Indigenous Textual Cultures

Front matter

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Reading, | ae à» 4099 ‘and Writing A LN, inthe Age, ^ i i ofGlobah g 4 Empire - , é A

TONY BALLANTYNE, LACHY PATERSON & ANGELA WANHALLA editors

PART I ARCHIVES & DEBATES 31 chapter one

Ka Waihona Palapala Manaleo: Research in a Time of Plenty.

Colonialism and the Hawaiian- Language Archives

60 chapter two

Kanak Writings and Written Tradition in the Archive of New Caledonia's 1917 War

80 chapter three

Maori Literacy Practices in Colonial New Zealand LACHY PATERSON

PART II ORALITY & TEXTS 101 chapter four

"Don't Destroy the Writing": Timeand Space-Based Communication and the Colonial Strategy of Mimicry in Nineteenth-Century Salish-Missionary Relations on Canada's Pacific Coast KEITH THOR CARLSON

131 chapter five

Talking Traditions: Orality, Ecology, and Spirituality in Mangaia's Textual Culture MICHAEL P. J. REILLY

154 chapter six

Polynesian Family Manuscripts (Puta Tupuna) from the Society

and Austral Islands: Interior History, Formal Logic, and Social Uses BRUNO SAURA

PART III READERS 175 chapter seven Print Media, the Swahili Language, and Textual Cultures in Twentieth- Century Tanzania, ca. 1923-1939 EMMA HUNTER

195 chapter eight

Going Off Script: Aboriginal Rejection and Repurposing of English Literacies LAURA RADEMAKER

216 chapter nine

"Read It, Don't Smoke It!”: Developing and Maintaining Literacy in Papua New Guinea EVELYN ELLERMAN

PART IV WRITERS 245 chapter ten

Colonial Copyright,

Customs, and Indigenous Textualities: Literary Authority and Textual Citizenship ISABEL HOFMEYR

263 chapter eleven

He Pukapuka Tataku i nga

Mahi a Te Rauparaha Nui:

Reading Te Rauparaha through Time ARINI LOADER

289 chapter twelve

Writing and Beyond in Indigenous North America: The Occom Network

315 bibliography 345 contributors

349 index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume developed out of the symposium Indigenous Textual Cultures, organized by Tony Ballantyne and Lachy Paterson of the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture at the University of Otago on 3o June and 1 July 2014. The editors would like to thank the Hocken Collections and their staff, who provided the venue. We would also like to thank Sue Lang, the former administrator in the Department of History and Art History at Otago, for the invaluable support she provided in putting that event together. Sue has provided the administrative support for the center since its establishment in 2012, and we are deeply appreciative of her hard work and expertise.

The center is one of Otagos "flagship" research groupings and has been very well supported by the university’s Research Committee, and the editors would like to acknowledge that funding and also the broader endorsement ofthe Research Committee.

The editors would also like to thank all the presenters at the symposium as well as the attendees who gave critical feedback. All but one of the presenters wrote chapters for this volume. We would like to acknowledge Alban Bensa and Adrian Muckle, Evelyn Ellerman, and Ivy Schweitzer, who subsequently brought their expertise to broaden the scope of the book. We would like to thank all the contributors to the volume for their engagement with and enthusiasm for a project that brings a diverse range of scholarly traditions into conversation.

A book such as this is a team effort. In particular, Lachy and Tony would like to express our appreciation to Angela Wanhalla, who joined as an editor for the book and spurred the project on to its conclusion.

We are also indebted to expert readers who gave valuable feedback on the manuscript, and to the staff of Duke University Press for bringing the collection to publication.

