Authority, Performance, and Interpretation in Religious Reading: Critical Issues of Intercultural Communication and Multiple Literacies

Abstract

This paper addresses two critical issues related to language and literacy. The first is the need to better appreciate how literacy practices and values, whether shared, complementary or disparate, mediate intercultural contact, communication, and conflict. The second issue is how to theorize using new models of what literacy is in an age of multiple literacies and increasingly global communication. From a multiple literacies and new genre perspective, readers give meaning to texts in culturally and historical embedded literacy practices. Focusing on the under-researched area of religious literacy practices, I seek to show how the oral performance of texts and their interpretation by textual communities constitute enactments of textual authority. Using the related frameworks of activity, genre, and critical discourse theories, I examine literacy practices in their sociohistorical contexts. Examples of religious reading practices and stances are drawn primarily from Orthodox Jewish reading practices, which recognize unique authority in the words of the Hebrew Bible, and which practice norms of textual interpretation and performance that are unique to that textual community. Religious reading practices highlight the repertoire of reading genres, strategies, and stances that members of modern multicultural societies learn to control. Because multiple reading traditions define communities, personal identities and power relations, it is critical that researchers and policy-makers avoid the danger of imposing one secularist model of reading on all reading activities, or one set of dominant reading stances on all cultural groups.