration created a way of returning to the texts, so that they grew to be part of the family’s settled ways of being, their acquired dispositions, returned to the habitus. In some cases, texts as instantiations of practice were subsumed into the family’s habitus, the space of practice. In May’s household, different practices, such as watching the television, drinking beer, receiving cards, are found instantiated within her text. The idea of the text came from the family’s practice of having improvements to the kitchen. The spatial nature of the text was also informed by a number of experiences of drawing spatially in a school setting.



Habitus in children’s multimodal text-making

Conclusion In order to analyse the two examples, the bead map and May’s plan, I found that the concept of habitus led to the need to give a more structural, longitudinal and intergenerational account of a family’s dispositions and ways of being. That is, I was able to understand how dispositions in families seeped into practices that then sedimented into texts. May’s family’s home practices, the beer drinking, the birthday cards, the eating of skips and smarties and making of kitchen plans, are sedimented into her text. I have also used Merchant’s concept of ‘anchored’ identities, that is, identities that are rooted in more settled cultural ways of being, to describe the way in which the themes within the plan can be understood (Merchant 2005). The value of ethnographic work in literacy practices is that it exposed the repeated practices that happen time and time again in homes. Iteration, as Hymes pointed out, is the key to an understanding of narrative, and here, I argue it is also the key to understanding the habitus (Hymes 1996). The ultimate value of the habitus concept for me is that it justifies the doing of longitudinal ethnography, and that without a deepened understanding of household practice, the nuances lying within children’s texts, and an understanding of their communicative practices, would be lost. What needs to be done, is an account of text-making that incorporates detailed ethnographic analysis. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, field and different concepts of capital enable a tracing out from the text to rich description. Increasingly, this way of looking at texts has been used in research looking at the relationship between narratives of migration and home artefacts (Pahl and Pollard 2006) as it offers a way of analysis that is relational and structural. Plotting the way families engage with new fields of practice, and describing textual formations across diasporas, can be done with the aid of the habitus as a way in to considering adaptive strategies. What could now be described, is how these strategies shift across diasporas, how they are improvised upon and how the ways of being, doing and the practices engendered from the habitus both shape and are shaped by, text-making.

References Adams, P. C. 2005. The Boundless Self: Communication in Physical and Virtual Spaces. Syracuse NY: Syracus University Press. Agar, M. 1996. The Professional Stranger: An informal introduction to ethnography. (2nd ed.). New York NY: Academic Press.

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Alvermann, D. E. 2006. Ned and Kevin: An online discussion that challenges the “Not-yet adult” cultural model. In Travel Notes from the New Literacy Studies: Instances of Practice, K. Pahl & J. Rowsell (eds), 39–56. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis MN: University of Minneapolis Press. Bartlett, L. & Holland, D. 2002. Theorizing the space of literacy practices. Ways of Knowing Journal 2(1): 10–22. Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. 1998. Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in one Community. London: Routledge. Barton, D., Hamilton, M. & Ivanic, R. (eds). 2000. Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Transl. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. & Wacquant, L. J. D. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Collins, J. & Blot, R. K. 2003. Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Transl. Steven Rendell. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Gee, J. P. 2000. The new literacy studies: From “socially situated” to the work of the social. In Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context, D. Barton, M. Hamilton & R. Ivanic (eds). London: Routledge. Holland, D. Lachicotte, W. Skinner, D. & Cain, C. 2001. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Holland, D. & Leander, K. 2004. Studies of positioning and subjectivity: An introduction. Ethos 32: 127–139. Hymes, D. (ed.). 1996. Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Towards an Understanding of Voice. London: Routledge. Jenkins, R. 1992. Pierre Bourdieu. London: Routledge. Kress, G. 1997. Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy. London: Routledge Leander, K. & Sheehy, M. (eds). 2004. Spatializing Literacy Research and Practice. New York NY: Peter Lang. Maybin, J. 2005. Children’s Voices. London: Palgrave. Marsh, J. In press. Popular culture in the language arts curriculum. In Handbook on Research in Teaching Through the Communicative and Visual Arts. Vol. 2., J. Flood, S. B. Heath & D. Lapp (eds). New York NY: Macmillan/ IRA. Merchant, G. 2005. Electric involvement: Identity performance in children’s informal digital writing. Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education 26(3): 301–314. Mitchell, J. C. 1984. Typicality and the case study. In Ethnographic Research: A Guide to General Conduct, R. F. Ellen ( ed.), 238–241. London: Academic Press. Nash, R. 1999. Bourdieu, ‘Habitus’ and educational research: Is it all worth the candle? British Journal of the Sociology of Education 20(2): 175–187. Pahl, K. 2002. Ephemera, mess and miscellaneous piles: Texts and practices in families. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 2(2): 145–165. Pahl, K. 2004. Narratives, artefacts and cultural identities: An ethnographic study of communicative practices in homes. Linguistics and Education 15(4): 339–358.



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Pahl, K. 2006a. An inventory of traces: Children’s photographs of their toys in three London homes. Visual Communication 5(1): 95–114. Pahl, K. 2006b. Birds, frogs, blue skies and sheep: An investigation into the cultural notion of affordance in children’s meaning making. English in Education 40(3): 19–34. Pahl, K. & Pollard, A. 2006. Narratives of migration and artefacts of identity: New imaginings and new generations. Paper presented at the BERA conference, Warwick, September. http://www.diasporas.ac.uk/assets/PAHL%20EVENT.pdf Scribner, S. & Cole, M. 1981. The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Smith, D. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Street, B. V. 1984. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Street, B. V. (ed). 1993. Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Street, B. V. 2000. Literacy events and literacy practices: Theory and practice in the new literacy studies. In Multilingual Literacies: Reading and Writing Different Worlds, M. Martin-Jones & K. Jones (eds), 17–29. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Street B., Baker D. & Tomlin, A. 2005. Navigating Numeracies: Home/School Numeracy Practices. Dordtrecht: Kluwer. Street, B., Lefstein, A. & Pahl, K. In press. The National Literacy Strategy in England: Contradictions, control and creativity. In Literacy as Snake Oil, 2nd edn., J. Larson (ed.). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Wacquant, L. 1992. Toward a social praxeology: The structure and logic of Bourdieu’s sociology. In An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, P. Bourdieu & L. Wacquant (eds). Cambridge: Polity Press. Williams, R. 1958. Culture and Society 1780–1950. London: Chatto and Windus. Williams, R. 1989. Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism. London: Verso. Willis, P. 2000. The Ethnographic Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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chapter 5

Fateful literacy New meanings, old ideologies, and some unexpected consequences of Nepali love letter writing* Laura M. Ahearn This chapter presents a case study of women’s incipient literacy in a town in Nepaul, arguing that literacy can be both a catalyst for social change and a result of numerous other types of social transformation. The increase in female literacy rates in the 1990s made possible the emergence of new courtship practices involving love letters and facilitated self-initiated marriages, but it also reinforced certain gender ideologies and undercut some avenues to social power, especially for women. Through a close reading of the most salient written sources of development discourse in the village – government textbooks, female literacy textbooks, novels, magazines, and love letter guidebooks this chapter analyses some likely sources for new ideas about agency and identifies some prototypes for the development discourse so prevalent in Junigau love letters.

There is a common saying in the village of Junigau, Nepal: bhāvile lekheko, chhālāle chhekeko – “It is written by fate but covered by skin.” This adage reflects a belief not only among the Magars who populate Junigau but also among many other Nepali ethnic groups and castes that at birth a person’s fate is written underneath the skin of the forehead, making it impossible to ascertain what will happen.1 According to this view, fate is responsible for events that befall the individual, for it is fate, * This chapter draws in part from two previous publications, Ahearn (2003) and Ahearn (2004). An earlier version of this case paper was presented at a panel organized by the AILA Scientific Commission on Literacy, entitled, “Global and Local Issues in Literacy Research,” at the 13th World Congress of Applied Linguistics, 19 December 2002, Singapore. 1. Desjarlais (1992: 164) reports that the same adage is common among the Tibetan ethnic group with which he did his research. They end the saying with an additional phrase, however: “kasari dekheko?” – which Desjarlais translates as, “How can it be seen?” A similar belief in the writing of one’s fate on one’s forehead at birth is also prevalent in other parts of South Asia. See Divakaruni (1999) for a novel about India based on this premise.

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or, in a different translation, God or the gods, who have the power to write. Two other common sayings in Junigau are corollaries to this saying: dekheko mātrai hunna, lekheko hunu parchha – “It is not enough just to see something; it must also be written (i.e., fated)” – and, bhaneko mātrai hunna, lekheko hunu parchha – “It is not enough just to say something; it must also be written (i.e., fated).” Given these connections between fate and the written word, it becomes important to ask what happens when villagers in an incipiently literate community such as Junigau acquire the power to write, and the power to read what others write. How do conceptions of agency, gender, fate, and development shape and reflect new literacy practices? What new “structures of feeling”2 emerge with these practices? In this chapter, I argue that literacy is both a catalyst for social change and a result of numerous other types of social transformation. In attributing transformational potential to the technology of literacy, however, I hasten to distance myself from Jack Goody and his supporters (Goody 1986, 1987, 2000; Goody and Watt 1963), who are strong proponents of what Brian Street (1984) has called the “autonomous” model of literacy. Indeed, the bottom line is, as Bambi Schieffelin (2000: 298–299), drawing on Kulick and Stroud (1990, 1993) notes, “Literacy itself does not have agentive force to change societies. It is humans who are the active force in any transformational processes accompanying the introduction of literacy.” When Goody describes “the transforming effects of literate activity on human life” (2000: 2), he assumes that the advent of literacy will produce the same social and cognitive transformations no matter who learns to read and write, and no matter where or when literacy emerges. Even caveats such as “But I see these effects as trends rather than as necessities” (1986: 184) merely serve to reinforce a view of literacy that treats it as a neutral technology, independent of the social and historical contexts in which it takes place. In opposition to this view, I concur with Schieffelin (2000: 293), who writes, “How a community ‘takes up’ literacy, how it develops, how it is understood and deployed depends very much on the ideology and context of those to whom it is being introduced.” Thus, my approach is to situate emergent literacy practices socially, historically, and, especially for my purposes here, intertextually. While universal effects stemming from literacy’s purportedly intrinsic nature cannot be identified, particular instances of incipient literacy nevertheless can and should be studied for the complex factors involved. In the case of Junigau, Nepal, in the 1980s and 1990s, female literacy was facilitated by a number of dramatic economic, social, and political changes, and in turn these changes, once women began to utilize their literacy skills, were deepened, challenged, or reconstituted in unexpected (and not

2. Williams (1977).



Fateful literacy

always beneficial) ways by the women’s literacy practices – results that could not be predicted by any simplistic universal statement about “the power writing may endow upon various elements in a particular society” (Goody 2000: 1). In the analysis that follows, I investigate how villagers have applied their literacy skills to the new courtship practice of love letter writing in Junigau. I discuss the implications of the emergence of love letter correspondences for social relations in Nepal and trace out the broader ramifications for conceptions of literacy, gender, love, social change, and agency (which I define as the socioculturally mediated capacity to act).3 My central argument is that a close examination of love letter writing in Junigau reveals the microprocesses of social transformation as it is occurring. I contend that the new practice of love letter writing in Junigau has facilitated not only a shift away from arranged and capture marriage toward elopement but also a change in how villagers conceive of their own ability to act and how they attribute responsibility for events – developments with potential ramifications that extend far beyond the realm of marriage and well past the Himalayas. In addition to offering us valuable insights into the rapidly changing marriage practices in this one community, these love letter correspondences also provide us with a deeper understanding of the social effects of literacy. While “the literate mode is inevitably seen to open up opportunities,” according to Goody (2000: 154), such a mode of communication can also impose new and unexpected constraints, expectations and disappointments. The increase in female literacy rates in Junigau in the 1990’s made possible the emergence of new courtship practices and facilitated self-initiated marriages, but it also reinforced certain gender ideologies and undercut some avenues to social power, especially for women. Thus, this study reminds us that literacy is not a neutral, unidimensional technology, but rather a set of lived experiences that will differ from community to community.4

3. See Ahearn (2001b) for a review of the literature on language and agency. 4. For a sampling of literature on literacy practices, especially the approach known as New Literacy Studies, see Barton et al. (2000), Barton and Hall (2000), Baynham (1995), Collins (1995), Collins and Blot (2003), and Street (1984, 2001).

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From love to development – and back again In June 1992 Bir Bahadur,5 a twenty-one-year-old man who at the time often sported flashy jeans, a gold chain, and a winning smile, wrote the following words in his first love letter to Sarita, whose long black hair, fashionable Punjabi outfits, and demure giggles had caught his eye: Sarita, I’m helpless, and I have to make friends of a notebook and pen in order to place this helplessness before you. Love is the sort of thing that anyone can feel – even a great man of the world like Hitler loved Eva, they say. And Napoleon, who with bravery conquered the “world,”6 united it, and took it forward, was astounded when he saw one particular widow. Certainly, history’s pages are colored with accounts of such individuals who love each other. In which case, Sarita, I’ll let you know by a “short cut” what I want to say: Love is the agreement of two souls. The “main” meaning of love is “life success.” I’m offering you an invitation to love.

At the time this letter was written, Sarita, a twenty-one-year-old woman from the Magar village of Junigau, and Bir Bahadur, who was from another Magar village in western Palpa District, were both studying at the college campus in Tansen, the district center. They had met only once very briefly two months earlier when he had sought her out to deliver a message about some books she wanted to borrow from a relative. That one brief encounter, however, was enough to prompt each of them to enquire about the other’s family, personal qualities, and marriageability. Two months later, Bir Bahadur sent his “invitation to love,” and when Sarita replied, a complex, tumultuous courtship ensued. Courtships such as this one involving love letters became possible for the first time in the early 1990’s as a result of increasing female literacy rates in the village. Since it was still not considered appropriate for young men and women to date or spend time alone together (though many managed to do so occasionally despite close parental supervision), love letters provided them with a way to main5. “Bahadur” is a common middle name for Magar men; it means “brave.” (“Kumari” and “Devi,” meaning “goddess,” are common middle names for women in Junigau.) Although most Junigau residents stated that they would not mind my using their real names in my ethnography or in my public presentations because the courtships described have long since resulted in marriage, in order to protect the few who asked for anonymity, I have used pseudonyms for all love letter correspondents as well as for others who shared their narratives of marriage with me. I do not use composites or fictional characters, but I do omit or change minor details on occasion that would definitively identify someone. In keeping with anthropological convention, Junigau itself is also a pseudonym. 6. Words with quotation marks around them were written originally in English.



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tain contact with their sweethearts. Love letters such as Bir Bahadur’s above not only kept young people in touch with one another, however; 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 – 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.” Although Sarita and Bir Bahadur were among the first young people in their villages to court through love letters, they were not by any means the first to experience romantic love. Indeed, expressions of romantic love in Junigau can be found in old folksongs, poems, and stories, not to mention in villagers’ narratives of elopements that occurred decades ago. And yet, Bir Bahadur and Sarita’s courtship differed in many respects from those of their parents’ generation. The few older Magars in Junigau who eloped rather than taking part in arranged or capture marriages carried on extremely brief courtships, often eloping the day after meeting someone at a songfest or wedding. While these few elopements were frequently triggered by romantic love, and while romantic love sometimes developed between spouses who had had arranged marriages or capture marriages, most Junigau courtships that took place in the 1990’s differed significantly from those that occurred in previous decades with regard to how romantic love was conceptualized. Whereas in the past, romantic love was considered an emotion of which to be embarrassed, in the 1990s, love came to be seen as desirable, as it was linked in many young villagers’ minds with development and modernity; indeed, desire itself came to be viewed as desirable – a phenomenon I explore at greater length elsewhere (Ahearn 2003). Not only did courtships leading to elopements look different in the 1990’s; there were also many more of them in Junigau than there had been in earlier time periods. The number of elopements rose steadily in the village during the last decades of the twentieth century, whereas the number of arranged marriages and 7. Akhil Gupta (1998) notes that colonial discourse “bequeathed a set of dichotomies that were unusually ‘productive’ in a Foucauldian sense” because they enabled the construction of a sociology built on them (Gupta 1998: 9). That Junigau villagers themselves use such dichotomies as developed/backward or modern/traditional speaks to the complexities and ironies inherent in what Gupta calls “the postcolonial condition.” As Stacy Pigg notes, “Whether or not this [traditional/modern] dichotomy serves us well in social analysis, the fact is that these terms are thriving in the world we aim to describe and interpret. We need, then, to track the terms of the discourse of modernity as people adopt, deploy, modify, and question it” (Pigg 1996: 163–164). See also Collier (1997: 213) on how “modernity” and “tradition,” are best seen as subtraditions of a wider post-Enlightenment European culture.

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Percent

Women's First Marriage Types Over Time (n=105) 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Before 1960 1960-1982 1983-1998

Arranged Marriage

Capture Elopement Marriage

Figure 1.

capture marriages declined. (See Figure 1.) More and more emphasis was placed on obtaining the woman’s “consent” (mañjur) to the marriage. What this consent looked like in various types of marriage, how brides, grooms, and others felt about it, and how this consent affected villagers’ notions of action and responsibility are explored in greater detail elsewhere (Ahearn 2001a).

The costs and benefits of literacy The emergence of a new ideology of love in Junigau in the 1990s both encouraged and was facilitated by the growth of love letter writing, which itself was made possible by increased rates of female literacy. Literacy and love are therefore integrally interwoven in the village. And yet, for newly literate women, neither the new ideas about love nor their nascent reading and writing skills have been unambiguously beneficial. Because women continue for the most part to move into the extended households of their husbands’ kin upon marriage, they then come under the authority of their mothers-in-law, as is customary in Hindu families throughout Nepal and India (Bennett 1983; Raheja and Gold 1994). A woman who elopes after engaging in a love letter correspondence risks forfeiting her natal family’s support should her husband turn out to be abusive, her mother-in-law cruel, or the marriage untenable. Many times have I heard Junigau parents warn their daughters that they should not expect to be able to run home to mommy and daddy if things go wrong after they elope. Indeed, there are cases in which a love letter correspondence is followed by an extremely unhappy marriage. And because of a continuing double standard when it comes to gender, the consequences



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of these infelicitous matches fall more heavily on the women, who must live with their husbands’ extended families, than with the men, who can marry another wife or simply have extramarital affairs. And yet, although gender and age hierarchies often continue to be enforced in Junigau, the close emotional ties that develop over the course of a love letter correspondence sometimes lead to conflicts resulting in reconfigurations of power dynamics within joint families that benefit recently married daughters-in-law. A new husband’s loyalties, previously assumed to remain with his parents (who in the past were the ones who obtained a wife for him) are nowadays sometimes transferred from his parents to his wife because of the strong emotions engendered by a love letter correspondence. The following case study illustrates how one Junigau couple utilized their literacy skills to express their desires and embark upon particular life paths, sometimes challenging and sometimes reinforcing (wittingly or unwittingly) existing gender hierarchies in the process.

Durga Kumari’s two love letter correspondences It was not the sort of wedding gift Mirgun Dev had expected: a pillowcase full of incriminating letters that his new bride, Durga Kumari, had written to another man. The three youths who delivered it were relatives of the jilted former boyfriend, and they insisted on presenting their ‘gift’ to Mirgun Dev in person. It was the eve of the post-wedding dhobhet feast in the summer of 1995, and the courtyard at Mirgun Dev’s house was full of people preparing food and alcohol to take to Durga Kumari’s parents’ house for the blessing ceremony the next day. Upon looking inside the pillowcase and realizing what it contained, Mirgun Dev flew into a rage, storming up to the attic to escape the prying eyes of neighbors and family. Once there, he quickly downed two bottles of raksī, the rice alcohol that the women of Mirgun Dev’s family had distilled to take to the feast. Thus fortified, he returned to the courtyard and searched out Durga Kumari, threatening within earshot of everyone to kick her out of his house because of her correspondence with another man prior to her marriage to Mirgun Dev. Following her into the tiny room they had occupied during the two weeks since their elopement, Mirgun Dev accused her of not being a virgin when he married her and, half-crying and half-shouting, he shoved her against the wall. I was worried that the violence would escalate, but, fortunately, Mirgun Dev’s sister and mother were able to calm him down. “This is your wife!” they reminded him. “She’s yours now, no matter what happened in the past! Just forget it!”. The scene ended with Mirgun Dev sobbing himself to sleep.

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As shocked as Mirgun Dev appeared to be when he discovered what the pillowcase contained, he had received a hint of Durga Kumari’s previous relationship from Durga Kumari herself, though he may not have realized it at the time. Mirgun Dev and Durga Kumari had had a very brief courtship consisting of an exchange of several love letters and a single meeting in person. The brevity of the courtship was atypical for the 1990s in the village of Junigau, but Mirgun Dev was under extreme pressure from his elders to find a wife during his two-month leave from the Indian Army. They were so desperate for the labor of a daughter-in-law that they were prepared to arrange a marriage for Mirgun Dev if he failed to bring home a bride himself. Mirgun Dev had to act quickly, therefore, but his shyness put him at a disadvantage. Unlike other young men in Junigau who had started relationships before enlisting as Gurkha soldiers in the Nepali, Indian, or British Army, Mirgun Dev had been too shy to initiate a correspondence with anyone, and so he had had to start a relationship from scratch when he arrived home on leave. Another villager’s wedding feast provided Mirgun Dev with the opportunity to meet unmarried young women, and Durga Kumari, a pretty, vivacious high school student from the other side of the village, caught his eye. Emboldened by their brief conversation at the wedding feast, Mirgun Dev wrote Durga Kumari a letter. He asked one of his male relatives to act as a go-between and deliver his declaration of lifelong love to Durga Kumari. Durga Kumari’s response was heartening. She spoke of her happiness at having received Mirgun Dev’s letter and hinted that his feelings of love were reciprocated. She ended the letter, however, with a stern warning to Mirgun Dev not to back out of the relationship before marriage; after all, such a break-up would carry heavy consequences for Durga Kumari’s reputation. A woman who carries on a relationship with one man before marrying another – even if the relationship takes place solely in writing and not in person – risks being labeled a rādī (literally, a widow, but when used as a term of abuse, it means ‘slut’ or ‘prostitute’). So, Durga Kumari made the following appeal to Mirgun Dev at the end of her first letter to him: One thing that I hope you will promise is that you will love me truly and that when you think about the future you will continue to want to do so and won’t break up with me in the middle of our relationship. Okay? I do not want to go against your happiness; your happiness alone is my happiness. If you think that loving me will bring happiness into your life, then I will certainly accept your happy words. Not just in this life but in hundreds of lifetimes will I accept and love you.



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Later on in the middle of our relationship you are not to do anything [i.e., break up] – understand? I want you to love me without causing me suffering, okay? Finally, if you love me, send a “reply” to this letter, okay? For now farewell, Your Durga Kumari

Moving quickly to reassure her, Mirgun Dev responded in his next letter that his intentions were honorable. Indeed, he wanted to elope with her as soon as possible – ideally, he would bring her home to his house as his bride in the next couple of weeks. In Durga Kumari’s second letter to Mirgun Dev, she states that he has completely won her over. She agrees to elope with him, but tells him that they cannot elope until after she has finished her final exams. Her education is important to her, she writes, but she just as clearly declares her eternal love for Mirgun Dev in passages such as the following: Mirgun Dev, to find a husband like you would be my good fortune. In this world thousands of people love, but many do so for “fashion” and change their love as if love were a thing to be auctioned off. But I consider my love to be like clear water, as pure, immovable, and immortal as the Himalayas.

It is in this second (and final) letter from Durga Kumari to Mirgun Dev that the incident with the pillowcase full of letters from Durga Kumari to another man is foreshadowed. Durga Kumari guesses that Mirgun Dev has been hearing rumors about her involvement in another love letter correspondence – and indeed such rumors were swirling about the village at the time, for I heard them from at least two sources. In the following passage, Durga Kumari urges Mirgun Dev to ignore such gossip: Mirgun Dev, it seems that I have become caught up with you in a web of pure love. I don’t want to give you any hopes based on lies. There are thousands of people who will speak ill of me. In this world people are prepared to do anything for selfish reasons. They don’t do anything else but speak ill of others. The world is like this. Villagers or your friends may speak ill of me to you, but please don’t believe such talk, okay? Between us there should only be honesty in this life. There may have been many other men who wrote me letters – this is true, but I hate all of them and don’t accept any of them – and never have. I haven’t loved any man because I’ve stayed at home respectfully living with my mother and father. But today I love you because I see that your love is boundless. And I accept your proposal.

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Mirgun Dev believed Durga Kumari’s assertion that she had never loved another man, and so with great happiness he went forward with the elopement, bringing Durga Kumari home to live with him and his extended family. A Brahman priest was brought in from a neighboring village to conduct a short Hindu wedding ceremony, and all of Mirgun Dev’s relatives welcomed their new daughter- or sister-in-law. It was two weeks later, just before the newlyweds were to return to Durga Kumari’s parents’ home for the first time since the elopement for the dhobhet blessing ceremony, that Mirgun Dev received the pillowcase full of letters in which Durga Kumari declared her love for another man. After his rage was spent, Mirgun Dev reluctantly went forward with the ceremony, and gradually the relationship between the spouses regained its warmth. By the time Mirgun Dev had to return to the Indian Army, they had put the incident behind them. Six months or so later, after Mirgun Dev had returned to India, Durga Kumari found herself miserable in her marital home. The stigma of her previous love letter correspondence had not disappeared, and she felt mistreated by her husband’s relatives, especially his mother. She had not been allowed to continue her schooling, as she had been promised, and she was being given all the most arduous tasks in the fields and in the house. Once again she resorted to letter writing, this time to complain to Mirgun Dev about her treatment and to urge him to return home and intervene on her behalf with his mother. Such letters from newly married women to their distant husbands are becoming more common in Junigau. In several recent cases among villagers, including Mirgun Dev’s and Durga Kumari’s, the men have indeed come home and have taken their wives’ sides in the disputes. Life improved for Durga Kumari after that, but Mirgun Dev’s mother felt betrayed when her son accused her of mistreating his wife. Such an act represented further proof, she claimed (as if any were needed!) that the chhucho jovāna, a selfish, mean, or backbiting time period, had arrived.8 For Durga Kumari and other new daughters-in-law, however, their use of their literacy skills in this manner gives them an advantage over their mothers-in-law, who are members of a generation of females who were rarely taught to read or write. Still, certain gendered notions, such as the importance of a bride’s virginity and the assumption that men are more capable than women of taking effective action, persist even as literacy practices surrounding love and marriage change in Junigau.

8. Villagers use this phrase to refer to the kāliyug, the fourth or iron age, which Hindus believe began on 18 February 3102 B.C.E and will end on 18 February 428,898 C.E., when the world will be destroyed (Turner 1990[1931]: 79).



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Literacy practices and development discourses For the remainder of this chapter, I attempt to situate Junigau love letter writing in the wider range of literacy practices in which villagers engaged during the 1990s. By doing so, we can begin to discover some of the sources of the villagers’ new ideas about love, success, agency, and personhood. By the 1990’s, development discourse9 was ubiquitous in Junigau: textbooks; magazines and novels; Radio Nepal development programmes and soap operas; Hindi movies in Tansen; love letter guidebooks; and everyday conversations. I focus here on the most salient written sources of development discourse and new ideas about agency. While it is also important to investigate the actual literacy practices surrounding reading and writing, as well as the viewing of films, and to explore how literacy practices in Junigau have changed over the past few decades, for the purposes of this article, I will concentrate primarily on an analysis of most widely read texts. Through such a close reading of these texts, we can discover some likely sources for the development rhetoric found in Junigau love letters. All government schools in Nepal, including Junigau’s Sarvodaya High School (grades 1–10),10 use the same set of textbooks published by the Ministry of Education and Culture. When I taught English and math in the Peace Corps in the early 1980’s, these were the textbooks I used, and they are the textbooks from which many of Junigau’s love letter writers acquired their literacy skills in their early years of formal schooling. The themes that come through most clearly from the textbooks’ stories and pictures are (1) nationalism and development, which are presented hand in hand; (2) age and gender hierarchies; and, (3) hegemonic Hinduism.11 (See Figures 2, 3, and 4.) All of the messages conveyed in Nepal’s national textbooks are important influences on Junigau’s constantly shifting structures of feeling. They both reflect and shape villagers’ changing notions of personhood, agency, and social hierarchy (cf. Luke 1988; Schieffelin 2000). Similar themes underlie Nāyā Goreto (“New Path”), the textbook used to teach female literacy in Junigau and elsewhere throughout Nepal. The text and images in the female literacy materials through which many Junigau women have learned to read and write differ somewhat from those of the textbooks used for

9. On development discourse, see Escobar (1995), Grillo and Stirrat (1997), Pigg (1992, 1996), Sivaramakrishnan (2000), and Woost (1997). 10. Grade 10 is the final grade of high school in most places. In some schools a “10+2” system has been implemented, but not in Junigau. 11. See Luke (1988) for an analysis of the Dick and Jane textbooks in a very different cultural context.

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Figure 2.

formal education in Nepali schools, yet there are interesting parallels. Like the textbooks used in all government schools in Nepal, Nāyā Goreto (“New Path”) stresses the need to become “developed” (bikāsi), but while the formal school textbooks emphasize hegemonic Nepali nationalism and Hinduism and reinforce existing gender and age hierarchies, “New Path” seeks to challenge at least some of those hierarchies. Interestingly, both the textbooks used in Nepali schools and “New Path” are government-sponsored textbooks, which proves that no government is univocal in its publications. From page one, “New Path,” which is explicitly Freirean in design,12 is steeped in development discourse. From the vocabulary words accompanied by full-page illustrations designed to raise students’ consciousness to the serialized comic strip stories about villagers and their problems, the textbook clearly presents in unmistakably moral tones a correct – or ‘developed’ – way to live. (See Figures 5 and 6.) Of course, the degree to which literacy students or other villagers who read 12. See Freire (1972) and Freire and Macedo (1987).



Figure 3.

Figure 4.