Indigenous Textual Cultures, the Politics of Difference, and the Dynamism of Practice

INDIGENOUS TEXTUAL CULTURES offer crucial insights into the dynamics of communication, community formation, and political contestation within a modern world shaped by empire, mobility, and capitalism. Modernity was marked by the deepening and accelerating connectedness produced by aggressively expansive imperial orders, the encompassing reach of communication systems, and the integrative power of trade and markets that increasingly drew human communities into new forms of interdependence from 1492 onward. These connections were never total, nor uncontested. Even as the world became more connected through the early modern period, the networks that linked communities together developed irregularly in time and space, their reach was uneven in both geographic and social terms, and typically they were incomplete and in process, constantly being remade. Despite their globe-spanning aspirations, imperial rulers, advocates of evangelization, influential capitalists, and champions of new communications technologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries never produced the smooth and seamless global overlays that they often promised. Histories of connection were often fraught and violent and produced deeply unequal outcomes.!

The study of indigenous textual cultures illuminates the shifting cultural practices and social relations within native or indigenous communities that felt the pull of distant markets or directly faced the onslaught of colonialism. One of the promises of much work within indigenous studies is that it enables the reclamation of intellectual sovereignty and the reassertion of cultural autonomy. Key strands within that scholarly tradition have fundamentally transformed our understanding of indigenous histories and have been powerful forces challenging white domination and Eurocentrism in national and global politics.

Atthe same time, however, such projects are profoundly shaped by their engagement with and entanglement within these earlier histories of global connectedness, the very processes that disempowered traditional leaders, undermined local ways of knowing and organizing social life, and alienated labor, land, and economically useful resources? Deeply and fundamentally, "native" and "indigenous" are relational social categories.? They are historically contingent, being produced out of the development of the often highly unequal outcomes of cross-cultural trade, evangelization, colonialism and colonization, and nation building. These identifications were and are produced as a consequence of cross-cultural debates, incorporation into imperial regimes, the experience of colonial power, and engagements with the developing authority of national sovereignties. Of course, at a fundamental level, they have depended on the ability to reference shared ties to places and territories, a common linguistic and cultural tradition, and an identification with a history and set of genealogical connections that predate the disruptions of cross-cultural meetings and the onrush of colonialism.* These are some of the key resources that might be mobilized in order to produce the key differentiations from other social groups and the identification with “indigeneity.”®

Since World War II, the authority and reach of these identifications have also been enabled and supported by the interrelated development of global activist networks and the language of universal human rights. As Ronald W. Niezen has demonstrated, the category of "indigenous peoples" gained purchase through the International Labour Organization in the 1950s and since then has been woven into a range of human rights initiatives and the platforms of a large number of international organizations. These global currents were crucial in enabling the development of increasingly expansive and dense connections among groups who identified as being indigenous. These identifications both were facilitated by and reinforced the recognition that their communities shared powerful commonalities, including the alienation of land, resources, and sovereignty; the undermining of treaties; the denial of full political and social citizenship; and the experience of cultural loss as a result of successive governments pursuing the goal of “assimilation” and the privileging of national identity. So while contemporary indigeneity typically is anchored in genealogical affiliation and territorial belonging, it is also underpinned by a simultaneous differentiation of the “indigenous” from dominant social groups produced out of colonialism and recognition of shared experiences with other indigenous groups who typically share a common commitment to the pursuit of greater autonomy.’ More broadly still, as Niezen argues, the growing authority of the indigenous as a cultural identity reflects important shifts in the global political economy and public sentiment— including anxieties around the “uncertainties of a runaway world” produced by globalization—which have both helped legitimate indigeneity as a social and political category and invested it with a particular set of moral, political, and spiritual connotations.?

Writing and textual cultures were central to the processes of differentiation of "tribal" or "native" groups under colonial rule and the subsequent remaking of communities, in both (emergent) national and international contexts, as imperial regimes were dismantled or attenuated. Under modernity, writing has been a powerful instrument for cultural construction, playing a pivotal role in the "invention of tradition" (or its definition and reworking), in the production of “imagined communities,” and in “writing" the nation into being. It not only has been a vital tool for intellectuals, activists, and anticolonial leaders but also was absolutely central to the operation of modern bureaucratic states and all those groups who interacted with these regimes, which were underpinned by the regularized circulation of paper, information, and opinion. Writing was a powerful tool in the struggles against colonialism and in subsequent efforts to cast off the legacies of empire and dispossession; it has never been the sole political instrument for those committed to overthrowing imperial regimes, but it has often been indispensable and effective.

