From Literacy/Literacies to Graphic Pluralism and Inscriptive Practices

Abstract

This article considers the ongoing importance of studying writing practices within and beyond anthropology. The works included here concentrate on scholarship that has appeared since the productive yet divisive debates that established literacy as a plural phenomenon that is best studied ethnographically. It focuses on research that surveys the multiplicity of graphic forms, the changing notions of literacies, and the ways that literacy is implicated in and constitutive of sites of power. In addition, the cited works engage with the linguistic and semiotic ideologies that inform such literacy practices, the various aesthetic sensibilities that shape writing, and the physicality/materiality of inscriptive practices. Considering the effects of previously theorizing writing as a single, uniform phenomenon and the shift to research that characterizes inscriptive practices as multiple makes possible an argument for moving beyond multiplicity to question what writing is and can be, looking to works on “inscriptive practices” and “graphic pluralism.”

From Transcript to “Trans-Script”: Romanized Santali across Semiotic Media

“…The process once again created a situation whereby the specific sound-to-script correspondences between Ol-Chiki and the Romanized variety become naturalized through material instantiations on keyboards of phones or computers. The process from "transcript" to "trans-script" discussed in this article mirrors a wider theoretical move in linguistic anthropology away from the study of script as a bounded entity or literacy as a specific, or specialized text-based practice to the study of what Debenport and Webster (2019) have recently called "graphic pluralism." Unlike theories of script in which "certain sign-type relationships have been naturalized" (391), the Romanized trans-script does not serve to either hegemonize indigenous language scripts or disrupt stable monolingual or monographic ideologies.…”

“I Learned That My Name Is Spelled Wrong”: Lessons from Mexico and Nepal on Teaching Literacy for Indigenous Language Reclamation

“…Literacy is often associated with writing and reading specifically; however, text-based literacy is just one form of meaning-making and is inevitably characterized by context-specific practices and significance (Street 1984;Menezes de Souza 2002). While many have shifted from thinking about literacy to literacies, Debenport and Webster (2019) push scholars to think "beyond multiplicity to question what writing is and can be" (390) in different sociocultural contexts. The dominance of alphabetic literacy over other forms of meaningmaking has been critiqued in the context of Indigenous education in particular.…”