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Figure 5.

these materials (for the workbook is in wide circulation in Junigau) accept, resist, or otherwise grapple with this image of the bikāsi Nepali varies. The ideology of “New Path” is not absorbed passively or unquestioningly by its Junigau readers. Nor is it by any means the sole source of development discourse in the village. Tracing individuals’ actions and beliefs back to this particular text is therefore problematic, if not impossible. Nevertheless, I have heard Junigau residents use the comic strip stories as cautionary tales, especially regarding men with drinking problems and multiple wives, or women who are dissatisfied with their fates and decide to leave their husbands. (See Figure 7.) Where “New Path” has contributed the most to social change in Junigau and to the rhetoric found in love letters, it seems to me, is in its advocacy of the ideological package involving self-sufficiency, hard work, development, success, and individual responsibility. Many of the same messages are being communicated in Sarvodaya School’s textbooks and classrooms, albeit within a very different framework that emphasizes patriotism, Hinduism, and filial piety. As Junigau residents acquire basic literacy skills, whether through formal schooling or evening literacy classes, they are encouraged to associate the acquisition of all kinds of skills with greater development, capitalist activity, independence, and agency. Jenny Cook-



Figure 6.

Figure 7.

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Figure 8.

Gumperz recognizes this process when she states, “Literacy as a socially defined phenomenon is constructed through a process of schooling” (1986: 6). Next to the textbooks used in the government school and in female literacy classes, the most popular reading materials in Junigau in the 1990’s were magazines. Three main types were popular: (1) film magazines such as Kāmanā; (2) magazines such as Deurāli and Yuvā Manch, which focus on development, education, and entertainment; and, (3) publications such as Lāphā and Kairan, which support the janājāti ethnic political movement. Sample pages from these three types of magazines can be seen in Figures 8, 9, and 10. Another type of reading material available to Junigau residents in the 1990’s consisted of short stories or novels, but many fewer villagers actually read these materials because of their expense. They also lacked the appeal of magazines, which had more attractive graphics and prose that was easier for villagers to understand. The only work of fiction I saw in the village besides a few collections of folktales was a novel by Prakash Kovid (n.d.) entitled, Love Letters.13 (The cover 13. The Nepali title, Prem Patra, could be translated as singular or plural. In the book there are numerous love letters exchanged between the young protagonists rather than one special love letter, so the more appropriate translation is probably Love Letters.



Figure 9.

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Figure 10.

of this novel can be seen in Figure 11.) Although none of the letter writers with whom I spoke during my research had read the book before they wrote their love letters, other young people in the village had, and the details of the plot were circulated fairly widely, as was the book itself. Although most Junigau love letter writers have told me that they write only what is in their hearts/minds (man) and have never consulted a guidebook, the examples, rules, and sentiments contained in the love letter guidebooks that are sporadically available in bookstores in Tansen so closely echo Junigau love letters that I have decided to close with a few examples of these texts here. When I first heard that ‘how to’ books were available to Nepalis who wanted to learn how to write love letters, I asked one of the clerks at Shrestha News Agency in Tansen for copies of whatever they had. Sorry, the clerk replied, they were all sold out. I returned a couple of weeks later, but although they had received a new shipment of the guidebooks in the interim, they were again already sold out. By my third trip to the bookseller, the clerk recognized me and gave me an apologetic smile that acknowledged what he must have perceived to be my desperate need to learn how to write love letters. Still no guidebooks. Finally, a few months later,



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Figure 11.

I did manage to obtain a copy of Ara John Movsesian’s How to Write Love Letters and Love Poems (Movsesian 1993) from Shrestha News Agency, though in all my subsequent trips back to the store they never had any of the popular Hindi guidebooks in stock.14 I found two more English guidebooks in Kathmandu bookstores, J. S. Bright’s Lively Love Letters (Bright n.d.) and Manohar’s15 Love Letters (Manohar n.d.). In his guidebook, Movsesian puts forth the same philosophy of love that informs the Junigau love letters. According to this philosophy, love is an eternal centrality of life. At the same time, an evolution is posited that moves away from illiterate ‘backwardness’ toward ‘civilized, refined’ expressions of ‘Romantic Communication.’ The following passages from Movsesian’s Preface demonstrate the parallels with the love letters written in Junigau and the ideological assumptions regarding the effects of literacy: Verbal language has enabled individuals to personally express their love in a more refined manner than was earlier possible. Written language has provided lover’s

14. I was told that there are no love letter guidebooks written in Nepali. 15. The author of this book uses only one name, “Manohar.”

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[sic] a very potent tool which, in turn, has given rise to two forms of Romantic Communication: The Love Letter and Love Poem. Both of these forms have been used by literate people everywhere for centuries to communicate their innermost passions, desires and emotions. Even Henry VIII and Napoleon wrote love letters to their sweethearts. The most famous legendary writer of love letters was Cyrano De Berjerac [sic] who wrote countless letters, not for himself, but on behalf of his close friends. (Movsesian 1993: vii)

Similarities are immediately apparent between this passage from Movsesian’s guidebook and the first letter Bir Bahadur wrote to Sarita, quoted above, which contains the lines, “Love is the sort of thing that anyone can feel – even a great man of the world like Hitler loved Eva, they say. And Napoleon, who with bravery conquered the ‘world,’ united it, and took it forward, was astounded when he saw one particular widow.” Moreover, the very first letter in Movsesian’s book, in the section entitled, “Love Letters from the Past,” is from Napoleon Bonaparte to Josephine De Beauharnais, written in December 1795. It reads in part: I wake filled with thoughts of you. Your portrait and the intoxicating evening which we spent yesterday have left my senses in turmoil. Sweet, incomparable Josephine, what a strange effect you have on my heart! Are you angry? Do I see you looking sad? Are you worried? (Movsesian 1993: 7)

These lines are echoed in the many allusions to anger and sadness in the correspondence of Vajra Bahadur and Shila Devi. In the spring of 1990, for instance, Vajra Bahadur wrote, “Again, you’ll probably get angry reading this letter. Whenever I see you, you’re always angry. Why, oh why, when I see you walking, looking angry, does my heart get cut into slices?”

Conclusion Although it is undeniably true, as Goody (2000: 155) states, that “Changes in modes of communication do matter and have fundamentally altered the life of mankind [sic],” this statement begs the question of how things have changed, for whom, why, and with what results. As Schieffelin (2000: 293) reminds us, “We know that societies differ significantly in ways of taking up and organizing literacy practices (or resisting them), and this relates to cultural as well as historical factors.” In the case of Junigau, it is clear that ideology cannot be separated from literacy, as young villagers in the 1990s acquired literacy skills in the context of certain social forces that emphasized the importance of formal education as part of becoming ‘modern’ and ‘developed’.



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Moreover, while some literacy practitioners and scholars might view the increasing rates of female literacy in a place like Junigau as an unmitigatedly positive outcome, as an example of “the giving of power to the powerless” (Goody 2000: 158), my research indicates that literacy does not always bring with it power (cf. Luke 1996; Street 2001). A Junigau woman who uses her newly acquired literacy skills to write love letters risks ruining her reputation should the correspondence become public knowledge. Even if the letter writing results in an elopement with a young man, the woman often entirely forfeits the support of her natal family if the marriage happens to turn sour. Having married someone she usually knows only through love letters, she may end up devastated when her husband is less loving in actuality than he sounded in his letters, or when his mother is a harsh taskmaster over her new, lowly daughter-in-law – and when no one from her natal family will intervene on her behalf because she eloped rather than having an arranged marriage. That such distressing outcomes have occurred in Junigau belie the simplistic notion of literacy as a neutral skill of empowerment. Finally, the types of ideological messages conveyed in the texts used in and out of Junigau classrooms, and the unexpected uses to which Junigau young people are putting their newly acquired literacy skills, should open our eyes to the need for a more thoughtful and more culturally specific approach to pedagogy in the context of literacy acquisition. Some might argue that since Junigau women are primarily, or even exclusively, using their literacy skills to conduct love letter correspondences, perhaps love letters should be brought into female literacy classrooms as texts. Or perhaps the writing of love letters should be made central to the curriculum. And yet, my very strong hunch is that these suggestions would be rejected by the women who attend female literacy classes in Nepal, for they claim that they want a ‘real education’ – i.e., they want to learn to read and write using the same methods of rote memorization and the same textbooks as their brothers used to acquire their literacy skills. Indeed, female literacy students in the 1980s and 1990s explicitly dismissed the “New Path” text’s Freirean goals of consciousness raising and social activism as irrelevant to their own goals of becoming ‘truly literate’. Despite the fact that these women would be applying their literacy skills to tasks quite different from those of their formally educated brothers, they nevertheless perceived that there was prestige in becoming literate via particular pedagogical methods in particular social contexts. Although the women attending evening female literacy classes were required to use the less prestigious “New Path” textbook and were instructed in ways that could be called more participatory or progressive, they realized that the literacy they were acquiring did not have the same social value as the literacy their brothers had acquired. All means to the end of literacy are not created equal. This is because, as Brian Street (2001: 8) notes,

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…engaging with literacy is always a social act even from the outset. The ways in which teachers or facilitators and their students interact is already a social practice that affects the nature of the literacy being learned and the ideas about literacy held by the participants, especially the new learners and their position in relations of power. It is not valid to suggest that ‘literacy’ can be ‘given’ neutrally and then its ‘social’ effects only experienced afterwards.

In conclusion, while I have only managed to scratch the surface of the complexities involved in the Nepali literacy practice of love letter writing, I hope I have nevertheless provided a glimpse of some of the ways in which these love letters are situated intertextually among other commonly read texts in Junigau, all of which are saturated with various development discourses. In addition, by situating the Junigau practice of love letter writing in its historical, social, and intertextual contexts, I have presented one case study of the sometimes unexpected uses to which newly acquired literacy skills are put, and the many complex meanings and values associated with them. In so doing, I hope to have demonstrated the need for nuanced, fully contextualized analyses of literacy acquisition.

References Ahearn, L. M. 2001a. Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love letters, and Social Change in Nepal. Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press. Ahearn, L. M. 2001b. Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 109–137. Ahearn, L. M. 2003. Writing desire in Nepali love letters. Language & Communication 23(2): 107–122. Ahearn, L. M. 2004. Literacy, power, and agency: Love letters and development in Nepal. Language & Education 18(4): 305–316. Barton, D. & Hall, N. 2000. Letter Writing as a Social Practice [Studies in Written Language and Literacy 9]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Barton, D., Hamilton, M. & Ivanič, R. (eds). 2000. Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context. London: Routledge. Baynham, M. 1995. Literacy Practices: Investigating Literacy in Social Contexts. London: Longman. Bennett, L. 1983. Dangerous Wives and Sacred Sisters: Social and Symbolic Roles of High-caste Women in Nepal. New York NY: Columbia University Press. Bright, J. S. n.d. Lively Love Letters. New Delhi: Goodwill Publishing House. Collier, J. F. 1997. From Duty to Desire: Remaking Families in a Spanish Village. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Collins, J. 1995. Literacy and literacies. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 75–93. Collins, J. & Blot, R. K. 2003. Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook-Gumperz, J. 1986. Introduction: The social construction of literacy. In The Social Construction of Literacy, 1–15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



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Desjarlais, R. R. 1992. Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas. Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Divakaruni, C. B. 1999. Sister of My Heart. New York NY: Doubleday. Escobar, A. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Umaking of the Third World. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Freire, P. 1972. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Continuum & Penguin. Freire, P. & Macedo, D. 1987. Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. South Hadley MA: Bergin and Garvey. Goody, J. 1986. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, J. 1987. The Interface Between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, J. 2000. The Power of the Written Tradition. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Goody, J. & Watt, I. 1963. The consequences of literacy. Comparative Studies in History and Society 5: 306–326, 332–345. Grillo, R. D. & Stirrat, R. L. 1997. Discourses of Development: Anthropological perspectives. New York NY: Berg. Gupta, A. 1998. Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Durham SC: Duke University Press. Kovid, P. N.d. Prem Patra (Love Letters). Varanasi, India. Kulick, D. & Stroud, C. 1990. Christianity, cargo and ideas of self. Man, n.s., 25: 70–88. Luke, A. 1988. Literacy, Textbooks and Ideology: Postwar Literacy Instruction and the Mythology of Dick and Jane. London: The Falmer Press. Luke, A. 1996. Genres of power? Literacy education and the production of capital. In Literacy in Society [Applied Linguistics and Language Study], R. Hasan & G. Williams (eds). Boston MA: Addison-Wesley. Ministry of Education and Culture. His Majesty’s Government, Nepal. 1983. My English Book Two: For Grade Five. Bhaktapur, Nepal: Janak Educational Materials Centre. Ministry of Education and Culture. His Majesty’s Government, Nepal. 1994. Nayā Goreto (New Path.) 15th edn. Kathmandu: Gorkhapatra Sangsthan. Manohar. N.d. Love Letters. New Delhi: New Light Publishers. Movsesian, A. J. 1993. How to Write Love Letters and Love Poems. Bombay: Jaico Publishing House. Pigg, S. L. 1992. Inventing social categories through place: Social representations and development in Nepal. Comparative Studies in Society and History 34(3): 491–513. Pigg, S. L. 1996. The credible and the credulous: The question of “villager’s beliefs” in Nepal. Cultural Anthropology 11(2): 160–201. Raheja, G. G. & Gold, A. G. 1994. Listen to the Heron’s Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Schieffelin, B. B. 2000. Introducing Kaluli literacy: A chronology of influences. In Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, P. V. Kroskrity (ed.), 293–327. Santa Fe NM: School of American Research Press. Sivaramakrishnan, K. 2000. Crafting the public sphere in the forests of West Bengal: Democracy, development, and political action. American Ethnologist 27(2): 431–461. Street, B. V. 1984. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Street, B. V. (ed.). 2001. Literacy and Development: Ethnographic Perspectives. London: Routledge. Turner, R. L. 1990 [1931]. A Comparative and Etymological Dictionary of the Nepali Language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Williams, R. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Woost, M. D. 1997. Alternative vocabularies of development? ‘Community’ and ‘participation’ in development discourse in Sri Lanka. In Discourses of Development: Anthropological perspectives, R. D. Grillo & R. L. Stirrat (eds), 229–253. Oxford: Berg.

chapter 6

Children’s games as local semiotic play An ethnographic account* Mastin Prinsloo This chapter looks at a particular group of children in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, and examines the emergent literacy practices in their out-of-school peer-play. Play is seen as a site of meaning-making and identity work where the children draw on a range of resources and influences to take and make meaning. The influences of home and school are shown to be just part of what is available to these children. The site of play is shown to be itself a distinctive domain which allows children to practice, learn, innovate around, reflect on, and synthesize the conceptual resources available to them from multiple sites. These resources for semiosis and interaction are seen to be multi-lingual and multi-modal, and are sourced from social domains that are local, regional and global.

In this chapter I examine how one group of children’s play activity presented opportunities and experiences for them to engage in flexible, creative and productive signifying practices. I argue that a close examination of their activity shows them creating and modelling for each other a variety of flexible, situated ways of making and taking meaning from a range of language and other semiotic resources. Such a focus on children’s active engagement in signifying and meaning making activity provides a contrast with the particular kinds of limited engagement with reading and writing that often characterize school-based literacy learning in local schools in Cape Town, South Africa (Prinsloo and Stein 2004). Where the emphasis in school is often on children’s passive absorption of the signifying practices presented to them, the perspective I develop here is that children’s social participation in meaning making is not simply a unidirectional movement * An earlier version of this study was published as ‘Literacy is Child’s Play: Making Sense in Khwezi Park’ in Language and Education, 2004, 18 (4): 291–304. The paper was first presented at a panel organized by the AILA Scientific Commission on Literacy, entitled, “Global and Local Issues in Literacy Research,” at the 13th World Congress of Applied Linguistics, 19 December 2002, Singapore.

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in which they gradually take on board an already available social world. Within constraints, and given the space, children at least partly follow their own interests and experiences as they choose what they want to represent and choose the modes, means and materials for their representative work. In doing so they work with available social resources, and with the values and status that these resources and signs hold in that setting. A social practices orientation to learning, as I develop and apply it here, sees learning as active and as practice-based; that is, as socially situated, and distributed across people, artefacts and categories, in contexts of activity. In this view, reading and writing are one part of children’s social activity. Literacy and language as situated social practices are embedded in children’s social and practical lives.

Children play A productive focus on children’s play activities has developed from the understanding of children as active meaning-makers in the practices of reading and writing. (Kendrick 2003; Roskos and Christie 2001) Play offers a space for children to create imaginary situations where they can reshape concrete objects, actions, and indeed, their own voices. They can infuse their own intentions and meanings into those objects and actions (Dyson 1993). Children often replace the rules of ordinary life with precise, sometimes arbitrary and often unexceptional rules of their own that govern the correct playing of the game. Vygotsky (1978) regarded symbolic play as an important venue where children could develop their sign-making resources. Play provides opportunity for children to draw on texts, images, movement and semiotically imbued artefacts from their multiple social worlds of home, school and peer interaction (Dyson 1993) to create their own intertextual meanings. Kress (2003, 1997) has usefully addressed differences between adults and children as to how they encounter, learn and use literacy. He suggested that the process of meaning-making is the same for adults as it is for children, in that they both use what is available and which seems most suited to make the meanings that they are interested to make. However, he argued that children encounter literacy differently to adults in some key respects: In social settings where literacy is around and part of everyday life, children don’t necessarily attach the same status and importance to print literacy as adults do. Where adults are oriented towards what is ‘correct’, children are less constrained, Kress (2003) suggests, partly because they are less informed than adults, but also because they are more willing to work inventively with what is at hand, and to explore the signifying potentials of a range of resources and materials. Whereas adults’ orientation reflects the particular common



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sense of their societies, children are concerned to understand the nature of their worlds and to engage with them, to examine what their place is and might become. Where adults see a ready-made path towards meaning-making, children make their meanings by drawing on available resources “governed by their interest at the moment of making the sign” (Kress 2003: 155). Children’s interest, which is undoubtedly socially shaped as well, works to guide their selection of what they want to represent, and which aspects they use to operate as signs (e.g., circles drawn by a pre-school child to signify a car indicate the selection of the wheels and the steering wheel as emblematic for that child). For adults language, and language as writing, are the most highly valued available resources. To children anything at hand is apt as a sign-making and meaning-making resource – whether it be a stick, which readily becomes a horse (Vygotsky 1978), a cardboard box which becomes a warrior’s helmet, a blanket and chairs which become a house (Kress 1997) or an old pantyhose which the children call a ‘wait’ becomes a barrier rope, a key resource in an elaborate game activity, as I describe below. The nature of childhood, childhood play and the influences of adult norms upon children need also to be understood as culturally and socially variable practices, where parents and social groups have different attitudes and responses to children’s self-directed activities. The social practices approach to the study of literacy draws attention to the reality that children and parents live in home settings where time and space are conceptualised and regulated differently, where routines are differently organized, where attitudes to children’s play and literacy activities vary (Heath 1983).

Making sense in Khwezi Park My analysis here focuses on one child, in interaction with her peers in a play context.1 The child, Masibulele, was seven years old when the data were collected, in her first year of schooling. She lived in Khwezi Park Township, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, and attended a local school where she was learning to read and write in Xhosa, her home-language. She would later learn to read and write English, which will most likely become the predominant language of learning for her. Both Masibulele’s parents grew up in the Transkei Bantustan. Masibulele’s mother left school before finishing ‘Primary Schooling’. Her father left school 1. The research reported on was carried out as part of the Children’s Early Literacy Learning (CELL) research project. The data was collected by Xolisa Gazula, working as a research assistant on the Children’s Early Literacy Learning project, on which I was a Principal Resaearcher together with Pippa Stein from Wits.

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during his first year of ‘High School’ (after six years of schooling) to go and work on the gold mines in Gauteng. By the time we met Masibulele he was currently working on the railways. Masibulele’s mother did not have a job, but ran the household and took primary care of Masibulele and her older sister, Ntombephelo. Masibulele was doing well at her school and liked to draw and write, but there were almost no books or paper in her home. Her interactions with her parents were not characterized by those ‘scaffolding behaviours’, once thought to be near universal but now seen as mostly a Western middle class practice (Hasan 2000): i.e., her mother did not regularly engage her as a conversational partner, where the conversation starts at baby-talk level and gets increasingly ‘normal’ as the child matures. Nor did her mother try to prepare her for the interactive patterns of communication that are said to characterize the discourse of teacher-pupils, such as those of question, answer, feedback, or Initiation, Response, Evaluation (Heath 1983). Masibulele was in the ‘strong group’ in her streamed classroom and was often sent to assist children in the two ‘weak groups’: they contained around half the children; those who were just not ‘getting it’ when it came to the ‘basics’ of reading and who exasperated their teacher. Masibulele played daily with other Xhosa-speaking children in her neighbourhood, in a group varying between 8 and 16 children at a time, of varying ages, mostly girls, but the group often also included one or two boys. Their play was characterized by a mix of languages, narrative resources, images and artefacts from local popular culture (including ‘traditional’ Xhosa and Christian church influences), from the mass media (TV and radio) and school. The data I focus on here relate to the children’s interaction during two particular, overlapping games, ‘rounders’ and ‘wait’, both versions of ball-tag and skipping games. They share much in common with similar games played by children elsewhere in the world, and draw on the names and practices of such games from elsewhere. But the local versions of these games were substantially redesigned and elaborated on by the children studied. The Khwezi Park versions that Masibulele and her friends played allowed for substantial spoken, sung and danced displays at various stages. In between throws, and particularly when the ball was not fielded cleanly the children in the middle had license to tease and show-off. This aspect of the game was signalled by them as “steji” or “stage”. It is apparent that much of the fun of the game came from the space for verbal exchange, jousting, experiment, play and display that the game made possible, but the rules for playing were followed and continuously policed in verbal exchanges. In the wait game one of the children, by saying the Afrikaans word “praat” (speak; talk), could nominate a particular chant routine to be followed while crossing the rope (made from old twisted panty-hose), when the children had to call out the name of a colour, in English, at the conclusion of each stage. The height of the ropes to be crossed could also be set by the participants, as a further variation, at ankle-, knee- or



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waist-height. In my discussion of the play below I present the transcript first and then go on to discuss it. I refer to line numbers in my discussion. The mark // indicates there has been a deletion in the transcript. Upper case indicates shouting. The numbering of lines is for purposes of easy reference in the discussion. 1. Masibulele: Masidlaleni urounders maan (Let’s play rounders man) 2. Masibulele and Thandeka (in unison) STEJI! (STAGE!) 3. Masibulele: STEJI! Thetha thetha ngubani onothix’omkhulu emhlabeni? (STAGE! Speak speak who’s got a big God on earth?) (they laugh) 4. Child: Hay’aba! (No you!)

Masibulele and Thandeka shouted out “Stage!” (lines 2 and 3) at the initiation of the game, bidding to be the person in the middle who dodges the ball and is “on stage” in that she has a license to perform, heckle, tease the others as they try to get her ‘out’ by throwing the ball to hit her. Masibulele’s elaborate use of a religious saying (line 3) regarding who gets chosen won her a laugh from the other children as well as a successful bid to be in the middle – on stage. The humour lies at least partly in its mildly transgressive quality, a surprising and hyperbolic religious reference in a peer play setting, and the humorous intervention signaled her competitive intention to perform and tease. She continued, having been given the stage: 5. Masibulele: Ndinezitayile ngoku. Ndigcwele zizitayile (she sings) Isqendu sam nesika Ntombephelo. Esi sesika Ntombephelo. Esi sesam (I’ve got style now. I’m full of styles.) (she sings) (My piece) (short skirt or shorts) (and Ntombephelo’s. This one is Ntombephelo’s and this is mine.) (referring to her skirt and top)

Children in the middle were encouraged to strut, sing, tease and call attention to their bodily selves and their social selves in a kind of interactive display that usually elicited comment from their friends. Masibulele, in line 5 above drew attention to her clothes and to her relationship with Ntombephelo, her eleven year old sister who was also in the game and was an important influence on Masibulele's sense of herself, her confidence, her access to valuable information and what her development trajectory might be. She was thus marking here this relationship. At the same time she was engaged in embodied sign-making practices where her physical and social selves were resources for meaning-making and social interaction. She then moved on to a different kind of teasing display, involving numbers and a subversive intervention in the game, where her emerging literacy (to do with numbers and their social uses) is apparent: 1. Thandeka: Ukhona u one out? Ukhona u one out?

(Is there one out? Is there one out?)

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2. Masibulele: 3. Girl: 4. Masibulele:

Ewe, no five out, no six out, no seven out no twenty out. (Yes, and five out, and six out and seven out and twenty out) Hayi, u one out ukhona? (No, is one out there?) Ukhona ewe. Uyophela ku twenty-four. Ha, a out. Uyophela ku  twenty eight thousand out. (Yes it’s there. Up until twenty four. Ha, a out. Up until twenty eight thousand out.)

Masibulele can be seen here to be making use of her license on stage to be humorously subversive of the others efforts to monitor the game. While the others were trying to find out if anyone had gone ‘out’, she turned this into an exaggerated display of numbering. In her first year of school at that time she almost certainly had no precise idea of 28,000 but she clearly enjoyed invoking big numbers. She did something similarly exuberant and playful soon after this episode, again with numbers, and inviting response from the others: 5. Masibulele: 6. Thandeka: 7. Ntombephelo:

Irighti lo nto. Kaloku mna ndimdala ndingange one hundred and million dollar. (That thing is right. By the way I am as old as one hundred and million dollar.) Kodwa umfutshane kangaka kodwa ungange one hundred and million dollar. (But you are this short but you say you are as big as one hundred and million dollar.) Ngekudala wasweleka. (You would have died a long time ago.)

Notably Masibulele used the word dollar rather than South African currency (rand), perhaps because of its force as a non-local sign of value, or magnitude, but also perhaps because it marked the freedom to experiment that she had in this part of the game. The responses from the other girls (lines 6 and 7) joined in the playful spirit of the odd metaphor, not questioning its literal appropriateness in correlating amounts of age, size and money. This distributed cognitive playfulness around unconventional signs shows the children feeding off each other’s sign-making. Kress (1997) examined the emerging sign-making practices of pre-school children. He presented a similar example of original sign-making through metaphor, where a child out on a walk described a hill as ‘heavy’, a sign that worked for the child because of the correlation with the effort required to walk up the hill. Kress used that example to illustrate his point about meaning-making as being an internal sign-making process, where meanings are made by children drawing on their own repertoire of interest, experience and semiotic resources. Such re-



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sources do not resemble the conventional standardized forms of descriptive analogy that become the internalized versions used in later life. Kress also made the argument, important for my purposes here, that children happily combine various semiotic systems, such as talk, drawing, gesture, dramatic play and writing. He described “multimodality” as “an absolute fact of children’s semiotic practices” (Kress 1997: 137). The point to note here is that the game allowed the children to engage in such playful and productive exercising of their meaning-making resources, in a communicative context that was permitting of fantasy and experiment, with peer feedback and also with boundaries and rules. The children interactively and reactively shared notions of value and status with each other and explored how these were embedded in language and routines.

Playing by the rules The following extract is an example of intensive game playing. I relate it in order to show how the children, absorbed in the activity, are engaged in several tasks, including the management of social interaction and relationships and the maintenance and modification of rules of play. Their semiotic activity is seen to be multi-lingual in its resources, referenced to multiple other social contexts, and multi-modal in its blend of kinetic movement, dance, language and gesture. The language is a “social language” (Bakhtin 1981; Gee 1996): the meanings of words and movements of reference are internal to the social-semiotic domain of play that the children construct. The discourse practices are not those of reproducing inherited scripts or codes, but of situated production, which suggests a processual view of culture (Rosaldo 1993) or what Bourdieu called “regulated improvisation” (1977: 78). The meanings produced are only fully sensible to insiders, though the bits of language, as resources, come from outside of the play domain. The frequent use of English (and some Afrikaans) terms in the game signals this process of taking ‘status words’ or ‘fixed words’ and using them as clear meaning markers. These words included rounders, cross, wait, colours, statue, numbers, out, duck, partners, praat (speak; Afrikaans), rules, score, as well as colours and numbers in English. Numbers were a useful form of division and pacing. Each number corresponded to a step in the children’s dance across a rope. While the children were taught the numbers in isiXhosa at school, as well as the days of the week in the Xhosa language, they used the English words in everyday conversations, as did their parents. The numbers and colours below were said in English by the children.

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  1. Ntombephelo:   2. Ntombephelo:   3. Thandeka:   4. Ntombephelo:   5. Masibulele:   6. Ntombephelo:   7. Ntombephelo:   8. Child:   9. Ntombephelo: 10. Nomha: 11. Nomha: 12. Thandeka: 13. Nomha: 14. Mabhuti: 15. Masibulele: 16. N:

Hayi ingatyekeleli sisi. Emakhwapheni ngoku. (No, it must not be soft sister. At the armpits now.) Wait one chacha, One, two, one, two chacha. Wait one chacha Out, one, two, three, four, out, one, two, three, four, out, one, two, three, duck , one, two, three, four Orange Orange, one, two, three, four. Yhu praat (Hey talk!) (Praat is an Afrikaans word meaning talk or speak.) One, two! one, two, three, four. One, two! one, two, three, four, one, two, one, two, three, four, White. one, two, three, four, black, two, three, four, orange. Yithi orange. (Say orange.) Yhu praat! (Hey talk!). Yhu! Two, three, four, and two, three, four, and one, two, three, four. Irules! Ayikho inzikinzane. (The rules! There’s no nzikinzane.) (“Nzikinzane” is a cut under one of the toes, an analogical reference to the height at which the ‘wait’ is to be held). Esinqeni. (At the waist.) Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, out. Ukhona u one out. (There is one out.) One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, Yhu andidinwe! Bhekela Bhekela! (Hey, I’m tired! Move back move back!) One, two, three, four mustard, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Asenzi praat. (We don’t do praat.) Wait, wait, wait. Statue, Masibulele! Yiza ubulapha! (Statue, Masibulele! Come you were here!) Skozi? (Score?) Seven

The transcript cannot of course capture the blend of words, rhythm, gesture and movement that were involved here. Line 1 shows Masibulele’s older sister doing some meta-work, making sure the rope was at the right height for this stage of the game and that tension on the rope was right. Her own turn at the formulaic dance-shuffle movement across the rope was enhanced by her turning it into a cha-cha. In line 5, Masibulele intervened by nominating a colour, but it was not her turn to do so. However her sister accepted the prompt and then remembered (signalled by “Yhu!” in line 6) that she should have said the word praat (speak), which was the cue to nominate the names of colours at the end of each sequence. In line 9 she ‘switched off ’ the nomination of colours by saying “praat” again, and then continued her sequence of movements without any more colours. “Statue” (line 14) was a cue to freeze on the spot without moving, borrowed from another



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game. In line 10 the child Nomha made an intervention about the rules, again invoking an insider language (nzikinzane). The predominance of English words in this, and very many of the other examples of play recorded in the CELL studies, is remarkable, and could be seen to reflect the dominance of English as a language of status and influence, the language of schooling and knowledge, the language of learning of older children in the group and the language of status in the mass (musical and visual) media and popular cultural resources that the children encounter. But it might also be that English, because of its relative separation from children’s immediate, intimate lifeworld in their family settings, is also an exotic language that can be ‘looted’ more readily for children to construct their own meanings out of their own activities. An example is the term “wait” and its uses in a language of the children’s own. “Wait” is what the children in the game do between moves. It signals a completion of a sequence or a pause, a marker somewhat like a comma or full stop on a page. The word “wait” also signifies the panty-hose ropes that are stretched out and have to be crossed in elaborate patterns of movement and chant, as well as the name of the game itself: 1. Thandeka: Yhu akemde uwait wakho ndimbone izolo.Yhu!. (Hey, your wait is very long. I saw it yesterday. Hey!) 2. Masibulele: Uqala pha kulapali aye kuphela ngapgha kwezilabs. (It starts at that pole and ends over at the slabs.)

