Anthropology of Writing: Understanding Textually-Mediated Worlds

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The Anthropology of Writing

Also available from Continuum Discourses of Endangerment, Alexandre Duchene and Monica Heller Rethinking Idiomaticity: A Usage-based Approach, Stefanie Wulff

The Anthropology of Writing Understanding Textually Mediated Worlds

Edited by David Barton and Uta Papen

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © David Barton and Uta Papen 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. David Barton and Uta Papen have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

9781441108852 (hardcover)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

Contents

List of Contributors Preface

vii ix

Part I: The Anthropology of Writing: Writing as Social and Cultural Practice Chapter One

What Is the Anthropology of Writing? David Barton and Uta Papen

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Chapter Two

Writing Acts: When Writing Is Doing Béatrice Fraenkel

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Part II: Writing in the Workplace – Institutional Demands Chapter Three Updating a Biomedical Database: Writing, Reading and Invisible Contribution David Pontille Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Eruptions of Interruptions: Managing Tensions between Writing and Other Tasks in a Textualized Childcare Workplace Karin Tusting Tracing Cows: Practical and Administrative Logics in Tension? Nathalie Joly

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67

90

Part III: Writing by Individuals and Institutions Chapter Six

Vernacular Writing on the Web David Barton

Chapter Seven Keeping a Notebook in Rural Mali: A Practice in the Making Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye

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126

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Chapter Eight

Contents

Writing in Healthcare Contexts: Patients, Power and Medical Knowledge Uta Papen

145

Part IV: Historical Perspectives Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Edwardian Postcards: Illuminating Ordinary Writing Julia Gillen and Nigel Hall

169

Lawful and Unlawful Writings in Lyon in the Seventeenth Century Anne Béroujon

190

Chapter Eleven Sexuality in Black and White: Instructions to Write and Scientia Sexualis in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century 214 Philippe Artières Afterword Brian Street Index

226 233

List of Contributors

Philippe Artières, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. David Barton, Lancaster University. Anne Béroujon, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Béatrice Fraenkel, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Julia Gillen, Lancaster University. Nigel Hall, Manchester Metropolitan University. Nathalie Joly, AgrosupDijon/French National Institute for Agronomic Research UR, 718. Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Uta Papen, Lancaster University. David Pontille, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Brian Street, King’s College, London. Karin Tusting, Lancaster University.

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Preface

This is a book about the study of writing from a cultural and social perspective. Writing is of course not a new topic of research. Neither is the understanding of writing as a social practice a new idea. What is referred to Literacy Studies or New Literacy Studies (NLS) is nowadays a well established tradition of research developed in Britain and North America, but drawn on and further developed by researchers in many other countries and regions. Writing research, as much as other academic study, however, tends to develop within more or less closely connected research communities. Such communities, as valuable as they are, can also limit the degree of intellectual stimulation and development that is possible. As scholars, we tend to like the familiarity gained from working within a known field or discourse. But we also feel the need to extend our knowledge and ideas beyond that of those whose work we know and frequently refer to. Language, however, more often than not limits our ability to experience research from other countries and traditions. Academic communities are in part a result of language differences and the limited ability we all have to read books and articles in languages not our own. The present book has two aims. First, it seeks to broaden the focus of (New) Literacy Studies by reframing it as the anthropology of writing. Secondly, it intends to break some boundaries that result from linguistic differences and from the tendency to stay within one’s known field of experience. It brings together two research traditions on writing: the Anthropology of Writing developed in France, and the (New) Literacy Studies, originating in Britain and North America. Over the past 25 years, the French and the British traditions have evolved separately with different theoretical and disciplinary traditions, and there has been little exchange of expertise and cross-referencing of work done within the other tradition. Francophone research on writing is virtually unknown in Britain and Northern America and Anglophone researchers

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Preface

are barely known in the Francophone world. Beginning in 2006, a dialogue between researchers from both countries began to develop. The present book is one amongst other outcomes of this collaboration. Its main goal is to foster such dialogue and to open up the work by French researchers to the English-speaking public. As the editors of the book, working with colleagues from France and French-speaking Canada has been a fascinating discovery for us offering much intellectual stimulation, which we would like to share with others. The French tradition of writing research is similar enough to allow for mutual understanding. Yet it is also sufficiently different from our work to offer us many opportunities for learning. Bringing these two traditions together, the present publication is intended to allow readers not only to explore the similarities in both academic traditions, but to compare cross-culturally and historically the role of writing in different societies. The idea for this book was born prior to a visit of five French researchers to Lancaster in 2008. Initial contacts between the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre, home of the editors and the English colleagues present in the book, and French researchers of writing, go back to a summer school on literacy practices that the Literacy Research Centre organized in 2006 and which was attended by one of the French researchers. In the following year, in June 2007, the French research group ‘Anthropology of Writing’ at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, organized a conference ‘Ecriture et literacy: the constitution of a research field in Great Britain and France’. The two editors of this book presented their work at this conference. It was shortly after this visit that we first began to play with the idea of the publication of Francophone and Anglophone works on literacy. Our ideas became much more concrete in the months prior to a one day meeting on ‘Ethnographies of Literacy: an Anglo-French dialogue’ organized by the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre in May 2008. This meeting was organized under the auspices of the Linguistic Ethnography Forum, a Special Interest Group of the British Association of Applied Linguistics. Five members of the Anthropology of Writing research group took part in the event. Papers presented at the meeting provided the initial drafts for the chapters in this book. In the months after this event, these papers were revised and translated into French. We are grateful to the British Association of Applied Linguistics and Lancaster University for the support they provided to the meeting. We are particularly grateful

Preface

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to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Lancaster University and to the Yves Hervouet Fund for supporting the translation of four French papers for this book. Funding from the British Council, as part of its ‘Alliance FrancoBritish Partnership’ programme allowed a series of visits between the British and French contributors, leading to discussions which provided the groundwork for the presentation of both traditions in Chapter One of this book. The funding also enabled doctoral students from both sides to present their work to the two groups. Collaboration between the Literacy Research Centre and the ‘Anthropology of Writing’ group is ongoing. A further publication, a special issue of the French journal Langage et Société is in preparation, containing articles by British researchers. This book would not have been written had it not been for the enthusiasm and energy of the group of people who became contributors of this volume. We shared with them many stimulating discussions and debates. We would particularly like to thank Mary Hamilton, Carmen Lee, Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, David Pontille and Karin Tusting for their comments on Chapter One. We also need to thank the two translators, Karin Vincent-Jones and Mike Hanson, for their excellent translations of the four chapters that were originally written in French. Our special thanks go to Jessica Abrahams, the research administrator of the Literacy Research Centre, whose many – often invisible – contributions to our work too often remains unacknowledged. David Barton Uta Papen


Part I

The Anthropology of Writing: Writing as Social and Cultural Practice


Chapter One

What Is the Anthropology of Writing? David Barton and Uta Papen

Introduction Writing is an everyday communicative practice which pervades our lives, at individual as well as societal level. Given the omnipresence of the written word, research into the role of written language in everyday communication is at the heart of understanding contemporary forms of social interaction, between institutions and communities as well as between individuals. A range of new technologies have led people to develop extensive new writing practices. These new ways of writing are central to how we work and live, to how governments communicate and how economies operate. Thus, writing research is essential for understanding contemporary life and contemporary institutions. The present book brings together two substantial research traditions on writing: the Anthropology of Writing, developed largely in France, and the (New) Literacy Studies, originating mainly in Britain, North America and other English speaking countries. For the past decades, these two traditions have developed separately from each other within different theoretical and disciplinary traditions, and there has been little exchange of expertise and cross-referencing of work. With notable exceptions, francophone research on writing is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world and anglophone researchers are little known in the francophone world. The present book aims to change this and to open up a dialogue between these two strands of writing researching. Its 11 chapters offer examples of current research and provide insights into prominent themes and key theoretical concepts of writing research in franco- and anglophone contexts. In this first chapter, we set the scene for the remaining sections. We start with an introduction to the study of writing and its link to different disciplines, particularly anthropology. This is followed by a discussion of what we mean when we

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talk about the anthropology of writing. In the third and fourth sections of this chapter, we introduce the anglo- and francophone research traditions. The perspective is comparative, identifying similarities and differences in theory and research in both contexts.

The Study of Writing within Anthropology and Other Disciplines We are participating in broad cultural shifts in the nature of knowledge and the nature of communication. Writing is crucial to these and its role is changing. We live in a textually mediated world where writing is central to society, its cultural practices and institutions. Writing also plays a major part in people’s everyday activities, be it at home or at work. Writing is an appropriate topic for anthropological scrutiny: It was created by people and is passed on culturally; it has symbolic value and material aspects; and it is crucial to interaction between people and central to knowledge creation. However, traditional anthropology had little interest in the study of writing and written texts. The reason for this is simple. When the discipline of anthropology was born, its eyes were firmly fixed on the ‘exotic’ or the cultural ‘other’. In most cases this ‘other’ was a society that did not rely on writing for communication. Anthropologists studied oral cultures. The ‘texts’ they examined were oral genres such as songs, poems and incantations. In British anthropology of the classical structural-functionalist period, as Barber (2007) points out, even these locally produced oral texts were mostly treated as ‘data’ to provide insights into the beliefs and morals of a group of people. Hardly ever were anthropologists interested in these oral texts as themselves located in cultural practices. The focus in American anthropology was also on traditional oral cultures within the Americas. By defining the other as ‘oral’ cultures, writing implicitly, and later explicitly (in the work of Goody, 1977), provided the dividing line between the researcher and the researched. Anthropologists of the early to mid-twentieth century usually studied societies in isolation without making relation to the complexity of the global relations they were part of. They hardly acknowledged the (mostly) colonial links which enabled them to be present in these societies and in fact sometimes to contribute to bringing new practices, including writing, to these societies.

What Is the Anthropology of Writing?

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Writing was something which belonged to the anthropologists and they did not turn their gaze upon themselves and their own writing. In contemporary anthropology, much of this has changed. Key turning points were the demise of colonial regimes from the 1950s onwards and later the publication of Clifford and Marcus’ ‘Writing culture’ (1986) and the responses to it (such as Behar & Gordon, 1996; James, Hockey & Dawson, 1997). Since then anthropology has moved away from a sole focus on the exotic and turned its gaze towards the researchers’ own societies. With anthropology no longer necessarily being an anthropology of the other, writing has become part of what constitutes the discipline’s subject matter. To understand contemporary Western cultures, writing and written texts can hardly be ignored. We live, as sociologist Dorothy Smith (1999) has suggested in a ‘textually mediated social world’. But writing has also become a common tool of communication in societies that were previously oral and which are part of the ‘exotic’ world that classical anthropology studied. Thus writing, as the subject of enquiry, should be regarded as a cross-cultural and global phenomenon. Examining written texts is essential for understanding how societies operate and are organized, how institutions communicate with the public, how work is being done, how individuals and social groups organize their lives and make sense of their experiences and how cultures in all their variations are produced and reproduced. It has been observed that much contemporary social change brings with it an increasing ‘textualisation’ of social interaction (as in Iedema & Scheeres, 2003). This is, for example, the case of many workplaces and workrelated policies such as the move towards global structures of quality control in manufacturing (Folinsbee, 2004). Cultures of work and production therefore have changed and the increased use of written texts is a central element of these transitions. Writing is also more and more prominently used in private and leisure-oriented contexts, where the growing availability of digital technologies allows more and more people to create social bonds and affinity groups (Gee, 2004) often focussing around specific interests, such as video games. Such networks rely on writing as their primary mode of communication, although as the studies in this book will show, this writing is located in multimodal meaning making. These and other studies show that written texts are central to culture, understood here in a broad sense.

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The case for studying writing from an anthropological perspective thus is compelling. As both a key cultural practice and a product of culture itself, writing is certainly explored in many anthropological works. Nevertheless, there have only been a few studies where writing has been a central concern for contemporary anthropologists, such as the studies in Behar and Gordon (1996). Anthropologists have rarely used literacy as an entry point or as a lens to study broader cultural phenomena. This, however, is what in our view constitutes the anthropology of writing. We will return to this in the next subsection. As one approach, the field of linguistic anthropology, as framed in Duranti (1997, chapter 1), brings anthropological approaches to address language issues. Linguistic anthropology has focussed attention on themes such as participation, indexicality and performance, but largely in relation to spoken language. The researchers’ focus here has been on spoken interaction; writing has been seen as something which researchers do and has not been subject to academic scrutiny. Frequently, literacy is dealt with primarily in relation to learning (as in BaquedanoLópez, 2004) and the general cultural uses and meaning of literacy are not addressed. However, other work such as Foley (1997) and Duranti (2001) provide a broader view, arguing for the study of literacy practices to be an integral part of anthropological linguistics. A further reason explaining the marginal role of writing as a field of research within anthropology is that literacy has always been an interdisciplinary field of research. Whilst some key researchers are anthropologists, much research on writing is also done by linguists, literary theorists, historians, education researchers, sociologists and psychologists, often drawing upon ethnographic methods derived from anthropology, but not identifying themselves as anthropologists. Even where anthropologists are amongst those studying writing, as literacy researchers they are more likely to be affiliated to interdisciplinary teams of researchers or to the disciplines of linguistics or education rather than working with anthropology as their primary frame of reference. What is the anthropology of writing? In the previous section, we have made the case for studying writing as a central aspect of culture and society. In doing so, we have argued for the need to develop an anthropology of writing. What, however, is this


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Anthropology of Writing and what makes it specific and distinguishable from other research on writing? We begin to address this question by looking at the variety of approaches to the study of literacy that exist and how they relate to what we are doing in the present book. There is growing interest in written language across disciplines. To some extent these areas are converging and an anthropological approach, although different from some of these perspectives, builds upon them and puts them in a broader context. A major strand of research within linguistics is the discourse analysis of texts (Fairclough, 2003; Wodak & Krzyzanowski, 2008) where the focus is on the role of language in the reproduction and transformation of social processes and structures. Compared to this approach, an anthropological perspective on writing, as the chapters in this book illustrate, goes beyond analysing the products of writing, that is, the texts that writers produce. Its core interest is to examine the processes of production and use of texts. A second strand of research on writing is informed by a literary perspective. This research is focussed on highly visible and valued pieces of writing, primarily the work of novelists. The focus is on the texts and increasingly the practices of producing and using them, providing a history of books and of literary reading. Examples of this important strand of research include Altick (1957); Boyarin (1993); Eliot and Rose (2007) and Colclough (2007). Allied to this are studies of the book as a cultural object (as in Finkelstein & McCleery, 2002), again focussing primarily but not exclusively on literary production. The Anthropology of Writing includes research of a different kind. As the chapters contained in this book show, we do not privilege literary forms of writing and we have broad notions of authorship and creativity (as in Pontille, 2004, and Papen & Tusting, 2008). Furthermore, the studies in this book examine everyday acts of writing and their significance in relation to private life and to work. Such writing may at times appear to be mundane and routine. But it is central to how societies operate and to the ways individuals relate to each other and to institutions. Examples discussed in the book include writing in areas such as farming, photosharing, childcare work and healthcare. As a third approach, writing is often studied by historians. Many historical studies of writing share a great deal with studies of contemporary cultures of written texts. There are studies tracing the historical development of practices around texts, such as those by Cressy (1980)

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and Clanchy (1993). Historians of culture approach the study of writing from a similar perspective to researchers studying writing in contemporary societies. Both share the interest in the role of writing in specific social and cultural contexts and the focus on a variety of genres and practices. In France, the work of Roger Chartier, discussed below, is particularly important and it is widely drawn on by those researching contemporary writing. There are three chapters on historical writing practices included in Part IV of the present book. Finally, writing is of course studied from an educational perspective. As noted above, writing is often viewed in terms of only learning and education. This has been as true of anthropological approaches to writing as of other disciplines, and issues of learning provided the framing for a key early call for the study of writing to take a broader view (Szwed, 1981). The field of literacy education, populated by psychologists, education researchers, linguists and others, examines how writing is taught and learned, what forms of texts are valued by educational institutions and what writing skills children and adults need as members of their communities and societies. From an anthropological point of view, the forms and structures of literacy education are an object of study in themselves. However, they are not at the centre of what the anthropology of writing aims to achieve. Generally speaking, we are interested in writing as ‘more than skills’ (Papen, 2005). We focus on writing as an activity or as something people do. What people do with written texts does of course relate to the abilities they have. But the focus here is not on measuring people’s skills levels and we study writing in a great variety of social and cultural contexts beyond education. Accepting the importance of this body of studies on writing outside education, Baynham (2004) examines how ethnographers of literacy can re-engage with education. In summary, we can see that various approaches to the study of writing exist, all of which to greater or lesser extent overlap with the perspective we present here and which we will define now. Primarily, an anthropological perspective on writing means to examine writing as both cultural and social practice. Anthropologists define culture as the ‘abilities, notions and forms of behaviour persons have acquired as members of society’ (Eriksen, 2001: 3). Culture refers to those aspects of humanity that are not natural but which are created. Writing certainly is part of culture understood in this way. Culture is closely related to society, and anthropology has always concerned itself with both the


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cultural and the social. Society is everything that has to do with how humans interact and organize their life. We may want to say that society is the space, physical as well as mental, within which culture ‘lives’. It is through individuals’ participation in social life, through their interaction with others and their relationship to others and to institutions, that culture emerges and is played out. Drawing on the association of culture with society, the anthropology of writing can then be defined as the comparative study of writing as social and cultural practice. The idea of writing as an activity and studying what people do with texts is central to our approach. As such, writing is always located within specific social and cultural contexts. Studying writing means examining how different social and institutional contexts generate and shape specific forms of writing. This includes understanding what functions these texts serve and how different actors appropriate and make sense of them. But writing is not only social, it also relates to culture. In order to understand how writing and written texts are used by different people in different contexts, we need to examine the values, beliefs and behaviours that are associated with different forms of writing. This is where analysis of the social and the cultural merge. Finally, the anthropology of writing is defined by its methodology. In order to understand writing as social and cultural practice, we need research tools allowing us to explore the activity and contexts of writing and the meaning their users, readers and writers, bring to these. Our methods are ethnographic and, in some cases, historical. They have in common an emphasis on the users and producers of texts and on the ways they engage with the broader social practices and discourses their actions are part of. Historical studies, while obviously relying on a different set of methods, adopt a similar perspective and provide insights into people’s practices. In moving from researching only the other to including our own culture, ethnographic approaches have developed alongside other qualitative approaches to provide more explicit methodologies (Heath & Street, 2008) and to address issues of research methods common to all the social sciences (as in Silverman, 2004; Denzin & Lincoln, 2008; Davies, 2007). One of the main principles of ethnography, as Latour and Woolgar (1986: 279) point out, is that ‘the anthropologist does not know the nature of the society under study, nor where to draw the boundaries between the realms of technical, social, scientific, natural and so on . . . We retain from ethnography the working principle of uncertainty rather than the

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notion of exoticism.’ This is also important for the anthropology of writing. We do not presume that we know the kind of writing practices that are used in the communities we study. In the following section, we carry on to define the anthropology of writing by looking at its scope of inquiry.

The scope of the anthropology of writing An anthropological gaze on writing includes all forms and types of writing practices. It covers a variety of areas of social and institutional life. As the chapters in this book illustrate, such a gaze goes beyond known genres and established views of what constitutes writing and what writing has authority in specific contexts. We look at forms of writing that are incipient and ordinary, often invisible and hardly known, frequently ignored or mistakenly taken for irrelevant. Several of the chapters in this book examine what could be called ‘ordinary’ (Lyons, 2007) or ‘vernacular’ (Barton, 2007) forms of writing. Vernacular, in our understanding, may be ‘ordinary’ in the sense of being mundane and routine. It may be incidental and not recognized as valid and valuable by dominant institutions of society. But ordinary writing is not necessarily associated with the writing of the poor and the uneducated. It is not necessarily a sign of an ‘incomplete or transitional literacy’, as Lyons (2007: 29) defines it. Highly educated people produce ordinary types of writing and something that is routine and incidental does not necessarily neglect standard spelling and grammar. Vernacular writings may contrast with formal genres less because of an inadequate mastery of correct writing by those who engage with it but because of the nature of communication and social interaction in the given context. Ordinary or not, the types of texts that the chapters in this book examine are all discussed in relation to events and practices that whilst being part of people’s ‘ordinary’ life, are often related to broad, complex and at times extraordinary social events. These are discussed in relation to issues that are at the heart of contemporary anthropology: knowledge and power, identity, social change and the interface between local and global spaces. These broader dimensions reveal the significance of acts of writing or writing practices (for explanations of these two phrases see further below) in relation to individual people’s lives as much as they shed light on wider processes of social and cultural change.


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Having discussed the nature and scope of the anthropology of writing, the two following sections provide an overview of anglo- and francophone research on writing.

The Anglophone Tradition of Literacy Studies Research In the past 30 years, the anglophone field of (new) literacy studies has developed and built up a range of studies of the role of reading and writing in society. Its inspiration has been multidisciplinary but it is strongly influenced by anthropological traditions, particularly in the way that its methodology has been primarily ethnographic. In the United States, a key foundation of literacy studies was the work of Shirley Brice Heath (1983) researching the disjuncture between family and school ways of using language and literacy in Appalachian communities in the United States. This research can be located as part of a broader tradition of using anthropological approaches to understanding social aspects of language identified with the work of Dell Hymes and his associates in the early 1970s, with a call to ‘reinvent anthropology’, partly by making ethnographic approaches central (Hymes, 1972; 1982). This work was crucial in the development of the fields of sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication. These areas focussed largely on spoken language but they provided a strong influence on the field of literacy studies, as it developed in the AngloAmerican context. Early on, Basso (1974) referred to the ethnography of writing. Heath’s use of the concept of ‘literacy event’ became central to literacy studies and was partly developed in parallel to the idea of the sociolinguistic notion of ‘speech event’. The other key idea for literacy studies alongside literacy events is that of literacy practices, that reading and writing are located in social practices. Applying the term practices to literacy has its roots in the work of the anthropologist Brian Street researching in Iran (1984) and the cultural psychologists Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole’s studies in Liberia (1981). Taken together, the terms event and practice are key units of analysis which link theory and methodology and which have proved useful in understanding reading and writing. Literacy practices refer to the general cultural ways of using reading and writing and a literacy event is a particular instance of people drawing upon their cultural knowledge (Barton, 2007: 35–37). Researchers identify particular

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configurations of literacy practices in different contexts which can then be referred to as different literacies. The notion of event becomes an empirical phenomenon, providing a starting point for analysing interactions (Papen, 2005). The concept has proved useful in research in different domains of life, although research has also identified the complexity of events nested within events and chains of events linked together (Barton & Hamilton, 2005; Kell, 2005). The concept of literacy practices provides a way of bringing in broader cultural and structural aspects and linking to issues of power. Practices can be seen as more theoretical, providing regularities and patterns which are abstracted from particular events (Barton, 2007). There have now been a wide range of studies identifying the distinct literacies in different domains of life, including studies of everyday life (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Gregory & Williams, 2000), multilingual contexts (Perez, 1998; Martin-Jones & Jones, 2000); religion (Kapitske, 1995) and workplaces (Gowen, 1992; Hull, 1997; Belfiore et al., 2004). Work covers a range of cultures including Street’s work in Iran (1993); Besnier’s in Tuvalu (1995), Ahearn’s study of the writing of love letters in western Nepal (2001); a set of studies in South Africa (Prinsloo & Breier, 1996). There have been studies of indigenous literacies in the Americas (Boone & Mignolo, 1994), including the place of writing in an indigenous community in Ecuador (Wogan, 2004) and a study of scribes and their clients in Mexico (Kalman, 1999). Vernacular texts and practices have been studied in Central Africa (Blommaert, 2008) and in Namibia (Papen, 2007). Work has also begun to unpack the dynamics of different literacies within any specific context (as in Ivanic et al., 2009, in relation to education). One repeated finding from literacy studies research has been the importance of other people in a person’s literacy practices. Barton and Hamilton (1998), for instance, have shown the importance of networks of support. Other research has referred to the scribes, mentors, brokers and mediators of literacy practices (see Malan, 1996; Baynham & Masing, 2000; articles in Baynham & Prinsloo, 2009) and the significance of groups, whether they be communities of practice or affinity groups (Barton & Tusting, 2005). Deborah Brandt (1998, 2009) refers to sponsors: she talks of the role of individuals and institutions acting as sponsors of literacy practices and as supporters and facilitators for people. Institutional sponsors can include businesses, governments and religions. Such sponsors support specific views of the nature of reading


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and writing and advocate on behalf of these views. The detailed work of literacy studies also shows the ways in which written texts are detachable from the social situation that originally produced them or from the place where they were first used (Blommaert, 2008). Written documents are constantly being reused and recontextualized and they move between physical places and social spaces. Texts therefore need to be studied in terms of what they are beyond a specific moment of use, beyond a specific ‘literacy event’ or ‘writing act’. They need to be studied in context and ‘in place’ (as in Scollon & Scollon, 2003) while also considering the fact that these contexts and spaces vary, multiply and overlap. Researchers in literacy studies have realized that in order to understand the role of writing in relation to culture they need to bring in broader framings of other socio-cultural theories. When linking to broader socio-cultural frameworks, two areas of research which have been drawn upon in Anglo-American research on writing are work on communities of practice (as in Barton & Tusting, 2005) and Actor Network Theory (ANT) (e.g. Brandt & Clinton, 2002; Clarke, 2002; Hamilton, 2009; Leander & Loworn, 2006, as well as French researchers discussed below). Interestingly, the originators of both these approaches identify the roots of their work to be in anthropology and the theories they developed to be based upon detailed ethnographic data (Lave, 1988; Wenger, 1998; Latour & Woolgar, 1986). We would also argue that both communities of practices researchers and ANT researchers put written language as central, even if they don’t make this explicit. Both of these approaches talk of stable entities which are portable across contexts: Wenger talks of ‘reifications’ as a crucial aspect of communities of practice (1998: 58–60) and, similarly, Latour talks of ‘immutable mobiles’ which can be used to coordinate action across distances (1987: 227–229). Although in both cases they provide details of a wide range of semiotic resources, most of their examples, and the ones they examine in detail, are in fact literacy related. (See Barton & Hamilton, 2005: 25–31 for more on this.) Researchers with similar frameworks in other disciplines are also contributing, as with the institutional ethnography of sociologist Dorothy Smith which draws upon feminist theory (1990, 2005) using concepts such as embodied knowledge. Elsewhere she details ways of bringing texts into ethnographic research (Smith, 2006). Linguist Graham Smart has examined the role of texts in financial institutions drawing on notions of discourses and genres (Smart, 2006). Bourdieu’s work has also been drawn upon in literacy studies,

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where researchers have utilized concepts including habitus, field, cultural capital and symbolic activity; see, for example, the studies in Williams and Zengler (2007), Purcell-Gates (2007), and Albright and Luke (2008), and also the study by Collins and Slembrouck (2007). Literacy studies can also be located in the broader developing field of linguistic ethnography in Britain which includes literacy as a key topic (Rampton, Maybin & Tusting, 2007; Creese, 2008; Maybin & Tusting, 2010). Other researchers locate the study of writing within multimodal meaning making (such as Kress & van Leeuven, 1996; Jewitt, 2009), and we do not cover the extensive literature on literacy and education here. One final anthropological approach has been the work of Jack Goody, an influential British anthropologist who has written extensively about literacy and other topics, arguing that there is a ‘great divide’ between oral and literate both at the level of cultures and of individuals (Goody, 1977). A critique of this thesis from the point of view of literacy studies has been made in detail by Street (1984), Gee (1996), Barton and Hamilton (1996) and others. The strong rejection of the claim of a great divide between literate and non-literate people and cultures has been central to the development of the field of literacy studies. An empirical ethnographic approach has been crucial in demonstrating, for example, that people who cannot read and write and people with low levels of literacy nevertheless participate in complex literacy practices (as in Reder, 1994, and as some of the studies in Prinsloo & Breier, 1996, amongst others, show). Literacy does not in itself have effects, but is located in practices as Collins and Blot (2003) work through in detail in relation to Goody’s work. They show the changes in Goody’s thinking over time, so that for instance in Goody (2000) the notion of technology is broadened and seems to include social practices (see Collins & Blot, 2003: 169–170), but they remain unconvinced that Goody’s more recent work takes account of the empirical evidence of literacy studies research. More recently, Olson and Cole (2006) have brought together a re-evaluation of Goody’s work, looking more broadly at his contribution and we return to the importance of Goody’s influence when discussing francophone research.

Francophone Research on Writing Writing has long been a topic of interest in francophone research. Contemporary work is influenced by a variety of theoretical positions


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and academic disciplines, including history, anthropology, sociology and linguistics. There is, however, less of a recognizable and established ‘tradition’ of work comparable to literacy studies in the anglophone world. Nevertheless, francophone research on writing is informed by similar theoretical perspectives and methodologies, which can be recognized if not as a ‘tradition’ then as a set of studies with identifiable features. In the following sections, we provide an overview of this body of research. Using examples of the studies in this volume and elsewhere, we focus in particular on the theoretical concepts which francophone researchers draw on, comparing these with the work done by anglophone researchers. To begin with, historical studies are prominent within francophone research on writing. Comparing British and French work, it is fair to say that there have been more historical studies in French and that overall the work by historians has had greater influence on studies of contemporary practices than is the case in the anglophone world. The act of reading and the development of a culture of book reading, for example, have been prominently studied (Chartier, 1994; Martin & Chartier, 1982). Chapters Ten and Eleven of this volume exemplify the strength of historical studies. Both chapters also show the similarities in perspective and theoretical orientation between historical and contemporary studies. This is partly a result of the influence historians, in particular Roger Chartier, have had on the development of writing research in France. Chartier and colleagues have not only shaped the ideas of historians interested in writing, but their work is frequently drawn on by sociologists, anthropologists and others studying contemporary practices and cultures of writing (see, for example, Mbodj-Pouye, Chapter Seven and Joly, Chapter Five in this volume). Several of the contributors to this book acknowledge the influence of Chartier, either directly, or indirectly via the work of French sociologist Bernard Lahire, whose contribution will be discussed further below. The notion of pratiques de l’écrit, which Chartier was not the first one to use, but which he developed, is used by many francophone researchers. Pratiques de l’écrit cover both reading and writing (Chartier, 1986). While Chartier was primarily interested in the development of reading practices from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, he examined reading in the broader contexts of how within a specific society at a given point in time texts were being produced and used. Reading, he argues, cannot be understood without taking account of writing practices and

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of the processes of the production of books and other texts (Chartier, 1994). The French-Canadian researcher Bélisle (2006) specifies that pratiques de l’écrit denotes the use of written language in the broad sense and that written texts are not only used by those who are able to decode them. Pratiques de l’écrit include the ‘production, dissemination, consuming, reproduction and transformation’ (Bélisle, 2006: 7, our translation) of texts. In ‘The order of books’ (1994) Chartier explains what a history of reading must capture: incorporating elements of literary analysis and bibliographical study such a project aims to understand the ‘specific mechanisms that distinguish the various communities of readers and traditions of reading’ (Chartier, 1994: 4). In order to understand how people read, he argues, we need to ascertain the conventions and norms of reading that are specific to different communities of readers, what they deem to be legitimate uses of books and legitimate ways of reading and understanding written texts. We could also say that we need to identify different reading and writing practices. Talking about such practices allows Chartier to draw the researcher’s attention away from the book or the text to the reader and their ‘tactics’ (de Certeau, 1984) of reading and meaning making. We can see from the above that Chartier’s pratiques de l’écrit is conceptually very similar to the English ‘literacy practices’, described earlier. Both phrases highlight the socially situated nature of reading and writing. Literacy practices are understood to be always embedded in broader social practices. Chartier too talks about reading, writing and books as ‘anchored in the practices and the institutions of the social world’ (Chartier, 1994: x). Because of the similarities of Chartier’s ideas with those in anglophone literacy studies, Mbodj-Pouye (2007: 255) and other francophone researchers use pratiques de l’écrit as a translation for literacy practices. When French researchers talk about pratiques [practices] references to Bourdieu’s work are unavoidable. They draw on Bourdieu’s concept when postulating that practices are always the result of an interaction between a specific situation with its own circumstances on the one hand and regularities in people’s activities, interiorized models of thinking and behaving (habitus) and the broader social and economic structures on the other (Mbodj-Pouye, 2007: 252). This understanding of practices is very similar to how anglophone researchers of literacy define their object of study. Chartier also argues that the relationship between what


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is inscribed and what is received is always a dialectic one and that ‘reception invents, shifts about, distorts’ (1994: x). Written works are open to appropriation and they can be used in different ways, not all of which are limited to reading in the sense of decoding. Chartier’s (1987: 11, 12) reference to how in the rituals of ancient cultures written texts were used in the middle of otherwise primarily oral ceremonies echoes the findings of studies into the role of texts in various social and religious contexts in, for example, South Africa (Prinsloo & Breier, 1996). With regard to methodology, Chartier invites researchers of reading and writing to adopt approaches that are broader than pure text analysis and which question explanations of differences in reading practices that are based on known social divisions such as the elite on the one hand or the people on the other (Chartier, 1994). In francophone research – as in anglophone studies – ethnographic approaches which investigate specific social contexts without starting from a priori assumptions about how different groups of people read or write are prominently used. Historians too, while bound by the availability of sources, examine practices and favour contextualized approaches (see Béroujon, Chapter Ten and Artières, Chapter Eleven in this volume). Another aspect of Chartier’s work that has been taken up in francophone research on writing is his interest in books and other printed matter as objects and in how they are produced and disseminated. Chartier himself, however, was not the first to pursue this line of research. Amongst others he drew on the work of McKenzie (1986), which had been translated into French. The analysis of practices, as Chartier understands it, includes attention to the material form of texts (e.g. books) and the processes of production and dissemination of written matter. Text only exist through their readers (de Certeau, 1988), but the process of ‘actualization’ (Chartier, 1994: IX) while shaped by the acts and habits of the readers and the social and cultural space they inhabit also depends on the material form through which meaning is received. Chartier argues that we cannot deny the effects of meaning the material forms produce. Drawing on his ideas, Mbodj-Pouye (this volume, Chapter Seven) shows how villagers make use of notebooks, received as part of agricultural trainings or left by their school-attending children, to develop a new form of personal writing. The notebook itself, with its specific affordances (Kress, 2003; 2005) for the writer has a bearing on what shape the author’s writing takes.

