Literacy, Emotion and Authority
Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll
Part of Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language
- Author: Niko Besnier, Universiteit van Amsterdam
- Date Published: August 1995
- availability: Available
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9780521485395
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Literacy continues to be a central issue in anthropology, but methods of perceiving and examining it have changed in recent years. In this 1995 study Niko Besnier analyses the transformation of Nukulaelae from a non-literate into a literate society using a contemporary perspective which emphasizes literacy as a social practice embedded in a socio-cultural context. He shows how a small and isolated Polynesian community, with no access to print technology, can become deeply steeped in literacy in little more than a century, and how literacy can take on radically divergent forms depending on the social and cultural needs and characteristics of the society in which it develops. His case study, which has implications for understanding literacy in other societies, illuminates the relationship between norm and practice, between structure and agency, and between group and individual.
Read more- A major contribution to our understanding of the ways in which specific kinds of literacy are embedded in the socio-cultural context
- Offers a unique combination of ethnographic details and theoretical concerns in this subfield of anthropology
- Of interest to scholars in anthropology, education, psychology and sociolinguistics
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×Product details
- Date Published: August 1995
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9780521485395
- length: 256 pages
- dimensions: 229 x 152 x 15 mm
- weight: 0.38kg
- contains: 7 b/w illus. 2 maps 2 tables
- availability: Available
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. The ethnographic context
3. The domains of reading and writing
4. Letter writing and reading
5. Letters, economics and emotionality
6. Between literacy and orality: the sermon
7. Literacy, truth and authority
8. Conclusion.
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