Community formation and the struggle against colonial rule stand at the center of this volume, which explores the operation of indigenous textual cultures in a modern age of global empire. Bringing together a range of sites and scholarly traditions, it explores the various ways in which the written word was deployed by native or indigenous writers who sought to assert their intellectual power within the uneven cultural terrains created by colonial rule. Here it is important to note that the volume brings together work focused on Africa, the Pacific, Australasia, and North America. While Australasia, parts of the Pacific (especially Hawai'i), and the United States and Canada are prominent in recent work in indigenous studies, Africa and African peoples typically largely sit outside the dominant global understandings of the category “indigenous.” For example, in 1992 the United Nations offered the following summation of indigeneity on a global scale: "Ihe world's estimated 300 million indigenous people are spread across the world in more than 70 countries. Among them are the Indians of the Americas, the Inuit and Aleutians ofthe circumpolar region, the Saami of northern Europe, the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders of Australia and the Maori of New Zealand. More than 6o per cent of Bolivia's population is indigenous, and indigenous peoples make up roughly half the populations of Guatemala and Peru. China and India together have more than 150 million indigenous and tribal people. About 10 million indigenous people live in Myanmar?

Some African communities—such as Nubians in Kenya and Basters in South Africa—do make claims to indigenous status, but their understandings of indigeneity have varied greatly and rarely aligned neatly with the developing global conventions. Of course, the particular depth of African history, as wellas the complexities of mobility and trade over long distances within and beyond Africa, means that making claims to being the original occupants of a place or region— often a foundational element of indigeneity—is deeply problematic.? Nevertheless, certain understandings of what or who was indigenous played a key role in the operation of colonial power in parts of Africa, and as Mahmood Mamdani has argued, those understandings have played a role in shaping crucial elements of the postcolonial political economy in some African nations." Mamdani has demonstrated that the idea of the native or indigenous was fundamental to the legally inscribed identifications that were central in the operation of colonial rule in much of Africa: the distinction between "natives, who were believed to possess ethnicities typically defined by tribal affiliations and who were bound by “customary law,” and "nonnatives,' those groups including Europeans, “Coloureds,” Asians, and Arabs, who were seen to be distinct races and who were subject to civil law and, as such, able to exercise a range of rights that were beyond the reach of the "native" populations." In light of this argument, there is real value in returning Africa to the fold of indigenous studies, especially given the centrality of the native as an organizing category in colonial thought in Africa, a powerful commonality with the Pacific, Australasia, and North America." Reconnecting these histories might offer substantial intellectual rewards, as leading Pacific historian Damon I. Salesa has argued."

CHANGE AND CHALLENGING THE RULE OF COLONIAL DIFFERENCE

One compelling way into the relationship between colonial rule and cultural difference is provided by the work of the Tasmanian indigenous artist Julie Gough. Goughs work is anchored in a set of conversations that weave together archival holdings, physical landscapes, and objects that carry traces of colonial pasts. Over the past two decades, she has produced a series of sophisticated meditations on indigenous experiences of empire building that rematerialize how language and knowledge were threaded through the dispossession and violence that were integral to the colonization of Van Diemens Land. Some works primarily draw attention to the relation among knowledge, violence, and domination, while others function as a kind of counterarchive, sites where the experiences and even more fundamentally the names and connections of indigenous peoples and places can be recorded and recalled.'? Both of these creative strategies foreground the "conflicting and subsumed histories" that are produced out of the entanglements of empire and the subordination of indigenous communities under colonial rule. Language, found and repurposed objects, and media of various kinds are central to the assemblages that Gough constructs, drawing our attention to how regimes of colonial difference were created and to how things and words can carry the legacies of past inequalities into our present.