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Chartier also discusses the notion of culture and how it relates to the study of writing. From an anthropological perspective, culture – as we explained above – is often understood broadly as being part of any practice and activity. While Chartier agrees with this, he also points out that culture can, and frequently is defined more narrowly as meaning those artefacts and practices which are deemed aesthetically or intellectually pleasing and valuable (Chartier, 1992; 1998). This understanding of culture, as Chartier points out, is close to what Bourdieu (1993) calls a ‘cultural field’ and it emphasizes that within given societies there is competition over what is deemed to be ‘cultural’ (Chartier, 1998: 263). With regard to writing, different communities and societies, both past and present, designate and thereby limit what forms of writing are recognized and deemed legitimate. Chartier’s thoughts on culture in relation to writing are comparable to Street’s ideological model of literacy and to notions of dominant and vernacular literacies prevalent in anglophone research on writing, discussed above. Within the francophone tradition, the notion of cultures of writing as potentially excluding is taken up in Bernard Lahire’s work on popular forms of writing and in his critical analysis of dominant discourses of illiteracy (Lahire, 1993; 1995). Lahire is a key figure in francophone research on writing, having influenced researchers in France as well as in French-speaking Canada (see Bélisle, 2004; 2006). His views show striking parallels with the ideas put forward by Street (see above) and others in the anglophone tradition, an observation that has prompted Bélisle and Bourdon (2006) to note that despite not citing each other, Street and Lahire’s analyses converge on many points. Lahire’s words certainly echo Smith’s view of the textually mediated social world. He argues that ‘writing is present in the whole of the social world [‘l’écrit marque sa présence dans l’ensemble du monde social’, our translation] to which he adds that ‘no domain of practices is without its mediation’ [‘pas un domaine de pratiques ne s’organisent désormais hors de sa médiation’, our translation] (Lahire, 2006: 43). Challenging the notion of the individual as autonomous and uniform [unicite] that underlies quantitative studies of literacy, Lahire argues for an approach that analyses reading and writing as context-specific practices involving individuals who are part of different social relations (friends, family, colleagues) and networks and whose feelings, ideas and behaviours are not always the same and not necessarily consistent (Lahire, 2008). Lahire, as much as Street, Barton, Gee, Papen and others in the anglophone tradition, criticizes


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the notion of literacy as a uniform set of skills applicable to different situations (Lahire, 2006: 35). Furthermore, he argues that while some individuals may not be competent readers it is wrong to deduct from this a necessary ‘suffering [souffrance]’ or ‘disability [handicap]’ (Lahire, 2006: 42). In a move similar to those in the anglophone world who challenge the deficit discourse of literacy (Crowther, Hamilton & Tett, 2001), Lahire suggests that the dominant view of the ‘illiterates’ reinforces their stigmatization and marginalization (2006: 38). Statistical measurements of literacy ignore the fact that skills are frequently acquired collectively. The same discourse that marks some as literate and others as illiterate also fails to identify the many ways in which people of different backgrounds and dispositions engage with written texts. Sociological research can challenge these views by uncovering the ‘plurality of the worlds of writing’ [pluralité des mondes de l’écrit, our translation] (2006: 43). This multiplicity of everyday reading and writing practices, Lahire argues, cannot be adequately characterized by reducing them to identifiable skills and hierarchies of abilities, a model of understanding borrowed from school notions of literacy. This is of course the same critique of the autonomous model of literacy made by Street, see above, and its implementation in national and international surveys such as the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) that is expressed by Hamilton and Barton (2000) and others. In his earlier books, Lahire (1993, 1995) has studied the reading and writing practices of working class people with limited formal education in the region of Lyon. He was interested in their everyday reading and writing at home or at work, including ‘innocuous’ texts (Lahire, 1993: 6), such as shopping lists or to do lists. Lahire’s work is comparable to Barton and Hamilton’s study of reading and writing in a working class community of Lancaster (Barton, 1991; Barton & Hamilton, 1998). In his analysis, Lahire emphasizes the role of literacy in relation to how people construct their relationship with the world around them and how they organize their lives, themes that are also discussed in Barton and Hamilton’s study. A further theme elaborated in both studies is the gendered division of writing tasks such as dealing with letters in families. Lahire’s study also examined reading and writing in his research participants’ work places, typically manual employment. Another important figure is Daniel Fabre and his notion of ‘écritures ordinaires’ [ordinary writings’] (Fabre, 1993) or ‘écritures quotidiennes’ [everyday writings] (Fabre, 1997). Conceptually, Fabre’s ordinary writings

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are close to what Barton and others in the anglophone tradition call vernacular literacies. Fabre characterizes writings [écrits] as belonging to a place, a social space they emanate from but which they also help to constitute and define (see Fraenkel, 2001). This echoes the anglophone idea of literacy as social practice. A collection of articles edited by Fabre in 1997 illustrates the role of writing in three different social contexts: the domestic sphere, religion and work. Fabre’s intention, similar to that of the (New) Literacy Studies, was to highlight previously neglected forms of writing. Fabre and Lahire’s ideas have also been taken up by researchers interested in writing in social contexts where formal literacy is not widespread, for example, in Mali (Mbodj-Pouye, 2007) and Senegal (Humery, forthcoming). Methodologically, both Lahire and Fabre advocate context-sensitive techniques. The dominant approach in francophone research on writing, as mentioned already, is qualitative and ethnographic. Fraenkel (2001) establishes key principles of research on writing in the workplace, which show similarities with the perspective adopted by anglophone literacy studies. While she acknowledges the need to study the content of what is said in specific documents, she is adamant that writing at work cannot be understood ‘hors contexte’ [outside the context] but needs to be examined in relation to the ensemble of practices and situations governing the workplace in question (Fraenkel, 2001: 240). Her description of the methodology to adopt for such studies shares much with how those in the (New) Literacy Studies define their approach: the need for direct observations is highlighted but also interviews with the readers and writers themselves in order to understand ‘représentations locales’ [local representations] (2001: 236). Following Chartier, she adds a need to examine texts not only in terms of what they say, but in relation to their materiality and physical presence, an issue which is also raised in anglophone work, as in Haas (1995), Wilson (2003) Pahl (2002, 2007) and Leander and Sheehy (2004). Despite similarities in perspective, French researchers such as Lahire and Fabre have hardly been recognized by anglophone scholars of writing. This is mainly the result of a language barrier. Chartier’s work has been widely translated but it is mainly known by historians and there is less of a convergence of historical and contemporary interests than in France (but see Brandt, 2001; 2009, whose historical studies of the United States are used to inform research on the present and the future


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of writing). The other French academic whose work is drawn on by anglophone literacy researchers is Bruno Latour, as mentioned in the previous section. Researchers draw on Latour in particular when trying to understand the power of written texts in specific social and institutional situations. Latour talks about objects such as books as actants that have agency, an idea which is utilized by Pontille (this volume Chapter Three, and Fraenkel & Pontille, 2006) and others when discussing the role of texts in different workplaces and public spaces. The notion of actants (a concept that crucially includes humans and non-human objects) allows Latour and his associates to emphasize the role of technologies as active agents, without however falling into the trap of technological determinism. Texts, including diagrams, tables or photographs, function as ‘inscription devices’ (Latour and Wolgar 1986: 37). As such, writing allows specific forms of knowledge to become ‘mobile’. This is made possible through the text in which knowledge is inscribed and which can move between and be drawn on in different contexts (Latour, 1988). The work of Jack Goody, introduced above, has been widely drawn upon by French authors, but its reception in France has been very different from its treatment by anglophone literacy researchers. Goody’s ideas became influential in France after 1979, when a French translation of ‘The domestication of the savage mind’ was published. In his earlier studies, Lahire drew on Goody when discussing the consequences of literacy and he did this in a way that is largely supportive of Goody’s claims about writing as enhancing rational thinking. Lahire argued that even mundane forms of literacy, not just schooling and formal education, support abstract thinking (Lahire, 1998), a position that is likely to be met with criticism by anglophone literacy researchers. We can see from the above example that despite much convergence in thought, there are also differences between anglo- and francophone approaches to the study of writing. In much anglophone research, Goody’s views on the consequences of literacy for individuals and societies have been heavily critiqued while less attention has been paid to the other contributions which Goody has made to the understanding of writing (except for Collins & Blot, 2003 and Olson & Cole, 2006, mentioned above). Francophone researchers, however, have found Goody’s work useful when examining specific writing practices in an ethnographic perspective (Fraenkel, 2001; Mbodj-Pouye, 2007). They examine the effects of reading and writing in specific cultural and

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institutional contexts, without however pre-judging what these might be and frequently adopting a critical stance. This has lead to studies examining in what ways tables, lists, forms, etc. afford bureaucratic rationality and give authority to specific forms of knowledge and social practices. Fraenkel, for example (2007 and this volume Chapter Two), examines the consequences of acts of writing and often it is the act of writing itself that produces an effect, as with writing a signature (Fraenkel & Pontille, 2006). Prominent themes in francophone research As well as everyday writing, prominent themes in francophone research include writing in the workplace, writing in public spaces and reading and writing in post-colonial societies. In anglophone settings much research on workplace literacy is shaped by educational concerns. This is not so in France where researchers focus their attention on the micro processes of writing as part of accomplishing work-related tasks. Denis and Pontille (2009), for example, have conducted ethnographic research to understand how the signs of the Paris subway are installed and maintained. In contrast to the work by Fabre and others (see Artières, this volume Chapter Eleven), who are primarily interested in ordinary writing by individuals, Pontille and others examine collective forms of writing. The aim is to show how workplaces are shaped through writing: that is through the texts they use and produce. This kind of research makes a unique contribution to understanding how work processes are mediated by written texts and how knowledge is organized. A further focus of interest is in how writing gives materiality to cognitive processes, an issue that has also interested Lahire (1995), also drawing upon Latour’s work. Texts, such as subway signs, also afford specific actions (Denis & Pontille, 2009 and forthcoming, Fraenkel, 2007; 2008 and this volume Chapter Two). Other examples of research on writing at work are studies of bailiffs (Fraenkel & Pontille, 2003; Pontille, 2006), of scientific authorship (Pontille, 2004; 2006) and of the role of writing in agricultural work (Joly, 2000; 2004, this volume Chapter Five). Similar to the work that was done in the United Kingdom by Jones (2000a and b) researching Welsh farmers, Joly examines how new rules introduced by the European Union (EU) have changed


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farmers’ daily writing practices. What is interesting here is, again, the historical perspective, comparing farmers’ traditional diaries with today’s bureaucratic registers and forms. Writing in the workplace, as mentioned already, often appears to be mundane and it may even be invisible. Such ordinary acts of writing are widely studied by the research group ‘Anthropologie de l’écriture’ (Anthropology of Writing) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). From a historical perspective, Artières, a core member of the group, is particularly interested in autobiographical writings. Mbodj-Pouye (2007 and this volume, Chapter Seven) and Humery (forthcoming), also members of the group, work on writing in post-colonial societies. They study ordinary forms of writing in contexts where school-based literacy is particularly dominant and where everyday writing practices are frequently multilingual, mirroring the coexistence of official and vernacular languages in postcolonial societies. Theoretical frameworks drawn on are mainly those developed by Goody, Chartier and Lahire, but Mbodj-Pouye (2004) is one francophone researcher to use ideas from the (New) Literacy Studies. A final area of research which has been developed in recent years in France looks at writing in public places and spaces. This work is coordinated by the Anthropology of Writing group at the EHESS. Denis and Pontille’s study of subway signs, mentioned earlier, is part of this much larger research project entitled ‘Ecologies and politics of writing’. Covering cities from around the globe, it examines how urban spaces are shaped by writings, both legal and illegal (www.iiac.cnrs.fr/ ecriture/spip.php?article3). A related study, also comparative, examines how writing in a variety of urban spaces is regulated and policed. Undoubtedly, as the above overview has shown, francophone research on writing is vibrant and covers a wide range of areas and theoretical perspectives. It has much to offer to those in the anglophone world interested in literacy. There are many parallels between the work of anglo- and francophone researchers, even though little of this is known by researchers on either side of the linguistic divide. The case of Lahire and Street illustrates the current state of affairs and the resulting lack of cross fertilization, notwithstanding differences in perspective that undoubtedly exist. Part of the aim of this book is to make the work of francophone researchers more widely known in the anglophone world and to promote dialogue between French and English speaking academics interested in writing as a social and cultural practice.

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The Current Volume The chapters in this volume are united by their approach to examining writing as cultural and social practice. They were chosen to illustrate the kind of work done by anglo- and francophone researchers and to indicate the similarities in theoretical orientation and empirical scope that makes the comparison between the two traditions so interesting. Together the 11 chapters aim to further our understanding of the place of written language in different social and cultural contexts, past and present. The book consists of four parts. The first part, that is, this chapter and a chapter by French linguist Béatrice Fraenkel (Chapter Two), focuses on theory. In ‘Writing acts: When writing is doing’, Fraenkel considers writing as an ‘act’ within speech act theory: writing is not only important for what is being written, but the act of writing itself is significant as an event or as a performance, covering writing as broad as graffiti, road signs, writing in New York after 9/11 and signatures. The chapter offers a first step in the development of a typology of writing acts. Part II of the book consists of three chapters dealing with writing in the workplace. In Chapter Three, ‘Updating a Biomedical Database: writing, reading and invisible contribution’, David Pontille explores the central but often overlooked writing work that is involved in building up and maintaining a biomedical database. It shows writing work that may appear to be mundane and routine but is in fact highly sophisticated. The chapter illustrates the crucial role of writing in the construction of knowledge in today’s knowledge-based economy. In Chapter Four, ‘Eruptions of interruptions: managing tensions between writing and other tasks in a textualized childcare workplace’, Karin Tusting takes up a key feature of many contemporary workplaces: their increasing textualization. The example given is that of childcare workers in England, who face a surprising amount of paperwork demands. Tusting’s research illustrates changing practices of writing in the workplace in response to growing demands for accountability. In Chapter Five, ‘Tracing cows: practical and administrative logics in tension’, Nathalie Joly looks at the writing practices of farmers, who keep daily records of their work. Keeping these records is not a new practice but with the modernization of agriculture, farmers’ writing has become more rationalized and subject to greater bureaucratic influence. Joly’s paper


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emphasizes the role of the wider context – in her case the EU and its regulations – in relation to changing writing practices. Part III examines writing by individuals and institutions. Chapter Six by David Barton, ‘Vernacular writing on the web’, provides an overview of research on people’s ‘ordinary writing’ and examines the new writing which is now being done on the internet. New online writing practices lead to new genres; this necessitates a re-evaluation of what is meant by vernacular practices of writing. The chapter shows the importance of the internet as a new cultural space for ordinary people’s writing. In Chapter Seven, ‘Keeping a note-book in rural Mali: a practice in the making’, Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye discusses a new writing practice discovered by the author during her ethnographic research in Mali: personal notebooks. These notebooks illustrate the importance of a personal domain in a society that is often thought of as communal in orientation. Mbodj-Pouye’s chapter demonstrates the importance of understanding writing in the context of social and cultural change. In Chapter Eight, ‘Writing in healthcare contexts: patients, power and medical knowledge’, Uta Papen discusses the central role of writing and written texts in the provision of healthcare. The chapter examines the power of writing as a means of passing on authoritative information and achieving compliance with medical advice and how patients through their own writing react to and engage with healthcare providers’ views. The chapter illustrates how vernacular writing responds to dominant discourses. Part IV is concerned with historical perspectives. Chapter Nine by Julia Gillen and Nigel Hall is entitled ‘Edwardian postcards: illuminating ordinary writing’. In Britain, postcards became massively popular after 1902. With up to six deliveries per day they became a huge source of everyday British writing. In their chapter, Gillen and Hall recognize the significance of these postcards as ordinary practices of writing and a sign of the democratization of literacy in Britain in the early twentieth century. This chapter is a good example of the affordances and constraints of particular artefacts of literacy. In Chapter Ten, ‘Lawful and unlawful writings in Lyon in the seventeenth century’, Anne Béroujon investigates different forms of public writing that were common in seventeenth century France. Based on her research in the city of Lyon, Béroujon describes texts such as epigraphs, public signs and inscriptions on monuments that increasingly became part of the urban environment. Another category of text common at the time were libels: pamphlets or

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posters containing defamatory statements about specific individuals. These texts, which were put up at the attacked person’s house or in public spaces, were regarded as illegal and their suppression became part of the municipality’s efforts to control the urban space. In Chapter Eleven, ‘Sexuality in black and white: instructions to write and Scientia sexualis in the nineteenth and twentieth century’, historian Philippe Artières examines acts of writing that are encouraged or demanded by a third party, for example, doctors inviting their patients to write or social scientists asking their research participants to produce diaries. He discusses the case of a young man who in 1902 had been asked by his doctor to produce a record of his homosexual practices. This resulted in a ‘sexual biography’, which, as Artières suggests, was not so much liberating for the writer but incorporated him into a wider apparatus of power. Finally, in the Afterword, Brian Street locates the examples of writing presented in the previous chapters within broader discussions about literacy in contemporary culture.

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Barton, D. & M. Hamilton (2005), ‘Literacy, reification and the dynamics of social interaction’. In D. Barton & K. Tusting (eds.), Beyond Communities of Practice: Language, Power and Social Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 14–35. Basso, K.H. (1974), ‘The ethnography of writing’. In R. Bauman & J. Sherzer (eds.), Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 425–432. Baynham, M. (2004), ‘Ethnographies of literacy: Introduction’. Language & Education, 18(4), 285–290. Baynham, M. & H.L. Masing (2000), ‘Mediators and mediation in multilingual literacy events’. In M. Martin-Jones & K. Jones (eds), Multilingual literacies, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 189–209. Baynham, M. & M. Prinsloo (eds.) (2009), The Future of Literacy Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Behar, R. & D. Gordon (eds.) (1996), Women Writing Culture. Berkeley, CA: University California Press. Belfiore, M.E., Defoe, T.A., Folinsbee, S., Hunter, J. & Jackson, N.S. (2004), Reading Work. Literacies in the New Workplace. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Bélisle, R. (2004), ‘Education non-formelle et contribution à l’aphabétisme’. Ethnologies, 26(1), 165–184. Bélisle, R. (2006), ‘Socialisation à l’écrit et pluralité du rapport à l’écrit d’acteurs du communautaire’. In R. Bélisle & S. Bourdon (eds.), Pratiques et apprentissage de l’écrit dans les sociétés éducatives. Saint-Nicolas, Québec: Les Presses de l’Université de Laval, 145–173. Bélisle, R. & Bourdon, S. (2006), ‘Variete, diversite et pluralite des pratiques et de l’apprentissage de l’ecrit’. In R. Bélisle & S. Bourdon (eds.), Pratiques et apprentissage de l’ecrit dans les societes educatives. Saint-Nicolas, Quebec: Les Presses de l’Universite Laval, 1–31. Besnier, N. (1995), Literacy, Emotion and Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. (2008), Grassroots Literacy: Writing, Identity and Voice in Central Africa. London: Routledge. Boone, E. & W. Mignolo (1994), Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Durham: Duke University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993), The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, Randal Johnson (ed.), New York: Columbia University Press. Boyarin, J. (ed.) (1993), The Ethnography of Reading. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Brandt, D. (2001), Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brandt, D. (2009), Literacy and Learning: Reflections on Writing, Reading, and Society. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Brandt, D. & K. Clinton (2002), ‘Limits of the local: expanding perspectives on literacy as a social practice’. Journal of Literacy Research, 34(3), 337–356. Chartier, R. (1986), ‘Les pratiques de l’ecrit’. In P. Aries & G. Duby (eds.), Histoire de la vie privee, tome 3. Paris: Seuil, 113–162. Chartier, R. (1987), Lectures et lecteurs dans la France de’Ancien Régime. Paris: Le Seuil.

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Chartier, R. (1992), ‘Labourers and voyagers: from the text to the reader’. Diacritics, 22(2), 49–61. Chartier, R. (1994), The Order of Books, Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chartier, R. (1998), ‘Writing the practices’. French Historical Studies, 21(2), 255–264. Clanchy, M.T. (1993), From Memory to Written Record. Oxford: Blackwell. Clarke, J. (2002), ‘A new kind of symmetry: actor network theories and the new literacy studies’. Studies in the Education of Adults, 34(2), 107–122. Clifford, J. & G.E. Marcus (eds.) (1986), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Colclough, S. (2007), Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695–1870. London: Palgrave. Collins, J. & R. Blot (2003), Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, J. & S. Slembrouck (2007), ‘Reading shop windows in globalized neighborhoods: multilingual literacy practices and indexicality’. Journal of Literacy Research, 39(3), 335–356. Creese, A. (2008), ‘ Linguistic Ethnography’. In K.A. King and N.H. Hornberger (eds.), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 10: Research Methods in Language and Education. Springer Science+Business Media LLC, 229–241. Cressy, D. (1980), Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crowther, J., M. Hamilton & L. Tett (2000), ‘Powerful literacies: an introduction’. In J. Crowther, M. Hamilton & L. Tett (eds.), Powerful Literacies. Leicester: NIACE, 1–13. Davies, C.A. (2007), Reflexive Ethnography. London: Routledge. Second edition. De Certeau, M. (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Denis J. & D. Pontille (2009), ‘L’Écologie informationnelle des lieux publics. Le cas de la signalétique du métro’. In C. Licoppe (ed.), L’Évolution des cultures numériques, de la mutation du lien social à l’organisation du travail. Paris: FYP, 94–101. Denis, J. & D.Pontille (forthcoming) Placing subway signs. Practical properties of signs at work, Visual Communication Denzin, N. & Y. Lincoln (eds.) (2008), The Landscape of Qualitative Research: Theories and Issues. London: Sage. Duranti, A. (1997), Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duranti, A. (2001), Key Terms in Language and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Eliot, S. & J. Rose (eds.) (2007), A Companion to the History of the Book. Oxford: Blackwell. Eriksen, T.H. (2001), Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology. London: Pluto Press. Second edition. Fabre, D. (1993), Ecritures ordinaries. Paris: POL. Fabre, D. (ed.) (1997), Par écrit, ethnologie des écritures quotidiennes. Paris: Editions de la MSH. Fairclough, N. (2003), Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge.


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Finkelstein, D. & A. McCleery (eds.) (2002), The Book History Reader. London: Routledge. Foley, W. (1997), Anthropological Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. Folinsbee, S. (2004), ‘Paperwork as the lifeblood of quality’. In M.E. Belfiore, T.A. Defoe, S. Folinsbee, J. Hunter & N.S. Jackson (eds.), Reading Work. Literacies in the New Workplace. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Fraenkel, B. (2001), ‘Enquêter sur les écrits dans l’organisation’. In A. Borzeix & B. Fraenkel (eds.), Language et travail. Paris: CNRS Editions. Fraenkel, B. (2007), ‘Actes d’écritures: quand écrire c’est faire’. Langage & Société, no. 121–122, 101–113. Fraenkel, B. (2008), ‘La signature: du signe à l’acte’. Société et Représentation, Paris, mai-juin 2008, n°25, 15–25. Fraenkel, B. & D. Pontille (2003), ‘L’écrit juridique à l’épreuve de la signature électronique, approche pragmatique’. Langage et Société, n°104, 83–121. Fraenkel, B. & Pontille, D. (2006), ‘La signature au temps de l’electronique’. Politix, 19 (74), 103–121 Gee, J.P. (1996), Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. London: Taylor & Francis. Gee, J.P. (2004), Situated Language and Learning. London: Routledge. Goody, J. (1977), The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, J. (2000), The Power of the Written Tradition. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Gowen, S.G. (1992), The Politics of Workplace Literacy: A Case Study. New York: Teachers College Press. Gregory, E. & A. Williams (2000), City Literacies: Learning to Read across Generations and Cultures. London: Routledge. Haas, C. (1995), Writing Technology: Studies in the Materiality of Literacy. London: Routledge. Hamilton, M. (2009) ‘Putting words in their mouths: the alignment of identities with system goals through the use of individual learning plans’. British Educational Research Journal, 35, 221–242. Hamilton, M. & D. Barton (2000), ‘The International Adult Literacy Survey: What does it really measure?’ International Review of Education, 46, 377–89. Heath, S.B. & B. Street (2008), Ethnography: Approaches to Language and Literacy Research. New York: Teachers College Press. Heath, S.B. (1983), Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hull, G. (ed.) (1997), Changing Work, Changing Workers: Critical Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Skills. New York: State University of New York Press. Humery M.-E. (forthcoming), ‘Pour une digraphie fluctuante, le cas du pulaar (Sénégal)’, Langage et société, à paraître dans un n° spécial ‘Digraphies’, co-dirigé par B. Frænkel et M.-E. Humery. Hymes, D. (1982), ‘What is ethnography’. In P. Gilmore & A. Glatthorn (eds.), Children in and out of school: ethnography and education. Center for Applied Linguistics, 21–32. Hymes, D. (ed.) (1999 orig. 1972), Reinventing Anthropology. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

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Iedema, R. & H. Scheeres (2003), ‘From doing work to talking work: Renegotiating knowing, doing and identity’. Applied Linguistics, 24(3), 316–337. Ivanic, R., R. Edwards, D. Barton, M. Martin-Jones, Z. Fowler, B. Hughes, G. Mannion, K. Miller, C. Satchwell, J. Smith. (2009), Improving Learning in College: Rethinking Literacies across the Curriculum. London: Routledge. James, A., J. Hockey & A. Dawson (eds.) (1997), After Writing Culture: Epistemology and Praxis in Contemporary Anthropology. London: Routledge. Jewitt, C. (2009), The Handbook of Multimodality. London: Routledge. Joly, N. (2000), ‘Chroniques du travail agricole et livres de compte : la diffusion des pratiques d’écriture en milieu paysan’. In Les enjeux de la formation des acteurs de l’agriculture. Dijon: Educagri Editions, 239–246. Joly, N. (2004), ‘Ecrire l’événement: le travail agricole mis en mémoire’. Sociologie du travail, 46, 511–527. Jones, K. (2000a), ‘Texts, mediation and social relations in a bureaucratised world’. In M. Martin-Jones & K. Jones (eds.), Multilingual Literacies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 209–228. Jones, K. (2000b), ‘Becoming just another alphanumeric code: farmers’ encounters with the literacy and discourse practices of agricultural bureaucracy at the livestock auction’. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton & R. Ivanic (eds.), Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context. London: Routledge, 70–90. Kalman, J. (1999), Writing on the Plaza: Mediated Literacy Practices among Scribes and Clients in Mexico City. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Kapitske, C. (1995), Literacy and Religion: The Textual Politics and Practice of Seventh-Day Adventism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kell, C. (2005), ‘Moment by moment: text, movement and participation’. In A. Rogers (ed.), Urban Literacy. Hamburg: UNESCO, 159–181. Kress, G. (2003), Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge. Kress, G. (2005), ‘Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning’. Computers and Composition, 22 (1), 5–22. Kress, G. & T. van Leeuven (1996), Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. Lahire, B. (1993), La raison des plus faibles. Rapport au travail, écritures domestiques et lecture en milieux populaires. Lille: PUL. Lahire, B. (1995), Tableaux de familles. Heurs et malheurs scolaires en milieux populaires. Paris: Gallimard/Seuil. Second edition (2000). Lahire, B. (1998), La raison des plus faibles. Rapport au travail, écritures domestiques et lectures en milieux populaires. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille. Lahire, B. (2006), ‘Cartographie de la pluralite des mondes de l’écrit’. In R. Belisle & S. Bourdon (eds.), Pratiques et apprentissage de l’ecrit dans les societes educatives. Saint-Nicolas, Quebec: Les Presses de l’Universite Laval, 31–51. Lahire, B. (2008), ‘The individual and the mixing of genres: cultural dissonance and self-distinction’. Poetics, 36, 166–188. Latour, B. (1987), Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. & S. Woolgar (1986, orig. 1979), Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Second edition. Lave, J. (1988), Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


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Leander, K. & M. Sheehy (eds.) (2004), Spatializing Literacy Research and Practice. Bern: Peter Lang. Leander, K. & J. Loworn (2006), ‘Literacy networks: Following the circulation of texts, bodies and objects in the schooling and online gaming of one youth’. Cognition and Instruction, 24(3), 291–340. Lyons, Martyn (ed.) (2007), Ordinary Writings, Personal Narratives. Writing Practices in 19th and Early 20th Century Europe. Bern: Peter Lang. Malan, L. (1996), ‘Literacy mediation and social identity in Newton, Eastern Cape’. In M. Prinsloo & M. Breier (eds.), The Social Uses of Literacy: Theory and Practice in Contemporary South Africa. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 105–123. Martin, Henri-Jean, & R. Chartier (eds.) (1982), Histoire de l’édition française. Paris: Promodis. Martin-Jones, M. & K. Jones (eds.) (2000), Multilingual Literacies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Maybin, J. & K. Tusting (2010), ‘Linguistic ethnography’. In J. Simpson (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics. London: Routledge. Mbodj-Pouye, A. (2004), ‘Pouvoirs de l’ecriture’. Critiques, no. 680–681, 77–88. Mbodj-Pouye A. (2007), Des cahiers au village. Socialisations à l’écrit et pratiques d’écriture dans la région cotonnière du sud du Mali, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université Lumière-Lyon 2, available at www.demeter.univ-lyon2.fr/sdx/theses/ lyon2/2007/mbodj_a McKenzie, D.F. (1986), Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. London: British Library. Olson, D. & M. Cole (eds.) (2006), Technology, Literacy, and the Evolution of Society: Implications of the Work of Jack Goody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pahl, K. (2002), ‘Ephemera, mess and miscellaneous piles: texts and practices in families’. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 2 (2), 145–165. Pahl, K. (2007), ‘Creativity in events and practices: a lens for understanding children´s multimodal texts’. Literacy, 41(2), 86–92. Papen, U. (2005), Adult Literacy as Social Practice: More than Skills. London: Routledge. Papen, U. (2007), Literacy and Globalization: Reading and Writing in Times of Social and Cultural Change. London: Routledge. Papen, U. & Karin Tusting (2008), ‘Creativity in everyday literacy practices: the contribution of an ethnographic approach’. Literacy and Numeracy Studies, 16(1), 5–25. Perez, B. (ed.) (1998), Sociocultural Contexts of Language and Literacy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Pontille, D. (2004), La signature scientifique: une sociologie pragmatique de l’attribution. Paris: CRNS Editions. Pontille, D. (2006), ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur scientifique?’ Sciences de la Société, n°67, 77–93. Prinsloo, M. & M. Breier (1996), The Social Uses of Literacy: Theory and Practice in Contemporary South Africa. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Purcell-Gates, V. (ed.) (2007), Cultural Practices of Literacy: Case Studies of Language, Literacy, Social Practice and Power. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Rampton, B., J. Maybin & K. Tusting (eds.) (2007), ‘Linguistic Ethnography: Links, Problems and Possibilities’. Special issue of Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(5), 575–695.

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Reder, S. (1994), ‘Practice-engagement theory: a sociocultural approach to literacy across languages and cultures’. In B. Ferdman, R.-M. Weber & A.G. Ramirez (eds.), Literacy across Languages and Cultures. New York: State University of New York Press. Scollon, R. & S. Scollon (2003), Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. London: Routledge. Scribner, S. & M. Cole (1981), The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Silverman, D. (ed.) (2004), Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice. London: Sage. Smart, Graham (2006), Writing the Economy: Activity, Genre and Technology in the World of Banking. London: Equinox. Smith, D. (1990), Texts, Facts and Femininity. London: Routledge. Smith, D. (1999), Writing the Social: Critique, Theory and Investigations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Smith, D. (2005), Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. Oxford: Altamira Press. Smith, D. (ed.) (2006), Institutional Ethnography as Practice. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Street, B. (1984), Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Street, B. (ed.) (1993), Cross-cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szwed, J. (1981), ‘The Ethnography of Literacy’. In M.F. Whiteman (ed.), Writing: The Nature, Development, and Teaching of Written Communication. Vol. 1. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 13–23. Wenger, E. (1998), Communities of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. & A. Zengler (2007), Popular Culture and Representations of Literacy. London: Routledge. Wilson, A. (2003), ‘Nike Trainers – My One True Love, Without You I am Nothing’. In J. Androutsopoulos & A. Georgakopoulo (eds.), Discourse Constructions of Youth Identity. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 173–196. Wogan P. (2004), Magical Writing in Salasaca: Literacy and Power in Highland Ecuador. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Chapter Two

Writing Acts: When Writing Is Doing Béatrice Fraenkel

The team I was in that night was travelling in Pierre-Antoine’s car – a rusty old Renault with zero horsepower – and we had to work in the town centre. Jean-Noël was at the wheel – he was an excellent driver, fast and confident – Ginette was on look-out, and me and Gabriel were doing the painting. When it came to painting I was quite uncompromising, but nothing compared to Gabriel, who took as much care over the slightest little wall slogan as if it were the Sistine Chapel frescos. His perfectionism was good in that he produced impeccable graffiti, and people were always more impressed by something that looked as if it had taken care and skill – but it was unfortunate in that it slowed us down. It was impossible to drag Gabriel away from his work until he thought he couldn’t improve it any more. We had just finished a particularly careful piece of work, covering the walls of M . . . Town Hall with slogans in beautifully outlined big red letters, when we were clocked by a police patrol car. Rolin, L’organisation

Writing Acts: Slogans, Pixaçao and Graffiti I begin with this evocative scene which has the advantage of immediately foregrounding the topics I am going to discuss here. It is January 1970, in a group of Maoist militants, on the outskirts of Paris, in M . . . That particular night the team had decided to cover the walls with injunctions in three languages to kidnap the bosses, that is, write the slogan ‘On a raison de sequestrer les patrons’ (‘it is right to take the bosses hostage’) in French, Arabic and Portuguese, the main languages spoken in the local factories. Painting revolutionary graffiti was part of the ‘repertoire of collective action’ (Tilly, 1986: 541) of many militant groups,1 particularly those on the fringes of legality. Graffiti written

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under these circumstances often fall into the category of slogans. They follow lexical, syntactic, semantic and rhetorical norms which are not explicit or institutionalized but which are nonetheless patterned by the activists’ memory and the practice of imitating familiar models. These slogans are often linguistic acts: orders, claims, exhortations, protests, denunciations, etc. The statement painted on the Town Hall walls ‘It is right to take the bosses hostage’, like the well-known slogans of May 1968 ‘Ce n’est qu’un début continuons le combat’ (‘This is just the start. Carry on the Struggle’) and ‘Étudiants, Travailleurs, Solidarité’ (‘Workers, Students, Solidarity’) are typical examples. These are exhortations which clearly belong to what the philosopher Austin calls the category of performatives. As he wrote, ‘An exercitive is the giving of a decision in favour of or against a certain course of action, or advocacy of it. It is a decision that something is to be so, as opposed to an estimate that it is so; it is an award as opposed to an assessment; it is a sentence as opposed to a verdict.’ (Austin, 1975: 155). The slogan is at the same time an enunciation and an action. Jean Rolin’s description is also a testimony as he belonged to a Maoist group and was an active militant during the winter of 1969–1970. His text reveals that over and above the speech act implied in writing the slogan, this was mainly ‘a writing act’. His account emphasizes the actual act of inscribing or painting. It was in fact the concentration needed to trace the ‘beautifully outlined’ red letters which was just as, or even more, important than the slogan itself. Also, in choosing the wall of the Town Hall rather than any other wall the militants were engaging in an act of bravado which gave the written words a particular value. Finally, the enunciation was seen as an exceptional inscription, a kind of written ‘coup’. It had a clear performative force.2 In fact, we see a number of writings on the streets of our cities which follow the same principle: a remarkable writing act that compels our attention. The Brazilian pixaçao graffiti, for example, found at the top of high buildings, as in Figure 2.1, immediately suggest that some prowess was needed to create these signs. The message is often illegible for the non-initiated, but this does not stop the writing from being noticed and sending out a message. As we remember from Manhattan in the early 1970s, the city dwellers who saw metro cars go past entirely covered in graffiti immediately grasped the dangers the graffiti writers had braved, notably the risk of electrocution. In these conditions the mere fact of

Writing Acts: When Writing Is Doing

Figure 2.1

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Pixaçao graffiti in Brazil

writing is recognized as a meaningful act in itself. The inscriptions convey a particularly effective graphic force. All the cases mentioned above form part of the large and rather ill-defined category of graffiti. All these acts can be seen as belonging to the same ‘family’: the making of graffiti.