This term also appears in informal peer talk at school: Zenande (talking to a friend in class): Yhazi ndimlibele u wait wam ndimlibele ekhaya. (You know I have forgotten my wait at home.)

It is clear here that materials such as old panty hose are shaped to become over time, context-specific meaning-making resources for articulation purposes of a particular collective group. Equally apparent is that language is similarly shaped as a resource. These processes are linguistic, material and social, and indexical of social relationships. When Zenande talked to her friend about having left her wait at home, she was simultaneously signaling their collective belonging to a social and semiotic domain distinct from school and home.2 The children’s collaborative production included their own development of an insider language, which was constantly under construction and elaboration. 2. This domain is also one into which we, the researchers, and now the readers of this work are partially drawn, thus indicating that it is not a narrowly exclusive or exclusionary domain. It is thus unfortunate that adults are often not interested in children’s ‘play talk’. Teachers, in particular, can surely benefit from engagement with such children’s creativity and flexibility.

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What they did cannot therefore be said to be code-switching as such, that is, they were not simply moving from one language (in the big sense of language as being either Xhosa or English) to another. Rather they were speaking a social language of their own, parts of which might well appear to be code-switched, but not in such a way that meanings remained static. That linguistic elasticity is just one example of children’s creative borrowings in this study.

Making meaning across social semiotic domains The children in the study built situated meanings while playing, and learnt how to use these meanings in context. They also displayed a meta-awareness of how words take on different meanings across different social sites and semiotic domains. Thus Masibulele (in the transcript below), whose ability to use English was quite limited, turned the word “cross”, which was usually about crossing the rope in the game (lines 1 and 2), into teasing a child, a switch that depends on the children understanding the double meaning of cross as in ‘a cross teacher’ or “ma’am [is] cross” (lines 3–7): 1. Nompumeleo: 2. Masibulele: 3. Masibulele: 4. Thandeka: 5. Zintle: 6. Masibulele:

Awucrossi! (You are not going to cross!) Thandeka cross! Dlala ma’am cross! Maam cross, ma’am cross! (Play ma’am cross! Ma’am cross, ma’am cross!) Hayi ke uyabona ke Masibulele? (Hey, you see Masibulele?) U ma’am cross ngubani Masibulele? (Who’s ma’am cross Masibulele?) Nank’epheth’ibhola u ma’am cross. (Ma’am cross is the one holding the ball.) 7. Girl: Andingoma’am cross mna. (I am not ma’am cross.)

What these children brought from school was varied but particular: School was one site for their English-language development, so that many of the English terms they were trying out had a school-echo to them. The authority relations of school were also echoed in their play. The language drills of their schooling were reproduced as well, as in the example below. Masibulele had not yet learnt the routine below at school, so the following initiation of an episode around lists of ‘comparative words’ was unquestionably something learnt out of school, from her eleven-year old sister or an older friend, or during the game at some other time. Masibulele was ‘on-stage’ when she initiated this exchange around ‘school English’, starting off with a teasing display of another child and then moving on to a schoolEnglish display.



  1. Masibulele:   2. Anelisa:   3. Masibulele:   4. Ntombephelo:   5. Child:   6. Ntombephelo:   7. Child:   8. Ntombephelo:   9. Child: 10. Ntombephelo: 11. Child:

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Anelisa unxibe la panty incinci. Leya wawuyinxibile. (Anelisa is wearing that small panty.3 The one you wore.) Hayi ke mna andinxibanga panty encinci. (No I am not wearing a small panty.) Whowu whowu! (Wow! Wow!) Good! Good gooder goodest! Fire firer firest! Good gooder goodest! Fire firer firest! Long longer longest! Leg lenger longest! Eye! (This child might have said ‘I’ rather than ‘eye’. Either way, she doesn’t get any further. ‘Eye’ would have linked with ‘leg’ in the previous example, and ‘I’ would link as a cue for ‘girl’ in the one that follows.) Girl girler girlest! Bread breader breadest!

The children’s playful interactive parodies of ‘school grammar’ speak for themselves at one level. They are deliberate and humorous, and to the outsider provide a comment on the limits of such decontextualized rule-teaching by rote. They show too how such play also involves processes of scaffolding and apprenticeship learning, where older children model resources and attitudes to resources that give younger children access to these forms of meaning-making and identity processes.

Children’s multiple social worlds If we understand the children’s social worlds of home, school and peer-play as distinctive but permeable, as does Dyson (1993), we can see them interactively using terms whose meanings adhere and shift across those domains.4 In the interaction below they play with shifts in meaning of ‘cheating’ in each location, in their play, at school and in ‘home culture’.

3. ‘Panty’ is an English South African substitute for the odd-sounding ‘pair of panties’. 4. Dyson’s notion of distinct but permeable worlds is an analyst’s distinction, and there is a question as to whether the children saw these worlds as distinctive, or as one, with multiple meanings to it. In my own analysis I follow Dyson, but with some hesitancy.

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1. Ntombephelo: 2. Anelisa: 3. Ntombephelo: 4. Girl:

Okay, wena uzoqhatha mna apha. (Okay, so you’ve come to cheat me here.) Uqhatha uNtombephelo! (You cheat Ntombephelo!) Uzosiqhatha elokishini! (You have come to cheat us in the location!) Uyeka ukuyoqhatha esikolweni. (She doesn’t go to cheat at school.)

‘Cheating’ in the game, ‘in the location’ and at school have distinct but related meanings; they each refer to different sets of relationships in social practice. Running them together like the children do here is a form of embedded, dialogical, meta-linguistic play with the shifts and relatedness of meanings across contexts. The Xhosa term elokishini (line 3) is a borrowing from the English location. The term ‘location’ was first used by Natal’s 19th century colonial government and later by apartheid administrators to refer to segregated urban residential areas designated for Black South Africans. The Xhosa term has survived multiple substitutes for this term in English (township being the most contemporary term) and also survived the demise of formal apartheid. So the saying “you’ve come to cheat us in the location” captures the children’s parents’ perception of ‘outsiders’ coming into their socio-residential domain to exploit them, and signals a particular element of local identity that has been sustained despite the ending of apartheid-era segregation. ‘Cheating’ at school has a particular meaning, again, that is school-bound and is linked to the threat of strong sanction. ‘Cheating’ in the context of game playing is usually a term used in peer conflicts over control, direction of play and interpretation of rules, and of course doesn’t carry the sense of transgression or threat of sanction that ‘school cheating’ carries. By invoking these three distinct domain-based meanings in a quick exchange of repartee, the children play with the situatedess and fluidity of sign-based meaning making. Dyson (1993: 133) identified a problem that inexperienced readers have in relation to the situatedness of meaning in text: “their difficulties lie not in the words but in understanding something that lies behind the words, embedded in the sense”. She suggested that the dialogue between ‘composers’ and ‘addressees’ occurs “against a backdrop of other voices – already uttered texts – without which the composers’ own voices cannot be heard”. The concept of intertexuality that Dyson, drawing on Bakhtin (1981) invoked here, and others studies use (Lemke 1997; Cope and Kalantzis 2000; Gee 1999; Snyder and Beavis 2003) makes the point that when we make or take meaning we do so by drawing on other texts or images we have read, heard or seen. These examples of children’s dialogue shows children playing with and across intertextual resources.



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Snow (1991) identified the facilitation of language and literacy acquisition in middle-class families in the USA as involving semantic contingency with adult speech and literacy. She argued that such semantic inputs from adults as expansions, semantic extensions, clarifying questions and answers to questions, scaffolded children’s entry into school, writing-based communicative practices. Snow suggested that certain metalinguistic strategies are only available through adult ‘scaffolding’ provided for children to learn (Snow 1991: 226) but I would suggest that what we can see here, in children’s creativity and linguistic playfulness, is that they are able to undertake and share with each other, without any such extensively provided adult scaffolding, at least some of the metalinguistic activities (involving reflection upon language) that are commonly thought to be not available to them.

‘Local’ resources for meaning-making The CELL research also demonstrated that Xhosa home-language resources provided the children with further rich sources for image, metaphor, rhythm and meaning-making, all of which surfaced unpredictably during play, as the following sample quotes from diverse moments of play illustrate: 1. Masibulele: 2. Masibulele: 3. Masibulele: 4. Ntombephelo: 5. Zintle: 6. Ntombephelo:

(to Thandeka) Statue! Awuvingcele endlwini yeempuku. (Closed in a rat’s house.) (idiomatic, suggesting close confinement) Rayi rayi ndinanto yam jikelele ngqu. (I have something that goes around.) Yatsho indoda endala.Yhu awumde ingathi usisikhonkwane esingabethelelwanga.) (Hey, you are tall like a nail that hasn’t been hammered in.) Uqale wabaphamanzi. Ubaph’isonka kushota ubaphe umngqusho uphinde ubathengele izihlangu. (Chant) (You first gave them water. Then you gave them bread. You need to give them samp (corn) and buy them shoes.) Bendithe nqa umam’umpumputhela angathethi! (I was wondering why the blind mother didn’t talk.) (She is being sarcastic, implying that Masibulele is normally very talkative). Hayi hayi hayi akho sesikolweni apha! (No no no, we are not at school here!) (Zintle’s response to Ntombephelo is an indication that for her sarcasm is a school/teacher resource which is best left there.) Ndizakuniqwayita nina! (I’m going to keep you out of play for a long time) (qwayita (mqwayito) is a reference to biltong, which is

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7. Masibulele:

meat that has been dried for a long time. Her meaning is: ‘I’m going to be in the middle for long enough to make dried meat.’) (To Thandeka) Iphi ibhola? Yhe smathamatha somntwana iphi ibhola x3. (Where’s the ball? Hey you sleepy child where’s the ball) (x3)

Various metaphorical and connotative resources of the Xhosa language were deployed in the various examples above and, as they show, this productive work was constantly responded to by other children. The rich intertextual resources that were drawn on above carry meanings and echoes for the various children using them. In the last example, Masibulele apparently enjoying the rhythm and melody of the utterance (“smathamatha somntwana” has a rhythmic quality in spoken isiXhosa) turned it into a repeated chant.

Language and musicality Another finding of the CELL research was that music of various sorts featured in the children’s play, as might have been expected. Popular and church music were favourite resources. The pop music that the children drew on showed them connecting with a wider youth culture, including local rap (kwaito) music, international pop songs and ‘hit-parade’ music, and church music including Xhosa and English hymns. The following musical and spoken dialogue is illustrative of the children’s playful interactive work around names and sounds. 1. Masibulele: 2. Masibulele: 3. Thandeka: 4. Masibulele:

sings: “Say my name, say my name, igama lam nguNtosh. (My name is Ntosh.) (This is from a local rap or kwaito song which mixes languages.) sings: Elinye igama lam ndingu Sibu okanye undibize Bulele. (My other name is Sibu or you can call me Bulele.) sings: My name is Thandeka. I live in Khayelitsha. sings: I believe I can fly. I believe I can touch the sky. (pop song)

Masibulele’s decomposing of her name into syllables displayed an often identified skill with regard to school literacy learning, where an awareness of discrete sounds of the language (phonological awareness) is treated by some researchers as an early skill required for successful literacy learning (Garton and Pratt 1998). The data on children’s play unsurprisingly has many such examples of children’s delight in music and rhyme. Such attention to the regularities and musicality of language are commonly seen as important resources for developing children’s



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sense of phonological awareness. Yet children’s independent play is not often recognized as an important venue for such learning activity. Sulzby and Teale (1991) claimed that we can look at metalinguistic awareness, or the ability to reflect on language as happening on four levels: phonemic awareness, word awareness, form awareness, and pragmatic awareness.5 They suggested that “all levels of linguistic awareness are necessary in becoming literate” (Sulzby and Teale 1991: 745). I have shown in analysis of the various examples above that the children in this study were constructing precursory practice at these levels (which are analytical levels, after all, and can and do happen simultaneously in practice) in their play.

A social practices perspective on early childhood literacy learning This study of children’s play suggests that local “ways of knowing” (Heath 1983) are themselves simultaneously enmeshed in wider influences from outside the local. In particular, the way children drew on mass media and modelled images and resource for each other, provided an important insight in understanding children’s early literacy learning. The children’s play that I analyzed can be seen in Bakhtin’s (1981) terminology as a space of productive heteroglossia (multiple meanings) where children’s meaning-making resources and identity work were given room for intertextual creativity. In their play they mediated and modeled semiotic resources, values and practices from school, local and popular culture, religion, mass media and home. The study demonstrates the value of studying children’s early childhood literacy practices through the lens of a social practices approach to the study of literacy; to show the interactive, participatory, cognitively and socially distributed nature of children’s early engagements with literacy and other semiotic modalities. The study draws attention to the large gap between what children are creatively able to achieve in unstructured settings, in contrast to the failure of the institutions studied to productively engage children as active learners, reported, for example, in Prinsloo and Stein (2004). Dyson’s (1993) model of the “permeable curriculum” is worth drawing attention to in this concluding discussion. She urges teachers to allow children to draw on their resources and experiences from out of school, and to use other media besides talk and print, including drawing and dramatic play, as they learn how the written media work, and what social possibilities it allows, for 5. The distinction between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness is sometimes blurred in its use. Phonological awareness is about sound awareness, while phonemic awareness is more print related, an awareness of sounds matching to phonemic units.

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example, for fulfilling the requirements of the official curriculum, for representing their imagined worlds, and for connecting with friends, as well as with family. In such classrooms the classroom is the space for an “expanded activity” (Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López and Tejeda 1999: 287; Engestrom 1999) where hybridity and diversity are viewed as important cultural resources in children’s development, where the activity system is extended and the activity itself reorganized, resulting in new opportunities for learning. In contrast to Dyson’s permeable curricula, it is sometimes claimed that teachers do not have the training to see and draw on diversity and difference (Freebody et al. 1995; Bloch and Prinsloo 1999; Bloome and Green 1992; Ferreiro and Teberosky 1982; Michaels 1986) Children are often described as learning a narrow capacity to produce a ‘successful lesson’ with the teacher, where such a lesson consists of a cue/response exercise, with children showing their competencies within a narrow range (Prinsloo and Stein 2004; Ferreiro 1992). It is interesting, finally, to note that while children in this study were learning how to distinguish and combine various resources, such as singing, drawing, mime, and the potential of various things, their schooling mostly teaches children to use just one: written language. Kress (1997) Lemke (1997) and Gee (this volume) have suggested that this needs to change if we are to help students develop sophisticated multimedia literacies that have value in the contemporary world where new communications technologies have such influence.

References Bakhtin, M. 1981. The DialogicaI Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, M. Holquist (ed.). Austin TX: Texas University Press. Bloch, C. & Prinsloo, M. 1999. ‘School is where you learn to read’: Early literacy learning in the lives of South African children. In Comparative Perspectives on Language and Literacy: Selected Papers from the Work of the Language and Literacy Commission of the 10th World Congress of Comparative Education Societies 1998, L. Limage (ed.), 463–480. Dakar: UNESCO/BREDA. Bloome, D. & Green, J. L. 1992. Educational contexts of literacy. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 12: 49–70. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M. (eds). 2000. Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. London: Routledge. Dyson, A. H. 1993. Social Worlds of Children Learning to Write in an Urban Primary School. New York NY: Teachers’ College. Engeström, Y. 1999. activity theory and individual and social transformation. In Perspectives on Activity Theory, Y. Engeström, R. Miettinen & R. Punamki (eds), 19–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



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Ferreiro, E. & Teberosky, A. 1982. Literacy Before Schooling. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann Educational. Freebody, P., Ludwig, C. & Gunn, S. 1995. Everyday literacy practices in and out of schools in low socio-economic urban communities. Brisbane: Dept of Education & Griffith University. Garton, A. & Pratt, C. 1998. Learning to be Literate: The Development of Spoken and Written Language. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Gee, J. 1996. Social Linguistics and Literacies. 2nd edn. London: Falmer. Gee, J. 1999. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. London: Taylor and Francis. Gutiérrez, K., Baquedano-López, C. & Tejeda, C. 1999. Rethinking diversity, hybridity and hybrid language practices in the third space. Mind, Culture and Activity 6(4): 286–303. Heath, S. 1983. Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kendrick, M. 2003. Converging Worlds: Play, Literacy, and Culture in Early Childhood. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Kress, G. 1997. Before Writing. London: Routledge. Kress, G. 2003. Perspectives on meaning-making: The differential principles and means of adults and children. In Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy, N. Hall, J. Larson & J. Marsh (eds), 154–166. London: Sage. Lemke, J. 1997. Metamedia literacy: Transforming meanings and media. In Literacy for the 21st Century: Technological Transformation in a Post-typographic World, D. Reinking et al. (eds). Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Michaels, S. 1986. Narrative presentation. An oral preparation of literacy with 1st Graders. In The Social Construction of Literacy, J. Cook-Gumperz (ed.), 94–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prinsloo, M. & Stein, P. 2004. ‘What’s inside the box?’ Children’s early encounters with literacy in South African classrooms. Perspectives in Education 22(2): 67–84. Rosaldo, R. 1993. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston MA: Beacon. Roskos, K. & Christie, J. 2001. Examining the play-literacy interface: A critical review and future directions. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 1(1): 59–89. Snow, C. 1991. Literacy and language: Relationships during the preschool years. In Language Issues in Literacy and Bilingualism / Multicultural Education, M. Minami & B. Kennedy (eds), 207–233. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (Reprinted from Harvard Educational Review, 53, 2, May 1983, 165–189). Snyder, I. & Beavis, C. (eds). 2003. Doing literacy online: Teaching, Learning and Playing in an Electronic World. Cresskill NJ: Hampton Press. Sulzby, E. & Teale, W. 1991. Emergent Literacy. In Handbook of Reading Research,Vol. 2, P. Pearson, R. Barr, M. Kamil & P. Masenthal (eds), 727–757. New York NY: Longmans. Vygotsky, L. 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Psychological Processes. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

part iii

Research tools Conceptual resources for literacy study

chapter 7

Learning in semiotic domains A social and situated account James Paul Gee This chapter develops a theoretical perspective on learning in ‘semiotic domains’. A semiotic domain recruits one or more modalities to communicate distinctive types of messages. The chapter develops an account of situated social semiotic practices where people, including teachers and learners in schools, communicate messages that use multiple communicative modalities, including literacy. It examines what domain specific fluency requires, including the acquisition of a ‘design grammar’ for making meaning associated with the domain and the joining of an ‘affinity group’, where participants share socially situated identities of particular sorts. The chapter suggests that children fail at school largely because they get wrong the domain-specific ways of using language, of acting and of identifying.

I want to talk about one particularly important type of learning: learning to be fluent in what I will call a “semiotic domain”. A semiotic domain recruits one or more modalities (e.g., oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artefacts, and so forth) to communicate distinctive types of messages. By the word ‘fluent’ I mean that the learner achieves some degree of mastery, not just rote knowledge. Here are some examples of semiotic domains: cellular biology, postmodern literary criticism, first-person-shooter video games, advertisements, Roman Catholic theology, modernist painting, midwifery, and so on and so forth through a nearly endless and motley list. It is too bad we don’t have a better term than the one I am making up here – “semiotic domains” – but the essential insight I am trying to capture is that domains like Yu-Gu-Oh (a card and video game) for a young fan, Japanese anima manga (comic books) for an otaku (expert), and cellular biology for a cellular biologist are each domains of specialized representations, modalities, knowledge, and practices. In their own ways, each is quite complicated and each is grounded in a group of people who have cognitive and social interests and help uphold a set

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of standards and norms. Each domain allows people to communicate distinctive sorts of messages (information, values, ideas) to each other. Any semiotic domain has what I will call a “design grammar” (New London Group 1996; Gee 2003). By this I mean a set of principles or patterns in terms of which materials in the domain are combined to communicate complex meanings. For example, consider all the elements that must pattern together in a certain way to constitute the meaning “carefully controlled experiment” in some of the sciences. Or all the elements that must pattern together in a certain way in a first-person shooter video game to constitute the meaning “better to sneak here than shoot”. Or all the elements that must pattern together in a certain way in an advertisement to constitute the meaning “product will enhance your identity as a successful female in the new global economy”. A “design grammar” involves whatever people in a domain use to communicate appropriate domain-specific messages (information, values, ideas) to each other. In Yu-Gi-Oh, for instance, this may involve, among many other things, laying down a certain set of cards in a certain order; though it may also mean, in another case, taking about the cards in a certain way. In theoretical linguistics it may mean, among other things, drawing words and symbols on a white board in a certain way. In a fundamentalist pray session it may mean, among other things, citing the Bible while orienting one’s body and gaze to another in a certain way. A person must know – consciously or unconsciously – the design grammar of a semiotic domain in order to understand or produce messages in the domain appropriately. Here the word “message” is meant to cover any act, utterance, element, or combination of elements from the domain that is meaningful. The word “appropriately” means being able to understand or produce messages in the domain in ways that are understandable and acceptable to people who have mastered the domain and are accepted as ‘insiders’ by others who have mastered the domain. Of course, a person can simply learn to repeat details, facts, or messages from a domain without really being able to understand or produce meanings in the domain in a creative way (this often happens in school). But I am concerned here with creative understanding, a form of understanding which is achieved by knowing how meanings in the domain are constructed by the design grammar of the domain. Semiotic domains are, of course, human creations. As such, each and every one of them is associated with a group of people who have differentially mastered the domain, but who share norms, values, and knowledge about what constitutes degrees of mastery in the domain and what sorts of people are, more or less, ‘insiders’ or ‘outsiders’. Such a group of people share a set of practices, a set of common goals or endeavors, and a set of values and norms, however much each of the individuals in the group may also have their own individual styles and goals,



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as well as other affiliations. I will call any such group of people associated with a given semiotic domain, an “affinity group”, that is, these people have an affinity for the content of the domain and share endeavors in regard to that content (Gee 2004, 2007). Mastering a semiotic domain means joining an affinity group, even if only as a beginner or ‘apprentice’. Of course, it is not always readily apparent just what semiotic domain someone is attempting to master. For example, in school science, learners are often not mastering any semiotic domain at all. They are just learning details, facts, or messages from a scientific semiotic domain without any real knowledge of this domain’s design grammar and, thus, no real capacity to join any real affinity group associated with any such domain. On the other hand, sometimes in school science learners are, indeed, mastering a semiotic domain that is best called something like “school science” because its design grammar is unlike any design grammar associated with any science outside of school. Think in this regard of “Freshman Composition” in many colleges and universities, in particular those with an allegiance to “personal voice” and “process writing”. There certainly is a design grammar to this sort of writing (acting, speaking) and students often master it, but it exists nowhere else in or out of the university. Students in Freshman Composition of this sort often become members of an affinity group that holds such views as “writing exists to empower my personal voice”, a value that is not, in fact, held by most of the other affinity groups that use writing in the university. Thus, we have three core notions: a semiotic domain, a design grammar associated with the domain, and an affinity group that produces and reproduces the domain and its design grammar. I will define “authentic learning” in a domain as learning that leads to growing mastery of the semiotic domain’s design grammar and growing membership in its associated affinity group. Such learning is a trajectory (perhaps, halted short at some point) towards full mastery and insider status in the semiotic domain. Within a domain, words, symbols, images, and/or artefacts have meanings and combine together (thanks to the design grammar of the domain) to take on complex meanings. But these meanings are situated meanings, not general meanings that can be defined once and for all (Barsalou 1999a, b; Gee 1990/1996, 1999/2005, 2004; Glenberg 1997; Glenberg & Robertson 1999). In order to understand any word, symbol, image, or artefact (or combination thereof) in a domain, a person must be able to situate the meaning of the word, symbol, image, or artefact (or combination thereof) within (actual or mentally simulated) embodied experiences of action, interaction, or dialogue in or about the domain. Consider, for example, the following sentence from a high school student’s paper on “Albinism”: “Then to let people know there are different types of Albinism, I

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will tell and explain all this”. This is, of course, ‘wrong’, and we know it, though it is not at all easy to say in words exactly what is wrong. The student appears to be situating a meaning for “tell” within a domain that has to do with telling a story. He appears to be situating a meaning for “explain” that has to do with an account that is meant to clarify a confusing situation. “People” is ‘wrong’, as well. The words in the student’s sentence, and the sentence as a whole, have general meanings in English, but not specific and situated meanings in the domain his teacher intended him to be writing within and about. The domain the student is meant to be in is a type of classificatory science. In this domain, a word like “list” is better than “tell”, a word like “describe” is better than “explain”, and the audience (“educated readers”) does not need to be named, because it is assumed as part and parcel of the practice. So something like “There are different types of Albinism. Below I list several of these and describe them” would have been better. Of course, this student could not write this if he did not really know what domain he was supposed to be communicating within and about or he had had no meaningful amount of embodied experience of action, interaction, and/or dialogue within this domain. Without such experience (and, thus, too, the ability to simulate in his imagination such experiences as he writes), the student cannot situate the proper meanings for words, phrases, and sentences within the domain’s historically specific space of meanings and ways of thinking and doing. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with the words “tell” and “explain” here, only with how they are situated. They could have been used differently and, thus, been better situated within the appropriate classificatory domain, e.g., “In this paper, I will tell the story of how different types of Albinism were discovered and explain how these discoveries changed our understanding of this condition”. This is fine, though it represents a different style (more ‘popular’) than the other sentence I suggested (“There are different types of Albinism. Below I list several of these and describe them”). Again, the point is, words mean only as they are situated within a domain and mean differently as they are situated differently within that domain or another domain. Situating meanings requires experience of a domain and the ability to situate meanings in terms of that experience. One of the key types of embodied experience one needs in a domain and needs to be able to simulate – thanks to the fact that domains are owned and operated by affinity groups – is dialogic talk with others within and about the domain (Tomasello 1999). Let me turn now to the issue of language (and not images, symbols, and artefacts, all of which also have situated meanings within domains) within semiotic domains. Each different domain – thanks to the workings of situated meaning and the interests and discoveries of different affinity groups through history – recruits a different style of English or whatever other natural language may be at



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work in the domain. I have elsewhere called such different styles, different “social languages” (Gee 1990/1996, 1999/2005). They are often called, by others, different “registers”. In this sense, learning a new domain is almost always also an instance of acquiring a new language (a new social language or register). Each social language has its own distinctive vocabulary and its own distinctive syntactic, pragmatic, and discourse resources for situating complex meanings in the domain. Of course, in learning to situate meanings (simple and complex) in a semiotic domain, one learns the domain’s social language, and vice versa, in learning a domain’s social language one learns to situate meanings in the domain. But the question arises: How does one learn to situate meanings in a domain, and thereby come to acquire the domain’s social language, when initially one does not yet know this social language (and so has not yet got any resources with which to situate meanings)? This is, of course, the traditional ‘bootstrapping’ problem in language acquisition (Gee 1994), though here phrased in terms of acquiring specific social languages and not “English” (say) in general. In fact, the question here is more general. Since most semiotic domains are multimodal, we can ask, as well: How does one learn to situate the meanings of symbols, images, and artefacts (and combinations thereof) in multimodal domains when initially one does not yet know how to situate meanings in this domain at all? The answer to both the language question and the more general question is, I believe, this: We bootstrap into a new domain by simulating the perspective of other more advanced people in the domain as we see them publicly situate meanings within and about the domain in action, interaction, and dialogue (Tomasello 1999). A newcomer sees a more advanced person use a particular combination of words, symbols, images, and/or artefacts in a particular setting. The newcomer imagines or simulates (at the time or later) the viewpoint or perspective of the more advanced person and concludes that from that perspective that person must (might) mean to situate such and such a meaning. The newcomer eventually tries it out in a similar situation and sees if it works. Let’s meditate a moment on what such perspective taking requires. Of course, first and foremost, it requires the ability and willingness to take another person’s perspective. Though this ability appears to be built into all humans (save those with disabilities like autism), the willingness needs to be socially or culturally motivated. Such perspective taking also requires that the learner see more advanced people at practice in settings rich enough to make good guesses as to what they might mean. But, then, this raises an additional problem: settings in practice, especially rich settings, are full of features, only some of which are here and now relevant to the situated meanings being constructed. So, the learner may well need some overt help about what features in the setting to foreground or pay most attention to. This is a type of efficacious overt instruction.

