Defining Literacy

Defining Literacy

Literacy is on the face of it something simple and straightforward, familiar in both everyday life and academic discourse, and the natural subject of study by a range of different disciplines. But like many such concepts, it is both more complex and less value-free than it seems at first. It is mainly over the last generation that anthropologists, together with social historians, have pointed to its complexity, ethnographic interest, and socially shaped attributes.

Human beings have over the ages developed a series of media to express or represent features of the social and natural world or to translate one medium into another through culturally acceptable analogues: drum beats experienced as if spoken words, Asian contour graphics or Western notations representing musical performance, hand gestures carrying cognitive meaning, cartography representing spatial relationships (Barnes, 1999). Writing is just one of these culturally developed forms. It is true that it is currently an extremely widespread and highly valued medium, but seen in comparative perspective it is no more transparent or 'obvious' than any other communication technology. Nor can we assume that the elusive relationships between writing and what it 'represents' - is it really 'visible speech' for example? - are necessarily the same in all cultures.

Differ in Concepts

One common model of 'literacy' is the type well known in recent centuries of Western history: phonetically based alphabetic writing, tied to the concept of a linear text, often with the (unspoken) connotations of something validated through high culture and, at the same time, rightfully open to mass use. But there are other writing systems too. These include - to follow one standard typology - pictographic, ideographic and phonetic (syllabic or alphabetic) forms; manuscript as well as print; and a number of different materials: stone, clay, papyrus, parchment, paper, computer screen. These varied forms are not just of antiquarian interest - merely precursors of the alphabetic achievements of Western civilization - but represent differing ways in which human beings have developed technologies which expand human control over time and space, and built these into their cultural institutions (Street, 2008).

Literacy in this wider sense is not confined to Western societies or the recent past. Writing has been around a long time, whether in Chinese, Arabic, the alphabetic scripts of Western European languages, or Maya hieroglyphs. As J. Goody put it:

At least during the past 2000 years, the vast majority of the peoples of the world (most of Eurasia and much of Africa) have lived ... in cultures which were influenced in some degree by the circulation of the written word, by the presence of groups or individuals who could read and write (Goody, 1986).

As Goody also points out, we cannot assume mass literacy either, for 'restricted literacy' is a common pattern too. Furthermore, the presence of literacy in a society does not mean that everyone participates in literate practices in the same way or to the same extent - these may (or may not) be quite marginal to people's everyday lives. Similarly there is little evidence that ...