Abstract
This article analyzes a set of handwritten documents produced by a
Burundese asylum seeker in Belgium. The documents are instances of
“grassroots writing”: their authorship is collective, and
they display considerable problems with “remembering.” They
are also rather typical text-artifacts of globalization processes, in
which literacy products from one part of the world meet literacy
expectations from another part. Two general points are derived from the
analysis. (i) The function of documents such as these is not
“reading,” but rather a complex of reading, viewing, and
decoding. The documents are at least partially visual bearers
of information. Such functions need to be investigated
ethnographically. (ii) The reason for this is the fact that the
production and reception of such documents has to be set against the
background of widely different economies of literacy. Consequently, the
differences between text production and text reception are grounded in
worldwide patterns of inequality. This casts doubt on a number of
popular theses about the nature
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Sociology and Political Science,Language and Linguistics
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