As scholar of Australian literature and visual culture Marita Bullock has observed, Gough’s work not only picks at the silences and occlusions of official understandings of Tasmanian history but also draws critical attention to the divergence between those narratives and the understandings of the descendants of the indigenous populations who were displaced and dispossessed. Across an impressive set of works, Gough assembles a striking visual language that has been an important artistic intervention in the so-called History Wars in Australia, a set of fraught debates over the nature and consequences of colonialism." That Gough’s work focused on the experiences of Tasmania's Aboriginal populations and the violence of the colonial order that developed on that island was especially significant given that the evidentiary basis for revisionist academic histories that foregrounded both violence and Aboriginal resistance stood at the center of the History Wars."

Goughs work is a rich departure point for this volume because it explores the entangled nature of colonialism, indigeneity, media, and knowledge production. In producing her work, she repurposes colonial images, fashions an alternative set of visual idioms that foreground questions

FIGURE L.1 Julie Gough, Some words for change, 2008 (detail). Site-specific outdoor installation: tea tree (Melaleuca spp.) and thirty-two book pages from Black War (Clive Turnbull, 1948) dipped in wax. Ephemeral art exhibition, Friendly Beaches, Tasmania. Photograph by Simon Cuthbert. Reproduced with the permission ofthe artist.

about indigenous experience, and explores the interplay between colonial domination and postcolonial reassertions of identity, rights, and cultural legitimacy. In her Some words for change (2008), for example, she presents a striking juxtaposition between the printed word and tea tree spears, markers of indigenous resistance. The leaves impaled by the weapons are from Clive Turnbull's Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines, an influential 1948 study of the colonization of Tasmania. Turnbull’s history emphasized the range and depth of the violence perpetrated by colonists in Van Diemens Land at a point when many historians scripted Australian history within liberal progressive narratives that tended to occlude violence and dispossession. Simultaneously, however, such accounts denied the continued existence of indigenous communities in Tasmania, failing to recognize the capacity of indigenous peoples to remake themselves within radically different circumstances. Gough's work challenges this narrative in a potent way, mobilizing the spear as a reminder that colonial domination was never uncontested, viscerally questioning the authority of written history.

The questions about colonialism, power, knowledge, and belonging that stand at the heart of Goughs oeuvre are urgent sites of contestation in indigenous politics globally, but they carry a special freight within the context of Tasmanian history. The colonial history of Van Diemen's Land was structured by violence, both in the operation of its convict system and in the forcible dispossession, containment, and displacement of indigenous populations. Those populations were subject to extensive violence and faced the terrible consequences of disease and dispossession. Tasmanian Aboriginal communities have often been imagined as extinct by politicians, journalists, and historians, and recent scholarship has framed the island's history as an exemplary case of colonial genocide.? Although much recent work on settler colonialism follows Lorenzo Veracini and Patrick Wolfe to argue that such forms of politico-economic organization were propelled by an eliminationist sensibility, Gough's work simultaneously underscores the centrality of violence in colonialism’s will to power and also challenges readings that imagine the complete erasure of Tasmanias indigenous populations, and their cultural presence, experiences, and memories, by colonial power.??

Atthe heart ofthis volume is a desire to recover the shifting configurations of indigenous communities and knowledge traditions, specifically through a close attention to ways in which important ideas and aspirations were articulated through textual cultures. When Some words for change was exhibited on heathland at Friendly Beaches on the Freycinet Peninsula in Tasmania in 2008, another installation of Gough's work with the same title drew attention to matters of language. A series of laminated pages recorded indigenous terms from nineteenth-century Tasmania for the innovations of the colonial order, listing words like wetuppenner (fence), booooo (cattle), bar (sheep), linghene (fire a gun), lughtoy (gunpowder), licummy (rum), and nonegimerikeway (white man). In her artist statement on this work, Gough described how this wordlist recorded the "clues in language and in print of Aboriginal efforts to understand and incorporate what had arrived" under colonial rule?! By foregrounding change, Gough stressed the adaptability and resilience of indigenous peoples, a crucial intervention given that many white Australians still frame Aboriginal communities in terms of tradition or unshifting racial difference or view them as essentially belonging to a primeval past.

