REVIEW ARTICLE Jill Brody LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY The New Literacy The Ethnography of Reading. Jonathan Boyarin, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.285 pp. Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy. Brian V. Street, ed. Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture, 23. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993.321 pp. Language and Literacy in Social Practice. Janet Maybin, ed. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1994.271 pp. Researching Language and Literacy in Social Context. David Graddol, Janet Maybin, and Barry Stierer, eds. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1993. 229 pp. Language, Literacy, and Learning in Educational Practice. Barry Stierer and Janet Maybin, eds. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1993.319 pp. Sociocultural Approaches to Language and Literacy: An Interactionist Perspective. Vera John-Steiner, Carolyn P. Panofsky, and Larry W. Smith, eds. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1994.402 pp. "New Literacy studies" is a burgeoning research area, currently receiving attention from a productive conjunction of scholars in education, anthropology, linguistics, and psychology. The general trend of the New Literacy Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6(l):96-104. Copyright © 19%, American Anthropological Association. The New Literacy 97 is to abandon the assumption of a fixed distinction between oral and literate societies and separation between spoken and written language, and to explore the relationship between orality and literacy in cultural context. The cross-disciplinary approach makes for a broad view of the range of considerations of literacy: from microethnographic, to deeply historical, to inclusion of nontextual modes. These six edited books contain a total of 85 articles, only one of which is repeated. Since it is impossible to give attention to all of the articles individually, I will give a brief overview of each book and then discuss some of the foundations, themes, approaches, and applications that are most interesting and important for linguistic anthropologists. The three Open University books (Graddol, Maybin, and Stierer, eds.; Maybin, ed.; and Stierer and Maybin, eds.) are part of a four-volume set for a course at the School of Education at The Open University (U.K.) called "Language and Literacy in Social Context." (The fourth, less relevant to print literacy, is Media Texts: Authors and Readers, edited by David Graddol and Oliver Boyd-Barrett). All but 6 of the 48 Open University articles have appeared elsewhere. The introductory material for each volume consists mostly of brief abstracts of the papers, and the editors provide no interpretation of the collections. Language and Literacy in Social Practice provides a general view of literacy as part of social practice, treating historical, cross-cultural and political perspectives on literacy as language in use, including ethnographic accounts from schools, homes, and cultural settings. This book could serve as a general reader for a course on literacy because of the inclusion of background and classic readings from Malinowski, Hymes, Halliday, Voloshinov, Heath, and Freire. While most selections are appropriate, others, such as that from Voloshinov, are rendered incomprehensible by decontextualization. Language, Literacy, and Learning in Educational Practice takes a more educational and psychological perspective, with historical readings from Vygotsky and Bruner. Where it addresses current educational trends, policies and projects in Great Britain, it becomes a venue for in-group battles between advocates of various factions. To the extent that authors stay close to the local issues without connecting them to broader phenomena, the usefulness of the work for scholars outside the United Kingdom is correspondingly limited. But as a case study of the application of a particular orientation to literacy in a particular situation, it is illuminating. Researching Language and Literacy in Social Context is oriented toward applying ethnographic approaches to classroom research. Three general papers introduce ethnographic theory, ethics, and methods. The rest of the book consists of papers that demonstrate the application of ethnography to a range of phenomena in a variety of classrooms. The combination of theory and application gives the volume a good balance. For linguistic anthropologists, the three most interesting collections are those edited by Street, by Boyarin, and by John-Steiner, Panofsky, and Smith, because they contain the most recent material, the most explicitly cross-cultural perspectives, and the more sophisticated theory. All three 98 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology are designed as collections of current research, although only the Boyarin and John-Steiner et al. volumes present all new material. Street's Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy collects studies of literacy in ethnographic and linguistic context that specifically address power relations. Street understands the nature of the relationship between literacy and power structures to be profoundly cultural. Power based in education, a dominant culture, religion, or gender affects