Acts of Writing, Acts of Reading Another scene from the same sphere of activity, political activism, enables me to extend the analysis to the area of writing. What follows is an extract from the testimony of a Parisian militant from May 1968: I remember seeing this inscription written on the wall of the post office in Rue des Archives: ‘Le vieux monde est derrière nous!’ (‘Away with the old world!’) I looked at it, and I thought that the old world was going to disappear because that’s what was written. We had a biblical belief in the power of the word! (Le Goff, 2006: 76–77)

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Here, the scene is described not from the point of view of the inscriber but from that of the passer-by. It is a scene of reading which also bears witness to an act. The utterance is still a slogan, but what this account emphasizes is the particular force of reading this inscription in a public place. It is not only the message which has this force, although this is part of it, it is also the fact that it is on display in public. The same phrase printed in a book would not have the same effect. So how can we relate this scene to the previous one? In what way are they linked? Just as the account of spraying graffiti on the Town Hall demonstrates the importance of the fact of writing rather than what is written, so in the second case the emphasis is more on the situation in which the message is received than on what it means. It is the fact of ‘looking at’ and not just reading the inscription that has an effect on the author: ‘I looked at it, and I thought that . . .’ We can see that the meaning of the utterance: ‘Away with the old world!’ is transformed by the fact that it forms part of the environment, or, more accurately, by the fact that it is presented to passers-by on a daily basis, it is durable. The very permanence of the inscription suggests to the militant that the utterance can come true: if slogans like this are no longer removed, does this not show that they have become legitimate and that the old world is in fact disappearing? We could say that the political graffiti is having its desired persuasive effect, and this persuasion is not the result of the message. It is the result of the performative force of the actual display of the writing. Here again is the idea that the value of an utterance lies not only in what it says but in the fact that it is written. The examples of acts of bravado given earlier are not the only ones where we can recognize a kind of ‘illocutionary force’ (Austin) within writing itself. Here, it is the mere fact that the inscription is durable that gives it a particular persuasive power. This case suggests that any writing act may be capable of producing effects when read. These effects are not reducible solely to the transmission of the written message, they occur because of the way in which the utterances are presented to the reader. As well as this example linked to extraordinary political events, we need to ask ourselves whether other modes of display are capable of producing equally powerful effects. When we think about it, we are all deeply familiar with these performative signs: our cities are regulated by laws governing signage, and some writings have an official performative force. One example would be


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posters announcing citizen mobilization in time of war. But others are much more everyday, such as the requirement to announce – and hence publish – the banns before a marriage in France. To recapitulate: the study of extraordinary writing and reading shows the importance of writing as an act of doing independent of the act of saying. I propose to refer to these phenomena as writing acts. The examples I have used are a particular type of act, namely the act of making graffiti. I should like now to examine the hypothesis that when writing we are always engaged in writing acts, and not only in the kind of exceptional situations mentioned above. I shall start from the idea that any written utterance has meaning as an utterance which is part of language, and also a specific value deriving from the fact that it is written, and is the result of a writing act. Going back to Austin’s analysis which showed that any linguistic utterance can be seen as a speech act, I shall attempt to construct a model of the writing act that can account for the graphic force of inscriptions, the effect of displaying these writings, and certain other aspects of writing and reading in action, based on an analysis of the specific situations in which they occur. What I propose is to look at all these writing acts from the point of view of a pragmatic anthropology of writing. At this point in the enquiry I should perhaps turn to more banal and rather less spectacular situations. The great majority of writing is produced in a quite routine manner, in normal situations. My hypothesis should also be able to account for these ‘unexceptional’ writings. What about day-to-day, ordinary writing situations? Can we identify writing acts here, and if so, which? For the sake of coherence, I shall continue looking at the same terrain, namely writings found in cities.

Signposts, Notices and Street Signs: Labelling as Writing I shall focus here on the three examples of signposts, notices and road signs. Again I shall be looking at writings in the city, but this time those of a normative nature. This is a category of writing that interested Austin, who remarked that road signs such as ‘Bends’ or ‘Dangerous Bends’ were written in ‘a primitive language of one-word utterances’ (Austin, 1962: 72). However they are warnings, linguistic acts that can also be classified as exercitives. The world of road signs is full of

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warnings of this nature. Elsewhere, Austin mentions another case: ‘Even the word “Dog” by itself may sometimes stand for an explicit formal performative (at least in England, a pragmatic and impolite country): this short word has the same effect as the utterance “I hereby warn you that the dog will attack you”’ (Austin, 1962: 274). These writings strike me as good examples of common writing acts whose performativity is real although not spectacular. To pursue Austin’s linguistic analysis further, it should be stressed that these utterances appear on signs located in specific places. In fact signs like ‘Beware of the Dog’3 and ‘Dangerous Bend’ take on their full performative force only when they are displayed in an appropriate place. However once these signs are put up they do much more than ensure optimum conditions for the effectiveness of these ‘performatives’. They also modify the places where they are found: the house which displays a ‘Beware of the Dog’ sign becomes a forbidden, protected place, just as the notices ‘Keep off the Grass’4 or ‘No Posters’ modify the status of the grass or the wall. The new qualification attached to these sites means that they are protected by law, with all the consequences that this implies for users. Walking on this grass or putting a poster up on this wall becomes an offence. It is easy to characterize the writing act, it consists of placing a piece of writing in a certain place, an action we can refer to using the verb ‘to label’. I shall use this term to refer to all those acts that consist of attaching something written to a place, object or person. The signs that proliferate in urban shopping areas are another example of labelling practices. They show the name of the shop and perform an act of naming. K. Bühler, in his theory of language, termed phenomena of this kind ‘attachment at a distance’.5 Wittgenstein, his contemporary, thought that naming could be thought of as labelling: ‘Naming something is like attaching a label to a thing’ (in Philosophical Investigations, Aphorism 15). These labelling techniques take advantage of the plasticity of the written object and its ability to be placed in any kind of environment. Latour and Hermant’s study6 of signposting in Paris, specifically the placing of street signs, helps us to go deeper in the topic. Focusing on the work of the Highways Department, they followed the personnel on their rounds. They went into the relevant administrative offices in the Survey Department, the Land Registry Technical Services Division and the Signage Department. The authors reveal the vast network of


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writings and agents involved in placing a street sign in Rue Huysmans in Paris. Looking at street signage as what it is, namely work, helps us move away from conceiving utterance as a pure semiological phenomenon. We can see ‘actions’ being formulated, exactly as in Jean Rolin’s literary witness to what was involved in painting slogans on a Town Hall. The act of labelling thus takes on a new dimension, it no longer refers just to the display of an utterance in a street, but to a small part of a much larger apparatus designed to regulate writings within the city. These examples demonstrate the importance of written objects in the processes of reading and writing. In fact, these three examples of signage make us see writing as an artisan activity, the fabrication of specific artefacts. We are so familiar with the objects that we write – letters, exercise books, notebooks, messages – that we find it difficult to see writing as a craft skill. However, it is clear that when I write in a notebook, for example, not only do I fill it but I also create it. I produce it as a written object. The same goes for all our writing activities: we are constantly producing written objects without giving them a thought. Every writing act is thus embedded in a wider activity that comprises the act of writing by hand, the speech act, the act of creating something, and in the case of public writings, the act of placing within an environment. My approach attempts to situate these acts within their total anthropological reality, which is why we should not artificially isolate the writing act from its processual context.

Writing Events and Writing Acts: When the City Writes At this point in the investigation I have put forward certain arguments for the relevance of the notion of a writing act and the value of a methodology focused on the analysis of situations. In examining various examples of urban writings I have made a distinction between two types of act, ‘writing graffiti’ and ‘labelling’. The first enables us to appreciate the graphic force inherent in any writing act, and the second to consider the performative uses of written objects. I have attempted to understand these writing acts by relocating them within the context of the activities of which they are apart. The writing of political graffiti is part of the activity carried out by political militants. Placing street signs is also a typical activity performed by agents of the Highways Department.

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In these two specific cases and more generally, it seems to me essential to understand writing as situated within a specific sphere of activity. The final example is not just a writing activity but a writing event. Staying within the area of urban writings, I shall discuss the research I carried out in New York after the attacks of 11 September 2001 (Fraenkel, 2002). The setting up of memorials in public spaces, comprising different types of writing – placards, sheets of paper, banners, note, etc – along with candles and flowers, suggests that we should refer to them as writing ‘events’ due to the sheer scale of the phenomenon. The creation of ‘sites’ where people came together to write, to read in silence or just to be together in these environments saturated with writing raises complex issues. It is clear that by writing at one of these sites and by simply being there, each person was performing an individual act with emotional and intersubjective effects (Fraenkel, 2010). How can we characterize these acts? How can we explain the new forms taken by reactions to such catastrophic events and their commemorations, involving writing practices which are still emerging, and writing actions which are difficult to explain? In New York in September 2001, thousands, perhaps million, of citizens left messages, signatures or letters in a multitude of places within the city. This is mass writing, but it is nevertheless individual as everyone writes with their own hand. It is made up of innumerable acts of language and writing which, taken individually, have little meaning. The writings are repetitive, commonplace – God Bless America – often consisting of a single word or a cliché. It is the city-wide scale of this writing which gives these acts their importance. One may conclude that the performative force of these New York writings comes from the sheer scale of their production and dissemination. The resulting act is the emergence of a mass collective subject, as if the citizens formed a single body capable of acting through writing. This type of construction evokes the notion of the ‘legal entity’ found in law whereby, for example, a city may sign a contract. In extreme situations like that created by the attacks of September 11, each citizen, through writing in the city alongside all the others, can experience the curious sensation of being simultaneously an ‘I’ who takes up the pen, and a ‘we’ created by participating in a communal act of writing, and above all having the impression that the city of New York as a collective body has come to life. This collective body may be seen as the human face of the city as a legal entity.


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When describing an event of this nature, one cannot avoid questions concerning the kinds of acts which permit multiple utterances. The New York writings are not alone in creating a situation where the subject of utterance is not confined to a single person. On the contrary, as I have shown previously (Fraenkel, 1992), the majority of written legal actions, which are, historically speaking, among the oldest performative writings, necessitate the presence of several persons in order to be valid. For an official Act of Chancellery to be valid, it needed the signature of the King, of the Chancellor, and of the beneficiary of the Act, and sometimes a list of witnesses would be appended. Even today two signatures are needed: that of the person in whom authority is vested (the Chancellor, the notary, etc.), and of the instigator of the action, the one who acts. Hence the polygraphy seen in Manhattan is a normal feature of our judicial culture. It would certainly be appropriate to single out a family of writing acts for which the verb ‘to sign’ would be the paradigm. Such a category would open up to examination the types of persons who are able to act through writing. We could then take into account such strange beings as the legal person and the collective entity, the enunciating team or the collective subject. This last example involves returning to the issue of elementary writing acts like signing and writing which are performed by several people. It seems to me that the act of writing makes possible very specific forms of collective life which should be further studied and analysed. We are far from being in an orchestrated world where each individual voice merges into that of the collective: we are in a world of contiguity where each signatory is valid in isolation from their neighbour. But when this polygraphy occurs on a city-wide scale it becomes puzzling. It would be useful to clarify the ways in which the visual resources of graphic signs, the reality effects derived from perception of the world around, and the emotions generated by the fact of being together are combined.

Anthropological Perspectives Throughout this chapter I have demonstrated that urban writings are an exemplary experimental field for an anthropology of writing. The fact that the majority of these writings are brief utterances, or

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even single words, has the merit of weaning us away from our normal methods of analysing texts. What particularly strikes us about them is the shape of the letters, the location of a written sign or the bizarre features of a document. The notion of a writing act is a model which enables us to bring together elements normally studied in isolation. It makes it possible to theorize the linguistic, graphic and situational aspects as a totality. Even better, the theory of writing acts applied to urban space draws attention to the written elements of our environment, and the way in which inscriptions constitute it, manage it and disrupt it. In this way we may find a partial answer to the two questions we asked from the perspective of an anthropology of writing: what do we do with writing? And what does it make us do?

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

C.f. Sorbonne 1968, Graffiti and Documents, (1998) collected and edited by Yves Pagès, Editions Verticales, Paris (No copyright). Speech act theory is based on Austin’s observation that certain utterances, ‘performative utterances’, are used to perform actions. Thus, when an appropriate person pronounces the formula ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’, she is doing more than saying the words, she is carrying out an action, that of naming and launching a ship (Austin 1975:5). The French of ‘Beware of the Dog’ found on warning signs is simply ‘Chien méchant’ (‘Dangerous Dog’), a less explicit performative. (Translator’s note) The French equivalent of ‘Keep off the Grass’ is again a statement which acts as a performative: ‘Pelouse interdite’ (‘Forbidden lawn’). (Translator’s note) C.f. Mulligan, Kevin (2004), ‘L’essence du langage, les maçons de Wittgenstein et les briques de Bûhler’, Les dossiers de HEL, Paris: SHESL, n°2, internet: www.htl.linguist.jussieu.fr/dosHEL.htm Latour & Hermant (1998), Paris ville invisible, 27–35.

References Austin, John L. (1962), ‘Performatif-Constatif’. In La philosophie analytique, Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie n°IV. Paris: éditions de Minuit, 271–304. Austin, John L. ([1961]1979), ‘Performative Utterances’. In J.O. Urmson & G.J. Warnock (eds.), Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 233–252. Austin, John L. (1975), How to do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fraenkel, Beatrice (1992), La signature. Genèse d’un signe. Paris: Gallimard.


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Fraenkel, Béatrice (2002), Les écrits de septembre, New York 2001. Paris: Textuel. Fraenkel, Béatrice (2010), ‘Catastrophe writings: in the wake of September 11’. In Mary Shaw & Marija Dalbello (eds.), Visible Writings: Cultures, Forms Readings. Rutgers: Rutgers University Press. Latour B. & E. Hermant (1998), Paris ville invisible, Les empêcheurs de penser en rond. Paris: La Découverte. Le Goff, J.-P (2006), Mai 68, l’héritage impossible. Paris: La Découverte. Mulligan, Kevin (2004), ‘L’essence du langage, les maçons de Wittgenstein et les briques de Bûhler’, Les dossiers de HEL, Paris: SHESL, n°2, internet: www.htl. linguist.jussieu.fr/dosHEL.htm Sorbonne (1968), Graffiti and Documents, (1998) collected and edited by Yves Pagès, Paris: Editions Verticales. Tilly, C. (1986), The Contentious French. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press.


Part II

Writing in the Workplace – Institutional Demands


Chapter Three

Updating a Biomedical Database: Writing, Reading and Invisible Contribution1 David Pontille

The development of information and communication technologies has multiplied our ability to produce, circulate and store large amounts of data. Whether for business use in managing stocks, suppliers and customers, or for administrative purposes of categorizing and classifying populations, databases are becoming increasingly important and their reliability is crucial. Over the last 20 years, databases have become an essential part of biomedical research (Bowker, 2000; Hine, 2006). As a result of developments in molecular biology and informatics it is now possible to undertake genetic analysis of large amounts of data. For these databases to operate effectively, a link has to be made between very small amounts of biological material (only a few microlitres) and a wide range of personal data relating to the donors (age, sex, occupation, lifestyle, diet, etc.) and their state of health (clinical and biological data). Yet most studies on bioinformatics databases take this link for granted, as if it emerged naturally and automatically from the data collection process. However, when we focus on the process whereby databases are made, the picture becomes more complicated. The relationship between samples and data does not emerge in and of itself. It is the result of the daily work of writing, and it is this point I wish to address. How, in actual concrete terms, does one produce a bioinformatics database? How does one forge a material link between different types of data? How does one ensure that this information is reliable and robust? A previous interdisciplinary research project on several biomedical databases in France and the issues involved in different forms of organization was a first attempt to answer some of these questions (Pontille, Milanovic & Rial-Sebbag, 2007). I shall go further here by examining a specific case: writing practices devoted to the updating of a bioinformatics

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database that combines clinical, biological and radiological data sets. In these particular circumstances, the link between inscriptions and samples has to be reconstituted. Thus, I will analyse the day-to-day production of the link between several sorts of data as one action within a larger chain of activities. This analysis gives me the opportunity to pursue several lines of investigation that have emerged from studies situated in the overlap between the anthropology of writing and the ethnography of work. The first involves understanding how writing produces robust links between scientific propositions and data sets. Here I shall follow several laboratory studies carried out within the anthropology of sciences which have drawn particular attention to the major role played by graphic representations in scientific work (Lynch & Woolgar, 1990). In this point of view, the notion of ‘inscriptions’, that ‘summarises all traces, spots, points, histograms, recorded numbers, spectra, peaks and so on’ (Latour & Woolgar, 1979: 88), is particularly relevant to analyse the different writing activities that occur in scientific laboratories and many others workplaces. The studies carried out by the Language and Work network have focused on the interweaving of productive work and language activities (Grosjean & Lacoste, 1998; Borzeix & Fraenkel, 2001), in reconsidering specific aspects of written performativity (Fraenkel, 2006). The second line of investigation will be to consider written documents as a resource for action, but also to interrogate the specific actions of writing, and what they make it possible to do and to make happen. Finally, several studies have emphasized the way in which the work of laboratory technicians who actually use the instruments has become devalued (Shapin, 1989; Barley & Bechky, 1994; Timmermans, 2003). Such studies have generally shed light on the ways in which the technicians’ contribution to scientific work may be represented or erased in the final published papers. I shall follow this third approach in order to stress out the active role played by these technicians in actually producing information through their daily involvement in writing practices. I shall, first, briefly describe the present case study and the methodologies used, before looking specifically at three main issues: 1. Data management: What is done with the written data? How is it actually handled? And for what purposes?

Updating a Biomedical Database

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2. Data processing: What is the graphic and textual information used for? What kinds of reading do they undergo? What combinations are made between them to produce other documents? 3. Writing and action: What links are made on the basis of these documents? What do they produce? What transformations do they undergo? This will then make it possible to see how some of these documents are evaluated compared to others and the scientific weighting attributed to them.

The Case Study: Constructing a Patient Cohort At the beginning of the 1990s, a team of French doctors began to be interested in the predictive factors for a joint disease. To establish the precipitating factors for the disease and identify the most severe cases, they began with the premise that they had to gather a set of data (clinical, biological and radiological) at the outset of the disease in order to follow the course of its development in patients for a sufficiently long time. They therefore set about recruiting a cohort of individuals who were willing to be examined once a year. Various types of data were collected between 1992 and 2002. First, at patients’ annual health check X-rays of all painful joints were made and archived. Then patients underwent a clinical examination designed to elicit a set of data which was recorded into especially fashioned ‘standardized research booklets’ for each patient devoted to the cohort. These contained a detailed 16 pages questionnaire on patients’ physical state (e.g. feelings of fatigue, severe pain, ability to move around) and mental state (e.g. feelings of being a burden to others, insomnia), as well as their daily activities (e.g. work activity, social life, family support, nervous tension). It also contained instances of graphic information (e.g. a cross placed on a scale of values, painful joints circled on a drawing of a limb, hand or foot). Finally, the participants gave a blood sample from which the medical team isolated two biological samples: blood serum itself and DNA. The aim of setting up the cohort was twofold. First, for clinical purposes, to enable doctors to make correct diagnoses and hence find

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therapeutic solutions. Secondly, the collection of data was a potentially powerful tool from the point of view of scientific research. Having access to a bioinformatics database held out the potential for formulating and testing a range of hypotheses using innovative techniques for detecting illness. It was a way of obtaining original results which could be published in major medical journals. Clinical practice was thus linked to biological research.2 This relationship involved a particular organization of work within the rheumatology unit of the hospital. First, the contribution of all personnel – the work of the head of department, the interns, the nurses and the technicians – had to be coordinated. Then adequate procedures had to be established in the rheumatology unit for dealing with patients receiving a series of treatments. At the annual health checks, nurses accompanied the patients to the X-ray department and took their blood samples. For their part, the doctors carried out clinical examinations and wrote a range of data into the research booklets. Finally, a room in the rheumatology unit had to be fitted out for analysing and storing biological samples, another made available for storing research booklets and another for setting up the bioinformatics database.

An Ethnography of Writing At the time of my study, new patients were no longer being added. The stage of data collection from the 880 patients over the period 1992–2002 had come to an end. The biological samples were stored in secure fridges, the radiological data were archived in each patient file, and the clinical data were inscribed in research booklets according to a standard procedure. However, the database associated with this material had been in a state of limbo for a long time. The clinical staff’s lack of time and the absence of specific funding for its upkeep had considerably delayed the project, even though an initial database had been started when the patients were enrolled.3 The bioinformatics database had to be updated in order to be functional. The main aim was to construct links between the clinical data, the radiological data and the biological samples. The different data sets had to be organized according to the same criteria and brought together in a single material place (the database). In 2004, a laboratory technician called Kelly, who was trained in biology and had a complementary


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degree in informatics, was engaged by the medical team to devote herself exclusively to this work, and she set about keyboarding the data. There were two imperatives that controlled the updating work. Kelly had to compile the bioinformatics database in conformity with regulations which had not been in place when it was originally set up. Since then regulation at stake had been pointed out and a number of increasingly detailed legal rules had been introduced (Pontille, Milanovic & Rial-Sebbag, 2007). Also, Kelly had to work relatively quickly to make the data available so that it could be used to produce innovative findings which could be published in international journals. The stage we’re at now, we’ve got five years to make use of this cohort. Five years from now, things will have moved on; the therapies and the questions will have changed. So we’ve got five years. We have to hurry up and make use of it, publish and get our work known. (Database manager) Here I shall focus particularly on the work carried out by Kelly. At the beginning of my research, in April 2005, the data on 600 patients was almost complete. I therefore observed the updating of data on 280 patients. This investigation was part of a larger interdisciplinary research project focused on five biomedical databases in France (Pontille, Milanovic & Rial-Sebbag, 2007). The ethnographic fieldwork was carried out at the same time to emphasize different forms of organization between these biomedical databases, especially selected in order to include a range of sizes, institutional contexts and developmental stages. Such a selection was made possible by the presence in the interdisciplinary project of a geneticist particularly informed with biobanking activities in France. She introduced me to the team of doctors interested in the genesis of joint diseases. In this particular case, I started with an interview with the principal investigator of the patient cohort who finally showed me round his hospital unit. I then negotiated to stay near Kelly during her work in order to be familiar with the biodatabase updating process. Afterwards I followed Kelly during a three-week period to understand her different activities, which are partly shared with several people, and involve a variety of tools and locations. Concretely, I sat down for hours near Kelly while she was facing her computer screen, reading research booklets

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and compiling data from juxtaposed texts on her office desk. I also followed her to the several rooms of the rheumatology unit she went during the updating process to identify the range of documents and of devices she systematically relied on. Finally, I made a regular collection of written documents that she used in the course of her day-to-day activity. Such an ethnography over time enabled me to study in detail the various elements that Kelly made use of in order to update the database, to note the constraints on her work as they emerged over time and to bring to light the range of writing activities that she engaged in. I supplemented my observations with photographs, interviews with several people involved in the clinical research project (the principal investigator and some of the doctors involved in setting up the cohort), and a sample of published articles based on this bioinformatics database. Following Kelly through the course of her daily work showed how she contributed to producing the database. Apart from having her own space in the laboratory attached to the rheumatology unit and a computer dedicated to her work, she had priority access to the locked room where research booklets had been stored since 1992. She had everything she needed for rapid updating of the data. All she needed to do was take the research booklets one at a time, read the contents, and, using the software, inscribe the data into the appropriate tables of the bioinformatics database: one ‘clinical datum’, one ‘biological datum’, two ‘radiological data’, and one ‘patient’ whose description included personal data (e.g. sex, date of birth, marital status, educational level, number of screenings, presence of serum or DNA samples). However, these facilities were far from sufficient. Circumstances had made it impossible to record all the data on the research booklets. The patient cohort was spread in time between the years 1992 and 2002, between different parts of the hospital rheumatology unit, and between a number of doctors and nurses some of whom had changed hospitals over the course of the project. Also the people who had seen the patients initially were not always the same ones who had written in the research booklets. The quality of the data varied markedly according to people’s availability and commitment (some doctors had written their theses on this cohort). There was also variation in quantity: replies to the questionnaires were more complete for some patients than others; the data were inscribed more conscientiously by some doctors than others. Contrary to what one might think, updating the database therefore did not require just an office, a computer and the research booklets.


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As we shall see, Kelly regularly made use of other elements in order to carry out her task. In particular, she had one essential tool. Instead of updating the database directly into the computer as she went along, she first wrote the relevant data by hand on an ‘intermediate form’ designed by the team. We shall see the reason for this additional step later, but for the moment let us note merely that this form was part of the updating process. Each intermediate form, consisting of four A4 sheets, was a summary of the results of each annual health checks taken from the research booklets. This was a crucial first stage in stabilizing the information and preparing the updating of the bioinformatics database. How did Kelly actually go about filling in the ‘intermediate form’? How did she deal with the multiple inscriptions in the research booklets? How did she manage to make links between the different types of data?

Handling the Documents Kelly did not start by filling in the intermediate forms. She began by organizing the different spaces that constituted her work place. Ever since 1992, the research booklets had been stacked in one of the staff rooms. Every time a patient attended an annual health check, the nurses and doctors would fetch their research booklets in order to fill in them. While the cohort was being set up, the research booklets would be in daily circulation between the storage room and the rest of the rheumatology unit and so would be removed from their storage boxes on a regular basis. The nurses would replace them more or less promptly depending on how busy they were and how many emergencies arose. Over the 10 years of patient follow-up, an increasing disorder had encroached on the apparently orderly organization of boxes neatly aligned on the shelves (Figure 3.1). The first thing Kelly did when she arrived was to spend several hours carefully sorting out the research booklets. This classification was twofold. First, she began by placing the research booklets for each patient in chronological order in box files. Then she arranged the box files in alphabetical order. This handling activity did not entail either reading or making sense of the research booklets, but merely noting the dates of the health checks and the patients’ names – although the activity did require some concentration. By placing the research booklets in the box files and then arranging the latter, Kelly was imposing a spatial organization on the documents.

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Figure 3.1


The stored research booklets room

The importance of this classification was seen whenever research booklets mysteriously went missing. Doctors and nurses sometimes used them when following up former patients from the cohort. Kelly’s first recourse was to look for the missing research booklet in the other box files in case it had been misfiled (some patients had similar surnames). If she found it in the wrong box she would sigh over her colleagues’ failure to take due care with the documents they dealt with every day: ‘I don’t believe it! It was hiding in here!’ In these action sequences involving handling and manipulation, the documents are not texts to be read. Kelly saw them as sheer objects which she carried around, moved, put in piles, sorted and arranged. By regarding documents as written objects, Kelly took into account the range of their material supports, here specifically the research booklets and the box files.4 It is important to emphasize this materiality of writing. Through her handling activities, Kelly became increasingly familiar with the tools of her trade: updating the bioinformatics database presupposes an intimate knowledge of the various elements which constitute it. Hence the documents are not simply textual resources. As material objects, they form an essential part of the working environment. In many work situations the fact that documents are objects which are produced and manipulated is just as important as their textual content


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(Latour & Woolgar, 1979; Latour, 1986; Grosjean & Lacoste, 1998; Pontille, 2006; Denis & Pontille, 2008). However, the handling of the written objects was not purely a manual task. By moving the research booklets and classifying box files, Kelly performed a stabilization of her working environment (Conein & Jacopin, 1993). The shelves and the box files constituted a visual memory. Minimal as they were, these paper technologies produced an additional set of landmarks, enabling Kelly to put in order the different elements that formed the material infrastructure of the bioinformatics database. The handling of the documents also required the ability to project oneself into the future. By arranging a spatial distribution of the data inscribed in different material supports, Kelly was preparing and anticipating future activities: the documents were organized in a particular way to produce a resource space rendered accessible through efficient routines (Kirsh, 1995). Once every element was in its place, Kelly was able to devote herself to fill in the intermediate forms.

Forms of Reading in Order to Write The challenge for Kelly lay in condensing the data contained in the various material supports into a single form (the intermediate forms) in order to transfer it into the computer database. Although doctors assumed that the data gathering stage was complete, Kelly still had to engage in an active process of data collection. Filling in the intermediate forms involved searching, sorting and selecting the data contained in the research booklets. This selection therefore involved a change of attitude to the documents: Kelly was now fully focused on their textuality. In the case of both biological and clinical data, she needed to know what she was looking for and know how to read them. But let us be clear as to what this reading entails. It is far from being an obvious and unambiguous activity. On the contrary, Kelly adopted several ways of reading in order to identify the relevant data. In some cases the reading was a rapid scan and a visual sorting to locate the essential data. Her gaze swept over the content and came to rest at precise points which formed landmarks thanks to the standardized presentation of the written notes. This reading could be done while standing up and continuing to pay attention to interactions with nurses and doctors who might be in the same room.

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Kelly carried out this form of reading in order to pick out the results of biological test which might not always be written up in the research booklets. In such a case, she consulted the patient file where they were stored along with other documents.5 Kelly rapidly scanned the biological results and picked out the relevant ones. Constant practice had given her a trained eye. For each patient she was able to rapidly distinguish the results that related to the cohort criteria from those that did not. The fact that the results were presented in the form of lists, tables or standardized formulas meant that the reading process could be structured and the contents scanned to decide which data need to be collected (Figure 3.2). The organization of the graphic space was also an important resource for action. Kelly held the biological results in one hand and filled in the requisite spaces on the intermediate form with the other. Her reading was inextricably linked to writing: while she scanned the graphic space of the documents, her attention was focused on the end of her pen. As soon as she identified a relevant biological result, she copied it down. For other tasks, the reading was more detailed. It presupposed a studious concentration, a meticulous attention to each word, and might

Figure 3.2

Reading in the office


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require several rereadings. This was the case when Kelly had to extract clinical data. How did she proceed? As Figure 3.2 shows, she opened a research booklet at the annual health check page, placed the intermediate form beside it on the desk, and opened the computer database at the entries dealing with that patient while keeping the medical notes in their cardboard file nearby. Here, reading involved, first, deciphering the doctors’ handwriting. They tend to fill in the health check results rapidly and often use abbreviations which make reading more complicated. Kelly was sometimes unable to make them out. In order to update the data, she had to use her wits. She often turned to other written objects where the writing is more legible. Well, I have to read the letters sent to the patient [at the time of that health check] because it’s written so illegibly, and the same for the treatment. Life would be a lot easier if they would all fill in the research booklet properly. (Kelly) Here again, the patient file was a resource; it contained all the letters sent to the patient. This correspondence provided data on how the pains were developing, the patient’s state of health at the time of the consultation, the treatment prescribed and any test results. But reading also involves interpreting. Without an understanding of what was written, the content would have been meaningless and Kelly would not have been able to process it correctly, that is, use it to fill in the intermediate form. The challenge was to study the data inscribed in the research booklets, evaluate its coherence and establish its meaning. This discernment is largely local; it is inscribed within the normative system of a group of professionals involved in the same clinical research. The shared writing objects, practices and common experiences are the basis for an understanding of the documents. The shared professional terminology provides specific terms for evaluating the patient’s state of health, the progress of the illness and the medical treatment provided. Thus the ability to read is closely linked to competencies based on medical knowledge situated in a specific configuration of several documents. Finally, reading also involved checking that the data made sense. Kelly’s practiced eye enabled her to recognize the note-writer (around ten

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of them between 1992 and 2002) and to attribute a relative weighting to the data contained in the research booklets. Kelly did not attach the same importance to all inscriptions to the research booklets, but evaluated them in terms of their enunciative authority. I think it must have been the technician before me who wrote that in the research booklet. I don’t like it so much. I think it should be a doctor! (Kelly) Identifying the handwriting played an important role. The value of an inscription varied according to whether it was written by a technician, a junior doctor in training, a fully fledged doctor or a noted mentor. Kelly attributed more or less weight to an inscription depending on the institutional hierarchy of the writers. Just as in medical diagnosis (Cicourel, 1990), the structure of authority relations between the staff plays a central role. Thus, Kelly was engaged in an activity that involved different forms of reading that were closely linked to writing. Systematically, she brought the different elements together, compared the research booklets with parts of the patient files and compiled items of data from correspondence. All these activities were necessary in order to copy, report, transcribe or inscribe data in the intermediate forms. In carrying out her meticulous work, Kelly selected and interpreted material previously provided by the doctors in order to produce a new link. But the link she forged by writing had to be sufficiently robust to enable one to navigate between the clinical, radiological and biological data sets.

Producing Reliable and Durable Information In looking at the content of different forms of writing, Kelly was not merely transferring data from one support to another. Along the way, she was producing information with different kinds of validity. As we shall see, Kelly transformed the data into reliable scientific and medical information, she produced legal documents and she fashioned a material link by modifying the status of the elements which made up the database. The performativity of writing was crucial throughout this chain of transformations.


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At several points, Kelly converted the inscriptions into figures and carried out calculations of certain biological parameters. That was the case when she was carrying out a recount of the number of swollen joints in order to convert it into a joint index: one of the sheets in the intermediate form contained a graphic representation of the human body showing the limbs, left and right, and including a calculation of the joint index (Figure 3.3). Checking these calculations was not just a linear process, it involved going back and forth between different data sets. It involved numerous adjustments which were not solely reducible to copying or transcribing. If she was in doubt about an annotation or a calculation, Kelly began reading, rereading, checking and redoing calculations. As she went along, she tried to verify it from other sources. Her biomedical knowledge was essential for carrying out such calculations, but it was linked to skills which were heavily dependent on the ability to manipulate writings: gathering, compiling, sorting, checking, examining and comparing (Latour, 1986). During this cross-checking, Kelly was trying to ensure that the data were medically coherent and hence make sure that they were valid. Updating the bioinformatics database was thus not an automatic process. Not only did Kelly gather inscriptions scattered among many different written objects, she also systematically made judgements of their value before writing them on the intermediate forms. The main issue here was to transform the data into reliable scientific and medical information. The intermediate forms were actively involved in this production. They served to give spatial distribution to the set of data compiled and condensed by Kelly within a single graphic space. The intermediate forms became the sole support for the process of updating the computer database. The intermediate place of these forms within the chain of production can be simply stated here: they were a replacement for the written objects used previously (box files, research booklets, patient files, correspondence, the results of biological test, X-rays) and formed the starting point for the production of original information which could be published in specialized journals. But the intermediate forms also had another purpose. By filling them out, Kelly was storing the data according to the requirements of the National Commission on Data Protection (Commission Nationale de

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Figure 3.3

The intermediate form: calculation of a polyarthritis index


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l’Informatique et des Libertés). She gave each patient in the cohort a number, which appears on the intermediate form as well as in the bioinformatics database, in order to preserve anonymity. She then stored each intermediate form in a cardboard folder with all the other data on the same patient. Finally, she placed this folder in a locked metal filing cabinet reserved for the cohort. This particular use of the intermediate forms was no longer concerned with the production of scientific and medical information. Kelly produced here a document with an explicitly legal function: if necessary, it would prove that the cohort set up for biomedical research purposes conformed to existing legislation and respected the patients’ rights. In terms of the French legal system, it is absolutely necessary to have a paper version of the database. It is the only place where the biomedical data and the patient’s name are found together, whereas the electronic version of the database, on which all subsequent treatment is based, must be completely anonymous. In inscribing the information on the same physical record, the writing also transformed the status of the individuals. They were not only patients who circulated within the hospital service, they also became entities forming part of the bioinformatics database. The attribution of numerical codes and the systematic inscribing of data was not merely a writing gesture. It was an act which impinged directly on persons (Bowker & Star, 1999; Fraenkel & Pontille, 2006). Here, it consisted of addressing them in a specific way by establishing their medical needs, and it influenced the course of their lives by obliging them to attend annual health checks. They were hospital patients, but they were also simultaneously categorized as individuals suffering from joint disease who featured in the bioinformatics database. The inscriptions made initially by the doctors and nurses, which Kelly then reworked, completed and archived, transformed their status permanently. It was through the intermediary of writing that they were constituted as members of the cohort and that their identity is newly organized through multiple inscriptions. One last operation completed this process. After checking for missing data and correcting anomalies, Kelly decided to backup the first version of the database on a CD-ROM. It would be a good idea to make a backup on CD so we have a clean and reliable copy. If we do this, if we have a problem at any


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Figure 3.4

The making of a bioinformatics database

time in the future, we will have a copy of the database that we can rely on. (Kelly) The purpose of this saving, which was in addition to the backups made regularly by the hospital’s computer server, was to have the same information available for all the analyses. The recording and storage were designed to give material form to the relationships that had been established between different pieces of information (Latour & Woolgar, 1979; Berg, 1996). As a transportable object, the CD-ROM played an active part in the construction of a material link between clinical, radiological and biological data sets. It formed the culmination of the process of updating the database. In doing this, it also formed part of the rationalization of the process since it contained no trace of the many doubts, hesitations and corrections which Kelly had laboriously overcome when making the database. It thus erased the whole set of day-to-day activities involved in updating it (Figure 3.4).

Invisible Workers of Writing and Scientific Contribution This erasure of the conditions of production of the database should not, however, reduce invisibility to a one-dimensional phenomenon.