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The learner may also need more advanced people to serve as teachers in the sense that, beyond directing the learner’s attention, they also model prototypical cases of words, symbols, images, artefacts and combinations thereof being given situated meanings in the domain. Prototypical cases are ones that need to be learned early if more complex cases are to be dealt with fruitfully later on. They can also be simplified cases that do not go beyond the learner’s current hypothesizing resources. These, too, are efficacious types of instruction. Finally, learners need the opportunity to produce combinations of words, symbols, images, and/or artefacts with the hypothesized situated meanings in order to test whether their hypotheses work. Here they need feedback when they are right and protection from punishment when they are wrong. This, too, is a part of efficacious instruction. Situations in any domain are almost always novel to some (however limited) extent, so no two events can ever be exactly alike. Thus, situating meaning is always a productive (generative) and creative act, matching nuances of meaning to nuances of situations. One is always, in a domain, taking features of possible meanings (a resource from the history of practice in the domain) and combining them in ways that work here and now for this situation (that is what it means to situate meaning). In quite novel situations, situated meanings new to the domain may be created (and, thus, too, new words, images, symbols, artefacts, or combinations thereof to carry those meanings). So far, then, learning in and for a semiotic domain appears a quite productive and creative matter – and it is. As Gunther Kress (1997, 2000a, 2000b) has stressed, learners make up semiotic resources that are apt for their purposes in a domain. Of course, we must admit that these purposes are often not just individual, but socially motivated by growing membership in an affinity group associated with a domain. However, no one can be wildly productive and creative all the time and still go on rapidly and effectively about the business of acting and interacting in a domain. No one can recreate all the semiotic resources that have developed in a domain over a long period of time. Thus, all newcomers need to build up some stored ‘lore’ about practice in a domain – that is, some relatively (not completely) ritualized ways of thinking and acting that help one act and interact rapidly and effectively. Such stored lore I have elsewhere called “cultural models” (Gee 1990/1996) and later (not much liking the term “culture”) “Discourse models” (Gee 1999/2005, 2004). I will here just use the term “models” (see also Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain 1998; Strauss & Quinn 1997). Models are partial storylines, metaphors, routines, scripts, principles, rules of thumb, or images that help one act and interact in relatively typical situations in a domain (they are much less suited to less typical situations, situations where they may “misfire”). Models are partially



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stored in people’s heads (with different pieces often distributed across different people in an affinity group who can, of course, ‘share notes’ if they need to) and partially stored in the books, materials, images, and artefacts available to members of an affinity group associated with a semiotic domain. Newcomers sometimes pick up models overtly by being told or having read them. More often they pick them up as ‘found’ items in the midst of practice as they pay attention to (or are directed to pay attention to) prototypical cases which best reflect the models a domain draws on. The models get reinforced and relatively ritualized as they are used in repeated practice. The models and allegiance to the models also become an important bonding cement within the affinity group associated with the domain. Here is an example of a model and how it might be used in practice. Romance is a semiotic domain (of course, one that differs across cultural, generational, and social groups). So, say a young man wants to ‘proposition’ a young woman. The young man has seen lots of movies and read lots of books with culturally specific stories and images about propositioning women. These stories and images are relatively similar thanks to the fact that they reflect one or a narrow range of cultures’ ways of doing such things (there were, for example, no scenes with woman in veils being propositioned in any movie our young man has seen). He applies these to the situation, either picking one wholly or, more likely, combining elements from several. Note, however, he is combining elements from a culturally constrained set of resources. Such a move is a way for a newcomer to get on in a domain in which he has, so far, had little practice. Thus, cultural models are also part of the bootstrapping story. They are also a way for more advanced people in the domain to operate on ‘automatic pilot’ – a necessity at many times when attention needs to be paid to more novel and important elements in the situation. This example also shows some of the perils in models. The young woman may share the young man’s models, but she may have another set, as well, perhaps a set of storylines wherein the woman mutually performs the proposition or otherwise views it as harassment. Thus, the young man may get a very bad result and both parties may have very different views about what went on. Or, perhaps, the situation is different: our young man has just discovered he is gay and is trying to proposition a male and he has, as of yet, just no good available models for the job. Perhaps his old heterosexual models work here, too (good luck that), perhaps they don’t (in which case, one has to improvise for the while). Models are the way in which history, institutions, and affinity groups think and act in and through us. We pick them up – often unconsciously – and operate in their terms, thereby reproducing traditional action, interaction, and thinking in the domain (and, of course, the models themselves). Of course, Kress’s story

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wherein actors creatively combine semiotic resources in a way that is apt for their (albeit, usually socialized) purposes is always true, too. There is always agency and creativity of some sort: even prototypical situations in a domain have new elements; even in prototypical situations learners must often combine, on the spot, pieces of different models; less prototypical situations involve even more creative effort (and sometimes lead eventually to transforming old models and the creation of new ones); and, of course, what is prototypical and what isn’t changes over time in a domain. Semiotic domains (and their associated cultural models, social languages, characteristics sorts of situating meanings, and affinity groups) have a very important property that is little commented upon: they are networked. Any semiotic domain is connected to others in a myriad of complex ways. One of these, one that I want to concentrate on here, is this: some domain (or domains) can be a precursor for another domain. This is so because one or more of the elements associated with the precursor domain (ways of situating meaning, pieces of a social language, cultural models) facilitates learning in the other domain. It can also happen because being (or having been) a member of the affinity group associated with the precursor domain facilitates becoming a member of the affinity group associated with the other domain because the values, norms, goals, or practices of the precursor group resemble in some ways the other group’s values, norms, goals, and/or practices. Let me give a concrete example of networks among semiotic domains that affect how mastery of such domains is acquired. In the larger semiotic domain of video games, first and third-person shooter games are a well-defined sub-domain. However, such games often have elements that are similar to features found in arcade games. Thus, someone who has mastered the domain of arcade games has mastered a precursor domain for shooter games (though such games have many other elements as well). On the other hand, fantasy role-playing games are another well-defined semiotic (sub-)domain of the video game domain. In this case, people who have earlier played and mastered the Dungeons and Dragons semiotic domain are advantaged in their acquisition of fantasy role-playing games, since such games originated historically, in part, out of Dungeons and Dragons, though they now contain a good many additional elements. Both the shooter domain and the fantasy role-playing domain have other precursor domains as well, and there are some precursor domains they share (for example, make-believe play wherein one is willing to take on different identities – a domain that some cultures and social groups do not encourage in children or adults). On the other hand, some of these video-game (sub-)domains may well serve as precursor domains for other semiotic domains. For example, it may well be that the popular (sub-)domain of simulation games (so-called “God games”



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like Civilization) could be, for some children, a precursor domain for those sciences that heavily trade in simulations as a method of inquiry (e.g., some types of biology and cognitive science). While I have used video games as my example here, Andy diSessa’s (2000) book Changing Minds contains an excellent example of the sorts of precursor domains which some young people have experienced at home that facilitate learning school-based physics. This issue of networking is deeply consequential for schooling. We have tended to ask very general questions about why some groups of people (e.g., certain minorities and lower socio-economic groups) tend to do less well in school and to seek very general comparisons and contrasts between ‘home culture’ and ‘school culture’. The framework I am developing here would suggest that we need also to ask how specific semiotic domains mastered (or not) locally in homes and communities, as well as in peer groups, relate to (or don’t relate to) specific semiotic domains encountered in school (e.g., types of science, art, music, math, etc.) and in society. I suspect that for children who come to school looking ‘gifted’ at schooling, they have been (and are) immersed in a wide variety of precursor domains, and that they continue to be immersed in ever newer precursor domains, in and out of school, for domains they face later in school and life. I also suspect that for children who come to school looking ‘behind’, they have often been (and are) immersed in semiotic domains that are not fruitfully networked (by teachers) to school-based semiotic domains. Furthermore, they are not introduced in an ongoing fashion to other precursor domains, in and out of school, which will facilitate success in the later or discipline-specific areas of schooling. At the same time, I suspect these matters are changing and in a variety of ways. Children in some homes are mastering precursor domains that suit them for later semiotic domains, the importance of which the school itself is only beginning to acknowledge. And, too, there are, perhaps, today more and more domains outside of school that are important precursors for the mastery of important semiotic domains later in life, a process that short-circuits the importance of schools, especially public schools and schools that restrict their curriculum to the basics and traditional subjects traditionally taught. Let me then distinguish between two types of learners coming to any semiotic domain. Some learners are what I will call “well-precursed” and others are “poorly precursed”. Of course, this is really a matter of a continuum, with a good many degrees of “medium-precursed” people in between the two poles. For complicated domains, there is a complex network of other linked domains that make up the precursor history of the complicated domain, stretching far back into the life of individuals and the history of societies. Failing to have lived a large part of this historical trajectory, individuals and societies have trouble acquiring the

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complicated domain, especially when and because other more advantaged individuals and societies often help them – in a myriad of ways – to fail, not least by telling them they are ‘slow’ or ‘backward’. For almost any domain, then, we can trace out what I will call “a resource precursor trajectory” (“RPT” for short). An RPT for a given semiotic domain is the set of all semiotic domains that contain elements or are associated with affinity groups that facilitate mastering that given domain. We can define “advantaged” and “disadvantaged” learners in terms of this notion of RPT, though I will add something more to these definitions below. We can define an “advantaged learner” (the “well precursed” learner) for any given semiotic domain as a learner whose actual history has seriously and fruitfully engaged with a good deal of the RPT for that domain (of course, not necessarily perfectly). We can, on the other hand, define a “disadvantaged learner” (the “poorly precursed” learner) as one whose actual history has not seriously and fruitfully engaged with a good deal of the RPT for that domain. And, of course, here, too, we have a continuum, rather than a clear binary distinction. Thus, we can talk about degrees of advantage and disadvantage. A person may very well be able to eventually master a semiotic domain (and join its affinity group) without having mastered any or most of its precursor domains, but acquisition is liable to be slower and more troubled in these cases (sometimes significantly so). In some domains – and within some institutions (e.g., schools) – a learner’s being slower can lead to negative judgments about the learner’s motivations, efforts, or capacitates, though these are usually undeserved. They are simply a matter of the ways in which the learner’s history does or does not reflect access to and engagement with the PRT of the new domain. Just as we can talk about facilitation for the acquisition of certain semiotic domains, so too, we can talk about defacilitation. Let me put this matter in terms of the notion of an “entry price”. There is an “entry price” for any new semiotic domain one wants to (attempt to) master. The price is higher for disadvantaged learners than it is for advantaged ones, though there is price for all newcomers. The price exists because mastery, even beginning mastery, of any semiotic domain requires a great deal of extended practice. This is so because, for humans, learning is, by and large, a practice effect. The price exists, as well, because mastery, even beginning mastery, of any domain requires not just practice, but embodied experience in which one commits one’s body, mind, and sense of self to the domain. The price exists, as well, because each semiotic domain requires one to take on and grow into (at least partially) the sort of socially-situated identity tied to the affinity group associated with the domain. The entry price for any domain is this: Learners must be willing and motivated to engage in extended practice in the domain in such a way that they take



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on and grow into a new socially-situated identity, an identity that they can see as a fruitful extension of their core sense of self. By “core sense of self ” I mean a person’s (changing) sense of their own unique individual traits and history (including their unique history of engagement with various semiotic domains and their associated socially-situated identities) as they see these melded with (what they view as) their primary family and community affiliations. In terms of their core sense of self people do not feel to themselves as if they were ‘kinds of people’. Rather they feel to themselves as if they are unique individuals, albeit with complex histories and sociocultural affiliations out of which this sense of uniqueness has been partially formed. By “socially-situated identity” I mean a way of acting, interacting, believing, valuing, and using signs, symbols, objects, and technologies so as to enact a particular socially recognizable identity as a certain “type of person” doing a “certain type of thing” (e.g., a type of policeman, computer-game player, feminist, doctor, gang member, physicist, African-American, etc.). People have many socially-situated identities and they pick up (and sometimes lose) such identities throughout life. Of course, one’s core sense of self and one’s myriad socially-situated identities reciprocally influence each other. By “fruitful” in the above definition I mean to cover anything that makes the learner see making a bridge between his or her core sense of self and the new socially-situated identity as worthwhile. That is, I mean to include anything that makes that person willing to put his or her own unique sense of self (socioculturally informed as it is) at the service of playing the ‘role’ of a ‘certain kind of person’. There are a large number of such reasons why someone would or would not be willing to do this. And, obviously, a person usually does not want to do it if they feel that inhabiting a particular kind violates in some serious way either their core sense of self or another of the socially-situated identities to which they are deeply committed. In this sense, we can talk about a learner’s core sense of self or other socially-situated identities (mastered as part and parcel of acquiring earlier semiotic domains through an extended commitment of self) as either facilitating or defacilitating the learner’s acquisition of a new semiotic domain. For me, then, one of the key questions in education today, especially in regard to the failure of certain socio-economic and sociocultural groups of children in school, ought to be this: What makes learners able and willing to pay the entry price for school-based semiotic domains (remembering that I have defined the entry price as: Learners must be willing and motivated to engage in extended practice in the domain in such a way that they take on and grow into a new socially-situated identity, a identity that they can see as a fruitful extension of their core sense of self)?

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We can now revise a bit our definitions of “advantaged” and “disadvantaged” learners above: An “advantaged learner” (the “well precursed” learner) for any given semiotic domain is a learner whose actual history has seriously and fruitfully engaged with a good deal of the RPT for that domain (of course, not necessarily perfectly) and who is able and willing to pay the entry price into the domain. A “disadvantaged learner” (the “poorly precursed” learner) is a learner whose actual history has not seriously and fruitfully engaged with a good deal of the RPT for that domain and/or who is unable or unwilling to pay the entry price into the domain. Of course, we need to acknowledge that other people (such as teachers) and institutions can affect, in a myriad of different ways, how and whether a learner is able and willing to pay the entry price into a given semiotic domain. What I am arguing, put simply, is that success or failure in a domain, and, thus, success or failure in any school domain – and school is made up of a good many different domains – is a matter of three things: (a) a person’s historical or life path or trajectory through various related semiotic domains (this is something that can be compensated for, but there must be compensation); (b) whether or not a person can (is taught to) situate meanings in the domain, which is a matter of getting guided experiences in the domain, not just words without experiences and (c) the person is able and willing to pay the entry price.

References Barsalou, L. W. 1999a. Language comprehension: Archival memory or preparation for situated action. Discourse Processes 28: 61–80. Barsalou, L. W. 1999b. Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22: 577–660. diSessa, A. A. 2000. Changing Minds: Computers, Learning, and Literacy. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Gee, J. P. 1990/1996. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses, 2nd edn. London: Taylor & Francis. Gee, J. P. 1994. First language acquisition as a guide for theories of learning and pedagogy. Linguistics and Education 6: 331–354. Gee, J. P. 1999/2005. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Gee, J. P. 2003. What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy. London: Palgrave. Gee, J. P. 2004. Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. London: Routledge. Gee, J. P. 2007. Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning, and Literacy. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Glenberg, A. M. 1997. What is memory for. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20: 1–55. Glenberg, A. M. & Robertson, D. A. 1999. Indexical understanding of instructions. Discourse Processes 28: 1–26.



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Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D. & Cain, C. 1998. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Kress, G. 1997. Before Writing: Rethinking Paths into Literacy. London: Routledge. Kress, G. 2000a. Design and transformation: New theories of meaning. In Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (eds), 153–161. London: Routledge. Kress, G. 2000b. Multimodality. In Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (eds), 182–202. London: Routledge. New London Group 1996. A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66: 60–92. Reprinted in Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (eds), 9–37. London: Routledge. Strauss, C. & Quinn, N. 1997. A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tomasello, M. 1999. The Vultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

chapter 8

Assembling “Skills for Life” Actor-network theory and the New Literacy Studies Julia Clarke This chapter offers an overview of actor-network theory (developed in the sociology of scientific knowledge) and relates this to the New Literacy Studies. The chapter examines an example of current government strategy for improving adult literacy and numeracy skills in England and discusses the ways in which complexity is suppressed in the powerful social networks of policy and practice. The approach developed here encourages literacy researchers to study the resources that are mobilized to produce established ways of ‘doing’ reading and writing: the configuration of people, devices, texts, decisions, organizations and inter-organizational relations that contribute to sustained networks of practice, in varying degrees of extensiveness and complexity; the way that effects of power circulate in networks of human and non-human entities.

Introduction: The treachery of translation What have the activities of marine biologists, scallops and French fishermen, or the global topology of anaemia, got to do with reading and writing in local communities or with a national strategy for “improving adult literacy and numeracy skills”? The connections explored in this paper are between actor-network theory, the New Literacy Studies and the mobilisation of literacy as part of a package labelled “Skills for Life”. My interest in exploring these connections is sustained by a concern with questions like that posed by Peter Freebody and Jill Freiberg in their opening chapter to this volume. “How”, they ask, “do ruling ideological and industrial discourses recruit ‘literacy’ as a self-evidently legitimate way of intervening in industrial relations and ideologies?” In my current engagement with the professional formation of youth and community workers in the UK, I want to know how these discourses, expressed in policy imperatives and in the practices of “programme delivery”, might be disturbed by the knowledge and insights derived from both actor-network theory and the New Literacy Studies.

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While new literacy studies continue to generate ever widening conceptions of literacy events and practices, we are faced with international literacy programmes, accreditation frameworks and other measures of acquisition and competence, which reduce literacy to homogeneous packages of functional skills. Within current policy for lifelong learning around the world, a prevailing rhetoric of global competition, skills deficit, human capital and social exclusion underpins prescriptions to remedy low levels of performance in functional literacy and numeracy among the adult population. In England, these are supported by the net of ‘widening participation’ as it sweeps through job centres, community projects, workplaces, pubs and football grounds, trawling for “people with difficulties”, who are often “reluctant to admit that they have a problem” (DfEE 2001: 28). How has this problem been constructed? How are the goals, desires and aspirations of individuals brought into alignment with a problem which they didn’t know they had? How are the energies of teachers, managers and politicians, the resources of local projects, national programmes and international campaigns summoned to address this problem? In what follows, my aim is to outline some of the concepts and methodological principles from actor-network theory which may help to illuminate questions such as these. Actor-network theory is characterised by ethnographic studies which do away with essential differences between people, objects, machines, animals, plants… in order to “…find a way of talking about the social-and-the-technical all in one breath” (Law 1991: 8) In one of its forms, ANT is referred to as the Sociology of Translation because of its concern with a process in which networks combine in particular ways to produce objects, knowledge or facts through the displacement or suppression of dissenting voices, or of those “facts unfit to fit” (Gebhardt 1982: 405). To translate is to displace… But to translate is also to express in one’s own language what others say and want, why they act in the way they do and how they associate with each other: it is to establish oneself as a spokesman. At the end of the process, if it is successful, only voices speaking in unison will be heard.  (Callon 1986: 223)

My desire to produce a clear and succinct summary of the key principles and concepts of actor-network will inevitably be thwarted by ANT’s refusal to be reduced, or translated, into “voices speaking in unison”. A singular account of the principles of actor-network theory would also constitute a betrayal, since one of the clearest principles involved is an anti-reductionist commitment to working with complexity. Lamenting the “…overwhelming pressures on academic production to render knowing simple, transparent, singular, formulaic” John Law



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(1999: 11) points out the similarity in Latin languages between traductore / tradittore – translation and treachery. I have been warned. And so have you!

So what’s ‘new’? With reference to actor-network theory’s disciplinary origins, James Gee (2000: 182) refers to “The new science and technology studies”. This sits comfortably beside the New Literacy Studies, and draws attention to the diversity of sites and practices that characterise both. They each derive understandings of what is called science, technology or literacy through ethnographic studies and, for actor-network theory, “What is called knowledge cannot be defined without understanding what gaining knowledge means…” (Latour 1987: 220). Similarly, in the New Literacy Studies, what is called literacy cannot be defined without understanding what gaining (and using, producing or engaging with) literacy means. What is ‘new’ in New Literacy Studies is a rejection of old, but powerfully persistent, understandings of literacy as a set of autonomous skills residing in the minds and bodies of individuals and effecting cognitive changes that are associated with rationality, civilization and socio-economic development. Recognising that some literacy practices achieve dominance through power relationships and social institutions, NLS brings to our attention the diversity of “other” literacy events and practices that can be identified in different social contexts. The New Literacy Studies (NLS) shares with actor-network theory (ANT) a common heritage in anthropology, but different theoretical understandings, both within and between ANT and NLS, determine how any particular social context is defined and what can be named, observed, recorded, analysed and represented, or “translated”. For NLS, what constitutes a literacy event depends on the researcher or the participants identifying (or producing or interacting with) what Gee calls the “literacy bits” and what Kress calls the “stuff of literacy” in a particular situation. Local events are seen as being embedded in wider social practices, and our attention is drawn in these studies to the diversity of language and literacy practices and the unequal value and status accorded to elements of these in different situations. In a recent discussion of literacies and everyday learning, Mary Hamilton identifies the roots of NLS in the ethnography of communication and situated learning theory. Now, she points out, the growing body of research on local, textually mediated interactions over the past 20 years has resulted in convergence of NLS with “macro-level sociological and anthropological theory” (2006: 128). In conceptualising the relationship between local events and the social order “out there”, however, actor-network theory gets rid of “out there” altogether. John Law (1992: 380) argues that, instead of assuming that we are observing traces of

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a macro-social system in a local context, the ANT ethnographer starts from the assumption that the local is all that there is. This, then, is one of the core assumptions of actor-network theory: that Napoleons are no different in kind to small-time hustlers, and IBMs to whelk-stalls. And if they are larger, then we should be studying how this comes about – how, in other words, size, power, or organization are generated.

This approach is derived from the studies of people ‘doing’ social life which have been developed in ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. But rather than aspiring to reproduce the ‘real’ world in a sociological representation, ANT acknowledges the role of narrative construction in research. All references are treated as “…simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society” (Latour 1993: 6). So what can be observed locally are the ways in which “out there” is produced in the patterning of relations between actors or entities in a network. In order to do this, ANT derives conceptual tools from French philosophy and semiotics, challenging traditional categories from the social sciences and combining Foucault with Machiavelli in its analysis of power as effect rather than as a set of causes.

Generalized symmetry and relational materialism The most radical claim of actor-network theory is that all of social life consists of patterned networks of people, animals, machines, texts, buildings, plants – any material entity that is brought into a network. These entities have no inherent qualities but take their form and acquire their attributes through relationships in networks with other entities. This goes beyond the idea that humans behave differently or take on different roles in different social situations, or that plants wilt when the soil is too dry or that light bulbs need electricity. Donna Haraway’s (1985) imagery of the cyborg offers a vision of the hybrid creature of machine and organism that is produced in both science fiction and modern technology and medicine. As we move through buildings, use tools, travel in cars, trains or planes, wear clothes, consume chemicals, plants and animals, read books – all these entities circulate through us as we circulate through them. Cyborg imagery invites us to consider the creative possibilities for these interactive relationships but also to take responsibility for the social relations of science and technology. In order to decide what to include in ethnographic studies of local events and practices, ANT “follows the actors” as they define and mobilise entities in their discussions, employing the principle of generalized symmetry. The principle is that the observer uses the same register, or repertoire of explanation, to describe



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technical, natural and social aspects of the situation, so that a computer, a tidal flow or a document can each be attributed with agency and a point of view. Latour (1993: 95) argues that, unlike social constructivism, which relegates nature to phenomena that are constructed and explained through human discourse and social relations, the principle of generalized symmetry locates both nature and society on an equal plane. From this symmetrical point, we can employ the same explanatory repertoire for the observation of quasi-objects that take on natural or social attributes in the networks in which they are enrolled. This means suspending judgements about what is natural or social, true or false, right or wrong and looking at how such judgements are made when entities are brought into particular relations in an actor-network. The principle of generalized symmetry means recognising that animals, mountains, micro-chips and people, as well as identities, categories, spaces and stories, all have politics and all are implicated in power relations. You may want to protest at this point that animals and mountains are facts, and that they are only political when humans make them so. Bruno Latour takes up this argument in Politics of Nature (2004), where he explains that nature and matters of fact are not so much human constructions, as human reductions. Reduced to objects when we separate them from values, facts are invoked in order to silence dissent in the big debates about how we can live together in the world. Latour (2004: 52) writes about the way in which gravity, for example, this “admirable rhizome that transformed all Europe and heavy bodies starting in 1650” is reduced to an object when enrolled in the kind of argument in which social constructivists are invited to jump out of proverbial fifteenth story windows. In arguing against the reduction of non-human entities to “unqualifiable” and irrefutable objects, Latour is not questioning the existence of a material world but points out how the attributes of both human and non-human entities are produced in actor-networks, There is a big difference between the isolated non-human tree that falls in the forest, and the object tree that falls in the forest to smash in the head of the idealist confronting the realist in a pub across from Kings College. What can we say about the former? That it falls, and falls by itself. Nothing more, nothing less. It is the second that responds, polemically, to a conflict of power over the respective rights of nature and politics. (2004: 51)

This argument infuses facts with values to such an extent that we have to call them something else. So Latour invites us to replace the notion of matters of fact with propositions, allowing non-human entities to be considered, as matters of concern, in the democratic process where the multiple voices, the disparate and often conflicting needs, interests and desires of humans and non-humans are taken into account.

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So, for ANT, the very humanity of human beings is an effect of the networks through which we derive ‘human’ attributes in relation to other human and nonhuman entities. This is what John Law describes as relational materialism. The argument is that thinking, acting, writing, loving, earning – all the attributes that we normally ascribe to human beings, are generated in networks that pass through and ramify both within and beyond the body. Hence the term actor-net(Law: 1992:384) work – an actor is also, always, a network.

The materialism of this position is in the idea that even abstract entities like power, literacy, love or the global economy are materially embodied in social, conceptual, technical or textual forms, and these can be observed empirically as network effects. Annemarie Mol and John Law (1994), for example, bring together ideas from health and social geography to add a third dimension of “fluid spatiality” to the topologies of regions and networks through a study of the question “where is anaemia”? This is an empirical study ranging across the inadequacy of anatomical explanation for tracing the movement of blood cells in the body, through laboratory and clinical networks, to the regional differences in what it means to be anaemic. If there are plenty of iron tablets available, ‘anaemia’ is a good diagnosis. If there’s no iron, and no good food and no way to cure worms or malaria, then there is no point in using machines to measure haemoglobin levels. Anaemia is real, as a pattern of physical symptoms. It is narrated, or discursively constructed in the context of different experiences and understandings; and it is social in the sense that what it means and what we do about it is something that is moved around in the fluid spaces of bodies and social relations. Whatever story is being told in this kind of account, we are reminded that “it might have been otherwise” (Hughes 1970 cited in Star 1991). Using the approach derived from ethnomethodology for observing local events, the observer tries not to privilege any of the actors’ points of view or to impose analytic grids, or to fix their identities if these are still being negotiated. This is, of course, problematic, as critics have pointed to the undesirability of ignoring those “enduring cleavages in the social order” like class, race and gender (Nespor 1994: 15) and of denying the significance of these in the observer’s embodied and socially embedded perceptions and understandings of people and events. There are two important questions here. One is about the assembling of disparate populations within totalising concepts like race or class, and the other is about the use of such concepts to indicate the standpoint of the researcher. As a feminist, I refuse to let go of the category woman or to stop labelling particular patterns of behaviour as sexist, or institutional practices as patriarchal, while such labels and categories continue to be strategically necessary. But these



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are labels and categories for limiting the complexity of an assemblage, to foreground gender in our descriptions, for example, or for saying “let’s act as if we were all the same in order to get something done”. ANT acknowledges the convenience of such categories as shorthand terms for collectives that have already been assembled. But, as the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s was sharply reminded, if we venture to speak for a collective, we have to keep listening for the voices that clamour “you maybe, but not us” (Latour 2004: 144). In his proposals for a political ecology, Latour (2004) draws parallels between the use of “man” as an unmarked category against which “woman” was marked as “other”, and a similar relationship between nature and culture. Nature is generally understood as being that which is just there, while culture is marked as particular, an additional but non-essential factor to be accounted for. Latour credits the “immense work of the feminists” in drawing attention to the effects of such distinctions and providing the conceptual institutions that allow us to see both categories as equally marked in relation to the other. The principle of generalised symmetry asks us to pay attention to a far more disparate and often discordant array of entities than those that have been deployed in the social sciences to both describe and explain phenomena, particularly in situations, … where innovations proliferate, where group boundaries are uncertain, when the range of entities to be taken into account fluctuates…. At this point the last thing to do would be to limit in advance the shape, size, heterogeneity, and com(Latour 2005: 11) bination of associations.

Literacy practices in the twenty-first century are most certainly characterised by the proliferation of new media and digital technologies and the erosion of boundaries that determine who or what is involved in a particular network of semiotic engagement. Using the principle of generalised symmetry in this work means asking how the attributes of some entities in a network, like literacy, are assumed to be certain or natural while others are open to negotiation. This offers a systematic approach to the problem of both asserting linguistic equality, for example, and acknowledging the inequalities of power and status attached to particular dialects and genres. It is an approach that enables NLS researchers to head off criticisms that they perpetuate the status quo by valorising low status language and literacies in an ‘anything goes’ relativism (Street 1996). But if we want to ask who makes these criticisms; how some understandings of literacy, basic skills or scientific facts come to hold more power than others; how certainties are constructed and how they might be blown apart; we can draw on actor-network theory’s notion of translation to provide a methodological approach to our investigation of these processes.

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The four moments of translation The goal of translation is to bring together complex entities into a single object or idea that can be mobilised and circulated like a branded commodity or a takenfor-granted fact. Latour (1987: 131) explains that, The problem of the builder of “fact” is the same as that of the builder of “objects”: how to convince others, how to control their behaviour, how to gather enough resources in one place, how to have the claim or the object spread out in time and space.

The four ‘moments’ of translation are derived from Michel Callon’s (1986) classic study of attempts by a team of marine biologists to raise scallops on artificial reefs on the French coast. In Callon’s analysis of this enterprise, he accords agency and desire to each actor in a network that includes marine biologists, local fishermen, the wider scientific community, the scallops and their non-human predators. However, and this is where Machiavelli comes into the frame, Callon chose to construct his story from conference papers and scientific reports, representing the world-building activities of the scientists as key actors who control a network in pursuit of their particular interests. In the following account, I shall use a single document, “Skills for Life” (DfEE 2001) to suggest a framework for analysis that could be mapped on to Callon’s explanation of each stage in the process of translation. “Skills for Life” is a policy document that sets out a “National strategy for improving adult literacy and numeracy skills” in England. An important actor, or entity, in this text is a population, “7 million adults” whose attributes pose a threat to national prosperity and the social order. This entity is introduced into the policy text as a fact, “A shocking 7 million adults in England cannot read and write at the level we expect of an 11 year old” (DfEE 2001: 1). Drawing on concepts from the sociology of translation, Mary Hamilton’s analysis of the procedures and published findings of the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) shows how this was just one of many facts produced in a process of translation and mobilization (Hamilton 2001). The actors in Hamilton’s story include a far-reaching network of international agencies and institutions, experts, research instruments, statistical outputs, teachers, learners, politicians and journalists. The embedding of the “7 million adults” in educational policy for England attests to its successful mobilization through the IALS network as a token that can be compared quantitatively with similar tokens of civilization, development and technical progress in other countries. My interest, like Callon’s, is to identify the points in the process of translation where dissenting elements can disrupt or sabotage the Machiavellian workings of powerful actors in such networks, and introduce the possibility that things could be different.



