Interdisciplinary approaches to literacy and development

Kaushik Basu, Bryan Maddox, Anna Robinson-Pant

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317990659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The links between literacy and development have been the focus of research conducted by both economists and anthropologists. Yet researchers from these different disciplines have tended to work in isolation from each other. This book aims to create a space for new interdisciplinary debate in this area, through bringing together contributions on literacy and development from the fields of education, literacy studies, anthropology and economics. The book extends our theoretical understanding on the ways in which people's acquisition and uses of literacy influence changes in agency, identity, social practice and labour market and other outcomes. The chapters discuss data from diverse cultural contexts (South Africa, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Peru, and Mexico), and from contrasting research paradigms. The contributors examine the significance of culture and socio-economic contexts in shaping such processes. As such, they contribute to our understanding of the role of literacy in processes of poverty reduction, and its importance to people's capabilities and wellbeing. The themes covered include: the dynamics of literacy use in the production of agency, the enactment, negotiation and embodiment of new social identities - including gendered and religious identities; the impacts of literate identities and use on institutional relations and social participation; the dynamics of literacy 'sharing' and their externalities within and beyond households; formal analysis of the impacts of proximate illiteracy on labour market and health outcomes across men and women and social contexts.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Development Studies.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literacy and Development: An Introduction and Review of the Field

KAUSHIK BASU, BRYAN MADDOX & ANNA ROBINSON-PANT

The concept of literacy has an important role in theories of social and human development. The development studies literature has consistently described illiteracy as a pervasive characteristic of poverty and human vulnerability, and literacy as a necessary component in poverty reduction and wellbeing. Illiteracy, as Amartya Sen has argued, is a ‘focal feature’ of capability deprivation and social injustice (Sen, 1999: 103). This argument is supported by an extensive literature which observes a strong correlation between literacy and other determinants of wellbeing such as income, women’s labour-force participation and health (Sen, 1999). The perceived importance of literacy in human development is illustrated by the central position of adult literacy rates in the Human Development Index and in wider measures of wellbeing. Despite this, there are a number of unresolved problems in the field of literacy studies. While literacy has an important evaluative position in theories of development, there is no ‘theory of literacy’ that can adequately capture and predict its complex role in processes of social change, and account for the role of literate (and illiterate) identities and practices in shaping social relations, capacities and aspirations. Such an understanding is however required if we are to make sense of the pervasive role of the literate in globalised material, institutional and bureaucratic cultures (Riles, 2006), in conceptions of schooling and citizenship, and in the analysis of inequality.

This edited collection attempts to develop new understandings of the relationship between literacy, identities and social change through a process of interdisciplinary dialogue. This locates the study of literacy beyond individual attributes, at the nexus of institutional and material practices and textual cultures, instrumentality, and the production of agency and identity. Drawing on both differences, and shared understandings of literacy and development in economics and anthropology, we build on what Jackson (2002) describes as the ‘creative tensions’ of interdisciplinary research. Disciplinary traditions in literacy research have largely developed in isolation. There are radical epistemological and theoretical differences in the way that economists and anthropologists view literacy and its relationship with wider aspects of development and human welfare. Tensions over ‘validity criteria’ and enumeration (Kanbur and Shaffer, 2007), contextual specificity and comparison, thick descriptions and thin generalities are not atypical of the wider difficulties encountered in mixing qualitative and quantitative research in development studies. Anthropological accounts typically view literacy as a set of social practices whose significance is revealed through contextually situated analysis (Gee, 2000). Ethnographic studies describe the complex interaction between literacy practices, textual politics and the formation and expression of personal and social identities. They question the construction of literacy as an individual state of being though an emphasis on the social mechanisms of collective practice and literacy mediation. Economists tend to take schooling participation rates as a proxy for literacy rates; ethnographers make a distinction between ‘schooled’ and informal literacies. The economic literature has yet to engage significantly with concepts of literacy as practice. The enumerative categories of ‘literate’ and ‘illiterate’ prevent deeper analysis of literacy practices and identities and their role in processes of development and change. Economic analysis appears to offer greater insights into questions of scale and distributional inequality, from intra-household levels to regional, national level analysis and international comparison, and explore relationships of correlation that are unavailable, or unacceptable, in ethnographic analysis (Hamilton, 2001). It is tempting, therefore, for ethnographers to view such differences as the inevitable outcomes of contrasting disciplinary orientations, and give in to what Kanbur and Riles describe as the ‘disciplinary urge [of anthropologists] to “critique” economic models, to expose their contingency or cultural specificity and demonstrate again and again that the “realities on the ground” are far more “complex” than such models would suggest’ (2004: 12). While this thesis offers certain attractions, it seems to impose unnecessary limits on the types of dialogue and collaboration that are required for further progress in the field of literacy and development.

