On distributed literacy: textually mediated politics in colonial Canada

Abstract

This article proposes the concept “distributed literacy” in order to move beyond the still common preoccupation in educational history and sociology with literacy as a technical capacity and attribute of individuals. Invoking the concept involves an appeal to a conceptual move and an analytic strategy that are well established in other branches of enquiry. The article begins by introducing the concept and then provides a sketch of its application in the case of the British North American colony of Lower Canada (the southern part of the current Canadian Province of Quebec) in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Its empirical materials are found in the correspondence files of the main state information agency, the Civil Secretary's Office, with a focus on issues of schooling and local government in the 1820s and 1830s.

Keywords:

• distributed literacy
• Lower Canada
• state papers

Notes

¹ Research for this paper was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I wish to thank Daniel Braun, Steven Rowe and Robyn Smith for help in elaborating the argument.

² Edwin Hutchins, “How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds,” Cognitive Science 19 (1995): 265–88; also Ronald N. Giere and Barton Moffatt, “Distributed Cognition: Where the Cognitive and the Social Merge,” Social Studies of Science 33, no. 2 (2003): 301–10.

³ See for instance, Steven Shapin, “Invisible Technicians: Masters, Servants, and the Making of Experimental Knowledge,” in A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth‐Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 355–407.

⁴ Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Michel Callon, “Writing and (Re)Writing Devices as Tools for Managing Complexity,” in Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, edited by John Law and Annemarie Mol (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 191–217; Bruno Latour, “Mixing Humans and Non‐Humans Together: The Sociology of a Door‐Closer,” Social Problems 35 (1988): 298–310.

⁵ Helen E. Longino, The Fate of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

⁶ Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

⁷ Frederick Cooper and Rogers Brubaker, “Beyond ‘Identity’,” Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1–47.

⁸ Dorothy Smith, The Conceptual Practices of Power (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); id., “Texts and the Ontology of Organizations and Institutions,” Cultures, Organizations, and Societies 7, no. 2 (2001): 159–98; id., Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).

⁹ Jean Lave, “The Values of Quantification,” in Power, Action and Belief. A New Sociology of Knowledge?, ed. John Law (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 88–111.

¹⁰ An excellent recent Canadian example is that of Jacques Demers, a professional ice‐hockey coach (including of the 1993 Stanley Cup champion Montreal Canadiens) and television analyst, none of whose associates or subordinates knew that he could not read and write.

¹¹ Shirley Brice Heath, Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Brian Street, “What's ‘new’ in New Literacy Studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice,” Current Issues in Comparative Education 5, no.2 (2003): 1–14.

¹² Inês Signorini, “Literacy and Legitimacy: Unschooled Councilmen in Legislative Sessions,” Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998): 373–91.

¹³ Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin et al. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 16–49.

¹⁴ His output is huge; among others, Roger Chartier, Le livre en révolutions. Entretiens avec Jean LeBrun (Paris: Les éditions Textuel, 1997); Lectures et lecteurs dans la France d'Ancien Régime (Paris: Seuil, 1987); “The practical impact of writing,” in A History of Private Life, vol. III: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. R. Chartier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 111–65; Chartier, ed., Pratiques de la lecture (Paris: Payot et Rivages, 1993). Not focusing on the capacities of individuals, but instead attending to the field, encourages thinking about the infrastructural conditions of literacy practices. Flooding the field with rich and variegated textual and symbolic resources that are cheaply available (as in the case of Indian health pamphlets) may be a more effective strategy in literacy education, for instance, than attempting to train individuals to engage with set texts.

¹⁵ For general background, see Allan Greer, Peasant, Lord and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes, 1740–1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985).

¹⁶ Alexis de Tocqueville, Voyages en Sicile et aux Etats‐Unis, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. J.‐P. Mayer. 4th ed., vol. V, pt.1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1957).

¹⁷ On the mercantilist model, François Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Lire et écrire. L'alphabétisation des français de Calvin à Jules Ferry, vol. 1 (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977), 73–7.

¹⁸ Richard Chabot, Le curé de campagne et la contestation locale au Québec de 1791 aux troubles de 1837–1838 (Montréal: Hurtubise HMH Ltée.), 1975.

¹⁹ Compare Antonia McManus, The Irish Hedge School and Its Books, 1695–1831 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002).

²⁰ Thus among the first and the continuing efforts at public education were the organisation of colonial agricultural societies. It was a common complaint of English members that habitants would not read agricultural tracts; they needed the practical demonstration of model farms.

²¹ Library and Archives Canada (LAC) RG4 A1 334, de Lery Boucherville to Yorke, 26 August 1830; “the works were auctioned off to the lowest bidder”; but it is the act of calling out or “crier” that is the boundary object here.

²² LAC RG4 A1 332, Peasley to Yorke, 5 August 1830.

²³ For more on the protagonists and struggles in St Eustache, see Gilles Laporte, Patriotes et Loyaux. Leadership régional et mobilisation politique en 1837 et 1838 (Québec: Les éditions du Septentrion, 2004).

²⁴ The circulation is partly an artefact of my empirical source – the correspondence of the colonial Civil Secretary's office – the main administrative agency of the relatively undeveloped colonial state system. Yet circulating and annotated texts are common in other areas of practice, as S. Rowe has shown with respect to French working‐class groups; see Steven Rowe, “Learning Literacy in 19th‐Century France: Practices and Appropriations” (paper presented at the Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting. London, Ontario, 2005).

²⁵ LAC RG4 A1 403, de Bellefeuille to Aylmer, 22 February 1833; 405, Scott to Craig, 16 March 1833; Scott to Aylmer, 23 March 1833; 406, de Bellefeuille to Aylmer, 3 April 1833; Scott to Craig, 8 April 1833.

²⁶ Included in LAC RG4 A1 321, Boyce to Yorke, 5 May 1830.

²⁷ LAC RG4 A1 440, Blondin to Craig, 19 October 1834; 442, Dion to Craig, 24 November 1834; 444, Blondin [as parents] to Craig, 19 December 1834.

²⁸ A typical example is LAC RG4 A1 436, residents, Bécancour, to Aylmer, 9 August 1834.

²⁹ For instance, LAC RG4 B30 85, Ottawa County School Return, 20 June 1833. The same argument can be made with regard to the delegation of practices of numeracy; see Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

³⁰ Montreal Herald (22 January 1835). There is a play on words, since the derisory term for the English used by French‐speakers was “les têtes carrées”, square heads or blockheads, and M. Carreau's name would translate as “Mr Square [head]”.

³¹ Musée de la Civilisation, Fonds du Séminaire de Québec, Polygraphie 3. n.71, Ellice to Howick [copy], 24 July 1836.

³² The best accounts are: Elinor Senior, Redcoats and Rebels: The Rebellions in Lower Canada, 1837–38 (Ottawa: Canada's Wings, 1985). Allan Greer, The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Lower Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).