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i. Problematization (or how to become indispensable) As the first stage in building a network, problematization establishes a focus on a particular goal or a problem to be solved. Whoever gets to define the problem locates themselves as the gatekeeper and casting director, determining who/what the other actors are, and claiming to know what they want. In the story of the scallops, the problem to be solved was that of an insufficient supply of scallops to meet consumer demand in the context of the socio-economic relations of global capitalism. The scientists made themselves indispensable to the other actors in their network by defining the problem in terms of a specific research question about the capacity of scallop larvae to attach themselves to artificial collectors. This question then became the “obligatory passage point in the network of relationships” through which the other actors must pass. Whether or not the agency and desires of the other actors include self-perpetuation, making a living or learning about marine science, the scientists establish their question, together with its underpinning assumptions and associated relationships, as the path of action and key to satisfaction for all the other actors. Similarly, the problem at the centre of the “Skills for Life” strategy is “the country’s ability to compete in the global economy”. The Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) makes itself indispensable by defining the problem in terms of the educational “needs” of a population that holds us back in this competition and “places a huge burden on society” (DfEE 2001: 3). The diagram in Figure 1 is modelled on Callon’s representation of the way in which the key actor defines the other actors and draws them through the “Obligatory Passage Point”. The actors and their identities are those invoked in the text of “Skills for Life”, in which the question, “How can we improve adult literacy and numeracy skills?” is defined as one that is in the interests of all the actors to

DfEE

7 million adults Curriculum Technology Trained Standards Research

Skills for Life “Priority groups”

“Needs”

“Materials”

Teachers Tests

Obligatory Passage Point How can we improve adult literacy and numeracy skills?

Figure 1.

Methods/Motivation

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pursue. There appears to be no room in this network for challenging definitions of literacy and numeracy, or for actors to claim that what they want is not addressed in this question. The network, the actors, and the relations between them are thus defined by this Obligatory Passage Point. ii. Interessement and  how the allies are locked into place and    iii. Enrolment how roles are defined in relation to each other   I have grouped these two moments together to emphasise the point that they are not consecutive, but describe the actions which exclude competing interests and secure alliances among the actors in the network. Enrolment is the goal of interessement, whereby actors take on the network’s problematization as their own. We can employ all kinds of research methods for collecting evidence of these moves, and draw upon our own particular expertise for the analysis of spoken and written language, of technological processes, or of animal and human behaviour, to show how actors can be enrolled into particular relationships with each other. For example, analysis of discursive and rhetorical strategies in policy texts, news headlines and institutional practices can show how subjects and objects are constituted as Us and Them, as problem or solution, as fact, prediction or vision. Ethnographic descriptions can provide accounts of social encounters and institutional practices that draw a group of entities into a network and establish connections based on assumed values and beliefs. Callon, (1986: 211) points out that “Enrolment does not imply, nor does it exclude, pre-established roles”, but their alliance must be secured, and in his story this was not achieved. First, very few larvae attached themselves to the collectors. These eventually hatched, but after two years the few resulting scallops were “shamelessly fished, one Christmas eve” before the scientists had been able to come up with an explanation for the deviant behaviour of those larvae which they had failed to enrol. The upshot of the story is that, “Faced with these silent mutinies of scallops and fishermen, the strategy of the three researchers begins to wobble” (Callon 1986: 220). This calls into question not only the original problematization, but also the identities and assumed interests of the implicated actors. In Figure 2, the network of actors enrolled in the “Skills for Life” strategy is enclosed by a sweeping arrow, which represents an attempt to exclude complexity and dissent. As long as the entities maintain their relationship through the Obligatory Passage Point of the “Skills for Life” problematization, their respective attributes can be fixed in place. This ordering can be disrupted, however, if competing definitions and perspectives acquire the strength to permeate the barriers of interessement constructed around the network. In the boxes on the left, I have indicated some possible alternative problematizations, which suggest attributes



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Improved literacy skills will improve health, prevent crime and secure national prosperity

How does literacy function to prevent, as well as to facilitate, learning?

Research

Skils for Life

Technologies

‘what works?’

works?’ How does literacy oppress as well as empower?

Literacy

Teachers

7 million adults

Tests

How does literacy inhibit the development of other semiotic modes of expression?

Where there may be competing definitions of actors’ identities, then barriers are constructed in an attempt to exclude actors outside the network who want to define them otherwise

Figure 2.

for literacy that are quite different from those that are produced in the network enrolled in “Skills for Life”. Researchers and practitioners who wish to explore such alternatives would need to enrol a different set of actors and establish their relationships with each other through the process of interessement. If any of the actors in a network can be unhitched from the relationships that hold them there, the network boundaries can be eroded. The effect of this instability is to interfere with the fourth moment in the process of translation. iv. Mobilization Callon describes the ‘moment’ of mobilization as that in which the various actors are transformed into manageable entities that can be transported into government reports and used by politicians in electoral speeches. Entities which have been successfully translated are like carefully packed suitcases which glide smoothly round the airport carousel or stack tidily in the luggage compartments on a train. More difficult to mobilize are the contested entities which, like carrier bags and chicken hampers and cardboard boxes tied with string, threaten to burst open and spill their messy contents on the ground for all to see. Latour coined the term “immutable mobile” (1987) for entities that have been standardised in this

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process of translation and mobilization, and Stephen Brown and Rose Capdevila (1999) relate this to the history of a scientific quest for the perpetuum mobile. The desire was for a machine which, once set in motion, would run by itself for ever. Although the quest for the perpetuum mobile was abandoned by the late eighteenth century, scientists have continued in their attempts to impose “… linear order and precision… submitting the social to the discipline of natural lawfulness” (1999: 28). In these attempts to control the future, Brown and Capdevila suggest that expressions of interests can be regarded as attempts to shape time, or to “… impose a chronology against some fate”. Thus the spectre of lagging behind in the competitive markets of global capitalism is presented as the fate we are urged to evade through the enrolment of deficient individuals in a national literacy programme like “Skills for Life”. In her story of the International Adult Literacy Survey, Mary Hamilton (2001) shows how entities like literacy and the 7 million adults in England who are deemed to have a problem, have been produced in the process of translation. Their representation as facts in “Skills for Life” attests to their successful mobilisation within certain powerful networks. Hamilton concludes that employing actor-network concepts to analyse this process has persuaded her of the potential for New Literacy Studies, substantiated by “convincing ethnographic research”, to generate alternative networks and powerful discourses which mark “… the beginnings of a strategy for entering the field of policy and practice”. In adopting such a strategy, however, we need to consider whether, in turning our gaze to the centres of power, we are turning our backs on those who stand at the periphery.

The prince and the pauper: Where does the observer stand? Much of the critical engagement with actor-network theory has come from researchers in health, information and communications technology, management, architecture and social geography where there is a particular interest in the relationship between human and non-human entities. In one of the few texts that has drawn extensively on actor-network theory for educational research, Jan Nespor (1994) departs from what he calls the “Callon and Latour account of mobilization” in which the focus is on the powerful actor or actors at the centre of a network. These studies of opaque and subtle manoeuvres and translations, associated with the archetype of Machiavelli’s Prince, are important to our understanding of the “field of policy and practice” to which Mary Hamilton refers. However, Nespor points out that a focus on the mobilizing activities of central actors in a network neglects the perspective of those “being mobilized” at the margins.



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This is important for any educational research which aspires to take account of the experiences of adult learners, and particularly of those who are mobilized as entities like England’s 7 million adults in the powerful network of the “Skills for Life” strategy. The other problem that Nespor (1994: 15) associates with this centre-outward focus is that, From the centre of an intersection things seem to come from every direction, everything is flow: from a distance, however, stable divisions and routes become visible.

Citing Donna Haraway’s (1992: 332) criticism that ANT neglects “… matters like masculine supremacy or racism or imperialism or class structures” Nespor argues that ANT’s emphasis on fluidity of networks should also recognize that the social world “… flows at times in very deeply worn channels”. The focus of Nespor’s study is on the space-time relations of knowledge, learning, curriculum and disciplinary practices. This is an ethnographic study in which Nespor compares both the material and representational production of space and time for undergraduates in physics and in management studies in a North American university. Using concepts from social geography to look at the construction of knowledge in disciplinary networks, Nespor argues for an approach that “… allows for the existence of worn landscapes as well as flows” (1994: 15). In response to the criticism that actor-network theory is indifferent to the “worn landscapes” of inequalities and power struggles, Latour argues that overarching social theories leave the contents of social forces unexplained. They rely on overpowering theoretical formulations of “stable divisions” that fail to offer any practical programme of emancipation. Deploying similar topographical metaphors, Latour explains how a detailed symmetrical description flattens the landscape so that nothing is hidden when local sites are placed side by side on the same plane as other sites. By following the networks, trails and connections made by the actors in each of these sites, however, “another mountain range begins to emerge”, offering points of intersection, and possibilities for contestation, that cut across an imagined global/local divide, It is not that there is no hierarchy, no ups and downs, no rifts, no deep canyons, no high spots. It is simply that if you wish to go from one site to another, then you have to pay the full cost of relation, connection, displacement, and information. No lifts, accelerations, or shortcuts are allowed. (Latour 2005: 176)

Paying the full cost means putting in the work needed for the production of detailed descriptions, but this does not mean we have to abandon the theoretical tools we want to use for the stories we want to tell. Description, in any language,

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involves a choice of words, images or grammatical conjunctions that are infused with contestable theories, meanings and associations. Noel Castree, whose interest is in a synthesis of ANT and Marxism for the project of “greening left geography”, shares Nespor’s concern that some networks are “longer and more durable” than others. But Castree supports the ANT view that the key to understanding how networks function is to “… step inside them – not to look for external causes which are natural or social, global or local” (2002: 120). This means retaining the insights to be derived from a Marxist analysis of the political economy, while “… multiplying the actors and complicating the politics involved”. Castree’s deployment of ANT’s conceptual tools, “… to make supple sense of the processes driving nature’s accelerated creative destruction in the twenty-first century” is illustrated in his treatment of money as an immutable mobile, whose effects can be observed in networks. Money… is portable and quantifiable, in the form of coins, paper currency and shares, say – but it represents something much bigger: namely, the collective actions of multifarious socionatural actants as they, together, constitute value. Accordingly, the owners of money have at their disposal a remarkable technology for capturing the agencies and powers of human and nonhuman others. In short, they can compel others to act as “intermediaries”. (Castree 2002: 141)

This consideration of the compelling power of money, as an entity in the actor-networks of literacy research and practice, is pertinent to the question that I posed at the beginning of this chapter. How can ethnographic studies of diverse and creative engagement with language in different communities help to expose the deception of ‘export quality literacy’? How can ANT and NLS help us to challenge programmes like Skills for Life, in which literacy exporters “… judge and characterise, yet again, whole communities or even nations as ‘failing at literacy’, not wanting to be better workers, better citizens or, in the end, better people”? (Freebody and Freiberg, this volume). Money is, of course, a powerful entity in the networks of government policy, and its effects on those who don't have much of it can easily be observed. So if our concern is for the less powerful entities mobilised in networks, we can look at the ways in which funding mechanisms, for example, are used to dupe, seduce or coerce those who are successfully targeted and enrolled into networks in which they take on shameful attributes of the donkey (see Bartlett, this volume), the failure, the illiterate. Similarly, we may want to look at the way in which research funding ties us into relationships with the homogenous immutable mobile of literacy. Those who are successful in securing money for NLS research are generally people who have developed the skill of translating proposals for ethnographic research into the prevailing discourse of governments and funding bodies. The art is to use the



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language of the powerful to describe what we plan to do for the powerless, to infiltrate their networks as subversive actors. The model of translation proposed by ANT however, shows how a particular problematization creates an Obligatory Passage Point which delineates the attributes of entities enrolled in a network. If the discourse of skills deficit or improvement is implicit in a funding bid for an ethnographic study of local literacy practices, then we cannot help also enrolling the narrowly defined literacy in relation to which a population like England’s 7 million adults is attributed with individual deficiencies. The Skills for Life programme funds outreach workers to lure young people into literacy classes via “music technology” projects, to coerce the jobless into “Entry to Employment” schemes or to blackmail mothers into “family literacy” classes. Front line workers in libraries, job centres or housing projects are trained in “Basic Skills Awareness” to help them spot those who successfully hide their “needs”. Like the Malleus Maleficarum – the 15th century guidebook used during the Inquisition for the identification of witches – Screening Tests are administered to people seeking welfare benefits or enrolling on carpentry courses in order to root out those whose “Basic Skills Needs” pose a threat to our national prosperity. When I was investigating the impact of Skills for Life on the voluntary sector in London, a community centre manager told me he saw Basic Skills Awareness as, “… a vision of people walking down the street and hooks appearing out of doorways and yanking them in… someone saying ‘You think you got away but we’re still running after you’” (Clarke 2005). Of course, much of this activity is motivated by good intentions, and a more benign understanding of this mobilization of literacy might be derived from a comparison with John Law’s (1984) actor-network analysis of McDonalds. Law describes the enrolment and interessement of eating patterns, franchise marketing and employment practices, in which the act of standardization involves a series of inclusions and exclusions. Drawing on her own experience of being allergic to onions, however, Susan Leigh Star points out that the McDonalds hamburger empire may provide “sameness and stability for some people”, but for her it is “a source of chaos and trouble” (Star 1991: 42). Star points out that, “no matter where you fall on the scale of participation”, most of us live with the fact of McDonalds because of its ubiquitous presence around the world. This is illustrated in a hypothetical scenario in which Star imagines McDonalds developing technologies to enrol more and more divergent groups, including those who can’t eat onions. But who would she be if, for example, she joined a “League to Protect Small Family Owned Businesses”? From being an excluded or problematic customer, for whom McDonalds must diversify their provision, Star would then become a different kind of subject,

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This is not the disenfranchised, which may at some point be ‘targeted’; not the residual category not covered in present marketing taxonomies. This is that which is permanently escaping, subverting but nevertheless in relationship with the standardized. It is not nonconformity, but heterogeneity. (Star 1991: 39)

By adding a hypothetical “self to which they are blind, but which affects my interaction with them” (1991: 37), Star conjures up a scenario that suggests a productive point of departure for New Literacy Studies. When NLS ethnographers set out to study literacy events in local contexts, we are interested in all the rich and diverse ways in which people engage with the written word in their communities. But this depends on an understanding of literacy that, like McDonalds, is already so ubiquitous and powerful that it is impossible to avoid living with the fact of literacy.

Conclusion An actor-network analysis of the process of enrolment, translation and mobilization has shown us how entities get locked into a relationship with the fact of ‘export quality literacy’. In this model, the entities to be enrolled are determined by the terms of the problematization so, for those of us who want to challenge the oppressive effects of programmes like Skills for Life, the task is to construct more expansive problematizations. For me, there is a connection between ANT’s use of this term and Paulo Freire’s problem-posing education, which takes us back to considering the perspective of those being mobilized in powerful networks. Who these people are, and the attributes with which they are accorded in a network, will depend on where and how we meet them. But if we come across those for whom literacy has presented itself as an obstacle that is not directly related to their interests and desires, then we might want to construct a problematization that draws on their experience and excludes literacy altogether. When Freire’s educators set out to “… engage the learners in the constant problematizing of their existential situations” (Freire 1972: 37), they brought their own political analysis to the task. While this limited our choices to the problematic (and, as I have argued elsewhere, gendered) binary of liberation or domestication (Clarke 1998) ANT’s emphasis on symmetrical relationships and collectives provides a more expansive framework for a research and pedagogy that can still take as its starting point the language and experience of the oppressed. This would involve reflecting on our own interests in constructing a particular network as the locus of enquiry into a ‘literacy event’ or as a network of literacy practices, and considering the position from which we observe and tell stories



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about these events and practices. There has been little evidence of this kind of reflexivity in most ANT stories, and little or no account of the relationship between the researcher and researched. On the other hand, NLS research has been characterised by an interest in collaborative approaches, in which research subjects participate, at least to some extent, in the interpretation and representation of their literacy practices. ANT's relational materialism expands the diversity of potential participants in a research collective, including actors like the panther, invoked by de Souza (in this volume) to illustrate the notion of cultural relativism. De Souza’s description of the high truth value placed on collective knowledge among indigenous people in Brazil draws our attention to the contrasting individualism of alphabetic literacy. The latter can be observed in a current obsession with plagiarism and ‘cheating’ in universities, where the measurement and grading of individual performance is threatened by the ungovernable relations of global digital networks. I offer these observations to illustrate the kinds of links and connections that might be followed in a research agenda that combines the complexity and symmetry of ANT ethnography with a commitment to reflexivity and collaboration. For when Mary Hamilton argues for “convincing” ethnographic research, we have to consider who we are trying to convince, by what means, and to what ends. No educational practitioner can avoid a relationship with attempts to standardize literacy (and serve it up, with or without onions, in fast-food outlets around the world). But educational research can set out to disrupt this relationship by emphasising the heterogeneity of semiotic and communicative practices and by including ourselves – as diverse actor-networks of teaching, learning, research and political engagement – among the “permanently escaping” subjects. As Star (1991: 52) points out, we are all members of multiple communities of practice or social worlds, each of which generates its own metaphors, and “Power is about whose metaphor brings worlds together, and holds them there.” And if we are worried that telling yet more stories is not enough, Latour offers persuasive reassurance about the value of our own literacy practices, Describing, inscribing, narrating, and writing final reports are as unnatural, complex and painstaking as dissecting fruit flies or sending a telescope into space… The simple act of recording anything on paper is already an immense transformation that requires as much artifice as painting a landscape or setting up some elaborate biochemical reaction. No scholar should find humiliating the task of sticking to description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement. (Latour 2005: 137)

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References Brown, S. & Capdevila, R. 1999. Perpetuum mobile: Substance, force and the sociology of translation. In Actor Network Theory and After, J. Law & J. Hassard (eds). Oxford: Blackwell. Callon, M. 1986. Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In Power, Action, Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge, J. Law (ed.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Castree, N. 2002. False antitheses? Marxism, nature and actor-networks. Antipode 34(1): 111– 146. Clarke, J. 1998. Deconstructing Domestication: Women’s Experience and the Goals of Critical Pedagogy. PhD thesis, University of Southampton. Clarke, J. 2005. Whose Skills? Whose Life? Skills for Life in the Context of Informal Learning download from http://www.literacy.lancs.ac.uk/rapal/docs/Whose%20skills%20Whose% 20life.pdf DfEE 2001. Skills for life: The national strategy for improving adult literacy and numeracy skills, http://www.dfee.gov.uk Freire, P. 1972. Cultural Action for Freedom. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gebhardt, E. 1982. Introduction to Part III, A Critique Of Methodology. In The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, A. Arato & E. Gebhardt (eds). New York NY: Continuum. Gee, J. 2000. The new literacy studies: From “socially situated” to the work of the social. In Situated Literacues: Reading and Writing in Context, D. Barton, M. Hamilton & R. Ivanic (eds). London: Routledge. Hamilton, M. 2001. Privileged literacies: Policy, institutional process and the life of the IALS. Language and Education 15(2–3): 178–196. Hamilton, M. 2006. Just do it: Literacies, everyday learning and the irrelevance of pedagogy. Studies in the Education of Adults 38(2): 125–140. Haraway, D. 1985. A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. Socialist Review 80. Haraway, D. 1992. The promise of monsters: A regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others. In Cultural Studies, L. Grossberg, C.Nelson & P. Treichler (eds), 295–337. New York NY: Routledge. Latour, B. 1987. Science in Action, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Transl. C. Porter. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Latour, B. 2004. The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Transl. C. Porter. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, J. 1984. How much of society can the sociologist digest at one sitting? The “Macro” and the “Micro” revisited for the case of fast food. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 5: 171–196. Law, J. (ed.). 1991. A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination. London: Falmer. Law, J. 1992. Notes on the theory of the actor-network: Ordering, strategy and heterogeneity. Systems Practice 5(4): 379–393. Mol, A.-M. & Law, J. 1994. Regions, networks and fluids: Anaemia and social topology. Social Studies of Science 24(4): 641–671.



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Nespor, J. 1994. Knowledge in Motion: Space, Time and Curriculum in Undergraduate Physics and Management. London: Falmer Press. Prinsloo, M. 2005. The new literacies as placed resources. Perspectives in Education 23(4): 87– 98. Star, S. L. 1991. Power, technologies and the phenomenology of conventions: On being allergic to onions. In A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, J. Law (ed.). London: Falmer. Street, B. 1996. Preface. In The Social Uses of Literacy: Theory and Practice in Contemporary South Africa, M. Prinsloo & M. Breier (eds). Cape Town: Sached Books.

part iv

Literacy practices in time and space

chapter 9

Elite or powerful literacies? Constructions of literacy in the novels  of Charles Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell Mike Baynham This chapter turns to 19th century literary sources in English, specifically  Dickens’s blockbuster masterpiece Bleak House and Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton and asks what these can show us about how literacy operates as a social and semiotic construct in the fictional worlds evoked. The chapter distinguishes between elite and powerful literacies in these settings and examines how these novels might count as evidence of historically distant literacy practices, how these might enrich understanding of literacy practices in contemporary times. The chapter explores the differing stances of each novelist in their representations of literacy practices and shows how textually mediated worlds of literacy are both represented in these literary texts and play a crucial role in their construction.

Introduction: Literacy practices in time and space The preceding chapters in this collection have clearly demonstrated the contextually situated nature of literacy. They have shown that literacy should be investigated both as text and practice (see also Baynham 2002). It follows from this situated perspective that literacy practices will vary in both space and time. While spatial variation has been addressed in ethnographic work on literacy (Street 1993; Martin Jones and Jones 2000; Luke and Baynham 2004) it is less easy to reconstruct the social practices that give rise to texts that are temporally remote from us, although this has been a continuing source of historical interest. In this chapter I will explore the potential of literary texts to illuminate historically distant literacy practices, illustrating the discussion with examples drawn from the novels of Charles Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell, specifically Dickens’s Bleak House and Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton. I will distinguish between elite and powerful literacies, the difference being primarily understood through their potential for social inclusion

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and exclusion, exploring the differing stances of each novelist in their representations of literacy practices. I will, additionally, show how textually mediated worlds of literacy are both represented in these literary texts and play a crucial role in their construction.

Literacy in time (1): Historical perspectives Literacy has proved a generative topic in historical studies. I have not the space to attempt even an overview, but will briefly mention, in chronological order of topic, the work of Michael Clanchy (1979) on literacy in Mediaeval England, of Houston (2002) in Early Modern Europe, Eisenstein (1980) on the impact of the printing press in renaissance Europe, the work of Harvey Graff (1979) on literacy in the 19th century city, David Vincent’s (1989) work on literacy and popular culture in England between 1750 and 1914, which I will draw on, covers the period in which Bleak House and Mary Barton were both written and set. Mastin Prinsloo (2005) has recently examined the literacy activities that characterized the C19th colonial encounters in Southern Africa between the Zulu King Shaka and his successors and colonial military forces, emissaries and traders. Deborah Brandt (2001) brings literacy history into the 20th century, examining literacy in American lives between 1895 and 1985, using oral history and documentary sources. Historians of literacy draw on a variety of evidence sources, written records, contemporary accounts, letters, autobiographies, to reconstruct the impact and functions of literacy in specific times and places.

Literacy in time (2): Fictional perspectives In this chapter I argue that literary sources, particularly novels, can be an additional valuable resource for understanding and reconstructing literacy practices that are distant from us in both time and space. This approach has already attracted literacy scholars, such as Jane Mace (Mace 2002) and Maxine Burton (Burton 2004). However I will also argue that the novels are literary texts and should not be treated simply as transparent sources to be trawled for representations of literacy in the mid 19th century or any other period. Literacy plays a role in the construction and shaping of these complex texts and I will also try to show how this is achieved.



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Key constructs for the study of literacy Barton and Hamilton (2000: 1–15) identified the characteristics of an NLS perspective on literacy as follows: Literacy is best understood as a set of social practices; these are observable in events which are mediated by written texts; there are different literacies associated with different domains of life; literacy practices are patterned by social institutions and power relations and some literacies are more dominant, visible and influential than others; literacy practices are purposeful and embedded in broader social goals and cultural practices; literacy is historically situated; literacy practices change and new ones are frequently acquired through processes of informal learning and sense making as well as formal education and training. We can extrapolate from Barton and Hamilton’s characterization of the New Literacy Studies some of the key constructs that have been used for the study of literacy, going on to use them to examine both the literacy worlds that are constructed in Bleak House and Mary Barton and the contribution of these to the shaping of the novels. Institutions/Discourses (e.g. Law, Medicine, Religion, Media, Trades Unions) Registers (specialized languages of professions and trades) Practices (e.g. legal proceedings, summoning witnesses, medical consultations, negotiating loan repayments, petitioning parliament) Literacy events and activities (e.g. letter-writing, copying, note-taking, reading silently or aloud, giving a speech based on notes) Texts and genres (e.g. letters, sub-poenas, street signs, visiting cards, Valentines, newspaper articles, petitions) Actors, including mediators of literacy (letter-writer, scribe, newspaper-reader, reader of novels, reader of street signs) Material culture of literacy (pens, paper, parchment, print, newsprint, telegraphy)

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Synopses of the novels Bleak House is set in and around London in the 1840s. Ada and Richard are both wards of the Court of Chancery, caught up in the Jarndyce & Jarndyce case, which casts a shadow over everyone involved in it, eventually destroying Richard. Esther, the illegitimate daughter of prominent society figure Lady Dedlock, having been brought up in ignorance of her parentage, goes to live with Ada as her companion at the instigation of John Jarndyce. Lady Dedlock’s former lover, father of Esther, has sunk in society and, addicted to opium, now earns his living, under the name of Nemo, as a legal writer. Through a strange coincidence Lady Dedlock recognizes his handwriting on a legal document. The Dedlock family solicitor, Tulkinghorn, is alerted to the possibility that Lady Dedlock may have a secret and sets to work, successfully, to discover it. Another character, the clerk Mr. Guppy also has suspicions of Lady Dedlock’s past and threatens her with love letters written to her former lover, now dead. In the climax of the novel, Lady Dedlock’s secret is exposed and she flees the family home, dying, although forgiven by her husband, at her lover’s grave. Mary Barton is set in Manchester in the 1840s. The heroine Mary Barton, a working class girl, employed as a seamstress, is courted by Richard Carson, the son of the mill-owner. She is also loved by Jem Wilson but initially rejects him in favour of Richard, later realizing she loves him. Mary’s father John Barton is a Chartist and union activist, becoming involved in a strike of mill workers. Their claims are rejected by the mill-owners, including Richard Carson and his father. A group of the union activist plan an attack on the mill-owners. John Barton is selected to carry it out and Richard Carson is murdered. Jem Wilson is falsely accused of the murder, understood as a crime of passion over Mary. Jem is acquitted at his trial, during which Mary declares her love for him. John Barton, on the verge of death, confesses to the murder. Richard Carson’s father, after a spiritual struggle, forgives the murderer. Jem and Mary start a new life in Canada.

Institutions/discourses in Bleak House and Mary Barton As Barton and Hamilton (2000) point out in the quotation above, literacy practices are patterned by institutions and power relations and are of course a central means through which institutions operate performatively. In Bleak House the reader encounters a rich variety of the institutions of Victorian Britain, both high profile and visible, such as medicine, the law, the missionary and benevolent societies, prison, the press as well as those on the shadowy fringes of society, such as the loan sharks who prey on the financially vulnerable. In Mary Barton, the



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Law, the Workplace and the infant Trades Union Movement are the most salient, though there are insights to be gleaned on access to hospitals for the poor and the organization of the port of Liverpool. In both books, more pervasively in Bleak House, the institution/discourse of the Law stands out, dystopically in Dickens’s savage portrayal of the Court of Chancery, blighting over generations a succession of young lives and hopes; more positively in Mrs. Gaskell’s presentation of the lawyer Mr. Bridgenorth who works late to prepare Jem Wilson’s seemingly hopeless case in his trial for murder, and indeed in the conduct of the court and jury itself, where justice can be seen to be done and the innocent Jem is acquitted, despite the determination of the murdered man’s father for revenge and a scapegoat. As writers such as Mace (2002) and Burton (2004) have pointed out, Dickens’s Court of Chancery is a world constituted by texts par excellence: the various solicitors in a case are ranged in line, “between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them” (BH Page 12). One of the peculiarities of the Court of Chancery is that only written evidence presented by lawyers can be considered. Those involved in the cases can attend the sessions of the court but play no part in them: Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from Shropshire, and breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at the close of the day’s business, and who can by no means be made to understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence after making it desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself in a good place and keeps an eye on the Judge, ready to call out ‘My lord!’ in a voice of sonorous complaint, on the instant of his rising.  (BH Page 16)

Richard and Ada, wards of court and applicants in the tortuous Jarndyce & Jarndyce case that winds its way centrally through the novel, are summoned to the Lord Chancellor’s chambers so he can review their situation. During the formal part of the interview, the Lord Chancellor is leafing through documents and talking in a low tone to the lawyer Kenge, occasionally addressing the young people directly: The gentleman in the bag wig laid bundles of papers on his lordship’s table, and his lordship silently selected one, and turned over the leaves. ‘Miss Clare,’ said the Lord Chancellor. ‘Miss Ada Clare?’  (BH Page 45) Mr. Kenge leant over before it was quite said, and whispered. His lordship with his eyes upon his papers, listened, nodded twice or thrice, turned over more leaves, and did not look towards me again, until we were going away.  (BH Page 46)

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In this world of texts, interaction is mediated through written documents. In both Bleak House and Mary Barton, whenever lawyers are portrayed in their offices, they are invariably presented as reading documents or writing. The Court of Chancery itself spawns a network of supporting organizations and individuals who provide services all with distinctive associated literacy activity, from the legal firms, both lofty and high status (Mr. Tulkinghorn with the secrets of half Britain’s noble families in his head), the more middle of the road firm of Kenge and Carboy, the dodgy Mr. Vholes into whose clutches Richard falls in pursuit of his claim in the Jarndyce & Jarndyce case, operating out of an office the size of a cupboard. Within the lawyer’s firms, there is also strict hierarchy, with the clerks (such as Mr. Guppy of Kenge and Carboy being the most outstanding) working on the instructions the lawyers. Playing another supporting role are the Law Stationers such as Snagsby, who provide the materials for literacy, paper and parchment for legal documents, as well as coordinating the activities of the legal writers, document copiers in an age before photocopying, with their distinctive legal hand, this last central to the plot of the novel in the shadowy figure of Nemo (for a discussion of Nemo as scribe cf. Mace 2002: 120–123). Further in the shadows is the rag and bone man Krook, compulsively collecting and hoarding the detritus of legal documents that he cannot read, forever planning to teach himself to read so he can read them. So far I have talked about the notion of the Law as an Institution, now I would like to consider it as a Discourse. I’m using this term in the Foucauldian sense to encompass not just language practices but the totality of material practices and artefacts, procedures, uses of space etc that constitute the Law as a Discourse. Not just the myriad texts but the silk gowns and Registrar’s red table would be among the artefacts and practices constitutive of the Court of Chancery. These include embodied practices. The bodily hexis of the Lord Chancellor as he turns away from the young people he is concerned with, listening to the low tones of the lawyer Kenge, his gaze oriented to the documents in the case, is a distinctive example of such practice. This definition of Discourse goes beyond the world constituted by texts suggesting that the world is not exhaustively textual, but is constituted through texts interacting with other material and embodied practices.