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On the contrary, observing Kelly go about her daily work enables to emphasize that there are various forms of invisibility. Kelly was mainly visible during her handling activities. She regularly carried around research booklets, patient files and X-ray plates from place to place within the rheumatology unit of the hospital. This carrying around was of course part of her work. In the eyes of her colleagues, it drew on reserves of physical energy and needed few specific skills (Shapin, 1989), although handling the documents was not reducible to this. Kelly used it to familiarize herself with her tools, organize her work environment and anticipate her future activities. When she was in front of her computer, her work generally consisted of a simple and repetitive task: physically keyboarding the data in the database. In common with many other laboratory technicians (Barley & Bechky, 1994), the importance of her activity remained largely invisible and unrecognized. However, Kelly participated actively in the process of data collection by virtue of different kinds of reading. Her expertise was closely linked to the way she used the graphic space of documents and to her ability to navigate between various written resources in order to act properly. There was an even more invisible stage: Kelly contributed directly to the production of new knowledge by her daily writing work. Day after day, she filled in numerous gaps in the data contained in the research booklets which were supposedly her only source material. As she wrote, Kelly checked, corrected and filled in any missing cases. She forged a robust link between different items of clinical, biological and radiological data sets. Of course her contribution was seen as essential: she was engaged to carry out work which no-one else within the rheumatology unit had sufficient time to do. Her employer also saw her as being necessary for the long term. At the moment I’m trying to think of a way of renewing my data management technician’s temporary contract. This girl has had training in basic statistics, I need to keep her. So I’m now looking for funding to extend her contract. (Database manager) However difficult, meticulous and crucial Kelly’s writing work may have been, it was still reducible to making a stable bioinformatics database. All her writing activities were directed towards preparing the database

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so that it could be used by clinicians. As a data management technician Kelly was responsible for producing multiple inscriptions (gathering, keyboarding and manipulating data, carrying out statistical analyses, drawing up intermediate summaries . . .). In no way was she judged to be in a position to write texts, that is, articles publishable in scientific journals, like the doctors she worked with. The way the latter saw her contribution confirmed this point: The authors acknowledge the contribution of Kelly Whitehand as a clinical research data manager as well as the help of the Computational platform for Clinical Research and Analysis in Epidemiology & Public Health of the Beautiful University. (‘Acknowledgments’ section of an article published in a scientific journal in 2007) When Kelly was thanked in published articles, it was in the same way as a technological platform. Although her work was essential, only its technical aspect was acknowledged. It was seen as inextricably linked to the ‘inscription devices’ (Latour & Woolgar, 1979: chapter 2), these laboratory instruments that can transform a material substance into a figure, a diagram or other inscriptions which form the starting point for scientific literature.

Conclusion This case study shows that the solidity of the link between the different types of data which make up the bioinformatics database is based on writing. As well as favouring abstraction and making it easier to carry out mental operations (Goody, 1977), writing is also a tangible object, easy to handle, to manage and to combine (Latour, 1986). This is shown by the multiplicity of the physical records that Kelly manipulated: research booklets, intermediate forms, patient files, computer files, CDROMs, etc. During her daily work, Kelly consulted various documents and committed herself in systematic writing practices which support the production of a strong material link between different data sets. This study also shows that ‘information’ is not the starting point of Kelly’s work. On the contrary, it is the result of all her actions devoted to the biodatabase update. The whole set of documents daily used by Kelly was precisely a way of making available information that has a


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polyvalent value: scientific, medical and legal. Classificatory tools and coding procedures were crucial to this differentiated information management. They had important political implications in terms of how individuals appearing on databases are identified (Bowker & Star, 1999). Finally, it shows that the work of laboratory technicians is not reducible to manipulating instruments. In some cases, they are actively involved in collecting data and thus make a direct contribution to the production of knowledge through their daily writing work. Kelly produced an effective link between various pieces of data. Her involvement in different forms of reading and writing activities together culminated in a single operation: transforming data into information by giving them a specific and durable form. Yet, even if they effectively write some original results, laboratory technicians are rarely authorized to put their name on papers and few of them receive recognition for the importance of their scientific contribution (Timmermans, 2003; Pontille, 2004).

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

This chapter has benefited from the comments of participants in the ‘Ethnographies of Literacy: an Anglo-French Dialogue’ workshop organized by the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre in May 2008. I am also grateful to Philippe Artières, David Barton, Jérôme Denis, Béatrice Fraenkel, Fabien Milanovic and Uta Papen for their helpful critical remarks on earlier versions of this text. See Keating and Cambrosio (2003) on the changes in clinical activities brought about by advances in molecular biology. This is the main preoccupation of most bioinformatics database managers. They have to constantly find grants to cover their use and maintenance: ‘We need people to carry out these specific tasks. And this is not part of the clinical staff’s daily work, so we have to get separate research funding’ (Database manager). In other action sequences not discussed here, Kelly manipulated different written objects: she carried around patient files, handled X-rays, sorted out cardboard files, and put forms away in plastic cases. See Berg and Bowker (1997) for a detailed analysis of the recording procedures that take place within patient files.

References Barley, S.R. & B.A. Bechky (1994), ‘In the backrooms of science: the work of technicians in science labs’. Work and Occupations, 21(1), 85–126. Berg, M. and Bowker, G.C. (1997) ‘The multiple bodies of the medical record: towards sociology of an artefact’. The Sociological Quarterly, 38, 511–535.

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Borzeix, A. & B. Fraenkel (eds.) (2001), Langage et Travail. Communication, Cognition, Action. Paris: CNRS Editions. Bowker, G.C. (2000), ‘Biodiversity data diversity’. Social Studies of Science, 30(5), 643–683. Bowker, G.C. & S.L. Star (1999), Sorting Things Out. Classification and its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cicourel, A.V. (1990), ‘The integration of distributed knowledge in collaborative medical diagnosis’. In J. Galegher, R.E. Kraut & C. Egido (eds.), Intellectual Teamwork: Social and Technological Foundations of Cooperative Work. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 221–242. Conein, B. & E. Jacopin (1993), ‘Les objets dans l’espace. La planification dans l’action’. In B. Conein, N. Dodier & L. Thevenot (eds.), Les Objets dans l’Action: de la Maison au Laboratoire. Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, Raisons Pratiques, n°4, 59–84. Denis, J. & D. Pontille (2008), ‘Placing subway signage: pragmatic properties of signs at work’. Working paper presented at the 58th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association ‘Communicating for social impact’, Montreal, Canada, 22–26 May. Fraenkel, B. (2006), ‘Actes écrits, actes oraux: la performativité à l’épreuve de l’écriture’. Etudes de Communication, 29, 69–93. Fraenkel, B. & D. Pontille (2006), ‘La signature au temps de l’ éléctronique’. Politix, 74, 103–121. Goody, J. (1977), The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grosjean, M. & M. Lacoste (1998), ‘L’oral et l’écrit dans les communications de travail ou les illusions du “tout ecrit”’. Sociologie du Travail, 40(4), 439–461. Hine, C. (2006), ‘Databases as scientific instruments and their role in the ordering of scientific work’. Social Studies of Science, 36(2), 269–298. Keating, P. and Cambrosio, A. (2003), Biomedical Platforms: Realigning the Normal and the Pathological in Late-Twentieth-Century Medicine. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Latour, B., (1986), ‘Visualization and cognition. Thinking with eyes and hands’. Knowledge and Society, 6, 1–40. Latour, B. & S. Woolgar (1979), Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Lynch, M. & S. Woolgar (eds.) (1990), Representation in Scientific Practice. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Pontille, D. (2004), La Signature Scientifique. Une Sociologie Pragmatique de l’Attribution. Paris: CNRS Editions. Pontille, D. (2006), ‘Produire des actes juridiques’. In A. Bidet, A. Borzeix, T. Pillon, G. Rot & F. Vatin (eds.), Sociologie du Travail et Activité. Toulouse: Octares Editions, 113–126. Pontille, D., F. Milanovic & E. Rial-Sebbag (2007), Collectionner le vivant: régulation, marché, valeur’. Revue d’Economie Industrielle, 120, 195–212. Shapin, S. (1989), ‘The invisible technician’. American Scientist, 77, 554–563. Timmermans, S. (2003), ‘A black technician and blue babies’. Social Studies of Science, 33(2), 197–229.

Chapter Four

Eruptions of Interruptions: Managing Tensions between Writing and Other Tasks in a Textualized Childcare Workplace1 Karin Tusting

Introduction ‘Writing in the workplace’ has been a particular area of study in literacy studies and social sciences for some time. Generalizations have been made about the nature of workplace writing in contemporary society. Work is claimed to be increasingly ‘textualized’ (Iedema & Scheeres, 2003), with workers expected to engage in complex literacy practices, even in previously non-textual jobs (Brandt, 2001; Hull, 1997). The move to an ‘audit culture’ (Strathern, 2000; Power, 1997) requires workers to record their practices in great detail to meet heightened demands for accountability. This textualization of work can lead to stress and conflicts (Farrell, 2000; Farrell, Kamler & Threadgold, 2000; Iedema & Scheeres, 2003) as workers re-negotiate practices, knowledges and identities in the face of heightened textual demands. This social structural trend towards a culture of audit and inspection plays out in local situations, shaped by complex histories, cultures and local meanings. The research drawn on here2 was based in two case study sites, an adult education college and a childcare centre. It seeks to understand the effects of changing textual processes on the nature and experience of work. The study explores the specific paperwork demands staff are faced with, where they come from and how they are mediated, for instance by local management. It asks what the impacts are of such paperwork demands on people’s professional identities, relationships in the workplace, and working practices. This chapter will focus on data from the childcare centre, although some of the themes which emerge are common to both sites.

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This research addresses literacy from a perspective which sees literacy as a form of social practice, in which literacy exists in multiple forms, tightly integrated with and shaped by broader social practices and structures (Tusting & Barton, 2005). It draws on linguistic ethnographic methods (Rampton et al., 2004) which aim to develop an understanding of the meanings and experiences associated with literacy practices in particular settings, through reflexive immersion over time, participant-observation and ethnographic interviewing. Data collection in a childcare centre for 1 year from early 2007 included regular observation of working practices and discussions with staff. Twelve staff, representing a range of age, level of experience and work situation, kept logs of all their encounters with paperwork over a period of 1 week (similar to those developed by Jones, 2000). Semi-structured interviews based on these logs were carried out to further explore the impact of paperwork on their working lives. One issue which emerged throughout the course of the fieldwork, consonant with the literature on the textualized workplace, was that many staff expressed difficulty, to varying degrees, in keeping up with all the writing tasks they were expected to complete during their working day. In this chapter, I will explore some of the reasons for the difficulties they described, relating these particularly to the material conditions under which writing tasks were carried out, and the multi-threaded nature of activity in a childcare workplace. I analyse in detail one observed instance of a childcare worker engaging with a writing task, who is interrupted throughout her writing by other demands on her time and attention. I will argue that what we can see here are the concrete effects of literacy events being interwoven with all the other activities at play in the workplace. The difficulties experienced by this staff member are less to do with her personal skills or with the nature of the task itself, and more to do with the material realities of the local and broader context they are working within. Analysis of the multiple processes and activities at play will demonstrate the role of the staff member and the semiotic artefact she is producing in articulating together processes and activities at a range of different timescales, which have a variety of goals, more or less complementary or contradictory to one another. This both goes some way towards explaining the experience she describes of having difficulty in keeping up with writing demands, and complexifies the notion of the literacy event.

Eruptions of Interruptions

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Paperwork Demands in a Childcare Centre Early years education is a field in which written accountability demands have increased dramatically in recent years. Most of these requirements come ultimately from the government department which regulates childcare centres, at the time of writing the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). The managers of the childcare centre interpret these requirements and construct systems to fulfil them, informed by regular inspections and reports from Ofsted, the government educational inspectorate. The expectations placed on childcare workers have been developing and changing since the publication of the ‘Every Child Matters’ Green Paper (HM Govt, 2003), which introduced a programme aiming to reform all aspects of children’s care. Since then, there has been an increasing shift away from staff-led group activities towards a ‘continuous provision’ approach. This aims to make a range of activities and resources available all the time, carefully selected to encourage the development of each of the children as individuals. Children themselves then choose which of these resources to draw on in their play. This provision is planned through staff regularly writing observations of children’s activities, and drawing on these to identify appropriate resources and activities to provide support for each child’s next developmental steps. The centre in which this research was carried out implemented the continuous provision approach in 2003–2004. This was experienced as a significant cultural shift for many of the more experienced staff, who were expected to move away from a role where they were responsible for setting and guiding group activities, and shift to working in a much more individually responsive mode in which the choices children made structured what was going on. In some ways, even at the time the fieldwork for this research was carried out in 2007–2008, some of the staff interviewed were still coming to terms with the changes this implied for their professional practices, identities and values. Childcare at the centre was organized into roughly age-defined rooms, with groups of children aged 0–1 in the babyroom, 1–2 in two crèche rooms, 2–3 in two nursery rooms, and 3–4 in pre-school rooms. In each room, strict child-staff ratios were observed at all times, with a maximum of 3 children to 1 adult in the babyroom and crèche, 4 children to 1 adult in nursery and 8 children to 1 adult in pre-school. The centre

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employed highly qualified childcare staff compared to the norms of the sector, with 95% having the equivalent of NVQ level 3 or above (as compared to 65% of childcare staff in group providers qualified to this level nationally in 2007, Nicholson et al., 2008). Each child had a named key person in their room who was responsible for completing the majority of the paperwork related to that child and liaising with their family and principal carers, though on a day-to-day basis, children were looked after by all the staff in the room depending on what was going on. Each room followed a daily routine with lunch at midday, snacks morning and afternoon, and times for the children to play and to rest, though this was flexible, particularly with the younger children. The rooms were set up with a range of different age-appropriate resources, such as books, sand trays, water trays, painting facilities and toys of various kinds, from which children could choose as they wished. Recording and planning of activities was based on written observations of individual children, which were expected to be carried out on a very regular basis for every child. Prior to the introduction of this system, written observations had been used, but less regularly, and primarily for specific reasons, for instance if a concern was raised about a particular child’s development. All observation and planning was linked to particular named and numbered sections of one of the ‘frameworks’, produced by the DCSF in response to the recommendations of Every Child Matters, within which all childcare providers were expected to work: Birth to Three for younger children, or the Foundation Level for pre-schoolers.3 Full-time staff were expected to complete around eight to ten observation sheets a week. These included a brief written description of some aspect of a child’s behaviour, a section relating this to one or two areas of the framework, and a ‘Next Steps’ section drawing out implications for future activities. At the time this fieldwork was carried out, observations were recorded on forms which were pasted into ‘achievement books’ alongside photographs of the child, as in Figure 4.1a and 4.1b. At this point, L., the child in the pictures, was around 8 months old. This example demonstrates the level of detail involved in the observations. All the observations and photographs are labelled with headings and subheadings taken from the Birth to Three framework, for example, ‘Skilful communicator – listening and responding’, ‘Healthy child, healthy choices – individual choice’. The example also


Figure 4.1a

Individual observations

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Figure 4.1b


Individual observations

shows how observations structured the future activities planned by the staff, in the ‘Future play and practical support’ section. The observation sheets were collated weekly and one member of staff would draw on the ideas noted down for future activities, for instance in this example ‘musical toys/instruments’ and ‘singing time’, to plan resources and activities for the room the following week. Once they had been used for


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planning, observations were collected in the child’s achievement book, which was shared regularly with parents. At the end of each term an Individual Play Plan was completed for each child, assessing their progress against each different area of the framework and making plans for supporting their future development. Planning was also produced in relation to the centre’s termly themes. Medium-term planning was carried out by drawing together ideas for possible activities related to the theme of the following term, produced by staff in the different rooms, collated by management into a table of activities to choose from. In all rooms below pre-school age, a daily feedback sheet was completed for each child which tracked what children did, what they ate, when they slept, and when nappies were changed and checked. These were filled out throughout the day by the child’s key-worker and given to parents at the end of the day, along with a verbal report. In addition, a range of health and safety records were kept, diaries were used to communicate between staff and to keep records, and there was ongoing contingent paperwork to deal with, including such things as staff meeting notes, information on policy changes and new information for parents. The management team of the centre audited each room on a monthly basis to check whether staff met paperwork requirements, scoring them out of 100 per cent and making suggestions for improvement where necessary. Every staff member I spoke to was aware that Ofsted inspectors could turn up unannounced at any point, so paperwork had to be kept as current as possible at all times.

Balancing Paperwork Requirements and Immediate Demands Keeping up with this paperwork while looking after the children was challenging for most staff. This chapter will focus on the experiences of Thea, a young staff member working in one of the pre-school rooms, as a case study example, using a brief extract from observing her work to illustrate the material realities of writing in this workplace. This has been selected as a ‘typical case’ (Mitchell, 1984), a good illustration of many of the issues discussed in the interviews with staff more generally.

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It was not the nature of the writing tasks in themselves which staff reported difficulty with, but rather the challenge of fitting them all in to an already busy day. The daily routine included many and varied events which placed different demands on staff: registering the children on arrival and departure, discussing any issues with parents, feeding them snacks and lunch, setting up and carrying out planned activities, routine cleaning and tidying up, and generally interacting with the children with an eye to promoting their development. Finding slots of time within these activities to complete all the paperwork demands – including completing observations, keeping achievement books up to date, brainstorming medium-term planning, recording daily events on daily sheets or food records, and keeping health and safety records – was a real challenge. Apart from the weekly planning time allotted to team leaders, there was no specific time allowed for writing activities, which were fitted in around the other daily tasks. The result of this was that at any given moment, there was always something else that could or should be written. This increased work intensity, since any (rare) natural pauses in the hectic round of activity were accompanied by a feeling that this ought to be taken advantage of as an opportunity for catching up on outstanding writing. In Thea’s case, the paperwork demands on her were such that she never felt she had completed everything she was expected to. In any spare moment, there was always something which could be done. It led to a constant underlying nagging feeling of guilt at never doing enough. As she said, ‘It gets to the point where if you are sat with [the children] you start to feel guilty that you should be doing the [achievement] book.’ Keeping up with the number of observations expected was a particular problem. Each full-time member of staff was expected to complete eight to ten observations in a week, pro-rata for part-time staff; but many staff, including Thea, struggled to achieve this number. With the introduction of the monthly audit, failure to complete the appropriate number of observations impacted not just on the individual concerned, but on the whole team of staff, since one member not completing enough observations brought down the score of the room as a whole. This requirement led not only to practical difficulties in coordinating multiple demands, but also in some ways challenged Thea’s understanding of her role and her professional identity. She defined her job


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as being primarily to interact directly with the children, and felt that other tasks – including paperwork – should be subordinate to this, telling me: ‘The job itself is caring for the children’s needs and what they need. That is the crucial part.’ Anything which took her attention away from this was seen as an obstacle: ‘It [paperwork] takes your attention away from what they need because your attention’s not on them, it’s on something else.’ She felt that there were times when writing demands prevented her temporarily from directly interacting with the children, impoverishing her ability to assess their situation and progress, since she found immediate interaction to be more useful for these purposes than writing and recording: A lot of the time I don’t necessarily need to fill something like that in as detailed as that to be able to know what I need to concentrate on [yeah] with my children . . . if I was sat down there and one of them was struggling with it then I’d automatically make a mental note and think ‘I need to sit with that child and help them to be able to do that’ . . . rather than actually having to write something down on a bit of paper.4 The different paperwork demands that the nursery had to fulfil came from a wide range of sources, including education policy, health and safety legislation, the management of the larger institution in which it was based, specific demands from Ofsted inspections, and requests from parents. It fell to local management to mediate these multiple demands and produce a single local system for staff to implement. The managers spent time with staff and children in the rooms on a daily basis, and had a good understanding of the tasks staff were carrying out during the day. They designed the system with these in mind. The observations were intended to be short and easy to complete. Discussing issues of paperwork and writing demands with me, the Centre manager suggested that perhaps some of the staff who were struggling with their writing load might be over-estimating the amount of writing that was being asked of them. For an observation, she did not expect staff to write a great deal; a sentence or two would be enough, and so each should take no more than a minute or two5. She also challenged the idea, expressed in the quotation above, that direct interaction with the children was more important than the other tasks

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of the job, describing the written observations as playing an equally key role in caring for the children: The value of sitting back and actually looking at the bigger picture and taking 5 minutes to jot down their observation and what you’re going to plan for them the following week is of equal value with being there. Communication between managers and staff was generally very good, with regular team meetings, individual appraisals and continual informal conversations. Nevertheless, when members of staff did experience difficulty with writing demands, there was a reluctance expressed in conveying this directly. This was a nursery which prided itself on its high standards. Staff were well trained, relatively highly qualified, and paid at a higher rate than the average wage in the local area. Unusually for the sector, the turnover of staff was very low. As respected and autonomous professionals, staff took pride in their ability to fulfil all the requirements of the job, and did not wish to appear to struggle: You find it quite hard to go and say I’m having a problem with this because you feel as though you’re almost going to be saying I can’t cope with my workload and I can’t do my job properly and it’s not that at all . . . you don’t want to come across to management as a whinger and somebody that can’t cope with what they’re doing. However, perhaps inevitably, there was a feeling among some staff that management did not fully understand the implications of some of the demands of the recording and planning system, particularly when additional requests were made in already busy days. As I was told: When you are out of the room for a long period of time, i.e. you’ve become management and you’re now in the offices, you don’t actually realize what an impact all these extra ‘Could you just maybe do this or can you just try and do that’ what effect it has, as it goes over time and all these different bits build up . . . I don’t think maybe that they do realize that we do find it hard work to keep on top of it all. I will now explore in more detail a vignette from my observations which illustrates and explains some of the reasons for these difficulties in


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‘keeping on top of it all’. These relate directly to the material circumstances under which staff were carrying out their writing. In this type of workplace, writing has to be carried out as one of a stream of parallel processes, which overlap with and can interfere with one another. It is this interference between processes which makes the writing tasks staff are faced with particularly challenging to complete.

The Challenges of Writing Observations At the time the fieldnotes below were written, the room contained 14 children aged between 3 and 5 years old and 2 members of staff, Thea and Ellen. It was mid-morning. Children had arrived between 8.45 a.m. and 9.30 a.m. They had been playing with a range of different resources, in small groups, and had had snack time together. Thea and Ellen had registered the children, set out different resources, joined in with some of the play, and set up and cleared away food and drink. The room was laid out with different areas for different activities: a sofa and books for reading, a water play area, a dressing-up area, the computer area, etc. There were several child-sized table and chair sets, which were multi-purpose. Children sat around these tables to eat; they would later be used for painting and for other play. There was no dedicated writing space for staff, although one of the tables was set up for children as a ‘mark-making table’, stocked with pens, pencils, crayons and paper. At a rare quiet moment mid-morning, Thea decided to take advantage of all the children being occupied to write up two observations of activities that she had noticed earlier on, when two of the girls had been sorting pebbles into different types. She got out two blank observation forms and sat down at the table that had just been used for snack, bent double over it, perched on a child-sized chair. The description below, taken from my fieldnotes, details the process of Thea writing the two observations, while skilfully negotiating a continual series of interruptions. Each individual interruption is marked by # and numbered in bold. (Children are referred to by initials; staff names are pseudonyms.) 10.35 a.m.: Thea grabbed a piece of paper. ‘I’m just going to write down what these two were doing with the sorting, before.’ She sat

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down at the child-sized snack table, bent over and starting writing on observation sheets. 10.37 a.m.: #1 A. spotted that Thea was sitting at the table on her own and went over to show her how his Transformer turned into an aeroplane. She stopped writing and talked with him about it. #2 S. had been wrapping some highlighter pens up in Christmas paper, and went over to Thea to ask if she could start the Sellotape off. Thea asked who the present was for, S. said for mummy and daddy. Thea explained she couldn’t take pens home for mummy and daddy from pre-school. ‘So what can I send?’ Thea suggested wrapping up a piece of paper with a message on for them, and went over to the mark-making table with her to set her up preparing this. #3 Another girl N. came over to Thea with the wrapping paper, and to get the Sellotape started again. Thea put the roll in a dispenser and showed the girls how to use it, before going back to the table to continue writing. #4 The boys were having another conflict with the Transformer, and went over to her. They were not happy that A. still had the Transformer. [#5 Thea noticed that M. at the mark-making table was struggling to tear paper into shape and called over to her: ‘Use scissors M.!’] #4 continued She called over to A.: ‘Come here a minute.’ She explained that the Transformer belonged to F., and that he needed to give it back now and be nice. F. might give him another go with it later. A. handed it back and she praised him, then checked, ‘Are we sorted now? OK.’ Thea turned back to filling in the observation sheet. 10.42 a.m.: #6 A sudden, loud scream came from the writing table. Thea and Ellen both went over and checked what had happened. D. was upset because M. had taken her picture away. After comforting her, Thea went back to writing. She had now completed one box on the first observation sheet, and started filling in the ‘next steps’ section. 10.45 a.m.: #7 M. went over to Thea, and showed her milk bottle tops she had wrapped up. Thea: ‘That’s a good idea, Mummy will love them.’ Thea began the second observation sheet. S. went to approach her, saw she was writing, and went back to the table to get the Sellotape from N.


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#8 Thea said, with frustration: ‘Oh, I’ve wrote “three” twice now.’ She was now onto the second Next Steps section. 10.50 a.m.: Thea finished writing-up the observations. Interruptions While engaged in the primary activity of ‘writing an observation’, Thea experiences a string of interruptions of different kinds, which place demands on her to respond in a variety of different and sometimes contradictory ways. Most of these interruptions come from the children, and require her to quickly frame appropriate responses. A frequent theme in interviews with staff was that children needed attention immediately, at unpredictable times, and that when in the room with the children, responding to these immediate needs had to take priority over writing. This caused Thea some frustration: When you’re trying to take the time out to sit and do bits of paperwork like this and if then something happens in the room or the children are wanting something from you, you’re then getting frustrated because you’re having to stop what you’re trying to do . . . you’re trying to do the best by the children and provide the care that they deserve as well as trying to fit these other bits in as well which sometimes are hard work. This example shows how this dynamic conflict plays out in practice. The majority of these interruptions are initiated by the children. In #1, A. begins a conversation about his toy. In #2 and #3, S. and N. are requesting Thea’s assistance with their activities. In #4, Thea is asked to resolve a conflict between the boys. In #7, M. shows Thea her bottle tops, demonstrating pride in her activities. #6 is child-led in a different way, with sudden and dramatic screams from D. eliciting an immediate response from both members of staff. Only #5 and #8 are interruptions initiated by Thea herself. In #5 she notices one of the children struggling and calls over to make recommendations, and in #8 she interrupts herself as she notices an error in her work. All of these interruptions, even relatively straightforward ones like #1, in which A. simply initiates a conversation about his toy, require Thea to shift her focus away from the writing task she is working on.

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The interruptions are not merely on a practical level, but often require Thea to engage in delicate interpersonal negotiations; the sort of workplace activity which has been called ‘emotional labour’ (Hochschild, 1983). Interruptions #4 and #6 require her to mediate conflict between the children. To achieve resolution, she needs to be sensitive to each child’s perspective and help them to reach a solution they are comfortable with, negotiating between the boys, using careful explicit explanations about what is appropriate behaviour, praising appropriate behaviour, setting boundaries around inappropriate behaviour and checking that the children are happy before returning to writing. In #2 a different kind of delicacy is required, when Thea needs to clarify for S. what she is and is not permitted to take home. She needs to handle this sensitively and with some thought. The difference between paid-for ‘resources’ such as highlighter pens, which cannot be taken home, and a paper message, which can, is not necessarily transparent to a 3 year old. Thea manages this situation in a creative way, coming up with a solution which enables S. to continue her activity without giving away resources which belong to the Centre, and without causing disappointment for the child. In #7, another child-led interruption, M. is displaying pride in her achievement. Thea is sensitive to this and reinforces her pride by giving her praise. These sorts of delicate negotiations are all part of the important socialization work that nursery staff constantly engage in. Each one requires Thea to shift her focus away from her writing task and to quickly come up with creative solutions to immediate social difficulties. In the childcare setting, unpredictable and dramatic events requiring an immediate response can happen at any time, interrupting any writing activity which may be going on. In interruption #6 in this example, D.’s loud screams led both Thea and Ellen to drop what they were doing instantly and go over to her, to find out what was going on and to comfort her. In this instance, the problem was an interpersonal one rather than, as was feared, an accident, but the impact on Thea’s writing was similar: a break in flow, a heightening of emotional intensity, and a shift of focus away from the writing task towards the children’s immediate needs. Thea’s principal activity at this point was writing the observation. In the quotation cited above, the manager described this as a process of sitting back, looking at the bigger picture and taking 5 minutes to jot down an observation, a description which implies this is a simple writing


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task which can be completed in one brief sitting. However, the constant interruptions to which Thea responds turn writing an observation into a rather more complex set of activities. To complete the writing task she has engaged in requires her to continually shift her attention back and forth between the interruptions and the writing task, refocusing after each one. She found that such constant interruptions made the writing task very difficult for her. Interruption #8 above, where she exclaims in annoyance at having made an error, shows how such constant external distractions lead to a break in cognitive focus. The space Thea is writing in is cramped, which makes her task more difficult, and it is itself directly affected by the multiplicity of activities going on. Because of the interruptions, she has to keep changing her work space as she deals with the children. In interruption #2, Thea has to walk away from the table at which she has been working to get to the other side of the room, to ensure that S. has all the resources she requires to get on with the message-writing activity. The same is true of #3, when she is asked to start the Sellotape off for a second time. And because tables are used for multiple activities and there is no dedicated space for writing, the activity is framed by Thea constructing a place to write by clearing a table, getting out her writing materials and pens, and putting everything away again afterwards. This is something staff have to do each time they decide to write anything more substantial than filling in the daily sheets or the register. The cumulative impact is that a relatively short piece of writing, which as an uninterrupted activity might well take only 5 minutes to produce, ends up stretching over 15 minutes. Discussing this example, Thea described it as fairly typical: Whenever you try and sit down and do something like that [. . .] you’re bound to get disrupted because the children need us to sort issues and different things out that are going on.

Multiple Processes, Multiple Activities, Multiple Goals The interpretive framework of activity theory offers us one way to describe the complexity of processes at play in this room. This approach to understanding human behaviour stresses the goal-directedness of human activity and the central importance of the material and semiotic

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tools which mediate activities. It is normally traced back to the work of the Soviet psychologists Vygotsky (1962, 1978) and his colleagues Leont’ev (1978) and Luria (1976). Vygotsky developed the idea that human action is not simply a direct response to a stimulus from the environment, as the then-dominant behaviourist model suggested. Rather, human action is always mediated by artefacts (including both physical, material tools, and cultural objects such as words and ideas), and ‘object-oriented’, that is, aiming to achieve a goal of some kind. The ideas associated with this school of thought have been translated into Western research by the work of Engeström (e.g. 1987) who developed the model to explore the complexities of collective activity systems. Here, however, I will not be drawing on the full representation of the different aspects of the collective activity system explored by Engeström. My analysis of the different activities going on in the room will focus primarily on their object-oriented nature, identifying activities by the multiple goals which people orient to in different processes, and explaining the impact of these concurrent competing activities on Thea’s writing. I will also explore, but in less depth, some of the mediational means used and produced in these activities. Identifying a multiplicity of activities going on in a given social setting is rarely difficult. As Lemke (2000) points out, in any human situation there are always many different processes taking place, unfolding over different timescales and relating to different systems. Most social activities include a range of goals which are ‘not necessarily common or shared among participants; different goals are just successfully enough articulated to permit collective activity to proceed for the most part coherently’ (Lemke, 2000: 288). There is no reason to suppose that these articulations of different goals will necessarily be made in a straightforward or non-conflictual way. And each process of articulating goals is itself another activity which has to be performed by people. In this room, we see many different activities taking place, using different mediational means, addressed towards goals of different kinds. By examining the detail of this literacy event, we can explore in detail which processes are being articulated together, both through the event itself and through the eruptions of multiple processes which interrupt it. The analysis which follows will be structured around the goals of these different processes, following activity theory, and the different timescales on which they play out, following Lemke’s timescale approach.


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Immediate activities and goals The room is a site in which many things are going on at the same time. Many conversations are happening; different groups of children are engaging in play of various kinds; children and adults are reading, writing and making things; people eat and drink, and clear away; staff record what is going on and plan what is going to happen. Each of the ‘external’ interruptions #1–#7 above can be interpreted as an eruption into Thea’s writing task of a concurrent process, associated with a different goal. Thea herself has multiple goals. Her immediate goal of completing the observation exists in tandem with an ongoing goal of maintaining order in the room and safety for the children. She therefore cannot simply choose to focus on writing for a given time in order to complete the task. She needs to remain constantly partially aware of other activities in the room, and to be prepared to switch focus immediately when necessary to engage with whatever else is going on. The children’s goals are different. Their immediate goals are to enjoy play and to pursue their relationships with their friends. It is as they engage in these activities that many of the interruptions arise. A good example of concurrent short-term goals can be seen in the ‘nested’ interruptions #4 and #5 above. While Thea is engaging in delicate negotiations between the boys, she notices another child struggling with an activity, and calls instructions over to her. She is at this point juggling three separate activities, each of which has different immediate goals. In writing the observation, her immediate goal is to complete it. In giving instructions, her immediate goal is to enable the child to complete the activity. In mediating between the children, her immediate goal is to keep the peace, with underlying longer-term socialization goals to which I will turn next. It is through Thea’s actions that these immediate goals are articulated together, as Lemke puts it, ‘more or less successfully’.

Longer-term systems and goals The processes brought together in these events are not restricted to local and immediate ones. The process of writing the observation integrates the immediate activities in the room into broader social systems,

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and to systems at longer timescales. These broader and longer-term systems include (among others) the interpersonal relationships in the room; the Early Years Centre and its planning procedures; Thea’s lifespan, career and training; and Government policy and inspection. Each of these is associated with different goals and plays out at different timescales. This is an example of a situated activity which locally produces and reproduces broader social orders – ‘social practice’, as Lave and Wenger (1991: 47) describe it. Several of the interruptions described above can be understood as Thea trying to meet medium-term ‘relational goals’, such as maintaining good relationships with the children, and encouraging harmonious relationships between the children. Thea needs to respond to the childled interruptions at an immediate level to maintain order in the room and to keep the children’s activities going, but also in the longer-term perspective to maintain her relationship with them. It is an important part of her role that the children should feel they can approach her with their problems and difficulties, to share their interpersonal conflicts or their moments of pride, and that they should trust that she will respond to them appropriately. The ‘emotional labour’ interruptions identified above are all eruptions into the writing activity of short- to medium-term processes of relationship maintenance. Relationship maintenance and emotional labour also contribute to longer-term goals relating to the children’s development, such as socializing the children into norms of good behaviour, constructing particular identities, habituses and social practices, and supporting the children in learning the content and practices laid out by the stepping stones of the Foundation Framework, in preparation for school. Within the local planning systems of the centre, writing down observations forms part of processes with the goals of planning activities both for the following week, and in the longer term relating to the theme of the term. The written observations will also be used for recording purposes in the medium-term, by being put together in the achievement books. Production of these durable, portable semiotic artefacts has the goals of representing each child’s activities and development, and of providing a basis for communication with parents. Writing the observations is also a means by which the local activities of the Early Years Centre are incorporated within much broader and longer-term policy systems, primarily by means of doing the work required to situate them within the Foundation Level framework. At the


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immediate level, goals include selecting particular behaviours to record and highlight, reframing them by associating them with the labels of different sections of the framework, and classifying these behaviours in levels against a ‘stepping stone’ structure representing desirable development. The framework also structures the activities made available in the room in the medium-term, doing work similar to Hamilton’s (2009) analysis of the ‘Individual Learning Plan’ in adult literacy classrooms, aligning local identities and practices with the goals of the national system. This broader and longer-term policy framework is set at the government level. It is mediated by the Centre management through the development of the local system of observations, achievement books and weekly and termly planning. Thea and the other childcare workers writing observations and doing planning then become the local agents of the governmental policy framework, integrating the children’s local play activities into a nationwide structure of meanings. Thea’s activities also contribute to goals which relate to her own life history, identity and development as a childcare professional. She draws on her training and experience in each interaction and activity in which she engages. Each time she writes an observation, she is reinforcing her expert knowledge of the children, the framework and how to relate them together. By fulfilling the range of goals she is addressing here, she contributes to her longer-term identity goals of being a good childcare professional. Writing the observation contributes in addition to local goals by fulfilling the requirement placed on her to produce the right number of observations. This is part of ‘being a good professional’, and also contributes to ‘being a good team member’. Each room is judged competitively against the monthly audit criteria of the Centre. In interviews with me, most members of staff said they cared about getting a good score in this audit, and particularly about not letting their colleagues down by failing to fulfil their requirements. At a broader level, and crucially for the continued existence and support of the Centre, writing observations contributes to the goal of ensuring that the evidence requirements of Ofsted are fulfilled at all times. We can see from this analysis that completing the observation form is not a simple isolated task. In Lemke’s (2000) terms, the observation form affords ‘heterochrony’, coordinating a range of systems and processes at different timescales. Even at the immediate level, the production of the observation form is an example of a semiotic artefact being

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used to ‘knit together’ the recent past and the near future. Thea is not ‘doing’ the observation while she is writing it; she observed the described behaviour earlier on in the morning, and made a mental note of it while she was doing other things. She recreates it in written form, thinking back into the immediate past, and thinking ahead as she completes the ‘next steps’ planning section. In the longer term, Thea is articulating what is happening in the room with goals from these broader social systems by constructing the mediational means of the observation form.

