Introduction: texts, power and identity -- The literary thesis: vexed questions of rationality, development, and self -- Situated approaches to the literacy debate -- Literacies and power in modern nation states: EuroAmerican lessons -- Literacies and identity formation: American cases -- Literacy, power and identity: colonial legacies and indigenous transformations -- Conclusion: Literacy lessons: beginnings, ends, and implications.
Summary
"Literacy and Literacies offers a unique, comprehensive survey of both classical and current (mainly anthropological) literature in the field of literacy studies, combined with in-depth critical discussion of particular cases. It explores questions of power, cultural form, and historical process as they are raised by and developed in studies of literacy, and draws on the history of literacy, critical education studies, and the anthropology of literacy, to develop a new synthesis."--Jacket
