Literacies of Distinction: (Dis)Empowerment in Social Movements

Abstract

Social movements often organise activities around the use of written forms. Yet these literacy events and practices have received little attention for the roles they play in effecting social, cultural and political change. In this article we argue that literacy activities should be analysed for their centrality to the formation of new identities, for their inclusionary/exclusionary effects and for their power to imagine and evoke liberatory worlds. We apply these concepts to an ethnographic study of women's activism in Nepal in the early 1990s, a time when female students, preparing for the annual women's Tij festival, were first beginning to use their literacy skills to record the Tij songs they were creating and copying from newly available Tij songbooks. In our multi-year study of the festival, we found that these new literacy practices, especially their ties to the epistemology of the newly popular political songs, were inadvertently introducing a social distinction that empowered ‘educated’ women at the expense of their ‘uneducated’ sisters. Examination of this case illustrates processes of social division brought about by literacy practices and helps explain how contingent, historical developments, such as social movements, can powerfully shape the relationship between literacy and identity.

Acknowledgements

A version of this article was presented as a plenary lecture at the conference ‘Literacies, Identity and Social Change’ organised by the Literacy and Development research Group at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, in April 2006. Thanks to organisers and participants in the conference, especially Brian Maddox and Anna Robinson-Pant, for their support and feedback on an earlier draft. Two anonymous reviewers offered valuable suggestions for clarifying and otherwise improving the paper. Our thanks as always when we write about our Nepal research go to the people who were part of the study and to G.B. Adhikari, a Nepali anthropologist, and Sapana Sharma who served as research associates.

Notes

1. Cultural constructions of the educated person and the relationship of literacy skills to being educated vary historically and from place to place (Levinson and Holland 1996). For comparison to the cultural model we describe in this paper, see Bartlett and Holland's (2002) and Bartlett's (2005, 2007) account of the ‘figured world of the educated person’ as practised in certain areas of Brazil.

2. Many studies indicate the significance of culturally specific constructions of literacy. Robinson-Pant (2001), for example, in her ethnographic study of two literacy programmes in Nepal, addresses questions about the links between women's literacy and development. Her work highlights the necessity of understanding the meanings and uses of literacy as construed by participants in literacy programmes. She describes participants' expectations about the consequences of acquiring certain forms of literacy including how newly literate graduates expect their social identities to change and analyses the significance of these expectations for students' participation and orientation to the class.

3. Brian Street is a key theorist and practitioner of a social studies of literacy referred to as ‘new literacy studies’. More recent concepts such as multiple literacies and multiliteracies (Bartlett, 2007) are addressed to aspects of literacy and ‘new literacy studies’ not discussed in this paper.

4. Naudada (a pseudonym), at the time of the study, was an eight-hour bus ride to the west of Kathmandu. It took another two hours of walking to reach the centre of Naudada from the road. In the ethnographic terminology used for Nepal, Naudada is a mixed caste, predominantly Hindu area. ‘Mixed caste’ distinguishes it in the literature from those areas in Nepal where one of Nepal's many ethnic groups (for example, Sherpa, Tamang, Gurung, Magar) predominates. ‘Hindu’ signals the importance of caste and Hinduism in the everyday lives of the people of the area.

5. For more description of Tij and analysis of this complex case, see Holland and Skinner (1995a, b).

6. One complexity that must be omitted due to space pertains to caste. The Tij festival is associated with the more highly positioned Hindu castes in Naudada, the Bahun and Chetri. We found that while Damai (considered ‘untouchable’) and Newar (a middle caste group) women composed Tij songs, they did not attempt to sing them in public.

7. Elsewhere, we have argued that cultural artefacts are essential to identity formation and to everyday identity work (Holland et al., 1998; Bartlett and Holland, 2002; Skinner et al., 2001; see also Bartlett 2005, 2007). Leander (2002), in discussing the cultural worlds of the classroom, calls these ‘identity artefacts’. He focuses on social identification, showing how students and the teacher employ identity artefacts to ‘stabilise’ a particular interpretation of one student.

8. The girls and young women in the Tij groups, particularly the 8–12 core members, referred and related to each other according to kinship ties, usually glossed by the terms, didi– older sister – and bahini– younger sister. The terms are also used in greeting and speaking to females to whom one wants to show affiliation and respect regardless of kinship ties.

9. We use ‘Pro-Democracy Struggle’ instead of the usual ‘Democracy Movement’ in order to help the reader recall that we are discussing two different movements. The Pro-Democracy Struggle intersected with the women's movement, but was not the same.

10. Some were procured from male songwriters – males had more freedom to travel and so were able to observe political events and they were more likely to be literate. They could obtain material for the songs by reading about political events. It is interesting that the Nepali woman referred to by Robinson-Pant (Robinson-Pant, 2008, this issue) said she was as good as literate. She was unusual for a woman in that she had travelled widely.

11. In Naudada, women's groups organised by political affiliation were as yet nascent. Both educated and uneducated women took part in the women's procession that marched through Naudada around the time of the 1991 election. The Tij group formed of female students in Naudada on Tij Day in 1991 was new; the rest of the groups were mixed and sang both dukha songs and rajniti songs. Groups in Pokhara and some of the other regional centres where we sent researchers tended to sing one type of song more-or-less exclusively, the older and presumably less educated women singing dukha songs while the younger women sang mostly rajniti songs in groups differentiated by political party. In Naudada, groups and individuals sang both dukha and rajniti songs, with no apparent argument that one or the other should be abandoned.

12. Copying rajniti songs from the songbook made sense, of course, given that books were considered good sources of news for political events and that songbooks were considered to be books.