Elite literacy practices, register and exclusion It would, however, be unwise to underplay the significance of textual or literacy practices in constituting the social world, here the legal world. To explore the role of elite literacy practices in the law-as-institution, I turn to a relatively well tried construct in social linguistics that of register, understood as the specialist techni-



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cal language of an institutional discourse community. Associated with Law as an institution and a discourse are the distinctive language uses (spoken and written) which constitute the legal register. These include forms of elite literacy, significant in terms of the power, prestige and financial reward that accrues to those who can manipulate them authoritatively and defined at least in part by those it excludes. It goes without saying that in the shifting social fabric of the industrial revolution, with enormous gulfs between rich and poor, against a backdrop of a push towards universal literacy (cf. Vincent 1989: Chapter 2), that the different characters in the book, exemplifying the broad span of social classes characteristic of Dickens’s work, are differentially positioned, typically along class lines, in relation to their access to the world of texts and register gives us a tool to explore this. The aristocratic Sir Leicester Dedlock for example is a man who relishes the technicalities of the elite legal text: Sir Leicester in a great chair looks at the fire, and appears to have a stately liking for the legal repetitions and prolixities, as ranging among the national bulwarks.  (BH Page 26)

Lady Dedlock however has interrupted him, “requesting him to miss as many of the formal horrors as possible” (BH Page 26). It is in this scene that Lady Dedlock recognizes the handwriting of her former lover Nemo by whom she had a child, Esther, thus triggering the unfolding of a central element in the plot, her gradual discovery by the lawyer Tulkinghorn, her fear of disgrace and her eventual death. As suggested at the beginning of this chapter, my definition of an elite literacy practice is one that promotes structural social exclusion. An illustration of how the specialist legal register excludes those not apprenticed into it can be found when the working class heroine Mary Barton struggles to find a solution to the trial of the man she loves, Jem Wilson, falsely accused of the murder of a former lover, the mill-owner’s son Richard Carson: She had heard of an alibi, and believed it might mean the deliverance she wished to accomplish; but she was not quite sure, and determined to apply to Job, as one of the few among her acquaintance gifted with the knowledge of hard words, for to her, all terms of law, or natural history, were alike many syllabled mysteries.  (MB Page 233)

Job, the autodidact working-class naturalist, acts as a mediator of literacy, interpreting the technical legal language for her. Tell me, Job! Isn’t it called an alibi, the getting folk to swear to where he really was at the time?  (MB Page 234)

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Mary does in fact know the meaning of the word alibi, but is sufficiently lacking in confidence to request the confirmation of Job. It is a mistake to imagine however that the high status technical registers hermetically exclude those who are not literate. When the sub-poena is delivered to Jem Wilson’s mother, requiring her to appear as witness in her son’s trial, a neighbour “spelled out the meaning and made it all clear to Mrs. Wilson” (MB Page 251). Working class people had networks to sort out literacy issues, whether reading a letter or document or writing. Job is a mediator in Mary’s network. Her neighbour who herself needs to spell out the meaning and is therefore by no means a fluent reader, is able to serve as a mediator of the meaning of the subpoena for Jem’s distraught mother. More distant from the world of texts than almost any other character in Bleak House is the unfortunate child Jo, sleeping rough in Tom All Alone’s, continually moved and moving on, homeless and destitute. Jo’s radical exclusion from the world of texts is demonstrated in his encounter with Lady Dedlock, who seeks him out to show her Nemo’s grave. She had heard of his existence in a newspaper account of the inquest following Nemo’s death: ‘Are you the boy I read of in the papers?’ she asks behind her veil. ‘I don’t know,’ says Jo, staring moodily at the veil, ‘nothink about no papers. I don’t know nothink about nothing at all.’ ‘Were you examined at an Inquest?’ ‘I don’t know nothink about no – where I was took by the Beadle, do you mean?’ says Jo. ‘Was the boy’s name at the Inkwhich, Jo?’ ‘Yes.’ (BH Page 260) ‘That’s me!’ says Jo. 

Jo’s exclusion is demonstrated in his lack of understanding of the legal term, albeit in very common currency, of “inquest” which he transforms poignantly and intriguingly into “inkwhich”. The elite literacies with which we started this chapter are literacies of exclusion. Included are those who by birth, education and training have been apprenticed into them. Excluded are vagabond waifs such as Jo. In the mobile 19th century social world that Dickens portrays, register also plays an interesting role in the spoken language of certain characters. Mr. Guppy, the aspirational lawyer’s clerk at Kenge & Carboy, struggling through his apprenticeship into the elite literacy of the law, plays a key role in the story in relation to the uncovering of Lady Dedlock’s relationship with Nemo. Mr. Guppy “likes nothing better than to model his conversation on forensic principles”: his talk is so saturated by the legal register and, indeed, legal procedures that they lard his everyday interactions, as we see in the following conversation with Esther, to whom he has previously made a declaration of love which he now wishes to retract:



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‘My intention was to remark, miss,’ said Mr. Guppy, ‘… to remark that you was so good on that occasion as to repel and repudiate that declaration. You – you wouldn’t object to admit that? Though no witnesses are present, it might be a satisfaction to – to your mind – if you was to put in that admission.’ ‘There can be no doubt,’ said I, ‘that I declined your proposal without any reservation or qualification whatsoever.’ ‘Thank you miss,’ he returned, measuring the table with his troubled hands. ‘So far that’s satisfactory, and it does you credit. Er … you wouldn’t perhaps be offended if I was to mention … if I was to mention that such declaration on my part was final, and there terminated?’ ‘I quite understand that,’ said I. ‘Perhaps – er – it may not be worth the form, but it might be a satisfaction to your mind – perhaps you wouldn’t object to admit that,miss?’ said Mr. Guppy. ‘I admit it most fully and freely,’ said I.  (BH Page 616)

Mr. Guppy’s talk, structured like the preparation of an affidavit, is an intertextual echo of the legal register and procedures in which he is daily immersed as an articled clerk. Interestingly both Mr. Guppy, Mr. Tulkinghorn and Mr. Kenge on different occasions seek explicit witnessed agreement that such and such a thing has been said. Sir Leicester Dedlock, after the revelation of Lady Dedlock’s past, and the flight that will lead to her death, calls a family member and trusted servants together: ‘Therefore I desire to say, and to call you all to witness – beginning, Volumnia, with yourself, most solemnly – that I am on unaltered terms with Lady Dedlock. That I assert no cause whatever of complaint against her. That I have ever had the strongest affection for her, and that I retain it undiminished. Say this to herself and to everyone. If you ever say less than this, you will be guilty of deliberate falsehood to me.’  (BH Page 895)

Mr. Vholes goes to the extreme of noting down what he has said in his notebook, so it can be adduced as evidence later: In reference to Mr. C.’s pursuit of his interests, I mentioned to you, Miss Summerson, the first time I had the pleasure of seeing you, in my desire that everything should be openly carried on – I used these words, for I happened afterwards to note them in my diary, which is producible at any time – I mentioned to you that Mr. C. had laid down the principle of watching his own interests; and that when a client of mine laid down a principle which was not of an immoral (that is to say, unlawful) nature, it devolved on me to carry it out.  (BH Page 925)

At particular moments Mr. Guppy, Mr. Vholes, Mr. Tulkinghorn, Sir Leicester are speaking for the record, in anticipation of time where these words may have to be counted, adduced in evidence.

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Literacy events in Bleak House and Mary Barton A key observational construct in NLS research, as indicated by Barton and Hamilton, the literacy event has been defined as “any occasion in which engagement with a written text is integral to participants’ interactions and interpretative processes” (adapted from Heath 1983: 93). A literacy event is typically a mix of spoken and written language, participants engage with, comment on, elaborate the written text verbally. Among the great diversity of literacy events I will pick on two instances of some similarity though rather different in tenor from the two books. In one, Mr. Guppy has sought an interview with Lady Dedlock. He has begun to unravel the mystery of Lady Dedlock’s past, in particular that Esther Summerson is her illegitimate daughter. Mr. Guppy has prepared himself for the interview by making notes, perhaps on the model of the barristers he has observed in court: Mr. Guppy refers to a little slip of paper on which he has made small notes of his line of argument, and which seems to involve him in the densest obscurity whenever he looks at it.  (BH Page 463)

Mr. Guppy seems only partly to have mastered the device and it lets him down frequently to comical effect: ‘Thank your ladyship,’ said Mr. Guppy, ‘quite satisfactory. No –I- dash it! – The fact is, that I put down a head or two here of the order of the points I thought of touching upon, and they’re written short, and I can’t quite make out what they mean. If your ladyship will excuse me taking it to the window half a moment, I – (BH Page 463)

Struggling unsuccessfully with his notes, Mr. Guppy, the articled clerk and therefore aspiring lawyer, has tried to use a written structure of points “written short” to prompt him in his speech. The comedy here is at the expense of someone of overweening ambition and self importance who has not completely mastered the elite literacy strategy of public speaking from minimal notes, second nature to barristers. The second example of speaking from notes is taken when a poignant scene in which Mr. Carson the mill owner and father of the murdered Richard has sought an interview with Job Legh and Jem Wilson to clarify the circumstances of the murder, after Mary’s father John Barton has confessed to the crime: ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mr. Carson, slightly bowing his head. ‘What I wished to know was,’ referring to a slip of paper he held in his hand, and shaking so much he could hardly adjust his glasses to his eyes, ‘whether you, Wilson, can explain how Barton came possessed of your gun. I believe you refused this explanation to Mr. Bridgenorth.’  (MB Page 360)



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‘And yet by his confession he must have been absent at the time,’ said Mr. Carson, referring to his slip of paper.  (MB Page 362)

In this poignant moment in which a father seeks to understand and ultimately be reconciled with his son’s murderer, he resorts to the same strategy as Mr. Guppy of recording the key points of what he wishes to say in note form. Here we see the interaction between oral and literate modes characteristic of the literacy event and literacy activity more generally.

Texts and genres Literacy events imply texts and genres. Before I go on to discuss texts and genres in the novels, I’ll briefly clarify how I distinguish between the two. In some linguistic traditions, such as Hallidayan functional linguistics, text refers to both spoken and written language, so you can have both spoken and written texts. Among some British linguists in the linguistic ethnography tradition the distinction is made between text and talk, where text means written text. This is the sense in which it is used here, given that the chapter is trying to highlight among other things the interactions of written and spoken language. I use genre to refer to a more abstract level of linguistic organization, with a clearly identifiable schematic structure, which is instantiated in particular texts. So what are the texts and genres characteristic of Bleak House and Mary Barton? There is an extraordinary pervasiveness of letters and letter writing in both Bleak House and Mary Barton and they play a significant part in advancing and developing the plot. Letters range from legal letters, business letters to personal letters. In Bleak House the philanthropist Mrs. Jellyby, forever concerned with her African missions to the exclusion of her suffering family, is at the centre of a veritable web of correspondence. Mrs. Jellyby “received so many letters that Richard, who sat by her, saw four envelopes in the gravy at once. Some of the letters were proceedings of ladies’ committees, or resolutions of ladies’ meetings, which she read to us; others were applications from people excited in various ways about the cultivation of coffee, and natives; others required answers, and these she sent her eldest daughter three or four times from the table to write” (BH Pages 56–57). Mrs. Jellyby’s eldest daughter is the sullen and oppressed Caddy, subsequently rescued by Esther and happily married to the dancing teacher Mr. Prince Turveydrop. At the expense of her own education and chances, she is pressed into service to take Mrs. Jellyby’s correspondence by dictation: ‘If you would like,’ said Mrs. Jellyby, putting a number of papers towards us, ‘to look over some remarks on that head, and on the general subject (which have

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been extensively circulated), while I finish a letter I am now dictating – to my eldest daughter, who is my amanuensis –’ The girl at the table left off biting her pen, and made a return to our recognition, which was half bashful and half sulky. ‘– I shall then have finished for the present,’ proceeded Mrs. Jellyby with a sweet smile; ‘though my work is never done. Where are you, Caddy?’ ‘ “Presents her compliments to Mr. Swallow and begs” ’ said Caddy. ‘– and begs, ’ said Mrs. Jellyby, dictating, ‘to inform him, in reference to his letter of inquiry on the African project.’  (BH Page 54)

Here we have another example of what I have called an elite literacy, the elite literacy of Victorian philanthropy, with its minutes, proceedings and resolutions, its voluminous correspondence, with letters modelled on business letters, its domestically enslaved amanuensis taking down letters by dictation. There are plenty of observations in Bleak House of personal letter writing, for example the passionate correspondence between Ada and Esther during the latter’s convalescence from smallpox. There are solemn letters, such as Mr. Jarndyce’s letter proposing marriage to Esther. How does this compare with letter-writing in the working class milieu of Mary Barton? Personal letters in Mary Barton are overwhelmingly associated with migration for work and travel overseas. Here Alice Wilson is telling how she came to live and spend a lifetime in service in Manchester, leaving her native Westmorland: ‘Do tell us about it, Alice.’ said Margaret. ‘Why lass, there’s nothing to tell. There was more mouths at home than could be fed. Tom, that’s Will’s father ( you don’t know Will, but he’s a sailor in foreign parts), had come to Manchester, had sent word what terrible lots of work was to be had, both for lads and lasses. So father sent George first (you know George, well enough, Mary), and then work was scarce out towards Burton, where we lived, and father said I maun try and get a place. And George wrote as how wages were far higher in Manchester than Milnthorpe or Lancaster; and, lasses, I was young and thoughtless, and thought it was a fine thing to go so far from home. So one day the butcher he brings us a letter fra George, to say he’d heard on a place – and I was all agog to go, and father was pleased, like; but mother said (MB Page 28) little, and that little was very quiet.’ 

Here we can see the role of letter-writing in keeping family members separated by migration in contact, as a means of passing information about work opportunities. An instance of what I have called the solemn letter is that written by Jem Wilson to Job Legh before his trial and quoted in full (MB Pages 299–300). Another kind of letter-writing are the love letters, first welcome, subsequently rejected, that James Wilson presses on Mary Barton.



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Material culture of literacy The material culture of literacy refers to all the artefacts, technologies and material processes which support and enable literacy activity. Importantly, material culture acts not just as a channel for literacy activity but plays a crucial role in shaping it. Different materials have different affordances with different communicative potential. In the present day we are ongoingly adapting our communicative activities to take into account the affordances of computer mediated communication. The period in which Bleak House and Mary Barton are set precede the invention of the telephone, although there are references to telegraphy, then in its early stage, in Bleak House. What is significant in both books is the huge extension in the possibility of written communication brought about by the introduction of the penny post. When Mrs. Jellyby plans to send out 5000 circulars in relation to one of her causes, she can do so because of the penny post. The impact of such innovations in communication is dealt with by social historians of the period such as Vincent (1989). Yet co-existing with the beginnings of a mass communications network are literacy practices that look backwards to earlier periods of scribal literacy, in particular the painstaking work on parchment of the legal writers. Parchments are prepared from the treated skins of sheep, about which there is much play in Bleak House. The work of the legal writer would have much in common with the mediaeval copyist of manuscripts in an era before printing. In comparing the material literacy culture of the characters in Bleak House and Mary Barton, there are distinct class differences, as might be expected, in the material culture supporting their literacy practices. Repeatedly the educated middle and upper class male characters are represented in their studies and libraries, perusing volumes or reading newspapers. The material culture of literacy for this class was one of luxury or superfluity. In the course of a strike in the mills of Manchester, which brought starvation to the striking operatives and their families, the shut down is experienced as additional leisure for the mill-owners: It was a pleasant thing to be able to lounge over breakfast with a review or newspaper in hand;  (MB Page 52)

When John Barton goes to the Carson’s house to ask for an infirmary order, so that his friend Davenport, dying of fever, can be admitted to hospital, he encounters just such a scene: In the luxurious library, at the well-spread breakfast-table, sat the two Mr. Carsons, father and son. Both were reading; the father a newspaper, the son a review, while they lazily enjoyed their nicely prepared food.  (MB Page 63)

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In contrast with the luxury and superfluity of the material means for literacy activity, the means available to the working-class characters are restricted and there are repeated instances of the use and re-use of a literacy artefact, like a coat or dress, patched and adapted for many different uses and wearers. Mary Barton, courted by Richard Carson, the mill-owner’s son and believing he will marry her, dreams of living in a grand house, where her father would have newspapers and pamphlets every day. In contrast, we see John Wilson at home in the next chapter avidly reading an old newspaper borrowed from a public house. Another interesting instance of the recycling or re-use of literacy artefacts occurs when Mary Barton copies out the text of a poem by the radical poet Samuel Bamford, read to them by Job Legh on the blank part of a Valentine, sent to her she supposes by Jem Wilson: ‘Mary! wench, couldst thee copy me them lines, dost think? – that’s to say, if Job there has no objection.’ ‘Not I. More they’re heard and read the better, say I.’ So Mary took the paper. And the next day, on the blank half sheet of a valentine, all bordered with hearts and darts – a valentine she had once suspected to come from Jem Wilson – she copied Bamford’s beautiful little poem. (MB Page 105)

Mary’s father carries this copied poem with him and, as she observes, reads it frequently. A fragment of the recycled valentine, found at the scene of James Carson’s murder, is the clue that tells Mary that her father, not Jem, was the murderer.

From elite literacies to powerful literacies? I’d like to finish the data presentation for this chapter by considering the way that Mrs. Gaskell presents the literacies of working class life in Mary Barton in comparison to the way they are presented by Dickens in Bleak House. While one of Dickens’s strengths as a writer is his ability to evoke pity at the exclusion and suffering caused to the poor by unjust working conditions and the gulf between rich and poor, we do not gain a strong sense of the emergent strengths of working class literacies in the 19th century in Bleak House, in the way that we do in Mary Barton. Poor Jo, marginalized and chased out of even the edges of society, evokes our pity and anger, but is entirely characterized by what he lacks. Education, for example that which the orphaned child worker Charley receives from Esther, is something gained by interaction with the pity and good intentions of a member of the educated middle class. I don’t want to use a crassly reductionist class analysis to hammer at the nuanced fabric of Dickens’s story, but the contrast with Mary Barton is quite striking.



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Mrs. Gaskell set out explicitly to portray working class life and her heroes and heroines in novels such as Mary Barton and North and South were not sprung from the educated and leisure classes. Even Carson the mill-owner originated on the factory floor and his wife was a mill girl. Mary Barton presents a much more detailed account of the networks of resources on which working class people might draw to accomplish literacy purposes and the social conditions, such as migration for work, that gave rise to them. In Chapter Five of Mary Barton, Mrs. Gaskell presents a portrait of the autodidact Job Legh, whose shared passion for natural history brings him into contact on an equal footing with gentleman scholars such as Mr. Bridgnorth, evoking the historically documented passion for selfeducation in working class circles, very different from Dickens’s dark portrayal of the illiterate Krook endlessly planning to teach himself to write. Who does Krook rely on but himself? Mrs. Gaskell evokes the connections between people, the socially shared resources that may be drawn on. Similarly Mary Barton, in the person of John Barton, the Chartist and trades unionist, shows how the trades union movement with its aim of the improvement of working conditions emerged as a significant source of working class education. As suggested above, John Barton hungrily reads the newspapers borrowed from local pubs, his daughter dreams of circumstances when these would be available to him as they are available to the moneyed and leisured family of Mr. Carson. Discussing with Jem the issues raised in the borrowed newspaper he tells the following story. When younger and suffering with a fever he had been taken to the local hospital, the Infirmary: So when I were better o’ th’ fever, but weak as water, they says to me, says they, ‘if yo’ can write, you may stay in a week longer, and help our surgeon wi’ sorting his papers; and we’ll take care yo’ve your belly full of meat and drink. Yo’ll be twice as strong in a week.’ So there wanted but one word to that bargain. So I were set to writing and copying; th’ writing I could do well enough, but they’d such queer ways o’ spelling that I’d ne’er been used to, that I’d to look first to th’ copy then at my letters, for all the world like a cock picking up grains o’ corn. But one thing started me e’en then, and I thought I’d make bold to ask the surgeon the meaning o’t. I’ve gotten no head for numbers, but this I know, that by far th’ greater part o’ th’ accidents as comed in, happened in th’ last two hours o’ work when folk getten tired and careless. Th’ surgeon said it were all true, and that he were going to bring that fact to light.’  (MB Page 77)

The routine entering of records had led to the insight that fatigue at the end of a long shift at work had a relationship with the industrial accidents occurring. Mrs. Gaskell describes the beginnings of literacies that might be called powerful without being elite, involving a democratization of the semiotic means previously

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controlled by a few. John Barton goes to London with the Chartists to take a petition to Parliament, which is rebuffed. In Chapter 16, we have a detailed description during the strike at the mills of a meeting between the trades union representatives and the mill owners, attended by John Barton. Adopting the language of negotiation, thus employing a literacy I characterize as powerful but not elite, ‘the leader of the delegates read, in a high-pitched psalm-singing voice, a paper, containing the operatives’ statement of the case at issue, their complaints, and their demands, which last were not remarkable for moderation’ (MB Page 172). The high-pitched, psalm-singing voice points to another source for the public voice that the delegates’ leader was taking up: public speaking in church or chapel. The meeting continues with a rejection of the operatives’ demands by the millowners: The masters could not consent to the advance demanded by the workmen. They would agree to give one shilling per week more than they had previously offered. Were the delegates empowered to accept such an offer? They were empowered to accept or decline any offer made that day by the masters. Then it might be as well for them to consult among themselves as to what should be their decision. They again withdrew. It was not for long. They came back and positively declined any compromise of their demands.  (MB Pages 172–173)

Literacy practices in fictional texts At this point it is relevant briefly to consider the representation of literacy practices in fictional texts and in particular the role of literacy practices in the construction of Bleak House and Mary Barton as fictional texts. Only a very naïve reader could hold that fictional texts are a simple reflection or representation of real life: fictional texts evoke and construct possible worlds, parallel worlds (Ryan 1991). There is a virtuoso flourish on page 18 of Bleak House that illustrates this very well. Dickens is describing the creaky and ponderous workings of the Court of Chancery, which he would have known very well as a court reporter in the 1820s, yet in describing it he transforms, heightens, exaggerates, in a word fictionalizes: ‘Several members of the bar are still to be heard, I believe?’ says the Chancellor, with a slight smile. Eighteen of Mr. Tangle’s learned friends, each armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a piano-forte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places of obscurity.  (BH Page 18)



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This little detail, with the repetition of the number eighteen, which would not be out of place in a Disney cartoon, illustrates how Dickens’s extravagant imagination plays with a routine piece of court procedure stretching it, exaggerating it and re-shaping it in the service of his comic intent. It has however also been suggested that Bleak House “accurately reflects the social reality of Dickens’s day … the scandal of the Court of Chancery, sanitary reform, slum clearance, orphans’ schools, the recently formed detective branch of the Metropolitan Police, Puseyite philanthropists, the Niger expedition, female emancipation, the self-perpetuating procrastinations of Parliament and Goverrnment” (J. Hillis Miller 1971). The novel of course cannot be a simple reflection of these matters, yet it remains paradoxically true they would have been and indeed are immediately recognizable to its readership. The novels are not simply a self referring textual artefact, a free-floating Lewisian possible world, they index/invoke/ intersect with real worlds, even as they transform them in fiction. So it is worthy considering, albeit briefly, how reference to literacy practices are integrated into the novel text and the role that literacy practices play in their construction. I think I have already shown that this is a central role in all aspects of the fictional text, in its setting, character and plot development. How are references to literacy practices integrated into the fictional text qua text? I think the way to approach this is through the phenomenon of speech and writing representation, the most prominent current account of which being perhaps that of Leech, Short and Semino (see Semino, Short and Culpeper 1997). These, like others who have dealt with speech representation typically propose a continuum, ranging from direct representation of speech and writing through the various blends of indirect, and free indirect speech to simple mention of acts of speech or writing. Again I have no time to discuss this in detail, indeed it would be the topic of another paper to do so, but if one takes the most prevalently reported genre, that of letter writing, one could examine, using such a framework, instances where letters are reported verbatim, those in which the content is reported indirectly, those where the letters are summarized, where their gist is mentioned, or indeed cases where a letter having been written or sent is simply mentioned.

In conclusion: Fictional texts as evidence of literacy practices? So given the caveats introduced about the nature of the fictional text, and assuming it has been possible to avoid a naïve reading of Bleak House and Mary Barton as transparent sources of information about 19th century literacy practices, what is it possible to say about these literacy practices through an attentive reading of

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these novels? I will discuss this in relation to the distinction I make between elite literacies and powerful literacies, to capture what might be called the democratization of semiotic means that became increasingly a goal in working class movements of the period. The novels, particularly Bleak House, are a mine of circumstantial information on the elite literacies constitutive of the legal system, most notably the Court of Chancery and also the industries of the legal stationers and legal writers that surround and support it. Also clearly represented in both novels are the literacy practices of the leisured professional middle and upper classes: the letter-writing, the perusal of volumes in libraries, the scanning of newspapers and periodicals over breakfast. I have suggested that Dickens has a less clear grasp of the emergence of powerful, that is to say democratic literacies, as portrayed in Mary Barton. The Dickensian illiterate is generally in search of a benefactor. Dickens does however in Bleak House provide an instantly recognizable portrayal of the resistance of working class people to the patronising provision of literacy by middle class benefactors. Mrs. Paradiggle the philanthropist visits the Brickmaker’s, wonderfully illustrated in the illustration by Phiz, feeling quite at liberty to barge in with little improving books to hand out to the undeserving poor. “An’t my place dirty”, growls a brickmaker reclining on the floor: ‘Yes, it is dirty. It’s nat’rally dirty, and it’s nat’rally unwholesome; and we’ve had five dirty and unwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them, and for us besides. Have I read the little book wot you left? No, I an’t read the little book wot you left. There an’t nobody here as knows how to read it; and if there wos, it wouldn’t be suitable to me. It’s a book fit for a babby, and I’m not a babby.  (BH Page 132)

As I have suggested, Mary Barton portrays from the inside the emergence of powerful democratic literacies, through union activity and the characterization of autodidacts such as Job Legh. Job Legh the amateur botanist is strikingly echoed in the autobiography of the Yorkshire weaver William Heaton, quoted in Vincent (1981): I collected insects in company with a number of young men in the village. We formed a library and bought a number of the best books we could find on the subject. As soon as the lovely rays of the summer’s sun have shone over the hills of my native valley, have we wandered forth, especially on the Sabbath morning, by four o’clock, and have not returned till seven or eight at night; often having never tasted food all the day: we have brought shells, eggs and nests, as well as insects home with us, and were as much, or more, pleased than if we had dined off the best.  (Vincent 1981: 173)



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This suggests that there is considerable overlap and intersection between the fictional worlds of Mary Barton and Bleak House and the contemporary social worlds on which they draw, that there is much in these novels that is recognizable from daily life in the periods in which they are set, and that, combined with other available historical sources, they can both provide valuable evidence of literacy practices historically distant from the present as well as a basis for developing literacy theory.

Texts Dickens, C. 1998. Bleak House. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaskell, E. 1994. Mary Barton. London: Penguin Popular Classics.

References Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. 2000. Literacy Practices. In Situated Literacies, D. Barton, M. Hamilton & R. Ivanic (eds). London: Routledge. Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. 1998. Local Literacies. London: Routledge Baynham, M. [Translated Maria Arapopoulou] 2002. Πρακτικές Γραμματισμού [‘Literacy Practices’]. Athens: Metaixmio Editions. Brandt, D. 2001. Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burton, M. 2004. Signs of stigma? Attitudes to Illiteracy in Victorian fiction, 1850–1890. PhD Dissertation, University of Sheffield. Clanchy, M. 1979. From Memory to Written Record. London: Houston. Eisenstein, E. L. 1980. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, A. 1981. The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies. London: Hutchinson. Graff, H. 1979. The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Society in the 19th Century City. New York NY: Academic Press. Heath, S. B. 1983. Ways with Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Houston, R. D. 2002 Literacy in Early Modern Europe: Culture and Education 1500–1800. Harlow: Longman. Luke, A. & Baynham, M. (eds). 2004. Ethnographies of Literacy. Special Issue, Ethnographies of Literacy. Language and Education 18(4). Mace, J. 2002. The give and take of writing: Scribes, literacy and everyday life. Leicester: NIACE. Martin-Jones, M. & Jones, K. (eds). 2000. Multilingual Literacies: Reading and Writing Different Worlds. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Prinsloo, M. 2005. Studying Literacy as Situated Social Practice. PhD Dissertation, University of Cape Town. Ryan, M.-L. 1991. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.

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Semino, E., Short, M. & Culpeper, J. 1997. Using a corpus to test and refine a model of speech and thought presentation. Poetics 25: 17–43. Street, B. (ed.). 1993. Cross-cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vincent, D. 1981. Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth Century Working-class Autobiography. London: Europa Press. Vincent, D. 1989. Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

chapter 10

Beyond “here’s a culture, here’s a literacy” Vision in Amerindian literacies Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza This chapter concludes the collection through an engagement with dominant Western assumptions about representation and meaning. The chapter argues that there appears to persist among western-based literacy theorists the tendency towards a certain amount of universalization in theoretical considerations of literacy. If not properly addressed, this may obscure the situatedness of literacies. The chapter draws on research on vision and the visual in Amerindian writing practices to examine the cultural specificity of commonly held views on concepts such as vision, perspective and relationality. It suggests that the lack of adequate discussion of the non-universality of the concept of vision and its relationship to writing and knowledge may have serious negative consequences in literacy practices in some cultures.

