The Ethnography of Reading

by Boyarin, Jonathan

• ISBN13: 9780520081338
• ISBN10: 0520081331
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-09-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr on Demand

Summary

Writing, the subject of much innovative scholarship in recent years, is only half of what we call literacy. The other half, reading, now finally receives its due in these groundbreaking essays by a distinguished group of anthropologists and literary scholars. The essays move well beyond the simple rubric of "literacy" in its traditional sense of evolutionary advancement from oral to written communication. Some investigate reading in exotically cross-cultural contexts. Some analyze the long historical transformation of reading in the West from a collective, oral practice to the private, silent one it is today, while others demonstrate that in certain Western contexts reading is still very much a social activity. The reading situations described here range from Anglo-Saxon England to contemporary Indonesia, from ancient Israel to a Kashaya Pomo Indian reservation. Filled with insights that erase the line between orality and textuality, this collection will attract a broad readership in anthropology, literature, history, and philosophy, as well as in religious, gender, and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

Loud Cows	vii
Ursula K. Leguin
Introduction	1	(9)
Jonathan Boyarin
Placing Reading: Ancient Israel and Medieval Europe	10	(28)
Daniel Boyarin
Gracious Words: Luke's Jesus and the Reading of Sacred Poetry at the Beginning of the Christian Era	38	(20)
Susan Noakes
The Cultural Construction of Reading in Anglo-Saxon England	58	(22)
Nicholas Howe
Keep Listening: Ethnography and Reading	80	(18)
Johannes Fabian
The Presence of the Name: Reading Scripture in an Indonesian Village	98	(41)
James N. Baker
Literacy, Orality, and Ritual Practice in Highland Colombia	139	(17)
Diana Digges
Joanne Rappaport
Japanese Spirit and Chinese Learning: Scribes and Storytellers in Pre-modern Japan	156	(24)
H. Mack Horton
Textual Interpretation as Collective Action	180	(32)
Elizabeth Long
Voices Around the Text: The Ethnography of Reading at Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem	212	(26)
Jonathan Boyarin
Keeping Slug Woman Alive: The Challenge of Reading in a Reservation Classroom	238	(32)
Greg Sarris
Afterword	270	(7)
Brian Stock
Index	277