Love-letter Writing in Nepal Beginning with my years as a Peace Corps teacher in Nepal (1982–1986), throughout my dissertation fieldwork (1992– 1993), and during many subsequent follow-up trips to Nepal, I have always been fascinated by the ways in which literacy practices intersect with emotion, agency, gender, and social change (Ahearn 2001a, 2008). ? When I first arrived in the village of Junigau in the early 1980s, almost all boys were being sent to the local school for at least a few years, and almost all men could read and write in Nepali at a basic level, either from the formal schooling that they had received or from informal instruction that they had been given as Gurkha soldiers in the British or Indian Army. Among girls and women, however, the situation was very different. Most women in the village were illiterate, and only some families were sending their daughters to the local school. There were evening female literacy classes for teenage girls and married women, however, so by the 1990s most girls and women under the age of 30 or so had at least some ability to read and write. In my research on this “incipiently literate” community (cf. Besnier 1995), I was very interested to learn what would happen as girls and women acquired literacy skills. How would pre-existing social norms and cultural practices influence how these girls and women used their new skills, and how would the application of their new skills in turn potentially influence these broader norms and practices? What I discovered was that many young, newly literate women in Junigau in the 1990s chose to use their literacy skills in an unanticipated way – to engage in love-letter correspondences, many of which resulted in elopements. Since most marriages up until that time had been arranged by parents, this was a dramatic change. Because it was not considered appropriate for Junigau men and women to date or spend time alone together, love letters provided them with a way to keep in touch with their sweethearts (see Figure 8.1). They also prolonged courtships, enabling the participants to get to know each other better. Moreover, the mere sending and receiving of love letters marked someone as a particular kind of person – what villagers called a “developed" (bikāsi) as opposed to a “backward” (pichhyādi) individual, someone who was capable of creating a particular kind of companionate marriage with a “life friend.” Together, the two would try to create a future made brighter by love and by “life success." Some Examples of Situated Literacy Research The following researchers are some of the many who treat literacy as social practice, just as Baynham advocated. Individually and collectively, they have changed the way many scholars and on-the-ground educators understand social interactions surrounding written texts. Preschool Literacy Practices in the Southeastern United States Shirley Brice Heath's long-term ethnographic research in the 1960s and 1970s in the Piedmont Carolinas area in the southeastern United States resulted in one of the most important and widely cited articles on literacy practices, “What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School” (Heath 2001), originally published in Language in Society in 1982 and later expanded into a book, Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms (Heath 1983).6 Echoing the insights of scholars such as Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin, who were working on language socialization (see chapter 4) at around the same time, Heath applied the same approach to literacy practices, stating that “ways of taking from books are as much part of learned behavior as are ways of eating, sitting, playing games, and building houses” (Heath 2001:318). Heath therefore considered it essential for researchers to study the many different ways in which preschoolers and adults interacted surrounding written texts in order to understand how these different ways of being socialized into reading and writing had an influence on children's subsequent performance in school. Heath compared the ways in which parents “socialize their preschool children into a literacy orientation” (2001:323) in three communities: • Maintown. A mainly white "middle-class” community, in which Heath focused on the families of primary-level schoolteachers who had their own preschool children. • Roadville. “A white working-class community of families steeped in four generations in the life of the textile mill" (2001:325). • Trackton. “A working-class black community," whose older generations had worked as farmers on their own or others' land and whose younger generations had more recently found work in the textile mill (2001:325). Preschoolers in the three communities were introduced to, and socialized into, literacy in ways that differed substantially. The Maintown children Heath studied were encouraged to give attention to books almost from birth on. Their bedrooms often contained bookcases, and their parents read to them regularly, frequently pausing in their reading to ask simple questions about the pictures or story of a book. Adults also talked about books with their preschool children outside of the actual reading time, making links to stories they had read and encouraging their children “to suspend reality, to tell stories that are not true, to ascribe fiction-like features to everyday objects” (2001:321). Well before