„Papierkram ist so wichtig!“: Literalisierungsprozesse innerhalb bürokratischer Kontexte in Benin und Bolivien

Abstract

AbstractIn both Bolivia and Benin, the state presumes that citizens can navigate its bureaucracy even if it does not provide them with the requisite literacy skills. However, bureaucratic procedures are highly characterised by literacy and digital literacy and people with little or no literacy require alternative strategies to manage them. This article contributes to debates on (il)literacy and bureaucracy studies by looking at the learning practices of persons with little or no literacy competence in La Paz and El Alto, Bolivia, and Parakou, Benin. It investigates their ways of coping with such bureaucratic requirements and especially how they manage to acquire specific literacy abilities in order to complete procedures. Our conclusions are based on empirical data obtained through various kinds of interviews and participant observation that we carried out during more than 12 months of fieldwork.Our article shows how participants have independently acquired literacy competence on their own to achieve their goals and resolve highly relevant issues. For them, literacy is not so much an end in itself but a means of dealing with the state. During bureaucratic procedures, concurrent processes of illiteracising and literacising, as well as processes of learning and unlearning literacy, take place. We conceptualise and amplify the notion of this learning and unlearning with the terms “literacising” and “illiteracising” as processual and relational. Thus, we interpret literacising in the context and during the experience of bureaucracy as an instrument through which individuals try to affect, cope with and control bureaucratic procedures.