Gough’s work as an artist can be usefully read alongside Leonie Stevens's work on indigenous traditions of literacy in colonial Van Diemen's Land. Stevens's cultural history from below is anchored in a body of largely neglected sources: the writings of the indigenous exiles at Wybalenna, an "Aboriginal Settlement" established on Flinders Island to forward their "civilization" and “Christianization,” in the 1830s and 1840s. Stevens deftly explores a rich body of primary source material, including letters written by indigenous people at Wybalenna between 1843 and 1847, records of school examinations, and a range of sermons delivered by the young men Walter George Arthur and Thomas Brune and the handwritten The Flinders Island Weekly Chronicle they produced in 1836—37. Drawing on these varied materials—which underscore the archival work that can still enrich our understandings ofindigenous histories— Stevens keeps the indigenous actors at the center of the story, exposing the limits of readings that imagine these sources (or colonialism more generally) as the unfurling of an uncontested and complete form of hegemony. Against such readings, Stevens presents Wybalenna as a “vibrant, noisy, and often rebellious community” whose creativity and resourcefulness challenged colonial assumptions and created a body of texts that capture a set of crucially important indigenous aspirations, experiences, and arguments articulated in the face of the (literally) unsettling claims of colonial authority.”*

LITERACY AND THE ELUCIDATION OF DIFFERENCE

Questions of language and literacy were central to the operation of colonial authority. The extension of European commercial systems, territorial authority, and cultural aspirations into the “New World” of the Americas and the Caribbean during the early modern period produced a growing archive of reflections on language and cultural difference. Samuel Purchas, an influential English cleric and editor who produced important compilations of travel writing in the early seventeenth century, suggested that writing was the key measure of cultural capacity: “amongst Men, some are accounted Civill, and more both Sociable and Religious by the Use of letters and Writing, which others wanting are esteemed Brutish, Savage, Barbarous.” Purchas stressed the particular significance of writings power to communicate across time: “By speech we utter our minds once, at the present, to the present, as present occasions move (and perhaps unadvisedly transport) us: but by writing Man seemes immortall.” Via literacy, an individual "consulteth with the Patriarkes, Prophets, Apostles, Fathers, Philosophers" and could communicate their ideas through time: “by his owne writings [he] surviveth himselfe, remaines (litera scripta manet) thorow all ages a Teacher and Counsellor to the last of men"? As Stephen Greenblatt has noted, there is a significant shift in the constitution of “barbarian” as a social category in Purchass text. Where in the ancient Mediterranean world this term delineated the boundary between Greek speakers and those who spoke other languages, now the barbarian was marked by the absence of literacy.”

As modern empires took shape in the second half of the eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century, language was particularly prominent in the articulation of imperial authority and the justification of colonial domination.” In the British case, philology was especially important in shaping understandings of cultural capacity and the path of human development. Language was, of course, both a key archive and an important grounds for the argument of leading Scottish Enlightenment thinkers who developed new "stadial" histories that traced the development of human communities from rudeness to "refinement": these arguments took shape in Thomas Blackwell's important treatment of Homer and were elaborated and refined by important later thinkers such as Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, and John Millar? A later generation of Scottish thinkers drew on these arguments, as well as the pathbreaking work of Sir William Jones on Sanskrit and the deep linguistic affinities of what came be known as the Indo-European language family, to craft linguistically framed histories of the cultural development of Asian societies." For the influential essayist and Sanskritist Alexander Hamilton philology was essential for historians of “Civilisation,” as language was the “most imperishable guide" to the origin and progress of all human communities.”*