Conclusions Thea tends to either put the difficulties she experiences with writing observations down to her own individual work preferences: I personally can’t sit in a room [with children in it] however quiet . . . because a lot of the time I end up writing something that they end up saying to me and I’m having to start the whole thing again and it’s . . . it is hard work. (Emphasis added.) or to the sheer volume of the demands she is faced with: You just seem to have to provide that bit more and more and more evidence of what you’re doing and it all has to be done in paper form. The analysis above elucidates the challenges she is facing in a different way. As Jackson (2000) argues, difficulties in fulfilling literacy demands at work do not necessarily come down to issues of individual skill, but are more likely to relate to the material and mundane features of work organization. The writing task is interthreaded with all the other activities going on concurrently. It becomes fragmented as Thea’s goals, and therefore her activities, constantly switch. Her cognitive, emotional and social focus has to shift quickly and constantly. And this is not an unusual event: this is one among many writing tasks she will engage in over the course of a working week, all under similar conditions. In a study of a Swedish day nursery, Davies (1994) has identified similar difficulties in managing paperwork against the immediate demands


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of childcare. As in the example analysed here, the workers Davies was studying had to carry out several activities simultaneously, leading to a range of tensions for children and workers. But this analysis is not limited to the experiences of people working in childcare. It speaks to issues identified in the textual mediation of care work more generally, where ‘writing’ work is often seen as separate from the work of dealing directly with people. Caring work can involve many different types of activity concurrently, with many different goals. As in this example, caring work can include emotional labour; teaching; cleaning; serving food; clearing food away; negotiating; boosting self-esteem; singing; categorizing and framing; planning; recording; filing; decorating . . . the list could go on almost indefinitely. Negotiating the complexities of this, while writing under the complex, challenging conditions analysed above, means that writing tasks which on the face of it might appear simple are actually fraught with difficult issues which workers negotiate on a daily basis. In the New Literacy Studies, the notion of a ‘literacy event’ is a central analytic tool. Heath (1983: 93) defines a literacy event as ‘any occasion during which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of the participants’ interactions and their interpretative processes’. Barton and Hamilton (2000: 8) gloss the notion of a ‘literacy event’ as ‘activities where literacy has a role. Usually there is a written text, or texts, central to the activity and there may be talk around the text. Events are observable episodes which arise from practices and are shaped by them.’ By this definition, the events observed here can clearly be seen to be a ‘literacy event’, given the centrality of writing to Thea’s activities. However, the notion of a literacy event as drawn on in the New Literacy Studies does not often incorporate the sorts of fractures and tensions identified in the analysis above. It has become almost a truism to state that literacy events are part of broader social practices. This analysis has demonstrated in concrete terms what this ‘being part of’ can mean in practice, with the literacy event of ‘writing an observation’ continuing in a multi-threaded way with many other activities, with different goals at different timescales. We need to think not simply in terms of a unitary ‘writing act’ but to look at the threads of practice woven together, and the eruptions into the act of interruptions, to gain understandings of the experiences of people writing in the workplace or elsewhere.

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Notes 1

2

3

4

5

I would like to express my thanks to the editors of this volume for their helpful and constructive comments on earlier versions of this chapter; to participants in the seminar ‘Ethnographies of Literacy: an Anglo-French dialogue’, May 2008, at which it was first presented; and to participants in the research at the childcare centre for their feedback. All inaccuracies and infelicities of course remain my own responsibility. I am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council for funding this work. The title of the research project from which this data is drawn is ‘Paperwork and Pressure in Educational Workplaces: The Textual Mediation of Target Culture.’ After this research was carried out, in September 2008, these were superseded by an integrated Early Years Foundation Framework, covering the years from birth to age 5. Interviews have been orthographically transcribed, removing ums, ers, repetitions and backchannelings, with capital letters and punctuation added by the researcher only where necessary to assist the reader’s interpretation. Ellipses . . . have been used to indicate where material has been deleted. Square brackets [ ] indicate material that has been added to clarify meanings inferred from the broader interview context. A few months after these observations were carried out, the format for the observation sheets was changed by the management to encourage shorter, more focused observations, a change welcomed by staff in the rooms.

References Barton, D. & M. Hamilton (2000), ‘Literacy practices’. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton, & R. Ivanicˇ (eds.), Situated Literacies. London and New York: Routledge. Brandt, D. (2001), Literacy in American Lives. New York: Cambridge University Press. Davies, K. (1994), ‘The tensions between process time and clock time in care-work’. Time and Society, 3(3), 277–303. Engeström, Y. (1987), Learning by Expanding. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit. Farrell, L. (2000), ‘Ways of doing, ways of being: language, education and “working” identities’. Language and Education, 14, 18–36. Farrell, L., B. Kamler & T. Threadgold (2000), ‘Telling tales out of school: women and literacy in “New Times”’. Studies in the Education of Adults, 32, 78–92. Hamilton, M. (2009), ‘Putting words in their mouths: the alignment of identities with system goals through the use of Individual Learning Plans’. British Educational Research Journal, 35, 1–22. Heath, S.B. (1983), Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. HM Govt (2003), Every Child Matters. Cm. 5860. London: Stationery Office. Hochschild, A. (1983), The Managed Heart: The Commercialisation of Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.


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Hull, G. (ed.) (1997), Changing Work, Changing Workers: Critical Perspectives on Language, Literacy and Skills. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Iedema, R. & H. Scheeres (2003), ‘Doing work to talking work: renegotiating knowing, doing, and identity’. Applied Linguistics, 24(3), 316–337. Jackson, N. (2000), ‘Writing-up people at work: investigations of workplace literacy’. Literacy and Numeracy Studies, 10(1), 5–22. Jones, K. (2000), ‘Becoming just another alphanumeric code: farmers’ encounters with the literacy and discourse practices of agricultural bureaucracy at the livestock auction’. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton & R. Ivanicˇ (eds.), Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context. London and New York: Routledge. Lave, J. & E. Wenger (1991), Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Lemke, J. (2000) ‘Across the scales of time: multi-level organization in activity networks and ecosocial systems’. Mind, Culture and Activity, 7(4), 273–290. Leont’ev, A.N. (1978), Activity, Consciousness and Personality. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Luria, A.R. (1976), Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations. Trans. M. Lopez-Murillas & L. Solotaroff. Ed. M. Cole. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Mitchell, C. (1984), ‘Case studies’. In R. Ellen (ed.), Ethnographic Research: A Guide to General Conduct. London: Academic Press, 151–153. Nicholson, S., E. Jordan, J. Cooper & J. Mason (2008), Childcare and Early Years Providers Survey 2007, London: BMRB Social Research. Power, M. (1997), The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Rampton, B., K. Tusting, J. Maybin, R. Barwell, A. Creese & V. Lytra (2004), UK Linguistic Ethnography: A Discussion Paper. Available online from www.ling-ethnog. org.uk, last accessed 2 June 2009. Strathern, M. (ed.) (2000), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London and New York: Routledge. Tusting, K. & D. Barton (2005), ‘Community-based local literacies research’. In R. Beach, J. Green, M. Kamil & T. Shanahan (eds.), Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Literacy Research (2nd edn). New Jersey: Hampton Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1962), Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978), Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chapter Five

Tracing Cows: Practical and Administrative Logics in Tension? Nathalie Joly

In the past 10 years, a large number of studies have looked at accountability both in the private and the public sector. The introduction of demands for systematic writing into a predominately oral workplace (at least in some industries) has given new impetus to analysis of modes of cooperation, of the production of knowledge, of individual and collective responsibility, and finally has provided a favourable environment for the study of creativity within organizations. At the same time, criticisms have been made of what can look like rituals of verification (Power, 1996) and of the rise of audit culture (Strathern, 2000) that publicizes, among other things, the coercive technologies of accountability (Shore & Wright, 2000) and the arrival of panoptic systems of surveillance (Puxty, Sikka & Willmott, 1994). In France, field studies have made available a body of findings on how workers react to accountability rules and how they put them into practice, mainly within the context of audit and quality control procedures. These studies have shown that writing down work procedures has led to recognition and sharing of previously tacit knowledge and the dissemination of appropriate practices, and has given rise to increased knowledge and expertise in production processes (Campinos-Dubernet & Marquette, 1999; Cochoy, Garel & de Terssac, 1998). However, these findings need to be qualified. Thus, despite the producers’ assurances that they were adhering to instructions, strategies of ‘selective compliance’ with quality control and accountability procedures have been observed (Rot, 1998). Hence, despite the success of enrolment ‘on paper’ (in the sense given by Callon, 1986, where enrolment consists of allocating tasks to the members of a network in order that they feel as actors and give sense to their actions), it was sometimes found necessary to compromise with systems of established relationships and to revert

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to oral communication in order to coordinate services (Reverdy, 2000). Also, problems arose when procedures were interpreted differently when used in different sites (Mispelblom Beyer, 1995), and not all organizations welcomed the conscious recourse to records1 (Cochoy & de Terssac, 2000). Therefore, enforcing accountability has not been a smooth process. Moreover, a number of analysts writing from a critical sociological perspective have attacked its Taylorist2 elements and its ‘disciplinary’ nature, in Foucault’s sense (1978). One of the least-explored aspects of this production of writing under constraint is the changes in record keeping, or, more precisely, the linkage between an existing system of records and a new system of accountability. This gap is no doubt mainly the result of the invisibility which has long cloaked writings produced within organizations (Borzeix & Fraenkel, 2001). Also, even when attention has focused on records within companies, it has proved difficult to document them adequately due to their often confused and fragmentary nature (Cochoy, Garel & de Terssac, 1998). Whatever the reason, the fact is that there have been few studies of the kinds of writings which preceded the institution of quality control procedures, and a fortiori, which placed them in the context of accountability systems. The only observation made was of the disappearance in some cases of industrial workers’ ‘little notebooks’: ‘When I started out, I copied a workmate’s little notebook: temperature, quantity . . . these little notebooks have practically disappeared. Nowadays, the bloke watches the procedure. These days, there’s one big notebook for everyone’ (Campinos-Dubernet & Marquette, 1999: 90). I intend to approach accountability in agriculture from the perspective of ‘native’ writings. This can be justified by the large number of ordinary writing practices that take place on farms. As we shall see below, these should be seen in the context of both the specific nature of this occupation (where, for instance, remembering events is crucial for people who work with living creatures) and the history of agricultural development (modernization involved mastering the techniques of ‘writing-counting-measuring’, Coquery, Menant & Weber, 2006). For some years now, accountability has been enforced on farms by regulations (European health legislation), by the requirements of agroalimentary industries and wholesalers and by new mechanisms of state support (contractualization and conditionality). As in the production of goods and services, the meaning we attribute to this imposition of

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writing is somewhat ambivalent: it can be interpreted as a form of subjection of local practices to global norms defined by the market and the State, or else as an opportunity for learning and the development of competences. It can also be seen as a kind of duty to consumers concerned about food safety and quality and environmental protection, but also as a more strategic form of farm management. The materials on which this chapter draws have been gained by observations in a dairy farm in a village of Côte d’Or (Burgundy) where the office and animal housing were piled with paperwork of all kinds. This farm is medium sized, representative of local farming as regards to the size of the herd and the crop. This is an ‘exemplary case’, which may be highly individual but is also absolutely typical of the ethnographic observations I have carried out over the last 10 years within very different farming contexts. The analysis will focus on writings produced as part of the farm’s internal management of the herd, and will describe their characteristics (content, format, and style) and their uses. Following Goody (1977), the emphasis will be on the processes whereby information is written down and made visible, and the cognitive possibilities they offer. This focus on ‘writing to oneself’ (Joly, 2004) makes it possible to detect potential tensions between practical and administrative rationalities which intermingle on a daily basis.

La Panetière GAEC3: ‘A Writing Farm’ The room is tidy. There are two sets of shelves holding files along the walls, a table and chairs in the middle, and at one end, a large bay window with another table drawn up to it, with a computer nearby. Then, as you go further into the bay, you see something surprising. From this space above the cowshed you can see almost the farm’s entire herd. Michel sits here to do his paperwork (see Figure 5.1). He likes being able to look from his cows to his registers to the computer screen. This is the office at la Panetière, a farm run by two brothers. This enclosed space, deliberately placed close to the animals, is the centre of a strategic activity, the management of the herd. This requires a patient process of obtaining and processing information such as milk production, feed, health checks, calving, sales, repairs, etc. No aspect of the animals’ lives is immune from forecasting, calculation and logging of results. The office is also the centre for document storage

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Figure 5.1

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An office above the cowshed

and administration. No event within a cow’s ‘career’ can be ignored. In fact, since the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy in 2003, the granting of European aid is conditional on the fulfilment of environmental, health, animal welfare and plant protection requirements. It has given rise to a system of checks known as ‘conditionality’ in which all documents held by the farmer are examined, with the possibility of sanctions. Within this space equipped with modern technological and more traditional writing tools – diaries, pocket notebooks, calendars – the conditions seem to be in place for ‘tracing’ cows, by constructing a continuous data chain of information on the origin, type of production (stock-rearing activities), movements (cows leave the field or change owners) and transformation in the ‘value’ of every animal on the farm. Michel is anxious to ensure that all his papers are in order and has signed up for a training course. This is when I first meet him, on a visit to his farm along with other farmers on the course. The category of ‘office work’ does not cover all the writings found at La Panetière. As you wander round the farm buildings you come across a large number of inscriptions, some of them improvized on odd bits of cardboard, others scrawled on a calendar or a wall chart. Amongst this proliferation of writings we may make an initial distinction between documents produced by a third party and those generated

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within the farm itself. The first category includes a huge range of information: technical, economic, legal and administrative. Some of these documents merely pass through the farm but others are stored there permanently. The first category usually consists of printed matter such as test results, echography scan results, animal passports, receipts for feed deliveries, weight tickets, etc. which involve no or little writing: just a signature or a tick in a box. The second category of documents relates to work and work-related activity and is produced on a daily basis. Michel makes entries in diaries, makes copious notes in exercise books and charts, and enters information into the computer. He uses two software programmes to keep track of the milking herd. Both words and figures feature in all of these different supports. Following legislation introduced in 1987, all bovines are identified by a unique 4-digit ‘lot number’ engraved on their ear tags, which makes the animal traceable. This lot number is used for general administration, by professional bodies and by market operators. Instead of giving his cows names of flowers as in times gone by, Michel has taken to referring to them by their numbers, like so many other stock rearers. Hence the endless lists of numbers scattered among all the writings relating to the stock. However, on closer examination, the initial distinction between externally and internally generated writings proves unworkable. Among the documents found in the office at La Panetière, we see a number of annotations handwritten by Michel on a wall chart produced by the milk marketing board. These give details of the weather during spring and summer, directly underneath a graph showing annual milk production. The farmer’s intention here is to note the influence of climate on the herd’s productivity. In another document, the health inspection record, the vet’s visits to treat the calves are noted. These two examples of multiple-authored writing show the dispersed nature of herd monitoring, which requires not only the skills of the farmer but also those of several outside partners: the stock advisor, the inseminator, the vet, the milk quality controller and so on. Another way of classifying the documents is in terms of their relationship to activities. We can thus distinguish between documents which will be stored and those which have a more ephemeral existence. The first type are the subject of ‘off-line’ reflection (Conein & Jacopin, 1993), distanced from the activity, for purposes of planning or assessment, whereas the second type are used ‘on-line’, that is, as a support for the ongoing activity. In order to operationalize this categorization and

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analyse the reasoning based on this writing, I shall look at the diaries which are kept at La Panetière and the various inscriptions found in the cattle shed. The decision to focus on the writings produced by Michel (his brother/associate is responsible for crop records) rather than those of third parties was based on the nature of the study. It should not be taken to mean that these were the only writings used in the course of stock rearing. Recording work Work documents are a grey literature which generally holds little attraction for researchers (Pène, 1995). Their function is to ‘get things done, make things known and evidence things . . . with the most economical linguistic and semiotic means’ (Fraenkel, 2001: 254) which normally means that the writer is not visible in the document. These formal characteristics feature in farm diaries. Their pages are filled with uninterrupted writing for a very specific use: not writing down ‘things to be done’ as is commonly thought, but ‘things done everyday’, work in the fields, looking after the herd, general maintenance, visits from experts, and the daily weather report. The style is stereotyped and draws on repetitive formulas, often omitting the finer points of grammar, as is shown in Figure 5.2. However, it is not totally devoid of narrative

Figure 5.2

Daily recording of weather conditions and activities

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effects which personalize these steady routines. These provide a glimpse into the micro-worlds of the scriptors’ work and surroundings, giving scraps of information on personal and family life – hairdresser and doctor’s appointments, births, family meals, visits, etc. This desire to document the day’s events is similar to that found in a documentary genre well known to eighteenth century historians, the ‘book of reason’ (Joly, 2000). Michel’s’ writing is a good example of these formal characteristics which I identified in my own research on agricultural diaries 10 years ago (Joly, 1996). The dry bulletin of everyday activities shows the desire to create a record, to fix and render visible the work carried out, with syntheses interspersed here and there: records of the animals in the herd, the amount of fodder harvested, etc. Generally, the weather observations come at the beginning or the end of the day’s work. The need to write every day, which is rarely shirked, is the most interesting feature of the diary. It provides the farmer with a ‘synoptic overview’ (Latour, 1985) of work progress on different timescales: daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. The diary’s ability to bring together otherwise scattered information which can be seen at a glance has several consequences. As he flicks through the pages of his diary, Michel finds it easy to track the beginning and ending of the specific operations which make up the work cycle of his year. He can grasp the thread of his activities and organize their course. These ‘temporal buffers’ (Cellier & Marquié, 1980) are then used to make seasonby-season comparisons which rely on diaries kept over 2 consecutive years. Taking the previous cycle as a reference, the farmer has available a ‘calendar of routines’ (Joly, 2004) that enables him to plan his activities and monitor their progress. The climatic information often provides the key to interpreting any deviations from the normal (a rainy spring which delayed sowing), which enables him to explain them and thus be reassured. Hence the diary plays the role of a ‘cognitive artefact’ (Norman, 1993) which makes it possible to manage a ‘dynamic environment’ (Hoc, 1996) in which living things, plants and animals have their own rhythm of growth. This depends on conditions which are in many cases unforeseeable and uncontrollable (such as climatic factors). Their development may also be out of step with human intervention, sometimes markedly: hence, the end result of an insemination may not be seen until the animal conceived has itself reached the age of reproduction.

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In these conditions, it is particularly important to compile observational data and establish temporal references. Farmers’ records are therefore crucial in this respect. As Goody (1977) stresses, referring to the calendar encourages a reflection on work activities in which temporal relationships between events are grasped on a different basis to that of simple experience. But at the same time, these memorized action scripts make it possible to form ‘expectations of events [. . .] and to use these as a means of reducing the uncertainty and complexity of decision making and action’ (Quéré, 1997: 171). They form ‘temporal arrangements’ (Joly, 2004), in the same way as the ‘spatial arrangements’ found in daily life (Conein & Jacopin, 1993). Drawing up lists Other types of documents found on stockbreeding farms, and at La Panetière in particular, complement this ‘central memoir’: grazing record sheets, health records, calving records, breeding plans, birth registers, etc. Most of them are at the interface between internal records and the relations of farms to their numerous partners, as mentioned above. But for information to be shared, it often needs to be copied several times, especially when data has to be entered into information chains with their own format. This is particularly the case with animal identification data which, since the stockbreeding laws on 1962, connect each of the ‘French Republic’s cows’ (Vissac, 2002) to the Ministry of Agriculture. The main characteristic of these writings is that they are essentially in list form. Following Goody (1977), lists differ from spoken forms of language (and no doubt also in how they are perceived visually) in that they separate and abstract their constitutive elements: since the words are isolated, ‘they can be seen in purely quantitative terms (and sometimes given an ordinal number as well), which means that counting, the simple arithmetical operation of addition, becomes a much easier and more obvious process.’ (1979: 161). We can see from this how much easier it becomes to organize a herd. The enumeration is permanent and relates to the need for technical and administrative management: recording genealogies, animal movements, health procedures, etc. Once the numbers reach a certain level or the need for records extends over a certain length of time, the written list fixes information that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to commit to memory.

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Generally, written records are processed by external organizations and thus have standardized formats. However, it is not uncommon to see liberties being taken with these formats, or to find parallel documents drawn up ‘for personal use’, where the information is presented differently. Hence, school notebooks are often used in preference to the documents produced by professional organizations. Alongside these lists which aim to show the state of the herd at a given time and which are stored permanently, other, more ephemeral lists can be seen around the farm buildings. These have the function of displaying immediate observations which may or may not be stored afterwards. This type of listing takes a very specific written form, using words or abbreviations, numbers, shorthand signs and other symbols (Fraenkel, 1994). At La Panetière, next to the milking parlour, there is a rather odd metal cupboard covered with inscriptions (see Figure 5.3). Here the farmer has made a note of cases of mastitis. From left to right, he has written the date of diagnosis, the cow concerned (referred to by its lot number), the teats affected (in shorthand form), the treatment applied (in abbreviated form), the end of the treatment (noted as day

Figure 5.3

A cupboard serves as reminder

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of the week). In fact, this list functions as a notice board. Read across, it serves as a checklist: the farmer knows which cows not to milk, and until what date – noted on the right hand side. Read vertically, it is an aid to decision making: the farmer can see at a glance which cows are prone to mastitis on the left side of the list – and can decide to dry them off at the appropriate time. This overview of mastitis cases is important for giving an idea of the herd’s overall health. It also enables specific animals to be targeted for treatment. A number of codes, including ticks, underlinings, question marks and comments, are used to make it easier to draw the farmer’s attention to abnormal or worrying events. Finally, there are other lists used to prepare for future action, in the form of rough drafts or plans. An example is a calendar displayed in the stable in which Michel has written down the probable calving timetable, noting down the numbers of the pregnant cows (see Figure 5.4). This is based on his memory of the matings from 9 months earlier which he jotted down in a small notebook. When calving begins, he ticks off the numbers in turn, as in a shopping list, and he thus has an immediate visual record of the births still to come and the cows to watch out for. He can also estimate the amount of work yet to come with greater accuracy.

Figure 5.4

An overview of calving

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Some of these lists have only a limited life, so the calendar, for instance, will be thrown away once the dates of calving are entered into the notebook. Others are kept and reused year after year. For instance, the farmer will draw on the mating schedule from the previous season to draw up the current season’s schedule. This is obviously of value. Sometimes the lists create a concrete representation of a given situation in order to make management easier, like the mastitis cupboard described. At other times they alert the farmer to a delay in carrying out an activity, on the basis of ‘diary variables’ (Arrow, 1974). They may also provide information on procedures, like the record cards farmers slip into their overall pockets which tell them about sowing schedules or the amount of fertilizer used the previous year and provide a basis for making ‘on the spot’ decisions.

Real Writing Work and Compulsory Writing Work Keeping diaries and filling notebooks and calendars with lists are two complementary practices which support reflection and rationality. The chronicle of work encourages ‘reflection upon information’, as Goody has suggested (1977: 109), and enables activities to be routinized. List making reorganizes information to make it easier to use. My analyses here are essentially deducible from the material reality of certain written documents we may observe in a limited period of investigation. But study of a corpus alone is certainly not sufficient to enable us to grasp the logics of writing. In previous studies, we have carried out biographical interviews to find out about the farmers’ motivations, their work histories, how they viewed their jobs, etc. We have also observed the writing work, the way farmers kept diaries and the role of wives. Talking to the farmers about their writing practices, we have been able to gather their views on the paperwork they are dealing with. We are convinced that writing practices are sufficiently complex to require a combined ethnographic approach (Dodier & Baszanger, 1997). There are, moreover, a series of written forms involved in stock-rearing management – notably computer supports – which have not been included in this analysis. But despite these reservations, we can try to draw some conclusions about the process of moving from the existing system of records to an official system of accountability.

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La Panetière is a kind of repository of writing practices in agriculture and the changes they have undergone over the last half century. It demonstrates the central role of science and technologies in managing a herd and the rationalization they have brought about in methods of management. There is a plethora of records. Calculation is everywhere and information processing is used increasingly. The farm also shows the great importance of regulation, administration, commercial contracts, in short, a whole body of obligatory inscriptions whose purpose is to regulate the activity of stock rearing and which frame the production of writing, evermore imperatively and normatively. What can we learn from this case study about the difficulties encountered by farmers today in recording their practices? First of all, we may conclude that although accountability is an innovation, it has certainly not been the first to introduce the logic of writing on the farm. Of course, not all farmers write in similar ways, or as intensively as Michel. But certainly all of them have been obliged to some extent to adjust their recording systems to outside demands. In this respect, we can identify three main issues. The first issue lies in the ‘incompleteness’ of the records produced for the needs of day-to-day management. As the herd is made up of lots, breeders can save themselves some registration works. When they carry out some routine intervention, for example, vaccination of the calves, the dose given to one animal will be the same for all other animals in the cohort. The information is embedded within the organization of the work itself (Lorentz, 2001) and does not need to be recorded in any other way. However, the current obligation to register every treatment each animal undergoes brings with it an additional burden of information management and the acquisition of new skills. Although information technology obviously makes it easier to deal with large numbers of events it does not resolve all difficulties – and only half of all farmers have computers. Specifically, the problem of going beyond organizational routines that are functional from the point of view of internal management but have to be suddenly rethought in response to new requirements. There is a second issue, linked, paradoxically, to the sheer abundance of records produced on some farms. Michel provides a particularly good example. In his anxiety to monitor his herd closely, he has produced a multiplicity of notes and supports. However, the more the

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information is spread around, the more reports are needed, and the more scope there is for errors and omissions (Mazé et al., 2004). During a visit I made to his farm – a practical session in information management – the group of trainee farmers witnessed a most enlightening exchange which illustrated this. In fact, the trainer rapidly picked up any gaps in the information, whether due to the software used or to the farmer’s mistakes: Michel: ‘when I see a case of mastitis, I treat it that morning. Like you say, I write it down here right away [information written on the cupboard, see fig. 5.3] and I know how long to wait. So I know what’s what. In the evening, I come along and I know not to milk her. After it happens, normally I come here on my computer in the evening, and then I input the information [. . .] This one, for example, she’s been milked there, you see, that’s entered [brings up data on the spreadsheet]. That one, she had mastitis on the 13th of February, and then in fact she was only treated on the 1st, that was the second quarter. So, in fact, I haven’t put down when the treatment ended!!’ [Michel looks surprised because this information is compulsory.] Trainer: ‘Well, obviously that isn’t in accordance with the rules. If you stay with this [with this software], you have to have a report on paper too for the rest of the information [that is, the compulsory information], in relation to . . . [. . .] An inspector who comes along, he’s going to say, “I want to see everything” well, what are you going to give him?’ Michel: “Well, I’m not very well up on this at the moment”. So even this ‘writing farm’ is not completely in order with regard to official accountability. The information missing from the spreadsheet is almost certainly written on the metal cupboard in the milking parlour. But supposing it has been rubbed out? Is it in a notebook? What would happen in an official health check? We can guess from this example the amount of work that has to be done to ensure complete correspondence between the data available, recorded on internal ‘native’ supports, and the data required, in a form that can be presented to an agent of administration during a farm check. This work makes cognitive demands. If it is not done regularly, it leaves farmers in a state of uncertainty, even those who are most scrupulous in their stock-rearing practices. There is a huge amount of stress involved.

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Similar conclusions have been drawn from studies of British farms: ‘It’s got dreadful with forms now!’ sums up many people’s response to the increasing amount of form-filling and other paper work that is now involved in routine farming practices’ (Jones, 2000: 71). A third issue relates to the language and style of the records. The ones that farmers utilize for their own management purposes use their occupational language whereas those they are obliged to produce for others often use other ways of describing their activity. Of course, this occupational language is largely hybrid. It shows the influence of over 50 years of intensive modernization and a culture of state support, and is a mixture of indigenous expressions, technical concepts and administrative terminology. But we should emphasize that not all farmers have an equal ability to straddle these different worlds. Some of them seemingly have little difficulty in marrying administrative forms to their own management instruments (Joly & Weller, 2009), while others have been profoundly affected by the challenge to their identity resulting from this conceptual distance, quite apart from any criticisms they may voice of the actual principle of control. Finally, certain farmers find themselves at odds with the style of records demanded. The increased codification of agricultural practices favours ‘mechanised and repetitive writing’ (Dardy, 2004), as opposed to the narrative writing of diaries. It requires other abilities on a daily basis: ticking, striking through or filling in box after box, which deprives them of the pleasure of writing. And also of other associated pleasures, as Albert has posited in relation to keeping accounts, a wider kind of stocktaking: ‘a soul-searching before the household deities of domestic order [here, the professional ideal], or ways of rendering accounts to an idealised self desirous of “a life well spent”’ (Albert, 1993: 46). Keeping records for others sets in train a series of transformations in the real work of writing. Will farmers, as they have done in the past, be able to keep their distance from these demands, and show inventiveness in reformulating them?

Notes 1

The authors stress that things can be accountable but yet still not understood. Hence, they suggest making a distinction between ‘accountability’, the written entering of single actions and events at work, and ‘mappability’, in the cartographic sense, which refers to the methodological and reflexive use of information gathered.

104 2

3


Frederick Taylor, in Principles of Scientific Management (1911) advocated modern ‘scientific’ management techniques such as the breaking down of complex activities into simple repetitive tasks, and the routinization and standardization of working practices. Critics saw this as de-skilling and as an attack on workers’ control over their work situation. This farm has the legal status of a GAEC, Groupement Agricole d’Exploitation en Commun, a non-trading partnership allowing farmers to work together under conditions similar to those of a family farm.

References Albert, J.-P. (1993), ‘Ecrits domestiques’. In D. Fabre (ed.), Ecrits ordinaires. Paris: POL, 37–93. Arrow, K. (1974), The Limits of Organization. New York: W.W. Norton. Borzeix, A. & B. Fraenkel (2001), Langage et travail. Communication, cognition, action. Paris: CNRS Editions. Callon, M. (1986), ‘Éléments pour une sociologie de la traduction. La domestication des coquilles Saint-Jacques et et des marins pêcheurs dans la Baie de Saint-Brieuc’. L’Année Sociologique, 36, 169–208. Campinos-Dubernet, M. & C. Marquette (1999), ‘Une rationalisation sans norme organisationnelle: la certification ISO 999’. Sciences de la société, 46, 83–98. Cellier, J.M. & J.C. Marquié (1980), ‘Système d’activités et régulations dans l’exploitation agricole’. Le Travail humain, 43(2), 321–336. Cochoy, F., J.-P. Garel, & G. de Terssac, (1998), ‘Comment l’écriture travaille l‘organisation: le cas des normes ISO 9000’. Revue Française de Sociologie, XXXIX, 673–699. Cochoy, F. & G. de Terssac (2000), ‘Au-delà de la traçabilité: la mappabilité: Deux notions connexes mais distinctes pour penser les normes de management’. In E. Serverin & A. Berthoud (eds.), La production de normes entre Etat et Société civile. Paris: L’Harmattan, 239–249. Conein, B. & E. Jacopin (1993), ‘Les objets dans l’espace. La planification de l’action’. Raisons Pratiques, 4, 59–84. Coquery, N., F. Menant & F. Weber (2006), Ecrire, compter, mesurer. Vers une histoire des rationalités pratiques. Paris: Editions ENS. Dardy, C. (2004), Objets écrits et graphiques à identifier. Paris: L’Harmattan Dodier, N. & I. Baszanger (1997), ‘Totalisation et altérité dans l’enquête ethnographique’. Revue Française de Sociologie, XXXVII, 37–66. Foucault, M. (1978), The History of Sexuality vol. 1 The Will to Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. Fraenkel, B. (1994), ‘Le style abrégé des écrits du travail’. Cahiers du français contemporain, 1, 177–194. Fraenkel, B. (2001), ‘Enquêter sur les écrits dans l’organisation’. In A. Borzeix & B. Fraenkel (eds.), Langage et travail. Communication, cognition, action. Paris: CNRS Editions, 231–261. Goody, J. (1977), The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Hoc, J.-M. (1996), Supervision et contrôle de processus. La cognition en situation dynamique. Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble. Joly, N. (1996), ‘Ecritures du travail et savoirs paysans’. In J. Beillerot, C. BlanchardLaville & N. Mosconi (eds.), Pour une clinique du rapport au savoir. Paris: L’Harmattan, 265–278. Joly, N. (2000), ‘Chroniques du travail agricole et livres de compte: la diffusion des pratiques d’écriture en milieu paysan’. In Les enjeux de la formation des acteurs de l’agriculture. Dijon: Educagri Editions, 239–246. Joly, N. (2004), ‘Ecrire l’événement: le travail agricole mis en mémoire’. Sociologie du travail, 46, 511–527. Joly, N. & J.-M. Weller (2009), ‘En chair et en chiffres: la vache, l’éleveur et le contrôleur’. Terrain, 53, 140–153. Jones, K. (2000), ‘Becoming just another alphanumeric code: Farmers’ encounters with the literacy and discourse practices of agricultural bureaucracy at the livestock auction’. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton & R. Ivanic (eds.), Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context. London: Routledge, 70–90. Latour, B. (1985), ‘Les “vues” de l’esprit’. Culture Technique, 14, 4–30. Lorentz, E. (2001), ‘Models of cognition, the contextualization of knowledge and organizational theory’. Journal of Management and Governance, 5, 307–330. Maze, A., M. Cerf, M. Le Bail & F. Papy (2004), ‘Entre mémoire et preuve. Le role de l’écriture dans les fermes agricoles’. Natures, Sciences et Sociétés, 12, 18–29. Mispelblom Beyer, F. (1995), Au-delà de la qualité. Démarche qualité, conditions de travail et politiques du bonheur. Paris: Syros. Norman, D. (1993), ‘Les objets dans l’action’. Raisons Pratiques, 4, 15–34. Pène, S. (1995), ‘Records de mains sur les écrits gris’. In J. Boutet (ed.), Paroles au travail. Paris: L’Harmattan, 105–122. Power, M. (1996), ‘Making things auditable’. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 21, 2/33, 289–315. Puxty, A., P. Sikka & H. Willmott (1994), ‘Systems of surveillance and the Silencing of Academic Labour’. British Accounting Review, 26, 137–171. Quéré, L. (1997), ‘La situation toujours negligée?’ Réseaux, 85, 163–192. Reverdy, T. (2000), ‘Les formats de la gestion des rejets industriels: instrumentation de la coordination et enrôlement dans une gestion transversale’. Sociologie du travail, 42(2), 225–243. Rot, G. (1998), ‘Autocontrôle, traçabilité, responsabilité’. Sociologie du travail, 40(1), 5–20. Strathern, M. (2000), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London and New York: Routledge. Shore, C. & S. Wright (2000), ‘Coercitive accountability: the rise of audit culture in higher education’. In M. Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London and New York: Routledge, 57–89. Vissac, B. (2002), Les vaches de la République. Saisons et raisons d‘un chercheur citoyen. Paris: Editions INRA.


