‘Making Things Happen’: Literacy and Agency in Housing Struggles in South Africa

Abstract

While ethnographies of literacy have played an important role in the shift towards understandings of literacy as situated social practice, these understandings have not necessarily impacted on day-to-day development work. This article draws on data collected during two periods of ethnographic work on the literacy practices of participants in grassroots social movements engaging in struggles around housing in South Africa. In this focus on the quotidian tactics of the participants in such projects, mundane everyday texts (like hand-written lists, memos, bank cheques, plans, invoices and so on) were central to the carrying across and projecting of meanings into new contexts and important in the construction of agency for individuals (in the cases reported here, for three individual women). Through the use of multi-site, micro-ethnographic methods, a language of description was developed for identifying, reconstructing and analysing the sequences of events through which people acted to change their living conditions and make things happen. However, recontextualisation and projection of meanings did not require literate individuals, nor did it always require alphabetical texts; it could be accomplished by groups in which literacy was viewed as a distributed capacity or it could be carefully mediated by development workers with a focus on capacities rather than deficits, it could draw on a wider range of mediational means like physical occupations of sites, or building extensions. The research showed that a lack of attention in organisational procedures to the detailed politics of recontextualisation and projection of meanings in such trajectories indicated the reification of literacy and its use as a marker of status and stratification. On the other hand, when careful attention was paid to this detail, literacy became naturalised, as a pragmatics of engagement in textually-mediated practices, less implicated in gate-keeping and conflict. Some studies in the critical discourse tradition in a range of fields have explored ‘chains of discourse’ and make claims that discourse is recontextualised and resemiotised as it travels through contexts, tending towards legitimacy and authority, and this in turn leads to permanence and stability in infrastructures and environments. The article argues that in contexts of extreme poverty, conflict and lack of resources, such uni-directionality cannot be assumed.

Notes

1. Literacy events can be defined as any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of the particpants' interactions and their interpretative processes (Heath, 1983); ‘event’ is a bounded series of actions and reactions that people make in response to each other and in which reading and/or writing are implicated. The concept of literacy practices is ‘pitched at a higher level of abstraction and refers to both behaviour and the social and cultural conceptualisations that give meaning to the uses of reading and/or writing. Literacy practices incorporate not only ‘literacy events’ as empirical occasions to which literacy is integral, but also folk models of those events and the ideological preconceptions that underpin them’ (Street, 1995: 2).

2. This research project was undertaken while the author was at the University of Cape Town and was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers' Fund.

3. All names used in the second study are pseudonyms.

4. In choosing this term I draw on the work of Goffman (1981: 10) but, also differ from the way in which he defines and uses the term as ‘any arbitrary slice or cut from the stream of ongoing activity … as seen from the perspective of those subjectively involved in sustaining an interest in them. A strip is not meant to reflect a natural division made by the subjects of enquiry or an analytical division made by students who enquire’. As explained below, my use of this term is etic. I do not argue that the strips identified are perceived from the perspective of those involved in the stream of activity but, uses the term as a heuristic to demarcate slices within the stream of activity for the purposes of analysis.

5. I preferred to use a term that was less value-laden than ‘community’ (even though I was initially influenced by the work of Wenger on communities of practice) and that had more resonance with linguistic anthropology. I therefore settled on the concept of participant framework (Goodwin, 1990), which I situated within the activity system, as representing the relation between the actor, their object and the immediate social grouping which interacted with the actor in the efforts to achieve the object.

6. I am therefore applying Engestrom's heuristic at a micro-level.

7. It also encompasses material rather than discursive artefacts (like building materials) and tools.

8. These are rather like what Brandt and Clinton (2002: 348) called ‘globalising connects’. A more modest version can be seen in the moment when the bookkeepers signed the cheque for MamaSolani to take to the building supply shop to order her materials. The amount filled in on the cheque indexed interminable earlier processes around fixing subsidy levels, these particular bookkeepers had been elected to replace earlier ones who had been accused of corruption, the cheque itself was indexed at the national bank, the name of the national association (HASSOC) was on the cheque, and so on.

9. This referred to earlier housing policy arrangements under what was called the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) where subsidies were paid out to private developers who then built such small houses that they were called matchboxes or toilets.

10. The bookkeeper was an informally elected and untrained member of Khayalethu who undertook to write out cheques and try to keep track of expenditure.