Much has been written about the plural aspect of literacies as multiple (Cope and Kalantzis 2000), situated (Barton et al. 2000) and social (Prinsloo and Breier 1996), where the plurality is seen from a largely ethnographic perspective focusing on the complexity that literacy acquires and/or embodies in heterogeneous social practices in equally heterogeneous social communities. As such, it is expected that discussions of literacy should have come a long way since Street (1984) eloquently denounced the ‘autonomous’ view and introduced the ‘ideological’ concept of literacy. However, Prinsloo (2005) has recently called attention to the fact that scholars of literacy still need to be reminded about the situatedness or context-specific nature of literacy: “When contextual issues are ignored or in the background, or when particular contexts are treated as if they are universal, then understandings of literacy tend to become more technical in nature”. Here Prinsloo is concerned specifically with how the literacy practices of “a middle-class, usually American, European, Australian or Asian (…) is assumed rather than explicit”. To compensate for the theoretical taken-for-grantedness or ‘universalization’ of these localized practices, Prinsloo sees the need to recapitulate the arguments for a consideration

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of the situatedness and essential localness (“placed”-ness) of current discussions and proposals for literacies, emphasizing the fact that technologies, like signs (and like a social view of language in general), rather than having inherently fixed values, acquire meanings in contexts of use. After more than two decades of Street’s introduction of the ‘ideological’ concept of literacy, how should one understand the persistence of the tendency towards universalization (as de-localization) in considerations of literacy, even among those who apparently ought to be aware of the situatedness and plurality of literacies? A key to the answer lies perhaps in the fact that Prinsloo is speaking as a South African from a South African context, and discussing screen-based and computer-related literacy practices; hence, apparently, his need to emphasize the difference between the value and use of this technology in South Africa and the value and use of similar technology in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia. Drawing attention to one’s locus of enunciation may be a start, but it is not enough to avoid the trap that Street (1995: 134) warned against in considerations of the plurality and locality of literacies (“here’s a culture, here’s a literacy; here’s another culture, here’s another literacy”) potentially leading to a reified list of multiple cultures and their multiple literacies. I believe that theorists like Prinsloo and others (myself included) working from outside dominant constituted geo-political domains of knowledge also need to draw attention to the qualitative and ideological difference between one’s own locus of enunciation and that of other literacy theorists located within these domains. Speaking from my location as a scholar of literacy in South America, concerned specifically with current indigenous literacies in Brazil, I feel that two related key issues that are not sufficiently discussed in current literacy studies are (a) the ‘trans’ (national/cultural) nature of literacy in marginalized, non-dominant communities and (b) the asymmetricality of the power-knowledge collusion implicit in these contexts. In this study, I propose to discuss these issues in relation specifically to the role of vision in indigenous literacies in Brazil.

Literacy as a ‘trans-’phenomenon In contexts such as those of indigenous literacies in Brazil or that of computerrelated literacy in South Africa as described by Prinsloo (2005), literacy consists of the introduction of a new ‘technology’ or means of meaning-making, such as alphabetic writing or computer hardware and software, into communities where such technologies did not previously exist. The ‘trans’ character of such situations lies in the border-crossings that are implied when these new technologies



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or semiotic means cross over from a previous existence in one community and its practices into a new community which has then to absorb or adapt them. Much of the discussions Street referred to in his ‘autonomous’ versus ‘ideological’ confrontation focused on the advantages, losses or transformations that accrued to the communities which underwent such border crossings. It seemed straightforward enough that (alphabetic) literacy, as a technology or a new (social) semiotic means did not, like any sign system, have inherent, abstract, decontextualized values, but acquired such values in the practices to which it was put by the communities across whose borders it had traversed. As Street (2003) rightly points out, citing Bakhtin, “language is a continually negotiated process of meaning making as well as taking”, and citing Kress, for whom “language is dynamic because it is constantly being remade by its users in response to the demands of their social environments”. This appears to resonate with Prinsloo’s (2005: 10) reference to Blommaert’s concept of ‘placed resources’ whereby, in the flow of semiotic resources from one social location to another, links between signs and modes of communication are severed and substituted by new ones. In these ‘trans-’movements or semiotic flows from one social context to another, can one state positively that signs divest themselves of previous meanings and pacifically acquire new meanings in new contexts or will this depend on the nature of the social context from which the flows originate and the social relationship between the context of origin (‘from where’) and the context of arrival (‘to where’)? In the same text mentioned above, Street (2003: 82) quotes Bakhtin as saying “words come saturated with the meanings of others”; does the nature of the “others” in the community of origin, when compared to the community of arrival, play a role in deciding to what extent the saturated meanings of the words are maintained, abandoned or modified when the words flow across the borders from one social context to another? Street (2003) further argues for a “culturally relative perspective” in order to value different varieties of literacy practices, distinguishing between school-based and home-based practices. This however seems to miss an important aspect of the ‘trans’ flow: rather than only focusing attention on characterizing the plurality of new practices developed in the community of arrival, attention may be profitably focused on how the relationship of similarity or difference between the two communities (of origin and of arrival) affects the literacy practices developed; that is, to what extent do the “saturated meanings of others” affect the new meanings acquired in the new contexts, if at all? Mignolo (1995), like Street, emphasizes the importance of cultural relativism as a necessary tool to deal with cultural differences; however, for Mignolo this is not sufficient; cultural relativism may help to understand differences, but its

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pitfall lies in the fact that it tacitly assumes that all cultures have activities similar to the theorist’s own culture, even though the activities of the cultures of the ‘others’ may manifest themselves differently. This means, for Mignolo, that one implicitly and uncritically attributes to one’s own cultural practices a universal value, against which the cultural practices of the ‘others’ are measured: “So, cultural relativism is not enough, if all there is to it is that different cultures are different. To go beyond relativism [it] is necessary, first to question the locus of enunciation from which the notion of cultural relativism has been produced; second, to question the model or culture used as a reference point to illustrate cultural relativism (…) and finally to explore cultural relativism in colonial situations where cultures are not only different but struggle for imposition, resistance, adaptation and transformation” (1995: 332–333). This brings us to the second aspect mentioned above, that of the asymmetry of power.

Literacy and the asymmetry of power Mignolo (2000) elaborates on the notion of the asymmetry of power in contexts of geo-political and colonial difference, calling attention to the power-knowledge collusion as proposed by Foucault and the extreme pertinence of this collusion in the construction of disciplinary scientific and academic knowledges. For Mignolo, the ‘colonial difference’ (i.e. the asymmetry of power ensuing from past and present histories of colonial domination and contact) of the power-knowledge collusion helps to explain how academic disciplinary knowledges rarely call attention to their geo-political locatedness, even when they are aware of the ideological, social and historical origins of all knowledge. In a similar vein, Bauman and Briggs (2003) emphasize the historical situatedness of western science and knowledge in the geo-politically-located ideologies of western European modernity and its rationalism, based on a need for the abstraction (i.e. de-localization) and the de-contextualization of any form of knowledge deemed to be worthy of being ‘scientific’. Mignolo (2000) further shows how a palpable consequence of this asymmetry of the power knowledge collusion generated by the colonial difference, prompts non-western academics to necessarily cite western academics in order to legitimate their discourses as ‘science’, whereas the reverse does not normally hold. The culmination of such an asymmetry, for Mignolo, is exemplified in the tacit western academic presupposition that “philosophy begins in Greece”. In terms of the role of vision in literacy and contemporary culture, a similarly decontextualized belief is that visuality is a recent phenomenon in contemporary (western? universal?) culture.



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Street showed that essentially what made autonomous conceptions of literacy ‘autonomous’ was their persistent social, historical and ideological de-contextualization of literacy as a semiotic means and as a set of cultural practices; thanks to the colonial difference and the resulting power-knowledge collusion and asymmetry of power, literacy theory has yet to benefit more widely from this awareness. I am not suggesting that one can, at the stroke of a pen, escape from the colonial difference, but that its effects may beneficially be reduced by drawing attention to its existence and how it affects literacy practices, which is the objective of this paper, in relation, specifically, to the role of vision in literacy. This means that, rather than assuming that in language, technology, and writing, the process of meaning-making ‘naturally’ causes signs to acquire new meanings in new contexts and new practices, one should be more aware of how possible existent asymmetries of power between the contextual origin of the language, technology and writing system introduced and the community into which the introduction has occurred may play an important role in the forms and values of the literacy practices which arise. Thus signs, rather than tacitly allowing themselves to be molded in new situations, may be more or less resistant to the process of molding, depending on the geo-political origin of the signs and the power-relationship between the community of origin and the community of arrival. A clear example of the ‘trans’ character of literacy and the role of the asymmetry of power and the power-knowledge collusion, may be seen in the role of vision in indigenous literacies in the Americas.

Vision Ever since Kepler (see Mirzoeff 1999) in the seventeenth century first argued that vision is not as straightforward or as transparent as it seemed, given that the lens of the eye presented an inverted image on the retina, vision has perplexed theorists. Finnegan (2002) emphasizes the role of vision in interconnecting people in the sense that it groups people in terms of shared conventions and therefore brings together those who see the ‘same things’ on one hand; on the other hand vision interconnects people in a different sense, this time in terms of seeing different aspects of a ‘same’ sight or object. Vision thus rather than a merely physical act as described by Kepler, is above all a cultural and historical physical process. Hoffman (1998) defines vision as composed of both a cultural action and a physical action: whereas the cultural action involves the socially constructed conventional process of interpretation – “the way things visually appear to you”, the physical action of vision involves “what you interact with when you look”. The two actions are interrelated, according to Hoffman, because in spite of the fact that we

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may interact visually with concrete physical objects, what in fact we see of these objects is a social construction of the community we belong to. Gombrich (1977) adds to this by showing how one sees with one’s mind and not with one’s eyes; that is, one sees what one ‘knows’, where this ‘knowledge’ is culturally constructed. Thus, vision is far from the neutral, transparent process that many seem to think it is. On the contrary, adding to Finnegan’s comment (Finnegan 2002) that vision interconnects people, vision may also separate them or promote conflicts between them, based on the differences between what they are looking at and what they see. Finnegan however calls attention to the fact that as communicating is a multiplex and versatile process, realized in many interlinked modes, vision rarely occurs on its own.

Vision and Amerindian literacies Mallery (1893/1979) and Brotherston (1979), in their analyses of colonial and pre-colonial Amerindian ‘writing’ in the Americas, call attention to the profusion of visual or picture-writing produced by the indigenous cultures in the region, such as inscriptions on surfaces like rock, ceramics, leather and human skin (tattoos); their explanation, however, for such a phenomenon, is based on the presupposition that these are primitive stages of an evolutionary process of alphabetic writing, beginning, as Mallery explicitly states (p. 204), with “iconography” and progressing to full “phonetic” writing. This may be seen as a clear case of cultural relativism whereby the culture of the analyst is uncritically taken as the yardstick for attributing values to cultural manifestations of indigenous ‘others’. Thus rather than attempting to theorize the clear profusion of visual inscriptions and their possible cultural meanings in the region, both analysts tacitly cling to the asymmetry of power of the colonial difference, apparently concluding that as their own western cultures are more ‘advanced’ than those of the Amerindian indigenous cultures, (a sign of this progress being alphabetic literacy), then part of the evidence of the primitivism of the ‘other’ is imputed to the lack of alphabetic writing and the existence of merely visual inscriptions. The main characteristic of the indigenous artefacts originating in Brazil is the non-figurative geometric nature of the inscriptions; no attempt is made to analyze the meaning-making practices related to the production or use of these. In the true western, modernistic, rational (Baumann and Briggs 2003) tradition of de-contextualizing language, these artefacts are seen as isolated, static, decorative material objects of little value other than as evidence of the cultural deficiency of their indigenous producers. Brotherston (1979: 15), for example, explicitly affirms, in terms of literacy, the deficiency of the artefacts from Brazil when com-



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pared to the codices of the Maya. Counter to this is the unrelated attempt by a (non-indigenous) Brazilian analyst (Brandão 1937) to analyze similar Brazilian non-figurative indigenous artefacts as those mentioned by both Brotherston and Mallery, but now as evidence of the existence of full-fledged phonetic writing systems among pre-historic indigenous cultures in Brazil. The difference between the analysts is their location on different sides of the asymmetric power dyad. However, in this case Brandão’s error, similar to that of the other two analysts is also to impute values of his own culture (in this case alphabetic literacy) to the indigenous inscriptions. The historical context of Brazilian nationalist republicanism and nation-building in which Brandão writes, may explain his benevolence and haste in attributing positive (though misplaced) phonetic value to the pictographic indigenous inscriptions. None of the three analysts seeks to theorize the visual nature of the inscriptions in relation to the cultures that produced them. In the culturally related context of North American Amerindian communities, Benedict (1922) is perplexed by the role of vision in various indigenous communities across the continent. This time however, the renowned American anthropologist has clearly perceived the recurrence of the value of vision in these cultures, but again the strategy of cultural relativism leads her to attribute to vision in indigenous cultures, cultural meanings similar to those existent in her own culture; rather than facilitating comprehension, however, the strategy confounds it, and she ends up interpreting vision as individual, isolated, abstract, and similar in value to the western notion of a ‘dream’ or ‘delusion’. The attribution of these (western) meanings to the indigenous visions generate perplexity on the part of the analyst, as they do not explain the extreme physical investment (sacrificial incisions and amputations) and ritualistic importance accorded to the visions by the communities concerned. Benedict’s initial anthropological tendency, resulting from her strategy of cultural relativism, is to read the visions as ‘texts’. This suggests that the value accorded to the western notion of text and its strategies of production and reading, may be sufficient to understand and explain the role of vision in the various Amerindian indigenous communities. Not so, as she wisely concludes: “The very great diversity of the vision pattern even in one culture area such as the Plains is therefore evident […] A blanket classification under some such head as the “acquiring of guardian spirits” leads us nowhere” (p. 21). In the case of Brazil, the recent introduction of alphabetic literacy via nation-wide state-sponsored literacy campaigns has generated a profuse production of written texts collectively authored by indigenous communities. A common characteristic of these texts, besides their collective authorship, is the large visual component which accompanies the alphabetic texts. This visual component consists of non-figurative geometric patterns similar to those mentioned by Mallery,

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Brotherston and Brandão (but now appearing on paper) and introduces the new phenomenon of figurative drawings. For non-indigenous linguists and literacy teachers, the drawings appear as illustrations seen to ‘complement’ the alphabetic text. Those accustomed to the recent western concept of the growing visuality in contemporary language, may see the phenomenon of indigenous visual texts as part of this tendency. The sheer persistence of this alphabetic-visual multimodality, and a critical awareness of the colonial difference and the strategy of cultural relativism point to the need for greater investigation of the phenomenon, as I have done elsewhere (de Souza 2003a, b; de Souza 2005; de Souza 2006a, b).

Vision, knowledge and indigenous perspectivism For my present purposes, suffice it to say that, firstly, like the Plains Indians of North America studied by Benedict, a large part of Amerindian cultures in Brazil are cultures of ‘vision’. For these cultures vision is not only the quotidian use of sight, but includes dreams and something similar to Benedict’s concept of vision as a privileged social ‘text’ which may be variously accessed via the ritual consumption of a liquid concoction, the consumption of tobacco, via rhythmic dancing or combinations of these. One of the primary aspects of vision in its varying forms for these cultures is as a source of knowledge; this knowledge may be personal (not individual) or collective, and may vary, for example, from knowledge seen as scientific (related to health, agriculture, hunting etc.) to the metaphysical (related to possible interference from other invisible planes of existence). Visions acquired ritualistically, via the consumption of a provocative element, are distinguished from and superior (i.e. have greater truth value) to visions acquired in unprovoked dreams. The ritualistic visions are marked by an initial phase of seeing intertwining and interconnected geometric patterns, where foreground and background, light and dark intertwine with each other, drawing the seer into the vision and giving depth to the vision, which then becomes figurative and narrative; this geometric phase of the vision is seen to metonymically indicate the presence of the anaconda, the keeper of the vision and valued cultural knowledge (Lagrou 1996; Keifenheim 1999). Secondly, a few contemporary Brazilian anthropologists, who have pushed past the disciplinary pale of anthropology and the colonial difference that this implies, (Castro 2000; Fausto 1999) have studied indigenous cosmovisions in Brazil and identified the pervading concept of indigenous perspectivism (Castro 2000). For Castro this is the ontology of indigenous interconnectivity, where all beings of nature are seen as being constituted by an equal human essence, but clothed differently as different animals or spirits; thus below an apparent difference, there



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is an all pervading humanity in the beings of nature. As Castro states, however, this is not a case of cultural relativism, which presupposes one’s own state and values as the basis and measure of difference, but cultural relationalism: thus from the perspective of a human observer, an on-looking panther may be seen as a panther, but from the perspective of the panther, it sees itself as human and sees the on-looking human as a panther; thus both the panther and the human when they see each other, are aware that they are simultaneously being seen and are aware that they see each other differently. Unlike cultural relativism, there is thus no fixed external measure of a grounded ‘true’ perspective, and in this sense the seer is also seen, generating a network of interconnected perspectives; according to Castro, this interconnectedness is an ontology of subject/subject intersubjectivity (as opposed to subject/object interactions in western epistemologies). This same interconnectivity is seen to occur both in provoked visions and in everyday interpersonal contact; in this sense, in normal communicative contact, each seeing subject is aware that what he or she sees may be different from what his/her interlocutor sees, there being no fixed external privileged perspective. Culturally speaking, there is no fixed external truth value, independent of the relational location of the interlocutor. The concept of person, different to that of a separate individual subject, is thus culturally and relationally constructed in and through this network of interconnected subjectivities, permitting personal perspectives (interconnected and interdependent on one’s interlocutors) but not separate, individual, isolated perspectives. Like knowledge, a perspective therefore is the product of a vision that is never total, self-sufficient and complete, but always interdependent on the vision and hence, perspectives, of those in one’s own group and community. The fact that a vision can never be total and complete, and has therefore no privileged, fixed, point of view indicates that vision, like knowledge, is seen as a dynamic process constructed by the co-participants rather than as a ready-made product. Thus meaning, knowledge and identity are always contextualized and intersubjectively and relationally situated and never abstract. Vision for these Brazilian indigenous cultures, both as source of knowledge and as interconnected relationalism has thus to be understood as inseparable from and constitutive of an indigenous cosmovision. A lack of knowledge of this cosmovision leads to Benedict’s perplexity in understanding the role and cultural import of North American Amerindian vision, which, not dissimilar to Brazilian indigenous vision, is also based on a cultural ontology of interconnectedness and inter-subjectivity (Deloria 1999). Camargo (2001) shows how in the indigenous languages of the region, there is a profuse use of evidential suffixes which defy abstract systemic linguistic analyses. These suffixes are used to verbally differentiate utterances as the product

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of one’s own perspective from those of a collective perspective; the marker of the collective perspective in this case, is used to indicate collectively produced or inherited shared knowledge, roughly equivalent to “they say”, “it is believed that” etc.; collectively marked knowledge has maximal truth value in the community, corresponding to the history, science, narrative heritage and medicine of the community. Indigenous interconnectedness, then, should not be seen only as ontology but also as a cultural ethic. Individually produced knowledge or actions have little significant social value; in order to acquire significance, actions and knowledge have to be produced within the network of interconnectivity and intersubjectivity. It is in this sense of the ethic of intersubjective perspectivism, and contextualization, that the need arises to make clear where one is speaking from, when one speaks or portrays knowledge in a non-indigenous language devoid of perspectival markers.

Vision and indigenous literacy Looking back at the existence of geometric patterns woven into textiles, inscribed on rocks, ceramics and on the skin in the form of tattoos, it may now be possible to perceive how for the Amerindian cultures of Brazil, for whom vision is the source of knowledge, always partial, relational and interconnected, never complete and independent, vision/knowledge can be functionally recorded and recalled in shared, conventionalized geometric patterns each of which metonymically and visually connects with a collectively shared narrative; this in turn houses a shared contextualized signification, all of which in concert, and interconnectedly, contribute to the recalling of the knowledge recorded. With the introduction of alphabetic literacy, purporting to record voice and not vision, the voice recorded on paper is seen to be truncated and abstracted from the interconnectivity with one’s interlocutors normally occurring in an enunciative situation; moreover, and perhaps more importantly, given that the recording of voice on paper is NOT the recording of knowledge, the knowledge which accompanies the disembodied voice on paper, and its accompanying perspective, have to be recorded by means of a visual text; it is in this sense that such visual texts should not be read as mere redundant illustrations or repetitions of the alphabetic text. In fact exactly the opposite process may be occurring: the alphabetic text may be a mere exercise in alphabetic literacy and the true vehicle of meaning may in fact be the visual text. My objective here is not to present a grammar of indigenous visual literacy, but to call attention to the fact that literacy is culturally connected to one’s cultural



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cosmovision; in this case, I have purported to show how indigenous literacy in Brazil is inseparable from an indigenous cosmovision and ethics, and how vision, its form and uses, is also inseparable from the same cosmovision. The crux of the matter, however, is not simply the connection between indigenous literacy, indigenous vision and an indigenous cosmovision. So called western concepts of vision, language and literacy are also similarly inseparable from a western cosmovision, and, in the ‘trans cultural’ situations of contact, these may play a crucial role in the perception or rejection of indigenous knowledges and literacies.

Vision, the Western cosmovision of modernity and literacy In stark contrast to the amerindian indigenous cosmovision of interconnectivity and intersubjectivities, Sahlins, in his essay ‘The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology’ (1996) delineates the bases of what he describes as ‘Western cosmology’: “Man was destined to wear out his body in the vain attempt to satisfy it, because in obeying his own desires he had disobeyed God. By putting this love of self before the love of Him alone who could suffice, man became the slave of his own needs” (397). This basic egocentrism, for Sahlins, lies at the heart of western economics and cultural conceptions: “Precisely as the individual was taken as the author and the supreme value of his own activity and as the collective economy seemed to be constitutive by and for personal satisfactions, so the urgings of the body would appear as the sources of the society” (401). In a similar vein, Bauman and Briggs (2003), Sahlins (1999) and Chakrabarty (2000) point to the egocentrism at the heart of discourses of modernity in the cultural constitution of the west; these discourses are manifested by the all-pervasive need to eradicate any vestige of the situatedness, locality and tradition of one’s own western values and clothe them, in the name of rationality, as abstract, objective, transparent, universal and for this very reason ‘modern’. It is against this backdrop of the abstraction and decontextualization of its own local values that the West constructed its difference from so-called indigenous cultures and other non-modern cultures. The foundational egocentric decontextualizing move of these discourses of modernity is not dissimilar to the strategy that Mignolo described as cultural relativism as we have seen above; to recapitulate, this consists of a strategy of ostensively accepting difference, but using one’s own values, disguised as objective and universal, as a yardstick for assessing other cultures. Rather than eradicating, as it claimed to do, the difference between the “West and the Rest”, the ideology of western enlightenment modernism, according to Sahlins

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(1999: ii), persisted in maintaining the contrast, portraying indigenous cultures as local, and therefore dependent, in contrast to the ‘universality’ and self-sufficiency that the west accorded to itself. Indigenous ‘locality’ was further read as despondency and evidence of isolation “which means that we weren’t there. […] Others would become just like us – if they survived. Of course the Enlightenment had already prepared this eventuality by insisting on the universality of human reason and progress” (iii). So called “human reason and progress” of course, were local western cultural values. The concept of vision in this egocentric western cosmovision may perhaps best be represented by what is known as Cartesian perspectivalism. Gardiner (1999) defines this Cartesian rational, self-sufficient, subject-centred cogito of western metaphysics as “egological narcissism”. Bakhtin associated this with “monologicism” and sought to mimimalize it with an opposing dialogic and heterotopic polyphony (Gardiner 1999: 61). According to Mirzoeff (1999: 43), in the early modern concept of vision, it was Descartes who first counterposed and privileged the concept of representation against the previously valued medieval concept of resemblance. Whereas resemblance was seen as the physical similarity between the object seen and the visual image of it, representation for Descartes was seen as the product of the work of the self-centred, rational mind acting on and interpreting the inverted image physically registered on the retina, and resisting the potentially corrupting effects of raw, uninterpreted, sensory data. Thus Cartesian perspectivalism, though valuing the process of interpretation and representation, saw these as the products of an un-erring, rational, self-sufficient isolated ego, very different from the concept of vision in indigenous perspectivism, which sees interpretation or meaning-making as an embodied (i.e. highly contextualized and sensorial) intersubjective, necessarily incomplete process. What kind of visual literacy do this western cosmovision and its corresponding concept of vision give rise to? As we have seen, vision, from the perspective of the western self-centred cosmology, refers not to the sensory data supposedly registered on the retina of an individual observer, but to the cultural and ideological values attributed to this data by the observer in a process which denies this attribution at the same time as it enacts it, generating what Mitchell (2005: 345) calls the “naturalistic fallacy”. As such, this process of vision, by denying the interpretive action it partakes in, seeks to reduce the interactive dynamicity of vision to the static nature of an observed image as product; vision is thus reduced to the apparently self-explanatory visibility of an image, denying (though not eliminating) both the role and the action of the observer (inter)acting within a specific context. In alphabetic literacy, the corresponding phenomenon to the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ in the reading of images is the concept of text as an independent, decon-



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textualized, self-explanatory object, and writing as logocentric (Derrida 1974) or telementational (Harris 2000). Curiously, whilst in alphabetic literacy the concept of text-production and reading as part of intersubjective social practices is widely disseminated, apparently overcoming the egocentred origins of the western cosmovision, the corresponding view of vision and visual texts still tends to emphasize the predominance of self-explanatory ‘image’ (as still image or photograph) over vision, where in many cases, ‘image’ is still considered ‘telementationally’ rather than interactively. For this reason, Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) groundbreaking work often runs the risk of being read (albeit unintentionally, since ‘cosmovisions’ in Sahlins’s sense, like ideologies, are unintentional) like a static grammar of static ‘images’ with static meanings, independent of the contexts in which they are read and used. Lemke (1997), on the other hand, clearly emphasizes the dynamic concept of the interaction between visual texts and other texts, both alphabetic and visual, generating a multiplicity of unforeseen meanings. In the reading of visual texts, Mitchell (2005) criticizes the polarized excesses of social constructivism on one hand and monologic static readings on the other, and proposes instead that discussions of the visual and vision should focus on the chiasmatic relation between the ‘social construction of the visual field’ and the ‘the visual construction of the social field’, in what sounds like a return to the traditional analytic dialectic between a focus on form and a focus on function, but what may in fact be an appeal for due attention to be accorded to the complexity of images, vision and visual literacy. In a related manner, Burnett (2005: 202–203) proposes that greater analytic focus should be given to the forms and uses of ‘visualization’ rather than of ‘images’. Burnett emphasizes the dynamic, intersubjective and multiplicative nature of visual interaction: “the crucial point here may be that images are not just information. If they were, then the tasks of viewing and interpretation would be simple and relatively direct […] Visualization is simultaneously part of the perceptual realm and the thinking mind. Simple methods of organizing information will not solve the complexities of interaction between humans and images”. Mignolo (1995), in his discussion of Aztec and Maya visual texts calls attention to how words like “book” and “writing” are culture specific. In Brazilian Amerindian languages such as Kashinawa, for example, the same word kene refers both to ‘writing’ and the geometric patterns in textiles, ceramics and tattoos, and now transferred to paper. So alphabetic ‘writing’ for the Kashinawa, as for several other Amazonian cultures, is inseparable from ‘drawing’ which in turn, refers not to patterns on paper, but to patterns seen in ritual knowledge-acquisition visions. Besides being a clear indication that this notion of ‘writing’ will affect this community’s related concept of ‘reading’, it is also a reminder of what Finnegan (2002)

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called the multiplex process of communication as involving all the senses in an interconnected synaesthetic manner. The culturally specific conception of ‘reading’ which emerges from the synaesthesia of indigenous perspectivism is one in which reading as access to and construction of meaning runs parallel to the interconnected construction of self. Like identity, ‘meaning’ (as the inseparable product of ‘reading’) is not seen as a static characteristic of a text-as-product, ie. external to and independent of the reader. The construction of meaning is a dynamic, intersubjective process, always based on a self-consciousness that what one sees or reads is based on one’s perspective or location in dynamic relation to the perspective of others involved in the interlocution; ie. meaning is always potentially modifiable in a concept of understanding as a dynamic process of always potentially unfinished (re)adjustment; unfinished because when one receives, in the process of interlocution, feedback about the perspective (located understanding, emerging from a location/understanding different from one’s own) of one’s interlocutor(s), one has to make the necessary re-adjustments to one’s own perspective. From a Western perspective, it is perhaps easier to conceive this dynamic process of meaning-construction/intersubjective self-location in indigenous perspectivism visually. When one conceives of a process of interlocution visually, and when one is aware (i.e. one already ‘culturally knows’) that what one sees depends on one’s own perspective (i.e. depending on where one is located in relation to one’s interlocutors), then visually it may become easier to appreciate that the point of view or perspective of each of the interlocutors is equally partial; it may thus become possible to visualize how each interlocutor has to make constant efforts to attempt to access the perspective of the other interlocutor(s), readjusting his own perspective; this readjusted perspective in turn provokes readjustment in the perspective of the interlocutor and so on in an unfinished process of dialogic feedback. It becomes clear how there is no external, privileged, totalizing, final perspective outside this intersubjective contextualized network as in the western cosmologic of Cartesian perspectivalism which imposes the speaking (ie. thinking) subject’s decontextualized point of view as the only possible, valid final point of view. Paradoxically, visualizing this process of indigenous perspectivism makes it clear that the process is not merely visual but synaesthesic, involving the dynamic use of all one’s senses; above all, it emphasizes the importance of perceiving indigenous intersubjective communication as embodied; this means that one is aware (ie. ‘culturally knows’) that one communicates with all of one’s senses which are . This process of readjustment in the intersubjective construction of meaning is important and I ask the reader to bear with me through the apparent repetitiveness of this section.