Part III

Writing by Individuals and Institutions


Chapter Six

Vernacular Writing on the Web David Barton

Introduction Studies of everyday reading and writing draw attention to the wide range of literacy practices which people participate in, and how they serve a wide range of purposes in people’s lives. Some activities, like filling in a tax form or paying utility bills, are imposed externally and are carried out in response to the demands of the state or other institutions. But many of the things people do, and the ways in which they do them, are voluntary and serve people’s own purposes; these are things such as reading novels and magazines, planning holidays, keeping a diary, writing to a newspaper. All of these activities are currently being transformed by the possibilities offered by new technologies. It is the ways in which these everyday practices are changing which is the focus of this chapter. The overall question is what is happening to writing as people take up new opportunities on the internet. The question is addressed here by examining the writing practices associated with the photo sharing site Flickr, framing this within what is known about vernacular practices. This chapter first describes some of the general characteristics of these vernacular literacy practices by reviewing studies of such practices. It then focuses specifically on writing practices and turns to an example of writing on the web, that associated with Flickr. The chapter reports on a study of the writing of active multilingual users of Flickr, examining it through the lens of literacy studies, and then returns to notions of vernacular activity and how they are changing in contemporary society.

Vernacular Literacies In an earlier detailed study of the role of reading and writing in the local community of an English town, Barton and Hamilton identified

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key areas of everyday life where reading and writing were significant for people and where they used reading and writing for their own purposes. To summarize from that study (Barton & Hamilton, 1998: 247–258), the activities in this ‘local literacies’ research ranged from ways of record keeping and note-taking through to extended writing of diaries, poems, life histories and local histories. The study contrasted such vernacular literacy practices, which were often voluntary, self-generated and learned informally, with more dominant practices which were more formalized and defined in terms of the needs of institutions. Vernacular literacy practices are essentially ones which are not regulated by the formal rules and procedures of dominant social institutions and which have their origins in everyday life. The areas of everyday life where reading and writing were seen to be of central importance to people were: organizing life, such as the records people kept of their finances; personal communication, such as the notes, cards and letters people send to friends and relatives; the personal leisure activities people participate in; the documenting of life where people maintain records of their lives; the sense making people do to understand their lives; and their social participation in local activities. Such vernacular practices are frequently less valued by society and are not particularly supported or approved of by educational and other dominant institutions. They may also be a source of creativity, invention and originality, and the vernacular can give rise to new practices which embody different values from dominant literacies. They can be shared locally but have tended not to have broader circulation. In terms of learning, vernacular literacy practices are learned informally. This is a sort of learning which is not systematized by education or other outside institutions. The learning is rarely separated from its use; rather, learning and use are integrated in everyday activities. Vernacular practices draw upon and contribute to vernacular funds of knowledge (as discussed in Gonzales, Moll & Amanti, 2005) and are linked to selfeducation and local expertise. They give rise to particular texts with their own local circulation. Vernacular texts are not circulated very far. They are often treated as ephemera, they tend not to be kept and are easily disposed of. Vernacular literacy practices can be contrasted with dominant literacy practices. Dominant literacies are those associated with formal organizations, such as those of education, law, religion and the workplace. These organizations sponsor particular forms of literacy, as described in

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Brandt (1998, 2009). These are the institutions which support, structure and promote particular forms of reading and writing. These dominant practices are more formalized than vernacular practices and they are given high value, legally and culturally. When people act in their lives they in fact draw upon all the resources available to them and it is clear that dominant and vernacular practices overlap and are intertwined. There may be official texts, for instance such as a letter from the bank. The texts are official but what people do with them, the practices themselves, can be vernacular. People develop their own practices around these texts. What is interesting here is how people make literacies their own, turning dominant literacies to their own use, by constant incorporation and transformation of dominant practices into vernacular activities. Everyone has vernacular practices: an international financier, a presidential candidate or member of a royal family may keep a personal diary, write a list of things to remember to do at the beginning of the day or write poems as a form of relaxation. But what is important for ‘ordinary people’ (a term which will be left loosely defined, but see Barton, et al., 1993) is the ways in which vernacular activities can provide a voice not otherwise available, for instance to marginalized people. This is particularly true of acts of writing, and such writing is the focus of this chapter. The study of ordinary writing normally focuses on the activities of ordinary people. Although such writing has not been researched as much as more prestigious texts, there have now been several studies of the value of ordinary people writing (such as Sinor, 2002), historical studies (as in Lyons, 2007), rural life (Donehower, Hogg & Schell, 2007 and Powell, 2008) and in developing countries (Barber, 2006; Blommaert, 2008). In an earlier study of adolescents in the United States, Camitta defines vernacular writing as that ‘which is closely associated with culture which is neither elite nor institutional, which is traditional and indigenous to the diverse cultural processes of communities as distinguished from the uniform, inflexible standards of institutions’ (1993: 228–229). This definition locates the writing in its cultural setting. Most of the studies have been of writing in English. Note that the term ‘vernacular’ is used here in a broader sense than when reference is made to ‘vernacular languages’, which means local languages. Vernacular writing is not tied to specific languages. Blommaert’s study and the studies reported in Barber show people drawing on written vernacular languages as well as dominant languages of English and French

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in Africa. The role of different languages in vernacular writing is revealing and is explored further in this chapter. One reason for being interested in people’s vernacular writing now is that technologies are changing the possibilities for people to act in the world. People use new technologies including computers and the internet in their everyday lives for writing, not only with instant messaging and emails, but also in many more ways. To some extent computers have been used to do old things in new ways: people have found new ways of sending messages and of maintaining contact with friends and relatives. However, technologies, particularly more recent developments, provide greater possibilities for people to engage in new and different activities, which have not existed before. (For an overview of recent research in this area, see Coiro et al., 2007.) The focus in the present chapter is on those parts of the web where users put in their own content, where there is a given interface which provides spaces for people to add content. Central to this is the idea of social networking, that is, participating and collaborating in communities of users. Often this is in the form of people communicating by writing, but it also includes uploading pictures and films. Blogs are a common example of an internet writing activity: a framework is provided and people write in and add content. Sites known as Wikis, like the ubiquitous online user-generated encyclopaedia Wikipedia and other specialist encyclopaedias and dictionaries provide further examples. There are also social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace where people communicate through writing and in other ways. And there are virtual worlds like Second Life. Such sites all provide new possibilities for writing. In addition, people write when they leave evaluations of music they have listened to, books they have bought, places they have visited and the quality of service they have received in service encounters. Often people make links between their activities in these different arenas.

Writing on Flickr Writing is obviously central to blogs and Wikipedia but this chapter examines a place where it may be less obvious that there would be writing, that is, in photo sharing sites. The focus here is on Flickr, one of the most well-known photo sharing sites internationally, www.flickr.com;


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Flickr is a site where people can upload and display their photos, effectively creating an online photo album. This chapter draws upon data which has been collected as part of a larger ongoing study of the literacy practices associated with Flickr to address the question posed earlier about what is happening to vernacular writing as people use new technologies. This study includes broader issues, such as language choice and issues of informal learning which will be reported on in more detail elsewhere. The research uses the framework of literacy studies (outlined in Barton, 2007) to examine writing on the web. To do this, it focuses on the practices people are participating in and the texts they utilize, drawing upon things which are known about the structure of literacy practices, including phenomena such as networks of support and informal learning and the ways in which people act within the constraints and possibilities of a medium with its perceived affordances (as in Lee, 2007). This includes issues about the significance of identity, about multilingual identities and about linking local and global phenomena. I will begin by describing how Flickr works and how writing is located within an assemblage of multimodal possibilities with word, image and layout intertwined in many different ways. Flickr is a website which provides a frame or interface and people add their own content, primarily photographs. As a first step, when someone uploads a photo, they can add a title and a description of the photo. They can also add tags: these are individual descriptive labels which can be used when searching for photos. Figure 6.1 shows a Flickr page where a photo has a title, description and tags. Users can form sets of their own photos, which they give a name to, and sets can be grouped into collections, which are also named. The photo in Figure 6.1 belongs to a set called nw yrk 2007. Users can also share their photos with other Flickr members by adding their photos to groups representing common interests across users. These groups also have spaces for discussion and sometimes members run blogs. People also make contact with other members by listing friends and family members they want to keep in touch with, known as their contacts. People can also comment on each others’ photos. Figure 6.1 shows a comment and response below the photo, and when scrolling down there are further comments. Users can join discussions of photos and they can send messages to other photographers. These are all optional activities and people using Flickr may do none of them, some of them or all of them. The list of possible activities continues, and

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Figure 6.1


A Flickr photo page

examples will be given below of how people use Flickr for complex social networking and how people situate their Flickr activities within a web of other ever changing Web activities. There is a separate page for people to write a profile of themselves. The page might be empty or it might contain several screens of writing. For example, Carolink wrote a description in Spanish with a translation into English below it: The only person that takes awful photos with the most expensive camera. I am not in this thing for the photo, with all my respects. I make photos to write. This is a permanent learning for me and I have nothing to teach. Knowing all that, if you still like my pictures, be my guest. There are some general categories which people fill in, optionally, when joining Flickr, such as gender and location. The profile also contains a


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list of people’s contacts and of the public groups they belong to. On their profile page people can provide links with internet activities, such as their blogs, other photo sites and websites. People can also add widgets, small programs, to show such things as the number of hits they have received, what countries viewers have come from and their most popular photos. The framing provided by Flickr is currently available in eight different languages, but people can write in any language they want to. In these different ways Flickr encourages social participation; it provides a range of affordances which people take up.

Researching Flickr As with any internet research, this research inevitably requires adapting existing methodologies and developing new approaches (as in Hine, 2005). Overall, the Flickr study is multi-method and brings together different sources of data. This chapter draws upon five interlinked sources of data. The study began with a systematic study of the Flickr sites of 100 members. There was then a two-stage online interview with 30 Flickr users. First, there was a general interview about their uses of Flickr, as described below. This was followed by particular questions based upon analysis of at least 100 of their photos. To get a broader idea of the range of language issues and how they differed in particular settings the sites of users of other languages, including French, Norwegian and Greek, were also examined. Finally, data also came from autoethnographies on our own developing Flickr activities, carried out by Barton and Lee. The study focussed on multilingual activity on Flickr for several reasons. First, it is the only way to include the range of international activity represented there and people’s deployment of different languages is essential to the global communication seen on such sites. In addition, language choice can be quite revealing about issues of identity and sense of audience. This can be analysed on people’s websites and followed up in individual questions for them. Crucially for this chapter, language choice illuminates what is happening to vernacular practices. The first step in the analysis was to get a gauge of multilingual activity on Flickr. A set of 100 randomly selected Flickr users who were members of a major English-based group, FlickrCentral, were examined. Of these, 75 users of the 100 users had their profile in only English, a further 12

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had a bilingual profile including English. Seven had it in a language other than English and 6 had no written profile. This demonstrates that even on an English-based site there are significant numbers of users of other languages. For the next stage of the research, the online interviews, a different group of people were studied: people were selected who were active on Flickr and who used at least two languages, Chinese and English or Spanish and English. These are the two most common languages on Flickr after English, and are languages which the researchers know. For the first stage of the interviews, participants were invited to complete an online survey at My3q, a website which hosts online questionnaires. This asked about the range of users’ Flickr activities: what they used Flickr for, their contacts, the languages they knew, where they were from and their educational background. The sites of people who answered the survey were then analysed, especially their 100 most recently uploaded photos. Based on this they were then asked specific questions about their site and the photos. This was done through Flickr email and was followed up, where appropriate, by further email exchanges. The research set out to study people who were frequent users of Flickr and, indeed, 26 of the 30 people who participated in the study said they went on Flickr almost every day or more frequently. As well as uploading photos, everyone did a range of other activities: they all commented on other people’s photos and nearly all responded to comments on their photos; most updated their profiles regularly and they used tags to search for photos belonging to other people on particular topics. There were eight people who administered groups.

Online Writing Practices Turning now to examine these people’s writing in more detail, all used titles for pictures; they did not give a title to every picture, some were blank and some were sequence numbers given by the camera or other software. Titles appear above the picture and to the left. Many titles were like the titles of novels or paintings; they might be explanatory or descriptive, like teatime, class of 79 or slightly cryptic like loser, I’m hooked. Many were playful. Often they were intertextual to other photos or to the wider world. A common way of doing this was with song titles, such as Wandering eyes, Singing in the rain and Common people.


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Descriptions of pictures were not quite as common as titles, but many pictures had them. The descriptions appear beneath the picture and can be of any length. Usually they provided further information about the picture or the person’s relation to it: These plants are genus of perennial subshrubs, and are an important specie of the mountains (known as páramos) of Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. They were apparently discovered by the botanist Alejandro Humboldt, in 1801. no photoshop. Sometimes descriptions were used to provide translations of the title, so the title might be in Chinese, for example, speaking to a local audience, and the description in English, addressing a more global audience. A different space for writing is the list of tags. Tags are categorizations provided for individual photos and they were used extensively by the people studied. In this data, and across Flickr, they range from conventional classifications like beach, summer and blue shared by other people through to innovative, cryptic and often idiosyncratic ones, such as van storm and noflashgordon. Some would be recognizable to other Flickr users, such as the tag 365 or 365Days, meaning that the photographer is involved in a photo project of taking one photograph a day for a year. Tags increase the accessibility and searchability of photos on someone’s site. Anyone can also view a person’s tags as a ‘tag cloud’ showing their most popular tags and Flickr also organizes popular tags into clusters. People provided tags in several languages. Similarly with the sets (and groups of sets, called collections) which people created, some followed conventional categories, such as photos of particular events of holidays or birthdays, or they were more specialized, inventive and individual, as in my purple wall or why breathe. Some sets were defined by a particular event such as a birthday party, whilst others, such as sunsets would be added to regularly. This was also true of the groups people belonged to which ranged from the conventional to the original. Unlike tags and sets, which can remain individual, groups can only work if other people share that category. As has been pointed out elsewhere, tags are taxonomies created by people, often referred to as folksonomies (Marlow et al., 2006; Winget, 2006). Another significant area for writing is the page where people can write their profiles. An open space for writing is provided and what people

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put in varied a great deal in length and content. It was common to write a short paragraph about oneself, as in the following example: It gives me an enormous pleasure to share my photos with strangers, friends, family and people i know. This pleasure is automatic, i don’t have any special expectation from your reactions, but if i can put a question mark in yourself, even if it’s a methaphysical one of any sort, then i would be very happy. [SMeaLLuM] Also on the profile page is a space for other users to write testimonials about the person. This facility was not used much but there were a few testimonials. People’s interaction with other users came initially through comments left beneath the photos, with the most recent being added at the bottom (unlike blogs, where the most recent are at the top). These were commonly evaluative – usually positive, as in: your work is an inspiration to me; or The bright blue and still waters are fabulous to present an air of calm. I like the clouds hovering over the horizon here. Some were more cryptic and may have been addressed to specific people: Hey baaaaby! Don´t hate me! =)). People also participated in other online writing activities which will not be pursued here, such as joining Flickr discussions and blogs. And from their profile pages they made links to their other internet activities, such as to their blogs and to social interaction sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Language Choice and Imagined Audience The examples so far have been mainly in English. However, all the people studied here deployed more than one language. Their language choices are revealing about people’s sense of identity and the audience they are addressing. They combined the resources of the different languages they knew in various ways. The titles and descriptions would be


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in either language, with titles more likely to be in English than the descriptions. In terms of tagging, people drew on various languages, sometimes translating directly and at other times having particular reasons for having a tag in a specific language. Carolink, for example, said she was participating in new practices and she had a strong sense of the global: I try to fit all the tags both in English (universalism) and in Spanish (my immediate Flickr public) and, since I know a little French, I put the French word when I remember it. Elsewhere she talked of her Spanish audience and her international audience: Spanish flickrs is too limited for these internet times. I do not leave Spanish, but I try to use English when I can and later she responded to our questions: Well, I try to put all my photos available to any kind of public, and it is not a mistery that English is more universal than Spanish . . . For her and for several of the people interviewed English provides access to a global culture, especially a music culture, which was drawn upon for titles and comments about photos, providing a common reference uniting people from many different countries. This shows the importance of music to people’s global identities and how people used it to identify themselves as global cosmopolitans. Often, the profile contained more than one language, and commonly it was in two languages – a rough translation with the English usually being below the first language. However, the languages were deployed in many different ways with translation being only one use of people’s linguistic resources. One Chinese person, Tiong, for instance, wrote in English ‘My English is not v good’ and in Chinese ‘neither is my Chinese’ – a joke which only people with a knowledge of both languages would understand. Often the English translation was shorter than the original, but people also used the two languages to provide different information. Where people left comments or wrote testimonials they wrote them in a range of languages. In this way language choice throws more light on issues of vernacular writing. Elsewhere we explore how people’s language choices are shaped by the content of the photo, their sense of imagined audience for the photo and their particular situated language ecology, which is to do with the status of the languages for them and their familiarity with the languages (see Lee & Barton, forthcoming). People talked of intended audiences and their imagined audiences. We saw this when they shifted from being interested in their existing friends and relatives and began seeing strangers as potential audience.

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They shifted local activity to participating in global flows of language and culture. Several people mentioned this shift over time, as in: At first, I intended to use Flickr for sharing photos with friends and family and for storing images only. But I found some of ppl commenting on my work and watching the photo work from other. After that, I keep surfing Flickr daily to keep friendship and to learn/improve my work. (*Andrew) Taking account of ‘imagined audience’ (Ivanic, 1998; Merchant, 2006) in this way is a very salient practice in internet writing activities and although people also imagine audience in other kinds of writing, this issue seems to have higher significance here. There is an unknown audience which can respond. Thus, they were interacting with new people, with different people and with people in different places. In this way, they were asserting new identities, including complex multilingual global identities which they were projecting to new audiences, and they had a sense of themselves as global citizens. Turning to references to their learning, people had many reasons for using Flickr, and often they referred to several reasons. Perhaps this can be summarized by what one person said succinctly: To learn about photography; To share my photos; To have fun; To meet people (Charleeze), with the additional use of writing a photo diary, which was also mentioned by others. In particular, several people mentioned learning, although this wasn’t prompted in any way by the questions. Sharing images with people – not my photographic skills, but my way of seeing the world. I try to do research in ways of telling stories or expressing moods. Yes, I try to learn to make photographs too and Flickr members are very good at sharing knowledge. (Carolink) I learn about different places, people and cultures. It is not just a matter of improving, but it is also about learning and interacting with different people. (Erick C)

Vernacular Practices Revisited Returning to examining this data in terms of vernacular writing practices and addressing the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter about how vernacular practices are changing, the first thing to


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point out is that the activities which people are engaging include new practices. Based on the responses which people gave us in the interviews, it is clear that some things people are doing, like creating a wedding album or sharing a photo with a friend or relative who lives at a distance, consist of carrying out existing practices in new ways. And, for several people, their engagement with Flickr began with a desire to continue existing practices. However, once people saw the affordances of the medium, they extended what they did into new practices. Their new practices included a range of specific activities such as commenting on and evaluating photos taken by other people, classifying their own photos and making links between different photos. Most people said they had not done these things before, particularly with people they did not know offline. Tagging is a good example where most people could not think of an earlier activity around photography where they had classified their photos in this manner. The only example we found was where one person had used tags effectively on his blog. By inventing tags, and putting their photos into sets and collections they were organizing and classifying their photos in new and more complex ways. This made their photo collections searchable more easily by themselves and by others and it opened up the possibilities for new uses of their photos. These specific activities contributed to broader social practices which resulted in people relating to the world in new ways. As a way of examining these broader social practices which the writing was located in, it is worth returning to the areas of life where reading and writing were seen to be of central importance to people, given at the beginning of the chapter. People engaged in these areas of vernacular activity in new ways. For example, there were the new forms of social participation which developed with a wider and more geographically dispersed group of people. Flickr served new purposes for them. They became involved in social networking, in deliberately setting out to get more views for their photos and trying to get a higher chance of being searched for and getting more comments and other activity around their pictures. They were also documenting their lives in new ways and their personal leisure activities were changing as Flickr took up more and more of their time. Flickr is a good example of vernacular activity on the web. Turning now to examine the other characteristics of vernacular activity mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, one can see ways in which the

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core notion of vernacular has changed. Vernacular literacy practices were described as voluntary and self-generated and this is true of people’s participation in Flickr and in the internet more generally. What people do on Flickr has its roots in everyday experience – albeit within a framework provided by a private company driven by commercial concerns. The software developers provide the possibilities and constraints within which people act. Companies such as Yahoo, the owners of Flickr, can be seen, in Brandt’s (1998, 2009) terms, as sponsoring particular practices. The people we studied saw it as providing many possibilities for them. They appreciated the freedom they had and did not refer to any perceived restrictions. Vernacular practices like the activity on Flickr may also be a source of creativity, invention and originality, and the vernacular writing did give rise to new practices which embody different values from dominant literacies, as in the sharing of knowledge and the support which people said they gave each other around photography, which they mentioned in the interviews. And, although it is not the focus of this chapter, people are taking different sorts of photos. This is partly enabled by digital technology where, once one has the equipment, individual photos are free and quick to produce, so that people can take as many as they want, review them immediately and decide what to keep and what to delete. In this way a space for experimentation is opened up where they can try things out and get immediate feedback. It seems that people are taking more photos of the everyday, of the mundane, of the self (with ‘me’ being one of the commonest tags on Flickr), of food, of one’s room, one’s body and one’s workplace. These relate to broader changes in the social uses of photography which Van House (2007), has begun to explore. People undertake systematic investigation such as the 365Days sets, mentioned earlier. People using Flickr have become reviewers, commentators, evaluators of their own and others’ work. They draw upon and contribute to expanding global funds of knowledge. Also, people are increasingly getting ideas from each other, and not just from professionals, for example, through photography magazines. In this way there are shifts in where expertise lies and in the role of professionals. In terms of what people said about learning, these vernacular literacy practices are learned informally, learning is not separated from use but learning and use are integrated in these everyday activities. This can be seen in the data and, as described above, people spontaneously talked


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about their learning and said they were sharing and learning in ways they had not done before. They were also reflecting on their own photographic practices in new ways. In many ways the practices seen on Flickr were similar to other vernacular practices. But there are ways in which what people are doing on the internet challenges and extends earlier notions of vernacular practices. First, as explained earlier, vernacular practices can be thought of as less valued by society and are not particularly supported or approved of by education and other dominant institutions. Now they are more valued. Flickr is trawled by media professionals wanting photos for books, newspapers or other internet sites. Teachers use it to get illustrations for their classes and researchers are exploring its use in classrooms (such as Davies & Merchant, 2009). In fact the success of these sites depends heavily on the users’ contributions. Developers also respond to users’ feedback, for example, where Flickr has launched multilingual versions. Another aspect of vernacular activity which online activities draw out is ways in which vernacular practices change and develop – the configurations of applications which people use and the ways they use them are constantly changing as new applications are developed and become popular. In this way vernacular practices can also be transitory, changing quickly. Vernacular practices have been thought of as more rooted in and restricted to personal spheres rather than to public spheres. Whilst people can keep areas of their Flickr site private if they want to, and many do, our research focussed on the public arena. Here, as in other areas of the internet, what counts as being private and personal in vernacular activity has changed. People are making available to the world activities which before were kept local. These vernacular practices are not private and they are not hidden from other people or from authority. On the internet, photos can have a different circulation. What is happening is that people are making the local global. There were several examples of people wanting to tell the world about their local activity. They were putting up photos to inform the world, showing people how we live, as one person put it, for example, when people added explanations of local sites or customs. People project global identities by making their photos available for other people to see, by participating in global discussions of them and by switching between their local language and English, the perceived global language. This can be seen as one of the effects of globalization (as in Beck, 2000). In this way the

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sociological distinction between local and global activity is eroded (as in Wellman & Hampton, 2002) and the whole notion of vernacular changes. We see practices which are at the same time both vernacular and cosmopolitan. Technologies make these connections possible and people take up the affordances offered and develop new practices. In discussions of the globalizing effects of new technologies, researchers such as Koutsogiannis and Mitsikopoulou (2007) have referred to glocalisation, making the global local, as when a brand is localized to local conditions, such as when a coffee company adapts their cafes to particular countries and cultures. An instance of this in our data is how Yahoo, the company which owns Flickr, has localized the global brand by providing an interface in different languages. But we are also seeing activity in the opposite direction, that of making the local global. People by their writing have made the local global. Sociologists emphasize the two-way relationship of glocalization, as where Urry (2003: 84) refers to ‘. . .mutually interdependent processes by which globalizationdeepens-localization-deepens-globalization and so on’. Most attention has been on how the global changes the local. Here we see the opposite: people using the local to write the global. Finally, the contemporary importance of the activity of writing is clear. With an increasingly wide range of multimodal activity on the internet, writing remains central to participation and vernacular writing is of increasing importance.

References Barber, K. (ed.) (2006), Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Barton, D. (2007), Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. Oxford: Blackwell. Second edition. Barton, D., D. Bloome, D. Sheridan, & B. Street (1993), Ordinary People Writing: The Lancaster and Sussex Writing Research Projects. Lancaster University Centre for Language in Social Life series, No. 51. Barton, D. & M. Hamilton. (1998), Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community. London and New York: Routledge. Beck, U. (2000), What Is Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. Blommaert, J. (2008), Grassroots Literacy. London: Routledge. Brandt, D. (1998), ‘Sponsors of Literacy’. College Composition and Communication, 49, 165–185. Brandt, D. (2009), Literacy and Learning: Reflections on Writing, Reading and Society. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.


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Camitta, M. (1993), ‘Vernacular writing: varieties of writing among Philadelphia high school students’. In B. Street (ed.), Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Coiro, J., M. Knobel, C. Lankshear & Leu, D. (eds.) (2007), Handbook of Research on New Literacies. London: Routledge. Davies, J. & G. Merchant (2009), Web 2.0 for Schools: Learning and Social Participation. Oxford: Peter Lang. Donehower, K., C. Hogg & E. Schell (2007), Rural Literacies. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Gonzalez, N.E., L. Moll & C. Amanti (eds.) (2005), Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Knowledge in Households, Communities and Classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hine, C. (ed.) (2005), Virtual Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet. Oxford: Berg. Ivanic, R. (1998), Writing and Identity: The Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Koutsogiannis, D., & B. Mitsikopoulou (2007), ‘Greeklish and Greekness: Trends and discourses of “glocalness”’. In B. Danet & S.C. Herring (eds.), The Multilingual Internet. New York: Cambridge University Press, 142–162. Lee, C.K.M. (2007), ‘Affordances and text-making practices in online instant messaging’. Written Communication, 24(3), 223–249. Lyons, M. (ed.) (2007), Ordinary Writings, Personal Narratives. Oxford: Peter Lang. Marlow, C., Naaman, M., Boyd, D. & Davis, M. (2006), HT06, tagging paper, taxonomy, Flickr, academic article, to read. Paper for HT’06, Denmark. Merchant, G. (2006), ‘Identity, social networks and online communication’. E-learning, 3(2), 235–244. Powell, K. (2008), The Anguish of Displacement: The Politics of Literacy in the Letters of Mountain Families in Shenandoah National Park. Charlottesville,VA: University of Virginia Press. Sinor, J. (2002), The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Urry, J. (2003), Global Complexity. Cambridge: Polity. Van House, N. A. (2007), ‘Flickr and public image-sharing: distant closeness and photo exhibition’. Computer/Human Interaction conference. San Jose, California. Wellman, B. & K. Hampton (2002), ‘The not so global village of Netville’. In B. Wellman & C. Haythornthwaite (eds.), The Internet in Everyday Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 345–371. Winget, M. (2006), User-defined classification on the online photo sharing site Flickr . . . Or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the million typing monkeys. Proceedings of the 17th ASIS&T SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop, University of Texas at Austin.

Chapter Seven

Keeping a Notebook in Rural Mali: A Practice in the Making Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye

Literacy practices are often divided into personal and professional or public, each domain of use displaying a set of writing and reading activities which can be readily identified. This chapter focuses on some practices and texts that blur such common distinctions in a multilingual setting in contemporary rural Mali where literacy is ‘incipient’ (Besnier, 1995). While working as an ethnographer on writing practices ranging from recording family events to keeping track of farming activities, my attention was caught by the fact that these texts often appeared in notebooks, either dedicated to personal writing, or more often rescued from a previous use to keep such notes. As keeping a notebook does not refer to any culturally defined genre of personal writing, I will explore the dynamics through which the notebook becomes a space for writing, as in Mbodj-Pouye, 2009. I will argue that these notebooks allow their writers to experiment with new ways of delineating a personal sphere. To investigate this practice, I draw on two distinct traditions: an approach to ‘literacy practices’ as framed in literacy studies, and an interest in the material and textual dimensions of writing as developed notably by historians working on writing and reading practices in medieval and modern Europe (‘les pratiques de l’écrit’, to borrow from Roger Chartier (1987)). The dominant trend in literacy studies research has defined itself as ethnographic. A key statement is that literacy should be approached as a ‘social practice’ (Scribner & Cole, 1981). Hence the interest in the oral and written interactions surrounding the uses of written pieces during ‘literacy events’ (Street, 2000; Prinsloo & Breier, 1996). A central assumption is that the meaning of literate activities cannot be deduced from textual analysis only. This might have led to a lack of interest in this level of investigation amongst researchers adhering to a social practices view of literacy. Some studies, however, offer a detailed analysis

Keeping a Notebook in Rural Mali

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of written pieces. For instance, Papen provides a linguistic analysis of a payment reminder received by one of her informants in Windhoek, in order to understand the way such a document is (partially) read (Papen, 2007: 80–86). While agreeing that detailed linguistic analysis helps understand specific literacy practices, I add another layer to this textually sensitive approach to practices by considering closely the materiality of the notebook. This dimension is inspired by research developed by historians of writing, who stress the importance of the material dimensions of print culture (McKenzie, 1986; Chartier, 1995). This aspect is key to understanding the evolution of forms of personal writing (Hébrard, 1999). Drawing on historical studies to understand contemporary writing practices has opened up a new field of investigations in French sociology (Lahire, 1993). In particular, insights from codicology and palaeography have proved illuminating when studying writing practices (Fraenkel, 1994). The study of notebooks as a site for personal writing in Africa has benefited recently from a renewed interest in ‘everyday literacy’ in colonial and post-colonial Africa (Barber, 2006). Though the strong association of writing with power, especially in colonial times, should not be overlooked (Hawkins, 2002), the emergence of local genres of writing and the way religious, bureaucratic, political and literary practices overlap needs also to be highlighted (Peterson, 2004). Studies of notebookkeeping range from investigations of strictly defined diary-keeping (Miescher, 2006; Watson, 2006) to explorations of less ordinary cases, as for example Gunner’s (2006) study of a member of a South African church who moves from copying hymns and prayers toward the recording of his visions in a notebook. This last example calls into question the idea of personal writing as regular and ordinary, echoing works on diary-keeping in Western settings which reveal that it cannot be reduced to the single model of self-centred and daily writing (Lejeune & Bogaert, 2003). Recent research in anthropological linguistics on ‘grassroots literacy’ also provides an interesting framework. Inspired by Johannes Fabian’s intuitive suggestions, Blommaert offers a fascinating analysis of two documents, an autobiography and a ‘history of the Congo’ both handwritten on exercise books (Fabian, 1990; Blommaert, 2008). Blommaert deals with texts only, not with observed ‘events’ or ‘practices’, but he argues that his perspective is fully ethnographic. Drawing on his work,

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I further elaborate on the role that ethnography in the classic sense of the term can play when combined with text analysis. Thus, this chapter brings together three levels of investigation on the notebook. First, a discursive analysis of its contents, exploring how writers deal with a diversity of genres and languages. Secondly, a study of the way they handle this specific support as a ‘graphical space’ where they display their notes. Thirdly, I offer an exploration of the notebook as an object and of its importance as a personal property kept by the writers with their belongings. The data I draw on was gathered through observations and interviews. How to deal with documents as texts and objects within an ethnographic investigation will be my focus throughout this chapter.

Context and Methods I rely on research data collected in Mali during a broader study of literacy practices in the cotton-growing region of Southern Mali.1 My initial objective was not to focus on a specific literacy practice. Rather, in a country where there had been very few studies of literacy practices, and hardly any on the ordinary uses of literacy, my intention was to provide a broad overview of these practices. Mali is considered as poorly literate, both by international standards (the national adult literacy rate is 24% – Source: Human Development Report 2007/2008, UNDP) and according to national discourses, which see illiteracy as a major impediment to development (for a comparative analysis of such discourses in developing countries, see Street, 2001). What was at stake for me, in line with other research in the field of literacy studies, was to scrutinize the actual practices of people deemed to be illiterate or semi-literate. The village where my study was conducted is located near the town of Fana. It is a large village, inhabited by 1,500 people. The main activity is agriculture, essentially the production of cotton, together with food crops such as millet, maize and others. As a cash crop, cotton has been the main focus of colonial and post-colonial interventions in the area. The organization of cotton production by a nation-wide company (the CMDT, Compagnie Malienne pour le Développement des Textiles) underwent a major change in the 1970s when new responsibilities were transferred to village associations. They were granted responsibility for cotton weighing, equipment and supply orders and credit management


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(see Bingen, 1998). This organizational change created the need for literate villagers who could assist with the local management of technical records. In line with government-sponsored literacy campaigns offered at the same time, the CMDT fostered literacy in Bamanan, organizing trainings in the villages, and promoting the use of documents in this language. In 1979, a bilingual primary school FrenchBamanan, was opened in the village, as part of a national experiment. Bamanan is the first language in this village, where French, the official language of Mali, is hardly spoken outside the school. My ethnographic research relied on the combination of several methods, mostly qualitative though complemented by a basic survey providing an overview of levels of education and literacy. I observed and participated in literacy events whenever they occurred in the village. Most of them related to collective activities, such as collaborative writing during the weighing of the cotton crop, in which I participated. However, except for moments of letter-writing or reading, literacy events are scarce in the domestic space of the compound (‘du’, in Bamanan). I also conducted semi-structured interviews, first with villagers identified by the community as literate (very often those who act as literacy brokers when NGOs or state agencies need local agents), and then more systematically with the first villagers who had achieved a complete primary schooling at the bilingual school. Those interviews were held in Bamanan, to begin with, with the help of an assistant, and then by myself. As a whole, I recorded 56 interviews. Informal conversations were added to this. The interviews explored the life trajectory of the villagers, with a specific attention to education and professional and migratory experiences. They also focussed on the writing and reading practices the interviewees engaged in, in a wide range of domains and activities including managing a farm, keeping records of family events, coping with administrative demands, accounting and making shoppinglist, writing letters, collecting religious prayers or magical recipes, etc. As I was often presented with notebooks during interviews, I developed a growing interest not only in the distinct practices displayed on the pages of the notebooks, but in the fact that a single object could be used for such different purposes. In order to investigate the notebook’s cultural and social meanings more thoroughly, I photographed them during my interviews. My corpus consists of 301 photographs of pages (often, double pages) of notebooks kept by 23 writers from the same village near the town of Fana.

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Literacies and Languages In this village, literacy can be acquired in different ways, involving three languages: through the adult literacy classes established by the CMDT already mentioned, in Bamanan; in school where two languages, Bamanan and French, are used; in the village Koranic schools that offer basic Islamic instruction. Neither the higher traditional Islamic learning, nor the modern form of the médersa were available in the village at the time of my study. Becoming literate means studying in one or more of these educational settings, and gaining other experiences when migrating for work in urban places. Thus the pathways to literacy are plural, and the writers’ repertoire often encompasses different languages. Multiscriptuality is common too, as Bamanan and French share the Latin alphabet, whereas Arabic is used both in Arabic script and in Latin transcription. Most of the notebooks vary both in themes and in languages. In that sense, these objects challenge the view offered by studies where different literacies (whether defined by separate domains or by distinct languages) are associated with distinct practices (Scribner & Cole, 1981; Herbert & Robinson, 2001). I will now discuss this point in more detail, dealing first with the issue of theme or topic, and secondly with the issue of language.

Bringing together various themes The following table provides an overview of the themes appearing in the notebooks.

Table 7.1

What is dealt with in the notebooks?