they entered formal schooling, Maintown children learned formulaic openings for stories and typical narrative tropes, which they used in their "Autonomous" vs. "Ideological” Approaches to Studying Literacy Literacy scholars have not always situated acts of reading and writing in terms of broader social and cultural practices in the way I advocate here. Indeed, some researchers and educators still espouse a view that considers literacy to be a neutral technology separate from any particular social context and entailing the identical social or cognitive results. A theoretical debate has been taking place as to how literacy should be defined and studied, and while most linguistic anthropologists consider the debate to have been resolved, it is instructive to review the main issues here, as they shed light on various scholars' and nonscholars' language ideologies regarding the nature of reading and writing. 5 On one side of the issue are scholars like Jack Goody, who was an early proponent of what Brian Street has called the “autonomous” model of literacy (Goody 1986, 2000; Goody and Watt 1963). Goody and other supporters of the autonomous model maintain that the advent of literacy in a society will cause the same social and psychological effects, no matter which society is being studied. These scholars “conceptualise literacy in technical terms, treating it as independent of social context, an autonomous variable whose consequences for society and cognition can be derived from its intrinsic character” (Street 1984:5). Walter Ong, another proponent of the autonomous model, asserts boldly that “without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations. In this sense, orality needs to produce and is destined to produce writing" (Ong 1982:14–15). Ong, Goody, and others who espouse the autonomous model see a “Great Divide” separating “oral” societies from “literate” ones a gap similar to the one turn-of-the-century anthropologists used to claim existed between “primitive” and “civilized” societies. Most linguistic anthropologists, including myself, find this approach to studying literacy untenable. Moreover, as we saw in chapter 5, scholars such as Scribner and Cole (1981) found no single, overall effect of illiteracy or different types of literacy among the Vai of Liberia but instead showed that each type of literacy was embedded in a set of very different social practices that led to different cognitive effects (1981:234). Opposing advocates of the “autonomous” model of literacy are those scholars, such as David Barton (Barton and Hamilton 1998; Barton et al. 2000), Keith Basso (1989[1974]), Mike Baynham (1995), Niko Besnier (1995), Jonathan Boyarin (1993), Tamar El-Or (2002), Ruth Finnegan (1988), James Paul Gee (2008), Mastin Prinsloo (Prinsloo and Baynham 2008), and Brian Street (1984, 1993, 2003) who favor an “ideological model for studying literacies. Besnier describes the goals of this approach as follows: “Rather than seeking an overarching and context-free characterization of the cognitive and social consequences of literacy, proponents of the ideological model focus on the activities, events, and ideological constructs associated with particular manifestations of literacy” (Besnier 1995:5). Scholars advocating this approach examine the specific ramifications of the advent of literacy in each society and claim that there are no universal attributes of so-called literate societies. Advocates of the ideological view of literacy maintain that it is impossible for literacy skills to be acquired neutrally. Many, in fact, speak of “literacies" instead of “literacy” because they want to emphasize the importance of studying the specificities of different literacies. Mike Baynham writes: ܕ Pema Kumari's Letter When Pema Kumari's marriage was arranged in 1988, she was in the ninth grade, the next-to-last year of high school in Nepal at the time. She and the other young women in her class, all of whom I taught when I was a Peace Corps teacher in their village, were by then the females with the most formal education in the village. The ideas to which Pema Kumari was exposed and the literacy skills that she gained at school turned out to be very influential because they helped her to transform a culturally acceptable practice in which arranged marriage brides were allowed to symbolically “resist” their marriages through ineffectual tears and verbal complaints into an action that was unique in the village's history. Upon learning that she had been given away in marriage, Pema Kumari retreated crying to the attic – the expected token resistance of a soon-to-be arranged-marriage bride. Once there, however, she composed a letter to her father threatening to have him put in jail if he made her go through with the marriage – an act unheard of in Junigau.3 Others who were there at the time recounted to me how Pema Kumari's father cried as he read the letter aloud to the assembled guests at the pre-wedding feast, after which he reportedly went upstairs to the attic and pleaded with his daughter not to throw away the family's honor. According to differing versions of the story, she either agreed to drop her threat to have her father jailed for marrying her off without her will, or her father proceeded without such an assurance. One woman maintains that it was her own reminders of the inauspiciousness of such actions that convinced Pema Kumari