Our response, then, is not to advocate disciplinary purity and isolation, but to explore the possibilities for dialogue and collaboration around mutual areas of interest. This offers scope to enrich and inform research agendas. The chapters in this volume discuss shared disciplinary concerns on themes such as literacy mediation, the implications and externalities that are shared between households and communities, and the significance of literacy practices and abilities in identity formation and social participation. They begin to map new terrain for research, for example on communities of practice and collective capabilities, on textually mediated entitlements and resources, and the externalities of literacy. The essays also suggest the need for a more substantial and sustained process of interdisciplinary research on the integration of a practice-based model of literacy in economics, and the socio-economic impacts and dynamics of literacy inequalities. Such collaboration seems to be necessary in order to resolve the existing difficulties in measurement, comparison and attribution, which are evident in the field of literacy and social policy.

Literacy and Anthropology

What does it mean for an individual to be literate? What part does literacy play in shaping a society? How do different cultural groups produce and engage with written texts?

Questions such as these lie behind many anthropological studies of literacy and continue to influence research on the relationship between literacy and social change. Recognising earlier anthropologists’ concern with the ‘great divide’ between traditional and modern ways of life, Goody and Watt (1968) suggested that this was due to the introduction of writing as a technology, causing a major historical change from a ‘nonliterate’ (or oral) to a ‘literate’ society. Writing acted as ‘“a technology of the intellect” (Goody, 1986) enabling individuals and cultures to expand the range of their activities’ (Goody, 1999: 31). Anthropologists documented the different ways that people used and processed information in oral as compared to written cultures, analysing the consequences of literacy for individuals in terms of the development of abstract thought (Ong, 1982), and for societies in relation to their more complex political and legal systems. Through ethnographic research on reading and writing texts in a variety of settings — not just inside educational institutions — this early work illuminated some distinctions between schooling (or education) and literacy, and offered methodological tools for researching reading, writing and oral texts in relation to different cultural groups (see Scribner and Cole, 1981).

The body of anthropological work now known as the ‘New Literacy Studies’ grew out of a critique of the research described above. Those researchers had drawn on an ‘autonomous’ model of literacy, Street (1984) argued, which

‘treated literacy in technical terms, as an independent variable that can be separated from social context. It is treated as ‘autonomous’ in the sense that it has its own characteristics, irrespective of the time and place in which it occurs and also in the sense that it has consequences for society and for cognition that can be derived from its distinctive and intrinsic character. (Street, 1999: 35).

In contrast to these assumptions about a single neutral literacy with universal consequences for individuals and society, the ‘ideological’ model of literacy recognised a continuum rather than a divide between literacy and illiteracy, between oral and literate societies, and drew researchers’ attention to multiple literacies and languages. Researchers within the New Literacy Studies — which Gee (2000: 180) saw as ‘one movement amongst many that took part in this social turn’ away from individualism and behaviourism — shared an approach to the study of literacy ‘not as a measurement of skills but as social practices that vary from one context to another’ (Street, 2008: 3). A major contribution of the New Literacy Studies over the past twenty years has been this ‘shifting away from literacy as an individual attribute’ (Barton and Hamilton, 2000: 13) and the exploration of how the ‘uses and meanings of literacy are always embedded in relations of power’ (Street, 1999: 37).

‘Literacy events’ (‘activities where literacy has a role’ (Barton and Hamilton, 2000: 8)) and ‘literacy practices’ (‘the particularity of cultural practices with which uses of reading and/or writing are associated in given contexts’ (Street, 1999: 38)) have remained central concepts in the New Literacy Studies, challenging researchers to analyse the relationship between written and oral texts and explore the relative dominance of certain literacies (particularly marginalisation of vernacular literacies in relation to ‘school’ literacy). Through research into literacy practices in everyday situations (for instance, Prinsloo and Breier’s (1996) account of taxi drivers and farm workers’ literacy practices in a South African township), in classrooms in schools, adult literacy programmes and universities, and development programmes, anthropologists have developed understanding of how literacy is viewed and practised in specific social contexts. These insights have focused not just on the differences, but also on the relationships, for instance, between ‘school’ literacy and ‘home’ literacy practices. By researching the perspectives of participants, planners and implementers of literacy and development programmes, terms such as ‘motivation’ and ‘drop out’ have been problematised. Methodological and theoretical innovation within this field of literacy studies has increased, partly due to the recognition of the need for multi-modal analysis in the ‘post print era’ (Brandt and Clinton, 2006: 256). Alongside ethnographic approaches, researchers conduct discourse analysis of texts, including cultural artefacts, photographs and computer media. Recognising the growing importance of different modes and new technologies, Street (2008: 13) calls for the development of an ‘ideological model of multimodality’ to avoid ‘mode or technical determinism’.

Many consider that the major contribution of the New Literacy Studies lies in the in-depth insights into literacies and literacy practices in local contexts, which had previously been overlooked by planners and researchers investigating the macro-level impact of literacy. However, this attention to documenting local literacies has also been regarded as a serious limitation — both in terms of the knowledge produced (the dangers of romanticising the local and that ‘it is impossible to describe local literacies without attention to global contexts’ (Pahl and Rowsell, 2006: 5)) and the difficulties of using such research to engage with policy and practice. Similarly, the emphasis on ‘the social’ within the New Literacy Studies has been criticised for understating the significance of individual agency and capabilities in the engagement with such literacy texts and practices, and in processes of individual and social change (Barton and Hamilton, 1998; Brandt and Clinton, 2006; Maddox, 2007b). The questions posed by policy makers around measuring the impact of literacy on various development indicators, particularly health and fertility, are rarely answered by the ethnographers whose agenda is to document, rather than evaluate, change.