literacy in such specific contexts as Papua New Guinea and Somalia, the Nukalaelae Islands, and Sierra Leone. Boyarin's The Ethnography of Reading takes a cross-cultural approach to literacy, addressing it specifically through the reading component. Taking reading broadly as textual interpretation, Boyarin brings together historical and ethnographic perspectives. Concentration on reading permits an understanding of how this aspect of literacy differs, for example, in a modern village in Indonesia, on the Kayasha Porno reservation, and at the beginning of the Christian era. John-Steiner, Panofsky, and Smith's Sociocultural Approaches to Language and Literacy applies a Vygotsky-based interactionist perspective to a variety of linguistic situations broadly construed. For the authors in this volume, interactionism means both the denial of dualisms such as subject/object or nature/culture, as well as an emphasis on the central role that social interaction plays in the process of development and social use of language. An important innovation of the contributions in this collection is the expansion of the concept of literacy to include understanding of how learning in general takes place. Foundations of the New Literacy: Ethnography, Ideology, Vygotsky A set of concepts foundational to the New Literacy crosscuts and interweaves the volumes. The universally used and acknowledged foundation is the ethnographic approach; exceptionally a few authors in Sociocultural Approaches use psychological experimentation on variation with control. A combination of a move toward qualitative analysis in education research with the recognition of a wide variety of types and uses of literacy crossculturally has resulted in a broad application of ethnographic investigations. Although ethnography has been carried out in classrooms for a long time, an ethnographic focus on literacy helps to open up the concept of what literacy involves. Taking an ethnographic perspective involves the explicit recognition of the importance of cultural context, both within and outside the classroom. The second foundation of the New Literacy is ideology, which is especially emphasized by Cross-Cultural Approaches but is also prevalent throughout the collections. Street explicitly contrasts the ideological approach with the autonomous view of literacy as a solitary activity. Consideration of ideology permits the understanding that learning to read and write and engaging in literacy activities is always mediated by power relations. In contrast to the paternalistic view of literacy (usually in a Western language) being imposed from the outside, ideologically based The New Literacy 99 views look at literacy from within a culture. This is a perspective where "rather than stress how literacy affects people, we want to take the opposite tack and examine how people affect literacy" (Kulick and Stroud, in CrossCultural Approaches, p. 31). The third New Literacy foundation represents substantive movement in theoretical orientation beyond the limitation imposed by the traditional distinction between oral/literate mindset taken in earlier influential work by Ong, Goody, and others. Vygotsky and (less often) Voloshinov/Bakhtin are the dominant theoretical touchstones for a social and functional view of language development and literacy. For Vygotsky, each individual's language development "originates in social interaction, and then language development and social interaction continue a mutually mediating and transforming relationship within the semiotic system of the given culture" (Smith, in Sociocultural Approaches, p. 43). Focus on the process of learning in interaction provides a means of investigating the way that learning proceeds. Without understanding the mechanics of the process of learning, all we have is the input of culturally based teaching skills—which, in the classroom at least, sometimes work and sometimes do not—and the results of actually learned material or behavior. Investigation of the process of learning affirms its fundamentally social nature. These three foundations are interactively interrelated: what the ideological perspective does for cross-cultural studies, the Vygotskian perspective does for development through revealing the crucial role of social interaction in learning; the ethnographic method and insistence on context provides the underpinning. When ethnographic method is allied to contemporary anthropological theory, emphasizing ideological and power processes and dynamic rather than static models, then it can be more sensitive to social context than either linguistics in general or discourse analysis in particular have tended to be. [Cross-Cultural Approaches, p. 161 Ethnography and Discourse Classroom ethnographies and the ethnography of speaking were the natural starting place for exploring the ethnography of literacy, but the modalities and situations recognized by the New Literacy push the boundaries of contextual features as traditionally viewed. Discourse analysis as developed in linguistic anthropology has been adopted—often without overt recognition—as being appropriate to the concentration on text and talk that is central to examination of literacy. The close attention to the culturally and structurally contextualized nature of language that discourse analysis