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located in or emanate from one’s body which occupies a definite though relational (i.e. culturally aware of the existence of its self-existence as being interdependent on the existence of others and therefore not ‘relativistic’ which presupposes a fixed, presumed viewpoint) physical space. This bodily space is the locus of one’s perspective, and interacts with the bodily spaces of one’s interlocutors, reminding each of the limits of the space each occupies and how it affects what each perceives, and at the same time making each aware of the importance of the unbounded collective space. The collective space is perceived as unbounded because its limits are constantly expanded or reduced depending on who or how many interlocutors are drawn into the process of intersubjective interlocution; it is also conceived as unbounded because it cannot be seen from an un-located, totalizing, abstract perspective. This process of dynamic readjustment in the intersubjective construction of meaning, and therefore in ‘reading’, is reminiscent of Lemke’s comment that in multimodal communication, meaning construction is dynamically multiplicative rather than statically cumulative or complementary. It is also reminiscent of Bakhtin’s semiotic theories of meaning as polyphonic or dialogic. Gardiner (1999) shows how Bakhtin has been associated with dialogism and voice, when a wider reading of his works reveals a more complex synaesthesic view of social communication, including vision and the other senses. If one considers that a theory such as Bakhtin’s, of the dialogic/polyphonic/heteroglossic nature of language as a bridge between a self and an ‘other’ (where both are socially and historically located), and where what one says is always already responsive (i.e. it depends on what was said before) and, remembering that the words one uses are always loaded with the meanings/voices/accents of others, it is becomes clear that Bakhtin conceives of language as ‘embodied’. Embodiment here may be understood both as an interlocutor occupying a specifically located physical, historical, social space and as engaging all his available bodily senses in the process of communication. The apparent novelty of Bakhtin’s ideas may be appreciated in terms of its radical departure from the more dominant (because more culturally coherent with the western comovision) Cartesian concept of meaning construction as dis-embodied (therefore un-located in any specific context), rational (ie. the product of the rational mind, in sheer rejection of empirical sense data as ‘distraction’), the product of an independent thinking subject (ie one that dispenses with the necessity of contributions of his interlocutors) all of which make for meaning as a final, objective, rational product. It is important here to remember that not only identity, language and meaning-making are culturally-specific, but also the concept of the body is culturally specific. Suffice it to say, for our present purposes, that for Amerindian Brazilian cultures the body is seen as permeable and incomplete requiring for completion

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the interaction with other bodies (physical, spiritual, social, symbolic), where this incompleteness is seen in positive terms as it is the source and basis of sociality and the construction of culture and community (see Keifenheim 1999; Castro 2000; Fausto 1999 and Lagrou 1996). In contrast, in the western cosmovision, as Sahlins (1996, 1999) has shown, the Adamic myth of the fall cannot be divorced from a negative view of the body as the source of distraction (sin) and constant necessity (i.e. the body as deficient, lacking and imperfect), which may help to contextualize the Cartesian and Augustinian desire for and postulation of abstraction and disembodiment. Needless to say, these varying cosmovisionary concepts of the body and their relationship to identity, meaning-making and language result in differing views not only of writing and reading as we have seen above, but also differing views of knowledge and ethics and consequently generate differing views of the ethics of meaningmaking, literacy and trans-cultural contact.

‘Trans-’border crossings, cosmovisions and the colonial difference Though I have sought to show the connections between differing cosmovisions and their corresponding concepts of vision and literacy, the connections should be seen as of heuristic explanatory value rather than as deterministic. In the case of alphabetic literacy, the western cosmovision of self-sufficient and self-centred separateness is clearly visible in the theories associated with ‘autonomous’ conceptions of literacy. To a large extent, over the last two decades these conceptions have been largely replaced by social and situated views of literacy as intersubjective (and not self-centred or self-sufficient) practices, indicating ongoing changes in the manifestations of the western cosmovision; however, given the historical and cultural depths of the cosmovision, profound changes may not occur easily, generating moments of contradiction and conflict between the basic values of the cosmovision and its manifestations. In situations of ‘trans’ cultural contact, especially those marked by a-symmetric power relations, the commonplace use of the strategy of cultural relativism leads to the imposition of the values of the dominant over the non-dominant. Thus Prinsloo’s (2005) need to denounce what seem to be recurrent ‘autonomous’ conceptual postures assuming that the computer-related literacy practices of one community are directly transferable to another – a clear manifestation of the selfcentred universalization of one’s own practices uncritically onto others. In a similar ‘trans’ cultural situation in Brazil, across the borders of colonial difference, the multimodal production of indigenous visual and alphabetic texts is often perceived from a purely non-indigenous standpoint attributing to the visual



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components of these texts the value of mere illustrations of the accompanying alphabetic texts rather than as enactments on paper of indigenous perspectivism. In many cases the publishing process of these texts by non-indigenous assistants either eliminates the visual texts or reduces their size and quantity and separates them from their original juxtapositions with the written texts. From the western standpoint, the indigenous visual texts are considered to be simple ‘images’ and not constitutive parts of the multimodal whole, nor tenors of knowledge in themselves. Another area of conflict between the Amerindian and western cosmovisions in terms of the varying notions of vision, is the value given to the vision-seeking rituals, and the visions produced thereof. It is easy and commonplace to assume that the rituals, provoked by so agents such as tobacco and herbal concoctions are little more than hallucinatory delusions; the term in itself is a product of trans-cosmovisionary conflict, attributing an aura of falsehood and deception to a culturally valuable source of information. An appendix of this conflict with the Amerindian notion of vision in indigenous perspectivism is the disbelief commonly expressed by the non-indigenous in relation to the relative visibility of the ‘invisible’ spirit dimension of interconnected beings, whose ‘presence’ is felt and sensed by members of the community. The rational egocentric form of vision promulgated by the western cosmovision leads to conclusions such as “if I don’t see it, it doesn’t exist”. Such a ‘reading’ of the non-human interconnected spirit-world is often an important aspect of Amerindian literacy and should be attributed at least respect. Given experiences of conflict such as these, where in a situation of contact, alphabetic literacy as a new semiotic resource of meaning-making is introduced into an indigenous community, and where this new resource is clearly distant from and detrimental to the existent cultural values and cosmovision of the community, what prompts the community to accept the new semiotic resource? The answer lies in both the power-knowledge collusion and the asymmetric constitution of the relationship between the community of origin (western) and the community of arrival (indigenous). Rather than purely and simply cutting the existing links in the new resource between the signs and modes of communication and the social values existent in the community of origin, i.e. transforming the resource and molding it to the needs of the community of arrival, the resource itself may be seen as a means of access to the privileges and power of the community of origin. Examples of this abound (Cavalcanti 1999) in indigenous literacy in Brazil, where for instance the indigenous community takes on the introduction of alphabetic literacy, but rather than become literate in the indigenous language, the community chooses to become literate in Portuguese, the national language, in order to have access to the cultural resources outside the community and thus

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resist the colonial difference. This blatantly contradicts the objectives of the national literacy campaigns which seek to “preserve the cultural integrity and survival of indigenous cultures and languages”. Hence depending on the power relationship between the community of origin and the community of arrival, the meaning-making resources made available may be maintained in their original forms and not undergo transformation. A curious example of an inversion of this process in a ‘trans-cultural’ situation is described by Murray (1991: 153) and refers to the case in the US in the 1970’s of Carlos Castaneda, when a series of ‘trans-cultural’ border-crossing encounters between “a white academic and a yaqui Indian” took place. Castaneda was severely attacked by his fellow academics in his disciplinary field of anthropology, because he purported to have participated in the visions of his Indian informant-cum-mentor. At the same time as, as a white western anthropologist, he was supposed to have ethnographically studied, recounted and analyzed the cultural values of his native informant, he was not supposed to have ‘crossed over’ and seen what his informant claimed to have seen. In accordance with the cultural relativism of the ego-centric western cosmology, which does not itself believe in the existence of extra- or non-human beings and the non-visible dimension, even purporting to respect the cultural beliefs of the ‘other’ culture in the name of an assumed essential similarity, actual encounters with radical difference in the other’s culture have to be denied equal value. Castaneda’s work was seriously attacked by the North American academy for having ‘crossed over’ and having accorded equal worth to the elements of Amerindian culture; a possible trigger of the wrath of the reaction may have been, according to Murray, the blurring of the genre between an academic ethnography and a work of fiction that Castaneda gave his work. Castaneda clearly violated here the established power-knowledge collusion that was in place in this context, when he as a white academic sought to learn from his native informant.

Conclusion If literacy involves the introduction of new meaning-making resources and related practices into a community, it is important to be aware of how these new resources, in their origin, are connected to essential values of the culture from which they originate; these values may be maintained or transformed in the movement of the resources from one community to another. Even though we are aware that literacy is situated and plural and as complex as the community which uses it, we have to be aware that we as scholars looking at a community ethnographically, from the outside, in spite of our openness and



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self-consciousness in participant observation, we are still the products of our own cultures and cannot easily divest ourselves of the cosmovisions of these. The western concept of cultural relativism, which as we have shown, uncritically presupposes and projects its own values on the culture of the other and the indigenous concept of interconnected relationalism which requires the perspectives of the other, may now be seen as generating radically different ethics of literacy and its related concepts of book, text, reading, writing, multimodality. These differences are not readily perceived in the recent move to ideological, social and situated concepts of literacy practices even from an ethnographic perspective, if one is not constantly and self-consciously aware of not only how the ‘Other’s’ culture is constructed in a different context, but how one’s own perceptions of these difference are constantly culturally constructed. As Mignolo (2000) has shown, due to the power-knowledge collusion in contexts of colonial difference (ie. of asymmetrical power), the asymmetry often uncritically intervenes (thanks to cultural relativism and the western cosmovsion) by allocating unequal values to the knowledges in contact. This may paradoxically result, for example in western studies of indigenous literacy, in a respect for the situatedness of indigenous culture as a local product/set of practices, and even in an awareness of the ‘locality’ of the theorist’s/analyst’s/ethnographer’s own knowledge and perceptions, but when academic disciplinary knowledge intervenes in later reflections on one’s annotated perceptions of indigenous knowledge and practices, the power-knowledge collusion takes centre-stage and enter the use of academic models and theories considered to be universal, decontextualized and objective, such as the theories of academic scientific realism (or even left-oriented theories of feminism and postcolonialism), still so prevalent in the social sciences, even after the crises of self-consciousness and the need for interpretive qualitative research of the eighties. Remembering that vision is a cultural and not a physical process, as Gombrich reminded us, we need to be aware that we see with our culturally constituted minds and not with our physical eyes. It is therefore not simply a question of “here’s a culture, here’s a literacy,” but “here’s how my culture colours my vision of another culture”, and “here’s how my literacy colours my views of another literacy”.

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Benedict, R. 1922. The vision in Plains culture. American Anthropologist 24(1): 1–23. Brandão, A. 1937. A escripta prehistórica do Brasil. Rio: Civilização Brasileira. Brotherston, G. 1979. Image of the New World: The American Continent Portrayed in Native Texts. London: Thames and Hudson. Burnett, R. 2004. How Images Think. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Camargo, E. 2001. Grafando o agrafo: Um ponto de vista lingüístico a partir do caxinaua. In Antropologia, História e Educação, A. L. Silva & M. K. L. Ferreira (eds). São Paulo: Global. Castro, E. V. 2000. Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. In Anthropology of Religion, M. Lambek (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Cavalcanti, R. A. S. 1999. Presente de branco, presente de grego? Escola e escrita em comunidades indigenas do Brasil Central. MA dissertation, Museu Nacional, Rio De Janeiro. Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Deprovincializing Europe. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M. (eds). 2000, Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. London: Routledge. de Souza, L. M. M. 2003a. Literacy and dreamspace: Multimodal texts in a Brazilian indigenous community. In Language, Literacy and Education: A Reader, S. Goodman, T. Lillis & J. Maybin (eds). Milton Keynes: Open University Press. de Souza, L. M. M. 2003b. Voices on paper: Multimodal texts and indigenous literacy in Brazil. Social Semiotics 13(1). de Souza, L. M. M. 2005. The ecology of writing among the Kashinawa: Indigenous multimodality in Brazil. In Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice, S. Canagarajah (ed.). Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. de Souza, L. M. M. 2006a. Entering a culture quietly: Writing and cultural survival in indigenous education in Brazil. In Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages, S. Makoni & A. Pennycook (eds), 135–169. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. de Souza, L. M. M. 2006b. The Shamanic book: Diversity, language and writing in an indigenous community in Brazil. In Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion, T. Omoniyi & J. A. Fishman (eds), 325–337. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Deloria, V. 1999. Spirit and Reason. Golden: Fulcrum Publishing. Derrida, J. 1974. Of Grammatology. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fausto, C. 1999. Da inimizade: Forma e simbolismo da guerra indígena. In A Outra Margem do Ocidente, A. Novaes (ed.). Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Finnegan, R. 2002. Communicating: The Multiple Modes of Human Interconnection. London: Routledge. Gardiner, M. 1999. Bakhtin and the metaphorics of perception. In Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual, I. Heywood & B. Sandywell (eds). London: Routledge. Gombrich, E. 1977. Art and Illusion. London: Phaidon. Harris, R. 2000. Rethinking Writing, London: Continuum. Hoffman, D. 1998. Visual Intelligence: How we Create What we See. New York NY: Norton. Keifenheim, B. 1999. Concepts of perception, visual practice and pattern art among the Cashinahua Indians (Peruvian Amazon Area). Visual Anthropology 12: 27–48. Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. Lagrou, E. M. 1996. Xamanismo e Representação entre os Kaxinawá. In Xamanismo no Brasil: Novas Perspectivas, E. J. M. Langdon (ed.). Florianópolis: Editora da UFSC.



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Lemke, J. 1997. Metamedia literacy: Transforming meanings and media. In Literacy for the 21st Century: Technological transformation in a post-typographic world, D. Reinking, L. Labbo, M. Mckenna & R. Kieffer (eds). Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Mallery, G. 1972 (first published 1893). Picture-writing of the American Indians. New York NY: Dover Publications. Mignolo, W. 1995. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization. Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press. Mignolo, W. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Mirzoeff, N. 1999. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2005. What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Murray, D. 1991. Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Text. Bloomington IN: Indian University Press. Prinsloo, M. & Breier, M. 1996. The Social Uses of Literacy: Theory and Practice in Contemporary South Africa. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Prinsloo, M. 2005. The new literacies as placed resources. Perspectives in Education 23(4): 87– 98. Sahlins, M. 1999. What is anthropological enlightenment? Some lessons of the twentieth century. Annual Review of Anthropology 28: i–xxiii. Sahllins, M. 1996. The native anthropology of western cosmology. Current Anthropology 37: 395–428. Street, B. 2003. The implications of the ‘New Literacy Studies’ for literacy education. In Language Literacy and Education: A Reader, S. Goodman, T. Lillis, J. Maybin & N. Mercer (eds). Stoke on trent: Trentham Books. Street, B. 1995. Social Literacies. London: Longman. Street, B. 1984. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Index

A acquisition  40, 65, 106, 113, 114, 129, 137, 141, 144, 146–148, 152, 205 actor-network theory(ies)  38, 151–167 affinity group  137, 139–144, 146 affinity spaces  74 agency  6, 32, 39, 54, 58, 60, 61, 63, 68, 69, 76, 93–95, 103, 106, 114, 144, 155, 158, 159 anthropology  7, 153, 200, 210 artefact  9, 10, 38, 47, 90, 137, 139–143, 186, 189 cultural artefact  9, 35, 36, 38–40, 43–48, 77 C change(s)  2, 3, 9, 59, 61, 69, 75–77, 93–95, 102, 106, 153, 175 children  2, 4, 7, 8, 10, 17, 18, 23, 24, 26, 27, 34, 35, 41, 44, 46, 51–53, 55, 56, 60, 63–68, 73–76, 79, 80, 82–84, 86, 89–91, 117–123, 125–133, 137, 144, 145, 147, 190 classroom(s)  8, 26, 27, 30, 31, 33, 39, 40, 47, 50, 53, 56, 59, 69, 76, 79, 83, 84, 86, 87, 106, 113, 120, 132 code(s) (coded, coding, decoding, encoding, codices)  3, 8, 12, 32, 37, 41, 123, 126, 199 compact(ed) concepts  7, 17, 18, 21, 22 culture(s)  2, 5, 18, 19, 25, 29, 32, 33, 74, 77–79, 90, 97, 120, 123, 127, 130, 131, 142–145, 157, 174, 175, 185,

193, 194, 196, 198, 199–203, 205, 207, 208, 210–213 cultural practice(s)  2, 17, 23, 31, 32, 77, 78, 175, 196, 197 cultural relativism  167, 195, 196, 198–201, 203, 208, 210, 211 D design grammar  9, 137, 138, 139 development(al/alist)  34, 36, 53, 54, 61, 63–69, 93, 94, 96, 97, 103, 104, 106, 108, 114–116, 121, 132, 153, 158 discourse(s)  3, 7–11, 18, 25, 39, 40, 47, 51, 53–55, 57, 58–69, 93, 97, 103, 104, 106, 114, 116, 120, 123, 141, 142, 151, 154, 155, 162, 164, 165, 175–179, 196, 203 domain(s)  2, 9, 10, 74, 75, 79, 86, 117, 123, 125–128, 137–148, 175, 194 E enrolment  18, 21, 160, 162, 165, 166 epistemology(ies/ical)  3, 11, 20 ethnography/ic/er(s)  1–5, 7, 34, 74–76, 78–80, 83, 87–90, 96, 152–154, 160, 162–167, 173, 183, 193, 210, 211 exclusion(s)  62, 125, 152, 165, 174, 178–180, 183, 186 F family(ies)  8–10, 18, 19, 23, 29, 35, 38, 41, 42, 44, 45, 51–57, 59–62, 66–69, 73, 76, 78–80, 82, 83, 86–89, 96, 98, 99, 102, 113, 125, 129, 132, 147, 165, 176, 178, 181, 183–185, 187

fiction(al)  10, 96, 108, 154, 173, 174, 188, 189, 191, 210 figured worlds  9, 39, 48 G gender(ed)  4, 9, 93–95, 98, 99, 102–104, 156, 157, 166 genre(s)  9, 157, 175, 183, 189, 210 global  8, 11, 17, 32, 34, 59, 60, 65, 71, 93, 117, 138, 151, 152, 156, 159, 162–164, 167 global competition  152 globalisation  5, 17–20, 32, 34, 75 H habitus  6, 10, 73–80, 82, 83, 87–89 history  6, 7, 10, 11, 73, 96, 140, 142, 143, 145–148, 162, 174, 179, 187, 202 historical  2, 59, 88, 94, 112, 114, 145, 148, 173, 174, 191, 196, 197, 199, 207, 208 home(s)  10, 12, 21, 24, 26, 29, 32, 33, 43, 44, 46, 47, 64, 67, 73–76, 78–81, 83, 84, 86–91, 98, 100–102, 117–120, 125, 127, 129, 131, 145, 184, 186, 190, 195 I identity(ies)  2, 4, 5, 6, 8–10, 17,  35–39, 47–51, 54, 55, 58, 73–78, 83, 86, 87, 89, 91, 117, 127, 128, 131, 137, 138, 144, 146, 147, 155, 156, 159–161, 201, 206–208 identity work  9, 36, 38, 39, 47, 49, 117, 131 situated identity(ies)  37, 137, 146, 147

216 Index

ideology/ies/ical  7, 8, 17–19, 22, 32, 51, 53, 59–61, 65, 93–95, 98, 106, 111–113, 151, 193–197, 203, 204, 205, 211 image(s)  1, 2, 5, 9, 10, 35, 38–40, 47, 53, 54, 79, 87, 103, 106, 118, 120, 128, 129, 131, 137, 139–143, 164, 197, 204, 205 indigenous  167, 194, 197–204, 206, 208–212 institution(s)  2, 10, 19, 131, 143, 146, 148, 153, 157, 158, 175–179 L language(s)  3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 28, 29, 36–38, 52, 53, 62–66, 69, 95, 111, 117–120, 123, 125, 126, 129–132, 137, 140, 141, 144, 152, 153, 157, 160, 163–166, 175, 178–180, 182, 183, 188, 194, 195, 197, 198,  200, 202, 203, 205, 207– 210 social language  9, 37, 123, 126, 141, 144 letter(s)  12, 56, 66, 67, 174, 175, 180, 183, 184, 189, 190 love letter(s)  9, 93, 95–103, 106, 108, 110–114, 176, 184 letter(s) (of the alphabet)  24, 25, 27, 38, 187 linguistic(s)  1–5, 23, 26, 52,74, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131, 138, 157, 178, 183, 201 applied linguistics  1 sociolinguistics  3, 5 literacy(ies)  1–13, 15, 17–22, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31–56,  60–63, 65–67, 69, 71, 73–76, 78, 79, 86, 89–91, 93–96, 98, 99, 102–104, 106, 108, 111–115, 117–119, 121, 129–133, 135, 137, 151–153, 156, 157, 160–162, 164–169, 173–176, 178–180, 182–191, 193–200, 202–205, 208–213 adult literacy  35, 36, 40–42, 46, 52, 54, 61, 63, 151, 158, 159, 162

doing literacy  8, 9, 35, 37, 38, 43, 47, 49 early childhood literacy  52, 54–56, 63, 131 elite literacy(ies)  178–180, 182, 184, 186, 190 family literacy  8, 9, 51–57, 59–63, 66–69, 165 literacy events  3–5, 12, 33, 47, 50, 78, 152, 153, 166, 175, 182, 193 literacy export(ers)  18, 19, 21, 22, 32, 164 export-quality literacy  17, 19, 164, 166 literacy practice(s)  1–8, 10, 11, 21, 22, 29, 37, 39, 40, 44, 48–50, 74, 75, 86, 89, 94, 95, 102, 103, 112, 114, 117, 131, 153, 157, 165–167, 173– 176, 178, 179, 185, 188–191, 193–195, 197, 208, 211 literacy skills  2, 19, 20, 21, 31, 32, 52, 53, 56, 59, 60, 62, 67, 94, 95, 98, 99, 102, 103, 106, 112–114, 151, 157–167 literacy studies  1–3, 7, 36, 37, 48, 49 194 New Literacy Studies (NLS)  1, 2, 4–6, 10, 11, 32, 36, 48, 73, 74, 95, 151–153, 157, 162, 164, 166, 167, 175, 182 material culture of literacy  43, 175, 185 perform(ing) literacy  35, 37–40, 43, 44, 48 powerful literacies  10, 173, 186, 190 local(ised/ly)  4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 22, 48, 61, 69, 75, 117, 119, 120, 122, 128–130, 131, 145, 151–154, 156, 158, 163–166, 187, 193, 194, 196, 203, 204, 211 M marriage(s)  9, 93, 95–100, 102, 113, 184 material(s)  6–9, 17–20, 22, 23, 27, 30, 31, 36, 38–40, 43, 47–50, 52, 61, 77, 103, 106, 108,

118, 125, 138, 143, 154–156, 159, 163, 167, 175, 178, 185, 186, 198 meaning making (making meaning)  3, 4, 73, 76, 81, 117–119, 121–123, 125– 129, 131, 133, 137, 194, 197, 198, 204, 207–21 situate(d) meaning  9, 126, 139–142, 148 mediate (mediator/mediation)  2, 31, 35, 39, 74, 77, 95, 131, 153, 173, 174, 175, 178–180, 185 migration (migrant, migratory, emigration)  10, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 88, 89, 91, 184, 187 mobilize(d)  7, 151, 154, 158, 161, 164 mobilization  158, 161, 162, 165, 166 model(s)(modelled)  3, 9, 20, 41, 48, 51, 53, 59, 60, 68, 69, 79, 80, 87, 88, 90, 94, 117, 127, 131, 142–144, 159, 165, 166, 180, 182, 192, 196, 211 multilingual(ism)  3, 5, 49, 117, 123 multimodal(ity)  1, 6, 10, 52, 53, 73, 74–76, 81, 86, 117, 123, 132, 141, 200, 208, 209, 211, 212 multisemiotic  7 music(al)  52, 125, 130, 145, 165 N narrative(s)(narrativity)  9, 35, 36, 39, 42, 47, 74, 75, 82, 83, 87–89, 96, 97, 120, 154, 200, 202 nature  6, 48, 94, 154, 155, 157, 164, 200, 201 204 (un)natural(ly)  7, 19, 22, 53, 54, 58, 63–65, 68, 140, 155, 157, 162, 164, 167, 179, 187, 197 novel(s), the  10, 25, 26, 93, 103, 108, 110, 173–178, 183, 187, 189, 190, 191 numeracy  66, 151, 152, 158, 159, 160



O ontology(ical)  11, 200–202 P pedagogy (pedagogies/ pedagogic)  8, 18, 28, 30, 51–54, 56–58, 60, 62–69, 80–82, 113, 166 play(s), playing  10, 43, 60, 67, 68, 79–84, 86, 87, 117–123, 125–131, 144, 147 power  2, 4, 11, 15, 39, 49, 75, 78, 93–95, 99, 113–114, 151, 153–157, 161–164, 167, 175, 176, 179, 194, 196–199, 208–211 powerful  10, 12, 47, 51, 62, 76, 83, 151, 153, 158, 162–166, 173, 186–190 practice(s)  2, 4, 5, 9, 19, 22, 31, 36, 39, 55–59, 61, 62, 64, 67, 68, 73–80, 86–89, 114, 118–120, 131, 138, 140–143, 146, 147, 151, 153, 162, 164, 175, 178, 195, 208, 211, 212 classroom practices  30 communication(/ive) practice(s)  10, 21, 75, 79, 89, 129, 167 community(ies) of practice  39, 167 courtship practice(s)  93, 95 cultural practice(s)  17, 23, 31, 32, 77, 78, 175, 196, 197 disciplinary practice(s)  163 discourse (discursive) practice(s)  8, 11, 63, 123 educational practices  23 embodied practice  178 everyday practices  32 household (home) practice(s)  73, 75, 77, 83, 88, 89, 195 institutional practice(s)  8, 156, 160 interactive practice(s)  8 iterative practice(s)  74, 75 language practice(s)  178 learning practice(s)  64, 65 literacy practice(s)  1, 2–8, 10, 11, 21, 22, 29, 37, 39, 40, 44, 48, 49, 50, 74, 75, 86,

Index 217

89, 94, 95, 102, 103, 112, 114, 117, 131, 133, 153, 157, 164–167, 173–176, 178, 179, 185, 188–191, 193–195, 197, 208, 211 local(ized) practice(s)  5, 10, 154, 192 material practices  178 mothering practice(s)  67, 68 networks of practice  7, 151 pedagogic practice(s)  53, 56, 62 reading practice(s)  25 reasoning practices  8, 17–19, 21, 29, 32 schooling practice(s)  7, 195 semiotic (signifying/signmaking) practice(s)  117, 121–123, 137, 167, 198 social practice(s)  1–8, 11, 21, 48, 60, 61, 73–75, 77, 79, 83, 86, 114, 118, 119, 128, 131, 153, 173, 175, 193, 205 study practice(s)  teaching practices  83 writing practice(s)  11, 192 precursor domain  131, 144–146 resource precursor trajectory (RPT)  146, 148 R reading  2–5, 7, 8, 11, 18, 19, 22–27, 29–32, 36, 37, 42, 43, 45, 52, 55, 56, 60–62, 64–67, 73, 75, 78, 87, 93, 98, 103, 108, 112, 117, 118, 120, 151, 175, 178, 180, 185, 186, 189, 199, 204–209, 211 register(s)  9, 37, 48, 141, 154, 175, 178–181 resource precursor trajectory (RPT)  146, 148 romance/romantic  9, 97, 111, 112, 143 S school(ing)  2–4, 7, 9, 10, 17, 19,  21, 25–27, 29–33, 37, 40–44, 46, 52, 58–61, 65, 67, 75, 76,  80–84, 86, 87, 88, 100,

102–104, 106, 108, 117–120, 122, 123, 125–132, 137–139, 145–148, 189, 195 schooling  2, 7, 10, 19, 25, 26, 29, 30, 41, 42, 80, 102, 103, 106, 108, 119, 120, 125, 126, 132, 145 semiotics  154 democratization of the semiotic  187, 190 semiosis  117 semiotic construct  173 semiotic dimensions  7 semiotic domain  9, 123, 125, 126, 137–148 semiotic engagement  157 semiotic forms  1 semiotic mediation  35, 39 semiotic modes/modalities  131, 161 semiotic play  116 semiotic resources  10, 117, 122, 131, 142, 144, 195 semiotic systems  123 shame  42, 43, 45, 47, 49 literacy shaming  8, 36, 42, 43 sign  42, 44, 46, 47, 118, 119, 121, 122, 128, 195, 198 sign-making  118, 119, 121, 122 site  3, 22, 29, 75, 76, 86, 117, 126, 163 situated meaning(s)  9, 126, 139–142 skill  21, 113, 130, 164 “Skills for Life”  151, 158–166 society  19, 22, 32, 61, 63, 66, 69, 94, 95, 112, 119, 145, 146, 154, 159, 176, 186, 203 sociocultural  2, 3, 32, 36, 37, 48, 95, 147 sociopolitical  8, 33 socioeconomic  21, 145, 147, 153, 159 sociohistorical  36, 48 sociolinguistics  3, 5 socioresidential  128 socionatural  164 sociology(ical)  5, 11, 48, 73, 97, 151–154, 158

218 Index

social constructivism  155, 205 (social) inclusion/exclusion  62, 63, 125, 152, 165, 173, 174, 179, 180, 186 social institution(s)  2, 153, 175 social world  12, 87, 118, 127, 163, 167, 178, 180, 191 space(s)  2, 11, 39, 45, 47, 48, 54, 58, 60, 62, 64, 74–78, 83, 84, 86, 88, 118–120, 131, 132, 140, 155, 156, 158, 163, 167, 171, 173, 174, 178, 207 spatial(ly)/spatiality  73, 74, 76, 84, 86–88, 156, 173 synaesthesia(etic/esic)  206, 207

T technology(ies/ical)  6, 19, 21, 63, 94, 95, 132, 147, 153, 154, 157, 159–162, 164, 165, 168, 185, 194, 195, 197 text  1–3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 17, 19, 38, 24–26, 29–31, 52, 53, 55, 56, 59–69, 65–69, 73–79, 82, 83, 86–89, 103, 106, 110, 113, 114, 118, 128, 151, 154, 158–160, 162, 173–175, 177–180, 182, 183, 186, 188, 189, 195, 199, 200, 202, 204–206, 208, 209, 211 translation(ing/ed)  41, 43, 94, 108, 151–153, 157, 158, 161, 162, 164–166

V vision  11, 51, 53, 77, 154, 160, 165, 193, 194, 196–212 visual(s)  1, 7, 11, 47, 52, 61, 75, 76, 83, 125, 193, 198, 199, 200, 202, 204–206, 208, 209 visuality  196, 200 W writing  2–5, 7, 9–11, 18, 26, 36, 37, 42, 43, 45, 47, 52, 55–57, 60–62, 64–67, 87, 90, 93, 95, 98, 100, 102, 103, 113, 114, 117–119, 123, 129, 139, 140, 151, 156, 167, 175, 178, 180, 183, 184, 187, 189, 190, 193, 194, 197–199, 205, 208, 211

In the AILA Applied Linguistics Series the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 4 3 2 1

Fortanet-Gómez, Inmaculada and Christine A. Räisänen (eds.): ESP in European Higher Education. Integrating language and content. vi, 282 pp. + index. Expected July 2008 Magnan, Sally Sieloff (ed.): Mediating Discourse Online. vii, 364 pp. Expected May 2008 Prinsloo, Mastin and Mike Baynham (eds.): Literacies, Global and Local. 2008. vii, 218 pp. Lamb, Terry and Hayo Reinders (eds.): Learner and Teacher Autonomy. Concepts, realities, and responses. 2008. vii, 286 pp.