As European imperial regimes extended their reach into the Pacific, language stood at the heart of European assessments of the sophistication of local peoples and was seen as indicative of their capacity to change.” During his first Pacific voyage in 1769, James Cook reflected on questions of language in the wake of a sojourn at the Endeavour River on the Cape York Peninsula, Australia. Cook observed that “the languages of the different tribes differ very much. This results from the continual state of war in which they live, as they have no communication the one with the other"? That Aboriginal peoples relied on the oral transmission of information and cultural knowledge was seen as a marker of a crude and unsophisticated culture. Indigenous communities in Australia were thus framed as “illiterate,” "primitive, and “barbaric,” reflecting the primacy of writing in European conceptions of civilization.

Indigenous knowledge orders that were anchored in orality were typically defined in negative terms, as lacking literacy. Such communities were variously understood as requiring special “protection,” “uplift,” or evangelization, or, in some cases, they were identified as a serious impediment to the project of colonial progress: they were consistently constituted as a “social problem." In the Australian case, many influential churchmen and colonial politicians were convinced that because indigenous communities had little interest in cross-cultural trade and limited enthusiasm for literacy and books, they would not be able to be converted to Christianity and were incapable of cultural change more generally.” Joy Damousi has highlighted the importance of the oppositions between “oral and primitive” and “literate and civilised” in the operation of colonial power in Australia in the middle of the nineteenth century. These were not simply abstract questions as they troubled the actual functioning of the colonial state, most notably in the legal system. Damousi demonstrates the ways in which indigenous peoples were marginalized in colonial courts in the 1830s and 1840s because they were understood as incapable of rendering reliable oaths, a “problem” that occasioned much debate among colonial authorities and humanitarian reformers.?

Thus, at the level of both scholarly activity and colonial realpolitik, language was central in encoding difference. The presence of writing was especially crucial, not just in shaping European evaluations of the cultural sophistication of indigenous and colonized peoples, but also in structuring how colonial knowledge itself was produced and organized. Nonliterate societies were typically imagined as "traditional," ordering their life around tribal units, oral tradition, and the weight of custom. Understanding these communities was to be the domain of ethnology and, subsequently, anthropology.** Conversely, those communities that were literate were seen not only as more sophisticated but also as belonging to the domain of historical study, as they produced written sources and were capable of change. This opposition, which was forcefully articulated during Europe’s “discovery” and conquest of the New World in the early modern period, was constantly reiterated and calcified during the aggressive extension of European imperial systems during the long nineteenth century. As Michel de Certeau has noted, this assessment of different forms of communication performed powerful cultural work, effectively “exiling orality outside of the areas which pertain to Western work... transforming speech into an exotic object.” Effectively, the native was seen as the embodiment of orality and the past, while the European colonizer was equated with writing and the ever-changing present of modernity.

STRUCTURING OPPOSITIONS

Questions relating to orality and literacy have been central to a range of work on the distinctiveness of native or indigenous epistemologies. Some foundational anthropological texts have been particularly influential in elaborating the literacy-orality opposition. In a number of his works, Claude Lévi-Strauss reflected on the impact of the introduction of literacy among the Nambikwara, a Brazilian indigenous community. Stressing the deleterious social effects that followed the Nambikwara’s adoption of writing, Lévi- Strauss argued that writing undermined the authenticity and innocence of tribal communities whose social life was anchored in orality. Literacy centralized power, promoted and calcified social hierarchies, and underwrote the authority of the law: in his commentary on Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida called these shifts the “violence of the letter?