offers has nourished literacy studies. The scope of New Literacy has widened beyond the classroom, and the orientation toward the classroom itself in New Literacy studies is different. Within classrooms, the focus is no longer on the teacher's decontextualized actions, the goals 100 Journal of linguistic Anthropology of the school administration, or what in general is supposed to be going on. Ethnographic observation of the full range of classroom activities is analyzed in terms of its implications for literacy. One of the things that actually happens in classrooms is that students talk about and comment on each other's work, even though they are not officially supposed to. Dyson's examination of this "off-task talk" (in Language, Literacy, and Learning) shows that it plays an important role in the development of students' writing. Consideration of literacy use among adults provides a link between the ideals of the classroom and the actualities of the real world. Ethnographic investigation of the everyday writing activities of British working-class adults (Barton and Padmore, in Researching Language and Literacy) and of middle-class women's reading groups in Houston (Long, in Ethnography of Reading), gives access to an understanding of how literacy operates in daily lives. Exploration of "exotic" cross-cultural settings of literacy is another contribution of the anthropological perspective; most education scholars have preferred domestic venues. Looking at non-Western literacies and the imposition of Western literacies on non-Western cultures—whether through colonialization or immigration—gives a very different perspective on the phenomenon. Historical "layerings of literacy, orality and practice" (Digges and Rappaport, Ethnography of Reading, p. 145) characterize many colonial settings where different participants have very different understandings of literacy, which are frequently motivated by ideology, as discussed below. Taking into account the history of literacy as social practice permits not only a better understanding of what reading and writing have meant in the past but also a clearer view of continuing literacy traditions. J. Boyarin's discussion of his participation in Bible study at a yeshiva on New York's Lower East Side is the direct modern continuation of the historical study of Bible reading in ancient Israel and medieval Europe documented by his brother, D. Boyarin (both in Ethnography of Reading). Another welcome result of ethnographic discourse approaches is the attention to word and meaning. The notion that meaning consists of information residing in the text, requiring only literacy in order to interpret it correctly is challenged by the New Literacy. Investigating meaning in historical context provides direct evidence about the process of literacy development, a methodology far preferable to previous speculations and projections from a limited ethnographic present. History of religions of the Book, which have specially cultivated relations with literacy, reveals ways both meaning of language and use of literacy take distinctive configurations in particular places at particular times. The continuity of tradition for biblical Hebrew is documented by D. Boyarin and J. Boyarin (see above), and the Christian literacy tradition receives treatment from Noakes and from Howe (in Ethnography of Reading). Uniform concepts of meaning conveyed by reading and writing are particularly challenged by the way that literacy in Arabic takes on qualities of secretiveness in non-Arabiospeaking Muslim regions. Koranic reading is part of Muslim religious The New Literacy 101 practice, although the Kalaodi Tidorese speakers of the eastern Indonesian village of Kalaodi do not understand Arabic (Baker, op. cat). For the Kalaodi, the koranic readings have a powerful indexical meaning, which is concentrated in the spiritually powerful names of religious figures, whose true names remain secret and hidden. The primacy of indexical meaning for the Kalaodi is not confined to the religious realm but constitutes a basic component of their understanding of the revealed and hidden aspects of meaning. For Mende Muslims in Sierra Leone, Arabic literacy specialists have secret powerful and sometimes dangerous knowledge that they are reluctant to reveal even to their students (Bledsoe and Robey, in Cross-Cultural Approaches). In the early part of the 20th century, the Yoruba Aladura religious movement developed in response to the pressures of colonialism and missionization (Probst, op cit.). The prophet Oshitelu of the Aladura movement received through visions a sacred script, "a book open, written in strange arabic language" (Turner 1967, quoted in Probst, p. 206), which took secrecy to the extreme, in that he alone could interpret it. Oshitelu's script intermediates between Bible reading and the "unwritten words of God" in the continuum of Aladura spirituality. It is not surprising that religious traditions locate meaning, define literacy, and use reading and writing in culturally specific fashions. The particular forms that literacy and its use take, however, force a reanalysis of literacy itself. Ideology Power relations are inextricably part of literacy, which has everywhere and through time represented authority, with restriction of access to