Whilst policy makers have often conflated the effects of schooling and literacy, for instance, using literacy rates as a proxy for ‘education’, the New Literacy Studies has helped to clarify the distinctions between literacy practices in school and outside. However the New Literacy Studies’ resistance to reifying a universal ‘Literacy’ and valuing multiple literacies instead has presented the challenge of defining the distinction between ‘literacy’ and ‘knowledge’. The term ‘literacy’ has often been used in a largely metaphorical sense to mean any area of skill or knowledge, no longer necessarily related to reading, writing or decoding. Brandt and Clinton’s (2006: 256) plea ‘to bring the “thingness” [or material technology] of literacy into an ideological model’ has provided food for thought for many anthropologists in this field, as the chapters in this volume illustrate. They draw our attention to institutionalised practices of literacy, and how their scale and pervasiveness affect power-relations and social identities in multi-lingual and multi-literate environments (Collins and Blot, 2003).

These debates have particular significance for our attempts to strengthen and develop interdisciplinary dialogue between literacy researchers. The New Literacy Studies has already moved beyond anthropological studies of literacy in local communities to explore the methodological implications of researching development policy processes, multi-modal literacies and numeracies. From what could be seen as an initial ‘oppositional’ stance to the dominant discourse on literacy and development, researchers have now begun to look, for instance, at how the driving concept of ‘causality’ (does literacy have certain consequences?) could be replaced with that of ‘mediation’ and discursive ‘crossings’ (Pahl and Rowsell, 2006). The early focus on combining discourse or textual analysis with ethnographic approaches — the recognition that a text should be analysed in relation to how it is used — has led researchers to analyse in more depth ‘how literacy relates to more general issues of social theory regarding textuality, figured worlds, identity and power’ (Street, 2003: 13). Bartlett (2007) discusses how cultural artefacts can be analysed at two levels (the interpersonal and the intra-personal) in relation to identity. Her definition of identity as ‘an ongoing social process of self making in conjunction with others through interaction’ (Bartlett, 2007: 53) contrasts with the notions of a fixed and static identity, common within the dominant literacy and development paradigm.

Literacy and Economics

The economist’s interest in literacy is much more instrumental. It is literacy that provides the foundation for acquiring human capital, and human capital is, in turn, the mainspring of sustained economic growth and the enhancement of wellbeing. The arrival of new growth theories, with human capital as the pivot, has raised the status of literacy and education in mainstream economics (Romer, 1986; Lucas, 1988). With the economist’s interest in dynamics, what caught the attention of the profession was the fact that the impact of enhanced education of a person or a couple carries over from one generation to another. And conversely illiteracy and the lack of education can also go cascading down generations. Illiteracy in one generation means poverty for that generation, which in turn means an inability to educate the children, thereby giving rise to another generation of illiterate adults and the cycle is ready to be repeated, trapping a whole dynasty in low human capital (Galor and Zeira, 1993). There is evidence that the proneness to child labour (which in most situations is synonymous with child illiteracy) tends to run along dynasties. A detailed empirical study using Brazilian data shows that child labour, like a legacy, gets handed over from parents to their children (Emerson and Souza, 2003).

These are important directions of inquiry but they limit the value of literacy to that of an instrument. A small literature which tried to place literacy on a more central pedestal — as worth striving towards because of its innate worth, for what it is or does to us directly, by enriching our lives and enhancing our capabilities — began with Sen (1985), echoing prominent writers of the nineteenth century, notably, John Stuart Mill, and has grown in importance.

Given the significance of literacy, instrumental or otherwise, and the recognition that this is one area where human beings may not be able to judge the full worth of it to them...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literacy and Development: An Introduction and Review of the Field
• 2. 'Why Literacy Matters': Exploring A Policy Perspective on Literacies, Identities and Social Change
• 3. Literacy Sharing, Assortative Mating, or What? Labour Market Advantages and Proximate Illiteracy Revisited
• 4. Externality and Literacy: A Note
• 5. Literacies of Distinction: (Dis)Empowerment in Social Movements
• 6. Literacies and Discourses of Development Among the Rabaris of Kutch, India
• 7. Mail that Feeds the Family: Popular Correspondence and Official Literacy Campaigns
• 8. 'Making Things Happen': Literacy and Agency in Housing Struggles in South Africa
• 9. The Roots and the Growth of Women's Writing in a Peruvian Village
• 10. Literacy Partnerships: Access to Reading and Writing through Mediation
• 11. Models and Mechanisms: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives on Literacy and Development
• 12. Afterword
• Index