For Lévi-Strauss, the uptake of these new skills meant a shift away from tradition and a dilution of native status: literacy broke the bonds of community and attenuated long-standing links to the natural world. As an anthropologist he saw these changes as a kind of loss, an undermining of a tribal culture by corrosive external forces. Yet, as Derrida noted, the distinction between “historical societies and societies without history” hinged on Lévi-Strauss’s concept of literacy. In particular, Derrida observed, the Nambikwara were not without a system of inscriptions—incised and engraved calabashes—and they also displayed a strong interest in writing when first provided with paper and pencils, something that Lévi-Strauss omitted from Tristes Tropiques. Moreover, Lévi-Strauss's treatment of the Nambikwara’s enthusiasm for the skills and technologies of literacy was dependent on the assertion that they had no word that was a direct equivalent of write; this was a narrow rendering of the linguistic possibilities that closed off any conception that preexisting indigenous graphic or representational systems facilitated the Nambikwara’s interest in alphabetic literacy.’

Where literacy was a key concern in Lévi-Strauss’s treatment of an imperiled "native" way of life, Walter Ong's work on orality and literacy focused on the impact of literacy on thought processes and ways of understanding the world. Ong argued that a substantial cognitive investment was required to master writing as a cultural technology. As a consequence, literacy effected a significant cognitive transformation, effectively restricting human thought as the world of signs and sight was privileged over the world of sound and listening. While Ong was interested in tribal communities and colonized groups, the key ground for his arguments was European culture itself. He suggested that a succession of deep cultural shifts—the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the emergence of modern knowledge systems in the wake of industrialization—had cemented the centrality of writing and print literacy, as the key underpinnings of human consciousness under modernity. As Ong simply argued, "writing restructures consciousness??? For Ong, these transformations were clearly evident in the European past, in which key medieval intellectual traditions of logic, rhetoric, and dialectics were transformed and subsumed with the growing ascendancy of print in the wake of the Reformation. But he was also aware that the arguments could be refracted beyond Europe’s shores and that old oppositions between "Civilization" and the natural world of the "Primitive" had been rearticulated through the orality-literacy divide. In response, Ong highlighted the significance of the interaction between such modes, whether in "native communities" or within the high Western tradition itself (as seen in Tudor poetry, for example).*° Thus, as Jane Hoogestraat has argued, Ong enabled a rereading of colonialism, making it "possible, and imperative, to imagine and to recognize the voices—absent, other and largely oral—that haunt the official languages that we still speak and write?“

Jack Goody’s influential treatments of orality and literacy tended to occlude such dynamics, stressing the divergence between the worlds of literacy and nonliteracy. Across an arc of publications, Goody posited that writing renders the relationship between a written word and the thing it refers to as abstract and universal.? As a consequence, he suggested that literacy promoted ways of thinking that were abstract, structured, and formalized. For Goody, the emergence of literacy was central in the separation between history and mythology, the development of complex forms of bureaucratic governance, and the development of sophisticated forms of cultural expression. Even as he mobilized a wide range of case studies, Goody frequently dichotomized oral and literate forms of social communication, glossing over or blurring hybrid forms of practice, especially the ways in which orality might condition literate cultures. Moreover, he tended to identify literacy as both a driver of change and a marker of cultural distinctiveness, when assessments of the impact and meaning of reading and writing need to be embedded in the broader operation of social communication and cultural differentiation.

UNRAVELING OPPOSITIONS

Goody’s work embodies a tendency of anthropological scholarship to extrapolate from specific ethnographic case studies to generalize about the distinctive qualities of orality and literacy. In making this move from the local to the abstracted universal, these arguments undervalue the placedness of these practices. In emphasizing the thickness and coherence of “culture,” these kinds of arguments tend to underplay the historical contingency of cultural formations. They also often flatten out what we might think of as the social texture of these practices: their distribution by age, gender, status, kin-group affiliation, occupation, and place.’ As William H. Sewell Jr. has observed, Lévi-Strauss was the influential architect of a vision that imagined culture as “a realm of pure signification,’ emphasizing its “internal coherence and deep logic?