literacy as a time-honored tool of repression. Recent investigations have revealed details of some of the historical processes involved in literacy and power and something of the range of cross-cultural variants that this power dynamic can take, including the religious dimensions mentioned above. The subtleties of the larger process are revealed in societies and classrooms, and most refreshingly the types of resistance against repression are also brought out. The goal of empowerment in the New Literacy studies echoes Friere's classic (viz. passage in Language and Literacy in Social Practice) methodologies for empowerment. The New literacy consists of those strategies in the teaching of reading and writing which attempt to shift the control of literacy from the teacher to the student; literacy is promoted in such programs as a social process with language that can from the very beginning extend the student's range of meaning and connection. [Willinsky, in Language, Literacy, and Learning, p. 6] One dimension of literacy in relation to power is women's access to education. Each volume includes one or two articles that deal with gender issues or that are concerned with data collected primarily from girls or women. The single repeated article across the six volumes is Rockhiirs (in Cross-Cultural Approaches and Language and Literacy) examination of gender issues and Hispanic women's literacy. The fact that this article was selected 102 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology by two editors testifies to its high quality, to the importance of considering gender issues in literacy, and to the relative scarcity of work in this area. It is not surprising to hear yet again that girls are treated differently at school, that adult women face particular challenges in becoming literate, and that women's literacy activities are ignored. Swann (in Language, Literacy, and Learning) classifies the educational attempts at establishing gender equality into "the anti-sexist tradition; a liberal response evident in the early stages of development of English in the national [UK] curriculum; and what might be termed a 'pro-female' response" (p. 117), concluding that "what girls really n e e d . . . is not simply support in what they are already up to but also the provision of alternative strategies for resistance" (p. 185). It turns out that girls have developed some resistance strategies on their own, through nonauthorized vernacular writing either on their own (Camitta, in CrossCultural Approaches), writing collaboratively with other girls (Shuman, op. cit), or using a speaking style in which turns are constructed collaboratively (Coates, in Researching Language and Literacy). Certainly girls are going to need every bit of resistance that they can muster, since even the most "progressive" educational innovations, such as "oracy" are subverted by teachers' inclinations to offer boys more opportunities to speak (Swann and Graddol, op. cit.) and by boys' inclinations to dominate (Fisher, op. cit). An additional contribution of the focus on gender issues is the illumination of otherwise hidden aspects of literacy. Long (in Ethnography of Reading) presents a challenge to the deeply ingrained Western concept of the isolated reader and solitary writer, a strongly held misconception that she illustrates with classical paintings and disproves through her investigation of women's reading groups. Horton (op. cit.) reveals the pivotal role of women in the historical development of Japanese writing in adaptation from Chinese, and in the spread of literacy through novels written by women. Challenges to adult women learning literacy spring from uniquely cultural sources: Rockhill (in Cross-Cultural Approaches and Language and Literacy) identifies Hispanic women's struggle in relation to sex role divisions in Hispanic culture, while recognition of different cultural learning styles (a Hmong woman observed, "Women learn like animals. Men study in their heads." [p. 331 in Sodocultural Approaches]) allowed Collingnon to adapt methods of teaching traditional embroidery of paj ntaubritualtextile art to facilitate Hmong women's learning to read. More work needs to be done on the question of literacy as a means for women's progress internationally. As mentioned above, exploration of multiethnic and multicultural dimensions of diversity shed similarly revealing light on the use and application of the ideology of literacy. Nowhere is the role of culture and ideology more powerfully and poignantly captured than in Sams's essay (in Ethnography of Reading) on the problematic attempts of outsiders to create "culturally relevant" readings for students on the Kashaya Porno Indian reservation by the appropriation of the sacred and dangerous figure of Slug Woman. The New Literacy 103 Vygotsky Highly influential in the field of education, Vygotsky's work has achieved buzzword status in the education literature. Vygotsky is the thematic source for all the authors in Sociocultural Approaches and for many of the New Literacy researchers, whether he is explicitly cited or not. Important concepts within the Vygotskian social learning framework are the zone of proximal development, mediation, appropriation, and scaffolding. A child's learning process importantly includes potential