Farming (dates for sowing or treating cotton fields, meteorological data) Business (accounting, record of credits) Family (dates of marriage, births and deaths; accounts of contributions at ceremonies) Village organization Religion (prayers) Magic and medicine (recipes) Notes from the radio (general news, sport results, song titles) Addresses Copy of notes during a training course Copy of a book, partially or completely


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This overview calls into question the notion of ‘personal writing’. In fact, many of the notebooks were not initially dedicated to personal writing. The notebook might have been received during an agricultural training course to which literate villagers are often convened. On such occasions, the organizer (NGO or administrative representative, agricultural advisor, teacher) gives out exercise books to the audience. At the end of the training (which generally lasts from one day to a week), each participant will have conscientiously filled in a part of the notebook by copying down the statements written on the blackboard by the teacher. This notebook will then be taken home with them. Paper has value in the village environment, and the blank pages will be either torn out to be used to make lists, write letters or notes, or filled in with other notations. A similar way of getting a notebook is to rescue a school exercise book in order to write in the margins or in other spare space. Few writers buy a notebook for their own use. The different topics listed above intermingle in the notebook in ways that are specific to the writers, according to their literacy skills, the other practices they are engaged in and their own background: their social background (gender, age, social status, occupations in addition to farming, migration, etc.) and their personal ‘history of literacy’ (Barton & Hamilton, 1998: 12). The examples I draw upon in this chapter give only a glimpse of these variations. They do, for example, exclude women, though few of them keep a notebook. Some use the notebook in a very organized way, opening a page for each new topic; some even make use of different notebooks to set apart different domains. For instance, one villager, Moussa Camara keeps the recording of the weight of cotton collected by family members during harvest on a small hand-cut notebook, written in Bamanan. Another exercise book, which he had bought for this purpose, is entitled ‘history of past events’ (‘Histoire des faits qui ont passé’ in the French original). It is a chronicle of birth and death and it is written exclusively in French (cf. Figure 7.1). But most writers switch from one theme to another within the same notebook, sometimes on the very same page. Writing is not dictated by the regularity of the daily routine. On the contrary, it depends heavily on having an occasion: the need to record a special event or to keep track of a particular set of actions. Writers often reported that they may not be writing anything in their notebooks for several months. Thus, writing is sporadic, allowing a single notebook to span across years.

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In a cross-cultural perspective, it must be remembered that ordinary writing in partially literate societies is generally characterized by mixed genres, as Chartier reminds us for medieval and modern times: Their names may change, but throughout Europe the genres of writing are the same [. . .]. Shifts from one style to another are easily made, resulting often in mixed texts, passed on from generation to generation. In these texts, we can find concerns about the household budget next to family related columns and the recording of events, minor or major, which spin the web of everyday life. (Chartier, 2001, 786–787 author’s translation)

Multilingual documents Moussa Camara’s notebooks mentioned above introduce the issue of language. This example is quite exceptional in the way it deals with the plurality of languages of writing: using distinct languages in notebooks dedicated to different purposes. More often than not, the biliterates make use of the various languages (and scripts) of their repertoire in the same notebook. It this context, the idea of distinct literacies identified by the use of distinct language is not helpful. Contrary to the almost ideal experimental Vaï setting where Scribner and Cole could isolate three literacies each characterized by their language, script and ways of learning, in my setting some literacy practices mix different languages (Scribner & Cole, 1981). Even approaches designed to investigate multilingual literacies often focus on practices where individuals draw from a multilingual repertoire to select one language for each practice (as evidenced in several chapters published in Martin-Jones & Jones, 2000). In my case, the writings are multilingual. Thus the notebook represents, not only a testimony that different literacies coexist, but the material place where they overlap. I will not deal in detail here with the linguistic problem of describing written code-switching, which requires to take into account the graphic devices by which code-switching is or is not marked (Sebba, 2000). I have described this phenomenon in my corpus elsewhere (Mbodj-Pouye & Van den Avenne, 2007). As one might assume, some genres or domains are closely associated with specific languages: Islamic prayers are in Arabic, medicinal recipes or magical formulas retain the original Bamanan forms, addresses used


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in a postal service are in French. But in addition to these cases a wide range of texts exist that can be written down in two or more languages, such as family events. This leaves the biliterate writers with a choice. A careful analysis of the notebooks reveals that it is predominantly made in favour of French. The higher status of the official language can partially account for this fact, but other explanations are called for. It is particularly striking to note that the writings where expressions of feelings appear, though often implicitly, are in French. Papen also observes that her Namibian informants have a strong desire for English literacy as opposed to writing in the vernacular languages (Papen, 2005; 2007). The comparison should be balanced by very distinct colonial and post-colonial histories which set apart post-apartheid Namibia and Mali. However, these results demonstrates that vernacular literacies do not necessarily imply the use of vernacular languages (Mbodj-Pouye, 2008b). Hence, the content of the notebook reflects the plurality of literacy practices and the various literacies writers engage in. This description of the heterogeneity of the practice calls into question the very category used throughout this account: Can we speak of a single practice? If so, where does its unity lie?

An Emergent Practice Naming the practice Investigating notebook-keeping was made quite difficult by the fact that there is no common designation of the personal notebook available, either in French or in Bamanan. I first got to see some notebooks when some informants produced them to show me some of their particular writing practices. For instance, when asked if he would write down magical recipes, a farmer answered ‘Yes, I do. I can show you some in my notebook,’ and then we would wait for him to go and find his notebook. When I decided to focus more specifically on this practice, I often had to introduce the topic myself, which proved tricky on two fronts. First, when trying to point to personal writing in general, I had to avoid labelling it ‘secret’ (‘gundo’, in Bamanan), which was the easiest way one would speak of it, but which would at the same time make any further question inquisitive. The ambiguity of this notion of ‘gundo’

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is well demonstrated in anthropological work on the Mande area (Jansen & Roth, 2000). In my context, most often it did not refer to specific cultural contents whose transmission is submitted to strong social control. Rather, it pointed to a personal sphere, whose social significance may be self-evident for a man, head of his household, but was often much more suspect when it came to juniors and women. The personal things writers dealt with in their notebooks were identified by quite loose phrases such as ‘my own business’ or, in Bamanan, magoñÆfÆnw, literally what you may need. Secondly, even the notebook itself is not always labelled in any specific way by the writer. Here too people resorted to very loose designations such as ‘my own notebook,’ or even ‘a dama kaye kønø’, (in Bamanan) or ‘un cahier à part’ (in French), meaning a notebook that is ‘separate’. These phrases allow to grasp a diversity of practices that a narrow definition of ‘personal writing’– not to speak of the terms ‘diary’ or ‘journal’, unknown in the village – are unable to capture. This general statement needs to be qualified in order to account for some specific practices. In a few cases, the writer chooses to give a title to his notebook. This title can appear on the cover or on the flyleaf. This is reminiscent of the school habits of naming the different exercise books according to the subject matter of the course or its use: exercise book, lesson book, etc. These vernacular ways of labelling are crucial in understanding the meanings attached to the practice. Three writers in my corpus give titles to their notebooks. Moussa Camara’s title ‘History of past events’ has already been quoted: as apparent in Figure 7.1, this title appears on the first page, and can be considered as the title of the following text. However, as the notebook

Figure 7.1

Opening page of M. Camara’s notebook (detail)


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is dedicated to this text, it operates as a title for the whole notebook. Its position, ‘centred’ on the first line, gives it the character of a title. Ganda Camara, a student in Bamako, who I interviewed when he was back in the village for the holidays, kept a notebook entitled ‘Memories’ (‘Souvenirs’ in French), which was written after he finished and passed the examination at the end of secondary school, and which was full of love poems and private jokes, reminding us of the main themes in youth writing. Finally, Moussa Coulibaly gives various titles to his notebooks, some taken directly from school models, like ‘Control notebook’ (‘Cahier de contrôle’) others pointing more directly to a private sphere, such as ‘Secret notebook’ (‘Carnet de secrets’). The titles chosen, all in French, obviously situate the practice within the domain of self-writing framed by these notions of ‘history’, ‘memory’ and ‘secret’. They are evidence of models of personal writing, but their scarcity does not allow extending this consideration to all the notebooks. Moreover, when discussing with these writers, I did not witness any use of these titles to refer to these notebooks. We can conclude then, that some notebooks are explicitly designated as self-writing, as indicated by their titles, but as a whole, there is no shared category or genre of personal writing that people could refer to when talking of their notebooks.

Shared features At a first glance, when looking at the different topics dealt with in the notebooks, we are struck by the variety of the themes and types of texts. However, all notebooks draw from this repertoire of type of texts, which then appears rather limited. Furthermore, most of them mix several of these types of text. In fact, it is the very heterogeneity of the practice which attributes to them a common aspect, as they have to find solutions to common problems. The most prominent one is to find ways of graphically separating the different entries. This is operated in various ways: some writers are comfortable with a school-like layout with a succession of distinct paragraphs, using the margin only for titles; others visibly struggle with the ‘graphical surface’ of the page, taking the whole double page, including the margins, as a unique space where the different units seems to float in an order much more uncertain. The notebook as a whole, and the

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order it provides, is also diversely handled – we shall return to this issue later on. In fact, even if the solutions differ, the fact that the writers have to address these difficulties give the notebook its shared features. The question is how they use one notebook over a length of time often spanning several years. Compiling various information, collected and written down sporadically over the years, produces writing that consists of chunks. As already mentioned, the practice never follows a model of journal writing: even when events are recorded, the writing does not follow a daily routine. Nevertheless, the distinct moments of writing might coincide with distinct textual units, providing the notebook with an entry-form style, as displayed in Figure 7.2. On the right-hand page appears the continuation of notes copied during an information campaign on HIV, in Bamanan, that occupied the first eight pages of the notebook. This page is the point where this activity of copying down ended, and where the notebook was turned into a personal object. The end of the page is devoted to a list of events, which are dated. These are not essentially family events recorded in French from 1997 to 2003: deaths and births, as well as one marriage, his father’s departure to Mecca, and one entry concerning a television bought for the African Football Cup (Coupe d’Afrique des Nations) organized in Mali in 2002. The left-hand page is devoted almost entirely to the results of the following African Football Cup in Tunis in 2004

Figure 7.2

A double page from Ndiamba Coulibaly’s notebook


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(some figures related to a weight of cotton appear on the right). This page details, in French, the results of the first round of the competition. Changes in ink suggest that the writing took place at different moments, maybe match after match.

Oral and written genres in the notebook In order to explore the question of what models or types of writing the notebooks draw on more thoroughly, we have to first examine the different textual units within the notebook. The thematic variety of the notebook, as displayed in Table 7.1, indicates a diversity of genres used in the notebook. The most distinct genres refer to forms that are well established in the oral or written communicative repertoire of the villagers. For instance, a type of entry clearly identified is the magical incantation (kilisi). It has a beginning and an end, often a title, and it is clearly named as such during interviews. The analysis of this genre, widely represented in my corpus (60 items) shows various strategies used by the writers in order to write down a kilisi, which involves transcribing speech – the text of the spell – but also often advice on how to use it and who provided it. Some writers carefully represent the oral origin by quotation marks (or other orthographic signs), through code-switching (by putting the incantation itself in Bamanan and the instructions for its use in French) or by means of the layout (separating the text of the incantation as a block, with accompanying information surrounding it). Some borrow the written genre of the medicinal recipe in order to provide a text which fits better into their representation of the written mode. Other kinds of writing are so recurrent that they are likely to be evidence of a known model that writers are familiar with, which can exist in printed form or simply be a regular patterned way of writing. For example, birth records are very popular among notebook keepers. When presented as a list, they look very similar to the administrative registers. Some more detailed descriptions (including date, time and place of birth, name of the parents) indicate that the writer may have used the printed birth certificate as a model. In this broad family of writing practices adopting bureaucratic models, the obituary stands out as a particular site of a fusion of distinct literate traditions. In addition to the influence of administrative texts, vernacular

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forms of writing are also present. A print model is available: the obituary notice in the newspaper. In Mali, in rural areas, this model as a material reference is rarely present. But, its handwritten form is very common, because of the practice of sending a note to the local radio (a ‘communiqué’) right after the death, as a means to inform relatives from neighbouring villages. The analysis of the genres the writers make use of allows us to understand better the thematic heterogeneity of the notebooks. Identifying different genres is a way to capture the distinct social practices that provided the occasions for writing in the notebook: the genre not only conveys the notion of a particular graphic disposition, but it is often associated with a writing practice used in a specific context. In the interviews, the writers often made these links clear for me by referring a text to a specific context of writing (taking notes while listening to the radio, or during a training), and also by skipping some texts when reading through the notebook with me, which was as meaningful.

Models of the notebook Up to this point, we have looked at individual entries to a notebook and which type of text they draw on. We will now look at the notebook as a whole. As reflected in the uncertainty of its naming, the notebook does not immediately evoke a single model. The practice of keeping a notebook relies conspicuously on the model of the school notebook. This can be seen in the layout (where entries are made on the pages). It also appears in the way the notebook is understood as an individual object, which is, in school-contexts, oriented toward evaluation and control by the teacher (Hébrard, 1997). Adult literacy classes follow a very school-like pattern, and the same pattern is incorporated. Throughout my corpus, the school-like exercise book appears to be a model to which some writers conform quite exactly (by inscribing regularly the date of the day, for instance) or much more loosely. However, this provides a general frame but cannot account precisely for the kind of practice observed. Professional and collective writing in the village often relies on notebooks, which further conveys the idea of the notebook as a document that is useful in everyday life and not only in schools. It also enhances the meaning of the notebook as a means of control: for instance, NGOs that promote a villager as their local representative will leave a notebook


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with him and regularly inspect his work through the notebook. At the beginning of the literacy campaigns, the CMDT has even tried to generalize the practice of keeping a notebook to manage the farm. Thus, the practice of notebook-keeping for one’s own purpose draws on distinct habits, taken from school and developed in professional settings. However, no single model of personal writing is available. This makes an important difference with the case Blommaert deals with. His writers challenge some of the most established genres: history and autobiography (Blommaert, 2008). The few writers in my study who choose a title for their notebook are quite reminiscent of these cases, testifying that some of them actually try and fit into some preconceptions of self-writing or history, but these are exceptions. Most often, what permeates is only a sense that proper writing should be thematically organized and homogeneous, leading the writers to almost apologize for the heterogeneity of their notebooks. For instance, Mamoutou Coulibaly, a nephew of the village chief, literate in Bamanan and local representative for several development projects, had much to say about his professional notebooks as well as the ones he kept for the village farming association. But when it came to his personal writings, he overlooked them precisely on the ground that so many different things could be written down in it. Maïmouna Touré, a woman involved in village projects tasks as a secretary, literate in French and Bamanan, became all the more confused when I drew her attention on her notes, saying: ‘It is a notebook I have just like this, I happened to . . . I grabbed one of my old school-exercise books, I write like this . . .’. Ordinarily, writers talk about their notebook and treat it simply as an object at hand, whose main characteristic is that it appears to represent a safe place to write down things they want to keep for themselves.

‘Keeping’ a Notebook: The Materiality of the Text and the Meaning of the Object In the last part of this chapter, I will explore the consequences of the material aspects of the notebooks. I will begin by considering their materiality at the level of the writing practice itself: What does it mean to write on this kind of material? How can this analysis enrich our understanding of the practice? Then, I will look at the notebooks as objects in the domestic setting, which are literally ‘kept’ by villagers as their personal belongings.

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Dealing with a codex Writing on a notebook means fitting into a particular written form. This form is part of a wider family of written objects, printed or handwritten, dealt with by historians (to be more precise by specialists in palaeography) as a codex. A codex is an assemblage of sheets. This broad definition gives us two hints on the uses of this kind of object as a writing support. First, the fact that the sheets are assembled (for the notebook: bound, with a central pair of staples) implies that the primary use of the notebook is to store sheets together. Of course, sheets can be torn out, but the normal use is to keep them together. At school, the difference between rough paper and the notebook is important. The villagers make use of various written matters: sheets torn out from notebooks, pieces of cardboard cut off from cigarette boxes, notepads taken from tea company advertisements, calendars, CMDT forms to fill in, etc. Among them, the notebook is characterized by the fact that it lasts: it represents the writing where a notation has the best chance to be kept. However, these distinct supports coexist in the same environment and one practice can involve successively or at the same time as a series of others. For instance, Moussa Coulibaly recorded the death of his sisterin-law on three different supports: from the calendar hanging on the wall (where the day of the death had been marked with a cross) to a personal notebook (where the event appeared in a short narrative), via a smaller leaflet (where a shorter record was written). The whole ‘chain of writing’ (Fraenkel, 2001) which is linked with this event, can be seen to be part of an even broader chain of events: there must be an official death certificate, as it took place at the hospital, as well as a written obituary sent to the radio, and maybe other records of this event in the village. Thus the distinctiveness of the notebook as a storing place becomes clear in comparison to other supports, and in this case it is acknowledged by the writer whose notebook, already mentioned, is entitled ‘Secrets notebook’. Furthermore, the fact that the notebook is made of different sheets implies that the sheet constitutes a unit of writing, but also that the order of the sheets may be significant. Some writers develop personal ways of using these characteristics, such as Makan Camara (a detailed analysis and a full transcription of his notebook is provided in MbodjPouye, 2008a). It is clearly organized in order to devote a specific page


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to each of the social spaces he belongs in: one sheet deals with family matters (recording several births and a marriage), another with two events related to the village, another with events heard on the radio (the death of national or international celebrities), etc. In that case, it is striking to observe that during the 6 years he has kept this notebook, he has carefully classified the event on the ‘right’ page each time, giving consistence to an order he has himself set. Others follow chronological order more classically, but even in these cases, there are specific ways the writers choose to write or not to write the date, come back to what they have previously written, or copy from time to time the same piece, etc.

A notebook of one’s own As mentioned earlier, most of the notebooks were not initially dedicated to personal writing. However, when set apart from other uses, the notebook takes on a new value. Kept in a briefcase hung on a clove in the mud-wall of their home, for those to whom writing is central to their social identity, like Mamoutou Coulibaly, or more often wrapped in a plastic bag with a few important documents, it enters the intimate space of its owner. The fact that the notebook is a personal belonging is essential. The extent to which it can be circulated varies: some would specify that they would not show it ‘outside the family’, whereas others would not show it to anyone except selected friends. As an ethnographer, I encountered some refusal to show me a notebook, but I often benefited from my position as an outsider, the villagers being confident that I would not be able to understand the secrets contained in it anyway. The common point of the entries is that they are related to the writer without implying self-examination. Keeping a personal notebook appears to be a way of setting aside some personal information and thoughts, which is a way of objectifying the existence of a domain ‘of one’s own’ which is not given as such in contemporary rural Mali. The content exceeds the boundaries of the ‘secret’ strictly defined, but neither is it equivalent to the domestic. Private, but not intimate, seems a good way to describe them, as the writing practice is not self-centred, and is definitely not a way to self-scrutinize. But it is part of the emergence of a personal sphere, whose boundaries are drawn differently according to the writer’s profile.

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Conclusion In the course of my research, while interviews and observations provided a useful overview of literacy practices including that of writing in notebooks, in order to understand the meanings of keeping these notebooks, a close analysis of the texts as documents and as objects was required. From this point of view, notebook-writing appears as a crucial site where the notion of a personal sphere is put into practice, though not discursively elaborated. Following on from this research, another ethnographic endeavour would be to observe the future development of this practice: Is this a genre in the making? Will these notebooks be transmitted? Or is it a unique moment, characterized by the emergence of a practice that will soon be replaced by new forms of compiling information and keeping track of past events? As this set of questions illustrates, the specific analysis presented here, combining discursive and material analysis, is most useful in raising new questions to which, as ethnographers, we must seek answers in the field.

Note 1

This research was a part of my PhD in sociology and anthropology, defended at the University of Lyon 2 in March 2007 (Mbodj-Pouye, 2007). I am of French and Senegalese origin, and my first experience in Mali was for fieldwork research for my thesis. To this purpose, I had previously learnt Bamanan in Paris at the INALCO.

References Barber Karin (ed.) (2006), Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Barton, David & Hamilton Mary (eds.) (1998), Local Literacies. Reading and Writing in One Community. London: Routledge. Besnier, Niko (1995), Literacy, Emotion, and Authority. Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bingen, James (1998), ‘Cotton, Democracy and Development in Mali’ Journal of Modern African Studies, 36 (2 June), 265–285. Blommaert, Jan (2008), Grassroots Literacy. Writing, Identity and Voice in Central Africa. London: Routledge.


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Chartier, Roger (1987), Lectures et lecteurs dans la France d’Ancien Régime. Paris: Le Seuil. Chartier, Roger (1995), Forms and Meanings. Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Chartier, Roger (2001), ‘Culture écrite et littérature à l’âge moderne’, in Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, special issue ‘Pratiques d’écriture’, juillet-octobre 2001, no. 4–5, 783–802. Fabian, Johannes (ed.) (1990), History from Below. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fraenkel, Béatrice (1994), ‘Le style abrégé des écrits de travail’ Cahiers du français contemporain, 1 (décembre 1994), 177–1994. Fraenkel, Béatrice (2001), ‘La résistible ascension de l’écrit au travail (chapitre 4)’. In Borzeix, Anni & Fraenkel, Béatrice (eds.), Langage et Travail, Communication, cognition, action. Paris: CNRS editions, 113–142. Gunner, Elizabeth (2006), ‘Keeping a Diary of Visions: Lazarus Phelalasekhaya Maphumulo and the Edendale Congregation of AmaNazaretha’. In Barber, Karin (ed.), Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 155–179. Hawkins, Sean (2002), Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and ‘The World on Paper’, 1892–1991. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hébrard, Jean (1997), ‘The Graphic Space of the School Exercice Books in France in the 19th–20th century’. In Pontecorvo, Clotilde (ed.), Writing Development. An Interdisciplinary View. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 173–189. Hébrard, Jean (1999), ‘Tenir un journal. L’écriture personnelle et ses supports’. In Lejeune, Philippe (ed.), Récits de vie et médias Cahiers RITM, n°20, 9–50. Herbert, Pat & Robinson, Clinton (2001), ‘Another language, another literacy? Practices in northern Ghana’. In B.V. Street (ed.) Literacy and Development. Ethnographic Perspectives. London: Routledge, 121–136. Jansen, Jan & Roth, Molly (2000), special issue ‘Secrets and Lies in the Mande World’ Mande Studies, vol. 2. Lahire, Bernard (1993), Culture écrite et inégalités scolaires. Sociologie de l’ ‘échec scolaire’ à l’école primaire. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon. Lejeune, Philippe & Catherine Bogaert (2003), Un journal à soi. Paris: Textuel. Martin-Jones, Marilyn & Jones, Kathryn (eds.) (2000), Multilingual Literacies: Reading and Writing Different Worlds. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Mbodj-Pouye, Aïssatou & Van Den Avenne, Cécile (2007), ‘“C’est bambara et français mélangés”. Analyser des écrits plurilingues à partir du cas de cahiers villageois recueillis au Mali’. Langage et société, n°120 (juin 2007), 99–127. Mbodj-Pouye, Aïssatou (2008a), ‘Pages choisies. Ethnographie du cahier d’un agriculteur malien’. Sociologie et sociétés, 40(n°2), 96–108. Mbodj-Pouye, Aïssatou (2008b), ‘Writing the self through the Other’s language? An ethnographic analysis of notebooks kept in rural Mali’ Paper presented at the African Studies Association Annual meeting, Chicago, 13–16 November 2008. Mbodj-Pouye, Aïssatou (2009), ‘Tenir un cahier dans la région cotonnière du Mali. Support d’écriture et rapport à soi’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, special issue ‘Cultures écrites en Afrique’, juillet-août 2009, no. 4, 855–885. McKenzie, Donald F. (1986), Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. London: British Library.

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Miescher, Stephan (2006), ‘“My Own Life”: A.K. Boakye Yiadom’s Autobiography – The Writing and Subjectivity of a Ghanaian Teacher-Catechist’. In Barber, Karin (ed.), Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 27–51. Papen, Uta (2005), ‘Literacy and development: what works for whom? or, how relevant is the social practices view of literacy for literacy education in developing countries?’ International Journal of Educational Development, 25(1), 5–17. Papen, Uta (2007), Literacy and Globalization. Reading and Writing in Times of Social and Cultural Change. London: Routledge. Peterson, Derek R. (2004), Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Prinsloo, Mastin & Breier, Mignonne (eds.) (1996), The Social Uses of Literacy. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Scribner, Sylvia & Michael Cole (1981), The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press. Sebba, Mark (2000), ‘Writing switching in British Creole’. In Martin-Jones, Marilyn & Jones, Kathryn (eds.), Multilingual literacies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 171–187. Street, Brian, (2000), ‘Literacy events and literacy practices. Theory and practice in the New Literacy Studies’. In Martin-Jones, Marilyn & Jones, Kathryn (eds.), Multilingual Literacies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 17–29. Street, Brian (ed.) (2001), Literacy and Development: Ethnographic Perspectives. London: Routledge. Watson, Ruth (2006), ‘“What is our intelligence, our school-going and our reading of books without getting money?” Akinpelu Obisesan and His Diary’. In Barber, Karin (ed.), Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 52–77.

Chapter Eight

Writing in Healthcare Contexts: Patients, Power and Medical Knowledge Uta Papen

Introduction In contemporary societies, much social interaction and communication is mediated by written texts. Public institutions, for example, frequently communicate with individuals in writing. Writing is also central to how individuals contest what official texts demand of them and it allows people to display and disseminate their own knowledge and views. In this chapter, I discuss examples of the role of writing in healthcare contexts and in communications between healthcare providers and lay patients. Healthcare contexts are an example of what Smith (1999) calls ‘textually mediated’ social environments. Communication between doctors and their patients, albeit primarily oral, frequently involves written texts. This is, for example, the case when – as I have found in my research – a doctor explains a medical procedure to a patient and gives her an information leaflet about it. As a social context, healthcare is shaped by structures of authority, and health texts are implicated in these ‘relations of ruling’ (Smith, 1999). Doctors and patients are expected to take on specific roles. Traditionally, the doctor is seen as the holder and provider of ‘expert’ knowledge and the ‘lay’ patient as its passive recipient, leading to a paternalistic model of healthcare (Charles, Gafni & Whelan, 1999). These rules are also revealed in the contents and functions of patient education leaflets, consent forms and other texts. Patient education leaflets aim to achieve compliance with medical advice. How patients engage with medical texts and the authoritative voices these contain can be seen in their reactions to written information and in the instances of patients’ own writing that I will discuss. The data I discuss in the following is taken from two research projects, one recent the other ongoing. Between 2003 and 2006, I studied the

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health-related reading and writing practices of adults living in the northwest of England (Papen & Walters, 2008; Papen, 2008a). More recently, I have begun a longitudinal study of pregnant women’s experiences with literacy in relation to their antenatal care (Papen, 2008b).

The Role of Written Language in the Delivery and Reception of Healthcare: A Theoretical Perspective Writing is more than a skill: it is a social practice that takes its meanings from the activities and context it is part of. Those theorizing reading and writing as social practice commonly use the term ‘literacy practices’ to refer to the culturally shaped uses and meanings of written texts (see, for example, Street, 1993; Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Papen, 2005; Barton, 2007). In this chapter, I focus specifically on health-related literacy practices: texts that are written for patients and writing that is produced by patients themselves. Such texts, and the acts of producing and using them, are instances of particular practices: patterned ways of using written language in healthcare contexts, such as, for example, the sending of appointment letters and information leaflets to patients. These are part of the wider practices of healthcare common in England, the context of my study, and they need to be understood in relation to these macro-conditions. At the more micro-level, it is necessary to look at a specific text’s role in relation to ongoing talk between health professionals and patients. Doctor–patient interaction has been widely researched (see, for example, Wodak, 1997; Sarangi & Roberts, 1999; Roberts, Sarangi & Moss, 2004; Roberts et al., 2005; Heritage & Maynhard, 2006; Iedema, 2007). Few studies, however, have looked at the role written-texts play in doctor–patient interaction and how talk is often structured around text (but see Freebody & Freiberg, 1999 for an example). In this chapter, I show how health texts are used or invoked during talk and as part of the social interactions that constitute a healthcare episode. The social relations governing this interaction – that is, the doctor’s position as the expert – define at least to some degree how any texts will be used and understood. The written word can be specifically powerful and the visual presence of hefty volumes of medical encyclopaedias in a doctor’s surgery are part of what turns the consultation room into a ‘medical space’ (Fairclough, 2001: 49). Patients also experience power as they feel subjected to the rules and rituals

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of the healthcare system. Modern healthcare is a bureaucratic system based on the institutionalization of specialized medical knowledge. It is enacted through a myriad of medical rituals and situated practices (Cicourel, 2005). Written texts are often central to such rituals. The relations of ruling, however, are not to be understood as fixed structures of domination which leave no room for the individual to act. Power, as Foucault has suggested, is not a unitary entity and it is not necessarily repressive. Relations between patients and the institutions they deal with, in my case England’s National Health Service (NHS), cannot be understood by thinking in terms of simple binary structures of authority and compliance. Conformity may be achieved through subtle means and patients often voluntarily subscribe to the procedures they are subjected to and accept the forms of conduct suggested by their physician (Lupton, 1994). But non-compliance and the desire to resist are also frequent. In order to understand patients’ ability (or not, as in some cases discussed below) to act independently, I use the concept of agency, defined as a person’s ‘socio-culturally mediated capacity to act’ (Ahern, 2004: 306).

Studying Writing in Relation to Healthcare: An Ethnographic Perspective If, as argued above, reading and writing are social and cultural practices, they need to be studied as such. An ethnographic approach, focussing on how specific patients in particular healthcare situations make meaning from written texts is required. Ideally, this is done through a combination of observations and interviews. Health, however, is a private matter and healthcare contexts frequently remain closed to the inquiring gaze of the researcher. Participant observation therefore is not always possible. The Literacy, Learning and Health (LLH) project was primarily interview-based. In all, 45 people were interviewed about their health-related reading and writing practices and their experiences with health texts. At the time of being interviewed, all of these were students in adult basic education or English (ESOL – English for Speakers of Other Languages) classes in various places in the north-west of England. They were people of various backgrounds and ages. Amongst the non-native speakers, some were educated to degree level. Those whose first language was English mostly had less formal education and

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several had left school before the end of secondary education. The interviews were semi-structured and open-ended, focussing on one or two recent health episodes and contacts with healthcare providers that the informants recalled. A total of 6 out of the 45 participants became key informants: they were interviewed several times and visited in their homes and 2 of them were accompanied on their visits to healthcare providers. In my ongoing research with pregnant women, I take a longitudinal approach and work with a small number of women, who I interview several times throughout their pregnancies. My informants are professional women with university education and I am particularly interested in how women with this kind of background react to the bureaucratization of antenatal care and the medicalization of pregnancy. Where possible, I complement interviews and informal conversations with participant observation. The data analysis in both these projects is guided by the patients’ own perspectives and accounts of their experiences. I explicitly look for my informants’ meanings of specific events and how they ‘read’ the cultural practices of using written texts in healthcare. My own reading of their accounts, however, is guided by what I believe to be a central aspect of writing in healthcare settings: its relationship with power and knowledge and the way texts and language are used, on both sides – doctor and patient – to achieve specific purposes. Thus, my approach is anything but purely inductive. In the following sections I discuss the main themes emerging from my research. I begin with texts that are written for patients. I then discuss writing by patients themselves.

Texts Written for Patients Patient information leaflets A variety of text types are used in healthcare contexts including patient information leaflets and consent forms, prescriptions, charts and wall posters, signage and other written instructions. These texts facilitate the organization of healthcare and they are part of how health professionals inform patients on things such as diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of a disease. Current healthcare policies in England emphasize the need for doctors to provide good quality information and to ensure that patients understand what is happening to them. Frequently, information


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is provided in written form. The goal is ‘informed choice’ and this is regarded as a way to change the traditional balance of power between doctors and patients (Pollock et al., 2008; Department of Health, 2001a and b). Patients are assumed to be empowered by this new focus on information sharing and joint decision-making. The question of course is whether this is necessarily the case (Kealley, Smith & Winser, 2005) and how patients react to the informed patient agenda (Murtagh & Hepworth, 2003; Henwood et al., 2003). In the following, I discuss some of the ways in which the people I worked with reacted to written health information. Sonia, a Polish woman in her 30s, saw a nurse about what she feared to be an ulcer on her lip. During the consultation, the nurse printed out for her a leaflet on the causes and treatment of cold sores. Leaflets, such as these, are ‘interpretive resources’ (Coupland & Williams, 2002: 420). In the interview, Sonia explained that the nurse had first described what cold sores are and how they can be treated. Sonia had been afraid that she was affected by something more serious, possibly an ulcer that might even have to be removed surgically. She appreciated the nurse spending time to calm her fears. After explaining about the sore, the nurse printed out the leaflet. She used a highlighter pen to mark important parts of the leaflet for Sonia and she wrote on it the name of the cream she suggested Sonia should buy. Sonia took the leaflet home. In this particular example, the leaflet was given to the patient towards the end of the consultation and it served to backup and confirm the information that had been provided orally. The written text was intended to support the authority of the medical practitioner. But because Sonia trusted the nurse and was happy with the advice received, she did not read the leaflet carefully. In an earlier encounter, however, Sonia was surprised to see a medical professional looking at the internet for information. Sonia had phoned the surgery asking to be seen by a doctor. She believed to suffer from a chest infection. She had been disappointed when the receptionist got her an appointment with a nurse, not a doctor. In Poland, Sonia explained, only a doctor would take such a case. After examining her chest, the nurse went to her computer. Sonia believed that the nurse was ‘typing the symptoms’ in a ‘special program’ to find information. She felt that she could have done this herself and that a medical professional should not take ‘help from a computer’ in this way. In fact, the nurse had searched for and printed out a leaflet for Sonia. The incident illustrates how a health practitioner’s acquired

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status as an authority can be put in doubt by her use of a written text. It also shows the significance of culturally specific understandings of healthcare and the expectations these generate. Sonia compared the care she received in England with what she was used to from Poland. For her, the nurse had less medical authority than a doctor and the fact that the nurse appeared to have resorted to information from the internet further undermined Sonia’s trust in her ability. Sonia’s reaction can be explained by her lack of familiarity with a practice which in some English surgeries is part of the dispensation of healthcare and which could be seen as an example of a ‘medical ritual’: patients being given a leaflet printed out for them. It shows differences in the cultures of healthcare and the role of written texts in patient information. The second time Sonia was exposed to the same practice – when she had the cold sore – she appeared to have been less taken aback by the nurse looking on the computer and she was genuinely happy with the advice she had received. When Anna, also from Poland and having lived in England for 2 years, was informed about her smear test, she received a leaflet explaining her results. She also received an invitation for a further investigation, a colposcopy. In several interviews, Anna spoke to me about her experiences of being treated for cell changes in her uterus. In one of our conversations, we discussed in detail a leaflet ‘Cervical screening – What your abnormal result means’ (see Figure 8.1) My own reading of the text had been that it was struggling to find a balance between the need to tell readers about the possibility that their smear test results could indicate the development of cancer, and the wish to avoid unduly frightening women who received it. The frequent use of modal verbs, as in ‘cervical cancer may develop’ and adverbs such as ‘sometimes’ and ‘usually’, illustrates this. From the health providers’ perspective, the leaflet had to be sufficiently direct about the possible consequences of the result in order to ensure compliance with the follow-up treatment. Anna herself showed much understanding for the leaflets’ lack of specificity. It was difficult for the writers to be precise about what the result indicated, she explained. They simply do not know at this stage, she told me. Having said this, she also made it clear that she was not at all unaffected by the possibility of pre-cancerous or even cancerous cells developing in the cervix alluded to in the leaflet. She was scared.


‘What your abnormal result means’

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Figure 8.1

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Continued Figure 8.1


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Leaflets, such as the ones discussed above, are centrally produced standardized texts. Not only do they have to account for the possibility of symptoms indicating different diseases, but also, the description of a procedure or an illness contained in a patient information leaflet has to be applicable and make sense to a large number of patients. They cannot but write about patients in a generalized way, even if the use of the second person singular, directly addressing the reader, aims to mitigate the distancing effect of this. Leaflets can, however, be personalized through the physician’s accompanying oral explanations. For Anna this was certainly important. She spoke very positively about the consultant who performed her colposcopy and the later loop extinction treatment. She told me in detail about how she was invited to ask questions and how both the doctor and nurse did everything to inform her about what they were doing. The leaflets she had been given and received by mail before the second procedure offered an additional resource. She read them in the light of what the doctor had already told her. Talk that surrounded the text offered a perspective and framing for understanding the more general account offered by the leaflets. Both Sonia and Anna’s case illustrate the central role of written information in the dispensation of healthcare. They also show different reactions to the practice of giving out leaflets. Anna seemed most strongly to have been empowered by the information she had been given and we can say that for her the informed patient policy appeared to have succeeded. This, however, is not always the case. Information about medication In view of the NHS’ policy to improve patient information, leaflets and other texts should present medical knowledge in terms accessible to the lay patient. This should include medicine package inserts. But for Grace, a Chinese woman, this was not the case. When she had to take medication, she only read the general instructions about how to take the pills, which can be found on the outside of the box. She doesn’t read the insert, she told us, because she can’t understand the information. She wouldn’t even read instructions in Chinese (when buying Chinese medication) as it was the same there: she wouldn’t be able to understand what was said. Other informants shared Grace’s view or simply did not see the relevance of the detailed information the inserts contain.