to relent. In any case, the wedding went forward on schedule. As a teenager, then, Pema Kumari was married to a man who was in the Indian Army. What no one told her at the time, fearing that she would become even more upset, was that he was about to be sent to fight in Sri Lanka. Within a year of her marriage, he was killed in battle there, and Pema Kumari was a widow. Recalling the scene at Pema Kumari's pre- wedding feast, many villagers remarked that she had brought her own bad luck (karma) upon herself by using her literacy skills to bring dishonor (beijjat) to her family. After the customary six months of mourning, Pema Kumari was unwilling to remain any longer in the extremely subservient role allotted to her as a widow in her husband's extended family home.4 She moved back to her parents' home and, without consulting either her parents or her in-laws, she informed the Headmaster that she would be returning to school. Pema Kumari subsequently passed the School Leaving Certificate exam and enrolled in classes at the Tansen campus of Tribuvan University. After she earned her bachelor's degree, she obtained a job in a bank. She continues to live alone in Tansen, supported by her salary and the generous pension provided to her by the Indian Army. Once a year on the anniversary of her husband's death she returns to her husband's home to perform rituals, but otherwise she has almost no contact with her in-laws and very little more with her own parents. Although Pema Kumari's "literacy event” – the writing of a letter of complaint to her father – did not succeed in preventing her arranged marriage from taking place, through a confluence of factors she did manage to use her literacy skills in a completely novel way, one that drew upon existing social practices that allowed arranged marriage brides to express opposition to their marriages. In the process, she challenged the practice of arranged marriage as no actions before ever Literacy Events vs. Literacy Practices Two useful concepts in the anthropological study of reading and writing are “literacy events” and “literacy practices." Shirley B. Heath straightforwardly defines "literacy events” as “occasions in which written language is integral to the nature of participants' interactions and their interpretive processes and strategies” (Heath 2001[1982]:319). The specific examples provided above that interweave orality and literacy are all examples of literacy events. The concept of "literacy event” stresses the situated nature of literacy – literacy events always take place in specific social contexts. Literacy events should not be studied in isolation from the social relations and cultural norms that prevail in a given society, however. As Heath notes, "literacy events have social interactional rules which regulate the type and amount of talk about what is written, and define ways in which oral language reinforces, denies, extends or sets aside the written material” (1983:386). To analyze these more general “rules" about the significance or interpretation of particular texts in the social contexts in which they are found, the concept of "literacy practice” is very useful. David Barton and Mary Hamilton define literacy practices as “the general cultural ways of utilising written language” (2000:7). They go on to contrast "literacy events" and "literacy practices” as follows: "Literacy events are activities where literacy has a role. Usually there is a written text, or texts, central to the activity, and there may be talk around the text. Events are observable episodes which arise from practices and are shaped by them” (2000:8). Literacy practices, unlike literacy events, are not specific, observable occurrences but rather general norms, routines, or habits regarding how written texts tend to be produced, interpreted, or discussed. Literacy events and practices must be studied together and must be situated within the overall context of social and cultural practices in general. “You can no more cut the literacy out of the overall social practice," James Gee writes, “or cut away the non-literacy parts from the literacy parts of the overall practice, than you can subtract the white squares from a chessboard and still have a chessboard” (Gee 2008:45). This relationship between literacy events and literacy practices is very much in keeping with the emphasis placed on practice from the very beginning of this book; indeed, "practice” was one of the four key terms defined in chapter 1. Just as specific social actions emerge from more general social practices and norms, then recursively loop around to either reinforce or reshape those very practices and norms, so too do literacy events arise from more general literacy practices, which are then either strengthened or reconfigured by those events. In other words, the distinction between literacy events and literacy practices is entirely compatible with practice theory and an approach that views all types of language use as forms of social action. As an example of how a specific literacy event can influence, and be influenced by, general social norms and literacy practices – culturally acceptable ways, in other words, of using reading and writing - here is a description of a literacy event from my fieldwork on literacy and marriage practices in Nepal in the 1980s and 1990s.2 Dame marilaattor
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