development that can be seen only in the child's interaction with others who have completed a stage of learning. The evidence of potential for learning is Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, where a child can perform a task with the guidance of others, but not yet by herself. The framework provided by the more knowledgeable teacher or peer is the scaffold, or external support, which assists the learner to accomplish the task. The child engages with the scaffold through the process of mediation in order to make the concept or task her own, that is, to appropriate it. Mediation involves "those means which become tools for thought, those means and practices which, through social interaction, become internalized and thus available for independent activity" (Sociocultural Approaches, p. 140). Vygotsky emphasizes the highly social nature of literacy in general and of learning to read and write in particular. The role of peers in the social development of literacy can be seen in the "off-task talk" engaged in by U.S. elementary school children (Dyson, in Language, Literacy, and Learning), and the collaborative peer talk among British middle school children (Maybin, in Researching Language and Literacy) to scaffold their learning to read and write. An implication for teaching literacy that arises from these findings is that formerly sanctioned social activities in the classroom actually contribute to learning and can be incorporated into educational practice. Taking the learning process as a point of departure, acquisition of literacy-related tasks begins before literacy-related activities can even be attempted, suggesting implications for eventually learning to read and write. Caregivers scaffold through "socializing attention" both verbally and nonverbally (Zukow-Golding and Ferko; McNeill, McCullough, and Tyrone; in Sociocultural Approaches) in ways which are culturally crafted. Early book-reading is also a scaffolding activity (Panofsky, op. cit), and in some communities, parents may need need assistance in learning to read to their children (Edwards and Garcia, op. cit). Schools can offer training to parents to enable them to prepare their children for reading. Vygotskian applications in New Literacy create the opportunity to investigate the ways that particular types of literacy, for example, in a second language (Shonerd; Collingnon; op. cit.) or for law school (Minnis, op. cit.) are scaffolded and appropriated in culturally specific fashions. Viewing literacy within the larger "interactionist" approach to language developed in Sociocultural Approaches expands the concept of literacy to include a wide range of types of learning. A major crossover is the recognition that other sensory modes, such as gesture for signers (Wilcox, op. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 104 cit.) and stitching for Hmong women (Collingnon, op. cit) are learned similarly and that transfer between modes is an important form of learning. The detailed ethnographic consideration of the social processes involved in learning a mathematical concept (Cordeiro, op. cit.) or to read in a second language (Ramirez, op. cit.) reveal the profoundly cultural nature of scaffolding. Conclusions As for other semiotic issues, the metarefractions of the phenomenon of literacy provide multiple challenges for investigators. For the New literacy, the push has been to broaden the scope of analysis beyond exclusive focus on texts through reading and writing, to view the classroom in new ways, and to look beyond the classroom into the home and the community for literacy-related activities. Cross-cultural investigations expand the range of phenomena recognized as literacy-related and also acknowledge the importance of local cultural contexts. The New Literacy offers so many challenges to the basic notions of literacy that it seems remarkable that the traditional concept has been so enduring. What the expanded vision most forcefully brings out is the complexity of literacy and the myriad ways it can be used for a wide variety of human purposes. The pairing of ethnographic methodology with Vygotsky's emphasis on interaction is a natural one, with a shared focus on context and the importance of social relations. The impetus for emphasizing social interaction comes from educators and psychologists whose attention is concentrated on learning and is also appropriate since literacy so obviously must be learned. Ethnography provides the means for investigating this complex interactional phenomenon, the opportunity to explore learning of other sorts and in other modes, and the inclination to move beyond the interior of Western classrooms. But there are also new ways of looking at literacy in the classroom. Once seen as the "natural environment" for literacy transmission and as the major if not unique site for literacy pedagogy, the classroom is now recognized to be a place where varied activities, some literacy-oriented, take place. The New Literacy interprets activities outside the classroom as integrated with larger cultural and ideological values. Just as investigation in the Vygotskian mode opens up traditional concepts of literacy, it also assembles a wider sweep of behaviors together into more profound understanding of socially learned patterned communication.