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Katherine, retired and in her fifties, too, did not read the information about side effects. She explained that when medication is prescribed, she doesn’t like to read the information about side effects, because ‘if you read them you start worrying about what pains you might get’, and yet she knows she has to take the pills. Reflecting on the experience of illness more generally, Katherine added that it was possible to know too much. Her brother, she explained, had inherited a family health book from her mother. Ever since they had this book, she commented, in her brother’s family they worried too much about illness. They looked up things in the book and this just made them unduly anxious. Katherine’s behaviour reveals a form of agency: she’d rather not know what to expect. At the same time, Katherine made it clear that she was usually happy to trust the doctor’s authority. Like many other patients, she trusts the physician’s words and personal advice (Henwood et al., 2003; Pollock et al., 2008). After all, the doctors, she explained, had spent years in training and so they knew what they were talking about. She had much less faith in her own abilities and when asked whether she would look up things on health, she said she doubted she would be able to understand. Medical knowledge, for her, was too complicated and, thus, too powerful to be something she would go into or contest. Katherine here is aware of her lack of agency in relation to the doctor’s and their expert knowledge. But she also displays agency by rejecting the view of the patient as the active and ‘reflexive’ consumer who is necessarily sceptical of expert views (Lupton, 1997) and who wants to be a partner in her healthcare. When Kate, a British woman in her 40s, was first diagnosed with lupus, her GP gave her several leaflets. She was so frightened by what they said that she no longer read any information that she was given or that her family found for her. She didn’t want to see herself in the descriptions she found. Later on in her illness, she asked her sister to search for information on her behalf. She explicitly told her that she only wanted her to pass on the ‘happy moments’ and that she did not want to know about the details of her condition and how it might develop. That patients, in particular those suffering from serious or lifethreatening diseases, request ‘partial, selective, and edited accounts’ (Pollock et al., 2008: 964) is not unusual. As Kate’s example shows, this can lead them to rejecting the written information received from their healthcare providers. Rejection here is a means of ‘self-protection’ (Pollock et al., 2008: 972).


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Grace, Kate and Katherine are examples of patients who do not conform to the informed patient view, but who prefer to remain ‘passive’. Lupton (1997) suggests that this is also a form of agency showing that people’s reactions to illness are shaped by a variety of needs and emotions. Amongst these may be fear of knowing too much, as indicated above. An apparent lack of interest in written information can also be the result of patients’ trusting their doctor completely. Imposed texts When Debbie, a 28-year-old mother of two boys, had a scan, the conversation with the consultant – rather than focussing on the ovarian cysts he had detected – unexpectedly turned to contraception. Debbie didn’t understand why the doctor insisted on talking to her about contraception and why he gave her a leaflet about the coil. She knew that her condition could not become worse from her getting pregnant, so for her there was no link between her reasons for seeing the consultant and him talking to her about contraception. At the time, she had no need for contraception, because she had separated from her children’s father and was not sexually active. Thus, she was taken aback by the doctor’s insistence on addressing this topic. When the consultant told her that she ‘could end up pregnant’ and that ‘they couldn’t offer her sterilisation’, she ‘felt like a 10 year old that their mum and dad were saying be careful’. Debbie took the leaflet. But she was not interested in its content. She did not throw it away though, but kept it for future reference. It became useful to her much later, at the time of the research interview, when she decided to have a coil fitted. The above is an example of information that was given but not solicited. We could even say that the information was imposed, as it was clear from Debbie’s account of her conversation with the doctor that she felt unable to refuse the leaflet. The consultant’s actions could have been part of a general policy to discuss contraception with women of child-bearing age. In that sense, it seems that the conversation might have been ‘schema-driven’ (Roberts et al., 2003: 196), informed by a medical agenda that is applied systematically to patients of Debbie’s age and that is driven through regardless of the patient’s reaction. In addition, we may have here an example of ‘patient labelling’ (Roberts et al., 2003: 196) where a doctor perceives a patient in a specific way and acts accordingly. Without doubt, Debbie felt ‘labelled’. When the

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doctor gave her the leaflet about the coil, he ignored her own views on her situation. In the doctor’s view the leaflet he gave her was about her, but she disagreed. She opposed the identity – of a young woman needing contraception – that he tried to impose on her. Debbie’s is a stark example of the asymmetry that has been found to be characteristic of much doctor–patient interaction: doctors talk much more than patients during a consultation and physicians frequently follow their own institutionally driven agenda while paying little attention to patient-initiated relevant issues (Sator, Gstettner & Hladschick-Kermer, 2008; Fisher & Todd, 1986). Not surprisingly, this imbalance can lead to patient dissatisfaction, as clearly evident from Debbie’s account of her experience. In Debbie’s case the leaflet reinforced the doctor’s dominance and as an artefact it became the symbol of the physician disrespecting her concerns and situation.

Not enough time for talk: doctor’s limited time and the role of paperwork in medical consultations A recent study of doctor–patient communication in an oncological outpatient department found that 22 per cent of the time of each consultation was devoted to non-verbal activities, such as the doctors looking at the patient’s file, completing forms and writing letters (Sator, Gstettner & Hladschick-Kermer, 2008). These activities take the doctor’s attention away from the patient, who may feel they are not listened to. Shanaz, a British-Pakistani woman in her 50s, talked about doctors as ‘book doctors’: ‘when you go there you explain and [they] look at the computer, look up book and give you medicine’. She carried on by saying that they ‘never listen to other things’. After several unhappy encounters with doctors in primary care and accident and emergency, Shanaz turned to alternative medicine. She bought herself a book on homeopathy and she consulted a doctor who she explained was not a ‘real’ doctor. Beneath Shanaz’ criticism of the doctors looking at books, lies her dissatisfaction with the bureaucratization of modern healthcare that results in impersonal service and doctors not having time to listen to their patients. When one night she had to go to the accident and emergency department because of a severe stomach ache, the doctors on duty found no cause for concern. At other occasions, when suffering from pain in her leg and her back, all she received was painkillers and an offer for an injection. Shanaz


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found she could not identify with the doctors, in particular those in accident and emergency who were too young to match her view of medical experience and authority. To compensate, it seemed to her, they looked in their books. As mentioned above, Cicourel (2005) uses the notion of ‘bureaucratic medical rituals’ to refer to routinely followed administrative practices, such as, for example, scheduling appointments. In the healthcare context, such practices often include the use of written texts. When doctors look at the patient file on their computer during a consultation, necessarily their attention is turned away from the patient. Cicoural further explains that medical rituals are a source of intelligibility and unintelligibility for the patient. For Sonia, the nurse’s practice of printing out a leaflet was a source of unintelligibility and misunderstanding, when experienced the first time. For Shanaz, the doctors’ reading was a source of dissatisfaction rather than unintelligibility: they lacked experience and didn’t care about her personal circumstances. Two visits to the hospital with Sally, one of the mothers-to-be in my ongoing research, allowed me to observe for myself the extent to which doctors and midwives consult written texts while they are with a patient. Sally was 7 months into her second pregnancy when her midwife referred her to an obstetrician. A small risk of Sally developing pre-gestational diabetes had been the cause for the referral. The consultation began with the obstetrician asking Sally why she had come. Sally explained and the consultant read through her ‘Green Notes’ to make herself familiar with Sally’s situation. Throughout the consultation, the doctor frequently had to turn towards these notes. Antenatal care in England is midwife-led: mothers-to-be are regularly cared for by midwives and are only referred to an obstetrician in case of any concern for their or the baby’s health. Because Sally’s pregnancy had until then been ‘normal’ the consultant had not had any prior contact with Sally and was not familiar with her situation. The ‘Green Notes’ are ‘handheld’: a patient file that is in possession of the patient herself and which contains records of all antenatal care visits as well as information for the mother-to-be on various aspects of her pregnancy. As a literacy practice, the Green Notes are central to the organization of antenatal care (Papen, 2008b). After we had left the hospital, Sally expressed her dissatisfaction with the consultation. Unlike Shanaz, she understood why the doctor had to look at her notes. However, Sally also felt that the doctor had not been a good communicator and that she had frequently not looked at her

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while addressing her. A few weeks after this incident, Sally had an appointment with a midwife. Pregnant women are frequently cared for by a team of midwives and this can mean, as in Sally’s case, that over the course of the 9 months the mother-to-be might see up to four or five different midwives. The Green Notes again played a crucial role during the visit. In fact, the consultation started with a greeting and the handing over of the notes. The visits are quite ‘routine’, Sally remarked afterwards, and the handing over of the notes, followed by the midwife’s reading them certainly felt like a medical ritual of the kind Cicourel (see above) describes. The consultation ended with the midwife adding a short report to the notes and handing them back to Sally. The midwife then turned to the computer to complete the hospital’s patient file. Watching her writing first in the notes then on computer, we asked her if she was writing the same both times. Yes, she explained, it was more or less the same and the purpose of the computer file was to make sure everybody involved in a patient’s care had access to the same information and also in case a woman had forgotten to bring her Green Notes to the consultation. As I have explained elsewhere (Papen, 2008b), the Green Notes are an attempt to address this imbalance and to provide mothers-to-be with more information about their pregnancy. The above scenarios confirm what other researchers have found: that during a consultation the physician frequently engages in reading or writing activities, which necessarily turns their attention away from the patient. As a literacy practice, this behaviour confirms the physician as the party with privileged access to powerful knowledge. It emphasizes the doctor’s role as the one who mediates or translates medical knowledge, while the patient’s access to this information depends on the doctor’s willingness and ability to fulfil this mediating role.

Patients’ Own Writing Imposed identities: forms Forms stand for and symbolize the institutions that issue them. Forms, by the way they are written and through their functions in specific contexts, can deny people access to resources and expertise. They may require the applicant to take on an identity they are opposed to. After several years with lupus, Kate applied for Disability Allowance. When Kate and her husband sat together to fill out her disability allowance


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form they struggled with the amount and detail of information about her disease they had to supply. They did not know much about lupus. In Kate’s words, the form was ‘hopeless’ and ‘an absolute nightmare’. It contained many ‘gobbledygook’ questions, which she simply did not understand. She did not understand the formal language used as she had no familiarity with this kind of register. Kate resented that she had to provide a lot of information that was already contained in her patient file. Being in a lot of pain day-in and day-out, she could not understand that there was a need for her to ‘prove’ how ill she was. Kate could not understand why her consultant’s verdict on her condition, contained in her patient file, could not simply be passed on to the Department of Social Services. But the state’s discourse of welfare obliged Kate to take on the position of applicant having to make a case. The completion of the application form including details of her illness is another example of a bureaucratic procedure imposed on the patient. Undoubtedly, the form itself and the fact that the patient is expected to complete it herself, is a source of power of the system over the patient/ applicant. The form is the ‘frontline’ piece of the Department of Social Services, symbolizing the power of the state to grant or refuse access to resources. The text replaces the ‘facework’ of any officials who in an older system might have received applicants in person to review their case (Malan, 1996). Because for Kate and her husband, there was no such person they could turn to, it was the form itself that became the symbol of the power they felt subjected to.

Instrumental and emotional writing Patients not only receive texts, they also generate them. Amongst the texts written by patients that I found in my research were notes on a procedure, lists of questions, vocabulary lists, records and diary entries, contributions to internet sites and letters to organizations. These serve a variety of purposes. The writing that my informants told me about falls into two broad categories: instrumental and emotional. The first of these is writing that serves a specific occasion or task, for example, preparing a visit to a doctor, writing notes about information found on the internet or completing a form (see above). Another example of this kind of writing, mentioned by two informants, is keeping a record of one’s blood sugar levels.

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Pamela took notes of the information she found on the internet about an endoscopy, a procedure her husband was to undergo. Maina, a Japanese woman living in Britain, used a small notebook to help her remember any important information related to her pregnancy. Peter, who had to take up to 18 different tablets each day, had prepared for himself a list of all the medication he needed. He took this list with him whenever he had an appointment with a doctor. Many of the non-native speakers of English I interviewed prepared lists of words and phrases ahead of their visit to a doctor, to help them explain to the physician what was wrong with them. The above examples illustrate patients writing that is instrumental (Drentea & Moren-Cross, 2005). This type of writing is responsive to the demands of the healthcare context. Often, it was empowering in the sense that it helped patients cope better with the communicative requirements of the health system or that it made them feel better informed and prepared for treatment they were undergoing. Pamela explained that the notes she had on the endoscopy were useful, as they now knew what her husband had to expect. Maina’s notebook contained information received from the midwives, advice found on the internet and a list of antenatal care services in the area of Scotland she was about to move too. Her note-taking strategy helped her feel in control of a situation that for her was in a sense rather unusual. As other well educated, professional women expecting their first child, she had to adapt to a context where she was relatively ignorant and bound to rely on ‘experts’’ voices without necessarily being able to judge their knowledge in the way she would usually approach other people’s verdicts (Carolan, 2007). For others, the writing they did was less empowering. Katherine was invited by her husband’s consultant to write down any questions she and her husband might have about his cancer and the chemotherapy he was about to start. Katherine did not find that writing down questions helped her in her efforts to communicate with the consultant. Being aware that the doctors used ‘big words’, she felt compelled to express herself well and she struggled to spell the words she needed and never took her list with her to the doctor. The second type of writing I found in my research serves more relational and emotional purposes, as in writing a diary and communicating with other pregnant women through internet sites. At first sight, this kind of writing is less shaped by the exigencies of the healthcare system.


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However, it could also be constrained by what the writers deemed to be correct language and the kind of writing that would give them authority in a medical context. Kate struggled to express what she wanted to say without sounding stupid. Her psychiatrist had asked her to write a diary to express her feelings about the disease. But she found it hard to use what she thought of as the appropriate words. For example, she wanted to talk about her depression. But since she didn’t know how to spell this word, she ended up using a much more colloquial expression – ‘being fed up’. In her view, this made her sound like a child. Both Kate and Katherine’s examples show how patients can feel obliged to adapt linguistically to the institution they are dealing with. They both feel that their own lack of ability to use a formal and professional register puts them in a position of inferiority towards the medical professionals. Throughout her pregnancy, Sally regularly communicated with other pregnant women through an internet site. At one point in the early stages of her pregnancy, she felt she received little support from her midwives who thought of her as experiencing what for them were no more than the ‘normal’ symptoms of the first trimester. In talking to her midwife, Sally felt constrained to play down her feelings and ended up presenting herself as coping better than she thought she did. On the website, communicating with other women, she felt no need to keep up a brave face. As Drentea & Moren-Cross (2005) who studied an internet mother site also found, for Sally the site offered a welcome space to exchange those sentiments, which were not given space and recognition by the health service. Maina also mentioned the emotional support pregnant women could receive from websites, but contrary to Sally she had only looked at them occasionally and felt that she had no need for the kind of sisterly support that was offered. But she found internet sites useful for asking questions she found too mundane to bother her midwife with. For example, she used the site to clarify some information the midwife had given her regarding foods to avoid. Internet sites such as those used by Sally and Maina offer a form of healthcare which is controlled by patients themselves. On the site, patients’ experiences and sufferings are situated within their lifeworlds rather than within the constraining sphere of biomedicine and what doctors and midwives deem to be pathological or not. On the internet site, patients themselves act as healthcare providers (Hardey, 2001 in Henwoord et al., 2003). They provide emotional support but also ‘formal information’ (Drentea & Moren-Cross, 2005: 932): information

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taken from professionals and organizations. The sites flourish because there is a need not only for such factual information but also for social support. Instead of investing their agency in requesting more and better or different care from their midwives and doctors, women like Sally opt for a complementary form of care in the hands of women themselves. Patients’ writing can also be driven by resistance or rejection of the experts’ point of view. For the first years of her illness, Kate had had full faith in her general practitioner and consultant and was happy to go along with the treatments they suggested. However, after 5 years of suffering from lupus she found her condition increasingly difficult to bear. Having been ‘passive’ so far, an evening with her sister Jenny proved to be a catalytic event triggering Kate’s resistance to the treatments she had so far received. Kate put her sister in charge. Jenny began to search information about lupus on the internet. She sent letters to various sites asking for more information, ordered an ‘alternative’ treatment for Kate and got Kate moved to a different consultant. Jenny also wrote to their local MP when Kate was refused a hip replacement on the grounds that she was too young.

Conclusions The data presented in the previous sections illustrates the many uses and meanings of written texts in healthcare contexts. They support the assertion that healthcare contexts are highly textually mediated environments. The scenarios recounted above also demonstrate that texts such as patient education leaflets are embedded in specific practices of healthcare. In some instances, they appear to be given to patients routinely and their use is part of a medical ritual. Health texts do of course contain information that can be vital for the patient. But patient information leaflets of the kind mentioned by my informants are constrained in what they offer: they privilege the dominant biomedical view and when and to whom they are given reflects the institution’s agenda, which may not necessarily coincide with the patient’s needs and desires. Information can be for compliance rather than for choice (Dixon-Woods, 2001). Debbie’s experience shows how texts are implicated in the relations of ruling. Kate’s experience of the form reveals the role of literacy as a threat (Barton & Hamilton, 1998).


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The form contained a statement warning applicants that in case of information withheld or wrongly presented support could be withheld. Written texts need to be understood in relation to the practices and policies they are associated with. Leaflets and internet websites such as ‘NHS direct online’, an information service for patients, are central to the NHS current policy of improving patients’ understanding of medical issues and empowering them to become partners in their healthcare (Henwood et al., 2003). Patients, however, react to any texts received from their doctors in a variety of ways, ranging from welcome acceptance to passive or active rejection. Leaflets can be useful and empowering, as in Anna’s case. But for others, like Grace, the written information received may be of no use. Whether written information, including the kind of information patients find themselves, is empowering or not also depends on whether the medical encounter itself favours or impedes a more egalitarian relationship between physician and patient. Shanaz may have been partially empowered by her use of a homeopathic book. But her encounters with health professionals were not satisfactory. That she turned to self-help should not be seen as evidence of the health system having made her an active partner in her healthcare. Rather it is the result of the system not addressing her needs. Sally’s use of an interactive motherhood website provided her with a lot of useful medical advice and the social contact the site offers was an invaluable source of support throughout her pregnancy. But even a highly educated, information literate and well-informed woman like Sally at times required the physician’s advice. When this happened, she was not always satisfied by the response she got. We can conclude that despite a rhetoric that professes the opposite, the literacy practices of information provision and healthcare more generally continue to be grounded in a transmission model that privileges the institution’s point of view.

References Ahern, C. (2004), ‘Literacy, power and agency: love letters and development in Nepal’. Language and Education, 18(4), 305–316. Barton, D. & M. Hamilton (1998), Local Literacies. London: Routledge. Barton, D. (2007), Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language (2nd edn). Oxford: Blackwell. Carolan, M. (2007), ‘Health literacy and the information needs and dilemmas of first-time mothers over 35 years’. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 16, 1162–1172.

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Charles, C., A. Gafni & T. Whelan (1999), ‘Decision-making in the physician-patient encounter’. Social Science and Medicine, 49, 651–661. Cicourel, A.V. (2005), ‘Bureaucratic rituals in health care delivery’. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2(3), 357–371. Coupland, J. & A. Williams ( 2002), ‘Conflicting discourses, shifting ideologies: pharmaceutical, “alternative”and feminist emancipatory texts on the menopause’. Discourse and Society, 13(4), 419–445. Department of Health (2001a), The Expert Patient: A New Approach to Chronic Disease Management for the 21st Century. London: Department of Health. Department of Health (2001b), Building the Information Core: Implementing the NHS Plan. London: Department of Health. Dixon-Woods, M. (2001), ‘Writing wrongs? An analysis of published discourses about the use of patient information leaflets’. Social Science and Medicine, 52, 1417–1432. Drentea, P. & J.L. Moren-Cross (2005), ‘Social capital and social support on the web: the case of an internet mother site’. Sociology of Health and Illness, 27(7), 920–943 Fairclough, N. (2001), Language and Power (2nd edn.). London: Longman. Freebody, P. & J. Freiberg (1999), ‘Health literacy and social practice: response to Nutbeam’. Literacy and Numeracy Studies, 9(2), 57–66. Fisher, S. & A.D. Todd (1986), ‘Communication in institutional contexts: social interaction and social structure’. In S. Fisher, S. & A.D. Todd (eds.), Discourse and Institutional Authority – Medicine, Education & Law. New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation, ix–xv. Henwood, F., S. Wyatt, A. Hart & J. Smith (2003), ‘“Ignorance is bliss sometimes”: constraints on the emergence of the “informed patient” in the changing landscapes of health information’. Sociology of Health and Illness, 25(6), 589–607. Heritage, J. & D.W. Maynhard (2006) (eds.), Communication in Medical Care. Interaction between Primary Care Physicians and Patients. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iedema, R. (2007) (ed.), Discourses of Hospital Communication: Tracing Complexities in Contemporary Health Care Organizations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kealley, J., C. Smith & B. Winser (2005), ‘Information empowers but who is empowered?’ Communication & Medicine, 1(2), 119–129. Lupton, D. (1994), Medicine as Culture. Illness, Disease and the Body in Western Societies. London: Sage. Lupton, D. (1997) ‘Consumerism, reflexivity and the medical encounter’. Social Science and Medicine, 45(3), 373–381. Malan, L. (1996) ‘Literacy mediation and social identity in Newton’. In M. Prinsloo & M. Breier (eds.), The Social Uses of Literacy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Murtagh, M.J. & J. Hepworth (2003), ‘Feminist thinking and menopause: autonomy and decision-making in primary medical care’. Social Science and Medicine, 56(8), 1643–1652. Papen, U. (2005), Adult Literacy as Social Practice: More than Skills. London: Routledge. Papen, U. (2008a), Literature Review: Understanding Literacy and Health. London: NRDC. Papen, U. (2008b), ‘Pregnancy starts with a literacy event: pregnancy and ante-natal care as textually mediated experiences’. Ethnography 9(3), 377–403.


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Papen, U. & S. Walters (2008), Literacy, Learning and Health. London: NRDC. Pollock, K., K. Cox, P. Howard, E. Wilson & N. Moghaddam (2008), ‘Service user experiences of information delivery after a diagnosis of cancer: a qualitative study’. Support Care Cancer, 16, 963–973. Roberts, C., V. Wass, R. Jones, S. Sarangi & A. Gillet (2003), ‘A discourse analysis study of “good” and “poor” communication in OSCE: a proposed new framework for teaching students’, Medical Education, 37, 192–201. Roberts, C., S. Sarangi & B. Moss (2004), ‘Presentation of self and symptom in primary care consultations involving patients from non-English speaking backgrounds’. Communication and Medicine, 1, 159–169. Roberts, C., B. Moss, V. Wass, S. Sarangi & R. Jones (2005), ‘Misunderstandings: a qualitative study of primary care consultations in multilingual settings, and educational implications’. Medical Education, 39, 465–475. Sarangi, S. & C. Roberts (eds.) (1999), Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings. Berlin: deGruyter. Sator, M., Gstettner, A. & B. Hladschick-Kermer (2008), ‘Seitdem der Arzt mir gesagt hat “Tumor” – das war’s’. Wiener Klinische Wochenschau, 120(5–6), 158–170. Smith, D. (1999), Writing the Social: Critique, Theory and Investigations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Street, B.V. (ed.) (1993), Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wodak, R. (1997), ‘Critical discourse analysis and the study of doctor-patient interaction’. In B.L. Gunnarsson, P. Linell & B. Nordberg (eds.), The Construction of Professional Discourse. London: Longman, 173–200.


Part IV

Historical Perspectives


Chapter Nine

Edwardian Postcards: Illuminating Ordinary Writing Julia Gillen and Nigel Hall

People today wonder how our fathers and mothers got on without those useful adjuncts of civilization – postcards. Anon, 1901

The Edwardian Postcard During the reign of Edward VII (1901–1910) the total number of postcards posted in Britain was 5,920,933,334, almost six billion, getting on for 200 cards per person. Although the postcard had been first developed in Austria in 1869 it was very quickly adopted across the world. In Britain the postcard’s use was carefully circumscribed by the British Post Office. The early postcards were preprinted, rigidly sized and pre-stamped; the whole of one side had to be taken up by the address and the other side could only contain the message. In the late 1890s this began to change and in 1902 one whole side was allowed to be taken up with an illustration and half of the other side was used for the message. Within 2 years postcard sending rose dramatically, reaching almost a billion cards a year at the end of the Edwardian period. To a large extent, 1902 was the year that writing was democratized in the United Kingdom. By 1902 Britain had experienced almost 30 years of compulsory education, and while literacy levels may not have necessarily been high, the postcard did not make huge demands on writers. Everyone could use postcards; they were cheap and attractive objects and nobody was looking over a writer’s shoulder checking for errors. Most people, save for the very poor and the totally illiterate, found that postcards had great value in their increasingly fast and complex social lives. The efficiency of the Post Office also contributed and one

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historian of the postcard commented, ‘The speed of the postal service is such that “Drop me a postcard” was said in just the same way that people today say “give me a ring”’ (Staff, 1979: 65). It is because the postcard was so widely used during the Edwardian period that it has great potential for anyone interested in the history of writing. Ordinary writing from England’s past represents an elusive quarry. The writing that has survived in archives, libraries and personal collections is often that of elite writers, their clerks and scribes, or belongs to distinctive educated individuals, often diarists. The absence of other people’s ordinary writing is not only because limited educational opportunities restricted access to writing skills, but also because any such texts were not seen as worth preserving. Exceptions to this, such as the late-eighteenth-century pauper letters (Sokoll, 2001), are amazing revelations of what could be achieved by relatively unlettered writers. The potential of the postcard for studying ‘ordinary writing’ is so powerful because on one level ‘ordinary’ can mean the everyday writing of all people, even those who may be highly educated or from a higher social class. However, it can also mean the ordinary writing of ‘ordinary’ people, people who may well not have normally used the more formal and more expensive medium of letter writing to communicate; as the author of one letter to The Times made clear, ‘Now the postcard is the letter of the poor’ (The Times, 14.3.1896). Postcards were used by almost everyone and they are evidence of ordinary people engaging in ordinary writing. The Edwardian postcard reflects the more informal writing of a very large section of the British population both rich and poor and both higher and lower classes. James How (2003) claimed that the establishment of the British Post Office system in the second half of the eighteenth century represented an opening up of a new epistolary space, with many consequences for the way in which people communicated and related to each other. We want to claim that the early postcard (and not just the Edwardian postcard) also represented a new epistolary space, one which perfectly suited the end of the nineteenth century with its greater than ever social and physical mobility. The Manchester Weekly Times predicted in 1890 (June 4), ‘The work of correspondence will be reduced to a minimum when one has only to carry a pack of postcards in one’s pocket, write one’s thought in pencil as soon as it occurs, and despatch it through the first messenger or the first receiving box one comes across.’ And one writer in Girl’s Realm of 1900 said, ‘The picture post-card is a sign of the times. It belongs

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to a period peopled by a hurried generation that has not got many minutes to spare for writing letters’ (cited in The Picture Postcard, 1900: 9). We want to consider the place of the Edwardian postcard within a ‘new communications landscape,’ deliberately borrowing a term from Kress (1998) that he used to apply to the contemporary era of the digital revolution. Examining the materiality and communicative affordances of this new medium leads us to suggest that the postcard is appropriate in a distinctive way to the Edwardian era, and also allows us to make some direct comparisons with current communications technologies. The explosion in use of the postcard in Edwardian times, reaching nearly one billion annually, bears a striking parallel to today’s growth in electronic communications. A downward shift in costs and improvements in technologies led to a dramatic increase in writings that reached their addressees quickly wherever they were. Multiple daily deliveries in some centres meant that multimodal communications could be exchanged more rapidly than ever before. The postal service was so efficient that up to six deliveries a day were being made in major cities. For the first time in British history there was a literacy-related object that did not demand too much writing or reading, could be posted extremely cheaply, in which a significant part of the overall message could be conveyed by a printed picture and in its relative informality was ideally suited to vernacular writing. The consequence was the use of the postcards by most sectors of society for a great range of purposes. In their easy multimodality, postcards may be seen to transcend the comparable communicative tools of a century later. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is very possible to send multimedia text messages, but this is still a relatively unusual mode in comparison with all the messages that feature words with a highly constrained range of additional graphical features such as emoticons. Multimodal emails are common for those sent by commercial organizations to their target markets, but the majority of 1:1 emails we send in our personal and professional lives are essentially verbal. By contrast, Edwardian postcards by default give the sender the opportunity to combine a choice of image with their text, at very little cost: it has been estimated that in real terms sending a postcard cost about one fortieth the amount in this period in comparison with the 1970s (Monahan, 1980; Staff, 1979). The postcard even offered the chance of avoiding writing at all. As one writer in The Picture Postcard wrote, ‘As a picture is far easier to read than

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print, so superior is the pictorial card to the written word’ (1901: 145). Indeed, many of the cards being sold during the Edwardian period have a pictorial side that included a printed text (e.g. ‘Why haven’t you written?’ or ‘I’m sorry I haven’t written’). The Edwardian postcard did bring with it two issues that have also affected digital communications. The first is privacy. Unlike the letter, a postcard is a very open and public form of communication, and any message written on a card will be exposed to scrutiny beyond that of its intended recipient. This problem was identified very early on. Only 10 days after the first postcard appeared in Britain, The Times commented, ‘Cryptography, or the art of writing in cipher, will be practised, new methods of expression will be studied, and many persons, no doubt, will discover that what they have got to say to their correspondents need be no secret at all.’ (The Times, 8.10.1870). The Times was correct and most writers simply ignored privacy issues for as the Postcard Collector in 1903 commented (p. 324), ‘And as for privacy, who expects it in these days. If he has secrets to hide from the light of day, by all means let him use a sheet paper, enclose it in an envelope, seal it with red wax, put on a penny stamp and be happy.’ But for those concerned about privacy, proffered solutions to their problem abounded. Our own collection reveals that people developed their own codes, borrowed ciphers, wrote upside down or reversed text, and some constructed rebuses. Eventually, postcard code books were published. Around 1908 Captain Bernard created The postcard code: a novel and private method of communicating by postcard. By using this, No longer will the servant or the Village Postman be able to read your private messages, no longer will the mistress know of the tender phrases sent by the maid’s followers, no longer will parents scowl, or the sister’s brother tease her, for when in possession of this book, by simply placing a few figures on a post card, a private message can be send to any part of the United Kingdom for a halfpenny, or for a penny to any part of the world. The second issue relates to concerns about standards. First, for some the postcard transgressed social standards. When the postcard first appeared, it was rejected by some as being below their dignity. The journalist James Douglas wrote in 1907, ‘There are still some ancient purists

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who regard postcards as vulgar, fit only for tradesmen.’ (cited in Staff, 1979: 81). For others, just as it is for some with today’s texting and email, the new medium was going to ruin the English language. Douglas (ibid.) also claimed that ‘The picture postcard carries rudeness to the fullest extremity. There is no room for anything polite’ while another critic said ‘The postcard is utterly destructive of style’ (Sims, 1900). However, one author suggested that ‘The postcard with its entire freedom from ceremony of formality, is such an obvious boon to thousands, if not millions, of correspondents in these days’ (The Times, 1.11.1899, p. 13).

The Edwardian Postcard and Ordinary Writing The project from which this article derives is beginning to explore writing on Edwardian postcards; crucially this is not simply to examine what writers wrote about but to investigate the nature of this writing as social practice (Barton & Hall, 2000). Part of our thesis is that postcards represent the kind of writing that has been characterized in a number of ways by different academics, such as ‘ordinary writing,’ (Sinor, 2002) and ‘vernacular’ and ‘everyday writing’ (Barton & Hamilton, 1998). So what kind of writing is it on Edwardian postcards? Is it ‘ordinary writing’ as defined by Sinor (2002)? She claims that ordinary writing is ‘writing that is typically unseen or ignored, and is primarily defined by its status as discardable’ (p. 5). She borrows from Langbauer’s formulation that it is an example of the ‘very things we cannot read because they are so commonplace as to be boring, to refuse our regard or interpretation. (p. 126). On one level it may seem that her characterization is not applicable, for postcards are read and sometimes kept; after all, in any given month millions of Edwardian cards are available for sale in British postcard collector fairs. However, it is worth looking more closely at her definition, for the writing on postcards is not the same thing as postcards themselves and it is very unlikely that many of the millions of old cards now for sale each month would have survived were it not for collectors’ interests that have focussed almost wholly on the picture sides. Out of the many hundreds of books that feature older postcards we have found only two that make a specific and major feature of the messages on the non-pictorial side? ‘What The Postman Saw’ (Brooks, Fletcher & Lund, 1982) did focus more on the messages than the

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pictorial sides of the cards. It printed transcriptions of 234 messages (‘complete with spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors where they occurred,’ p. 4) and even reproduced 12 of the messages sides of cards. However, its focus was on the topics of the messages rather than considering them as a form of writing ‘The Postcard Century’ (Phillips, 2000) contained reproductions of 2000 cards and alongside every card was printed a transcription of the message, ‘with all their disjointedness, eccentric spellings and wayward grammar’ (p. 14). Precious in their rarity, these two books are very welcome, but in neither of them does the writing on postcards begin to be examined as the hugely significant resource for understanding the social history of writing we believe it to be. It is clear that while the handwritten messages have not necessarily been physically discarded, they have nevertheless been largely refused our regard and interpretation. Ordinary writing has been too easily represented as mundane or insignificant, but as Thurlow, Jaworski and Ylänne (in press) point out it is the ‘apparent’ banality which makes postcards so communicatively important. Being positioned as banal obscures the complex range of functions embedded within such texts. Barton and Hamilton (1998) offer another perspective that relates to the ordinariness of writing on postcards. They discuss vernacular literacies and describe them as ‘essentially ones which are not regulated by the formal rules and procedures of dominant social institutions and which have their origins in everyday life.’ Postcards do not escape some of the rules of dominant social institutions for in many respects usage was regulated by the British Post Office; when they began they had to be of certain sizes, cost a specified amount and certain parts of postcard could only be used in certain ways (for instance only the address could be written on one aside of the card, restricting to the other side the illustration and message). However, vociferous campaigns, largely led by an MP, Mr J. Henniker Heaton, gradually led to relaxations of these rules (e.g. Henniker Heaton, Letter to The Times, 19. 8. 1899, p. 8). Postcard writers developed many creative solutions to how they could write on postcards and the composition of messages was restricted only by Britain’s libel and obscenity laws. Most importantly, no-one sought to restrict the quality of composition, spelling, grammar and punctuation. No-one set acceptable standards for postcard writing and no-one assessed what people wrote. We have failed to uncover a single manual prescribing how postcards should be written, while across several centuries there were many hundreds for letter writers (Poster & Mitchell, 2007)

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and in its earlier days there was even published guidance for people about using the telephone (e.g. Post, 1969 [1922]). The ways in which postcards were written, while sometimes drawing on longstanding letter writing conventions, often reflect oral language use in everyday life (see below). Thus, postcard texts essentially evolved out of the practice of writing them and these practices were situated in people’s ordinary, everyday lives. Postcards might contain no writing, a couple of words or up to, in some cases, well over a hundred words, they could have drawings, codes, or symbols, and the writing could be oriented in many different directions. The evidence of the millions of Edwardian cards that have survived is that their authors took every opportunity to explore their freedoms.

Looking at the Texts on Edwardian Postcards In the section that follows, we examine a number of texts found on Edwardian postcards. These examples come from a collection of 2000 Edwardian cards that we have assembled. Unlike almost all postcard collectors we collect by price (very cheap) rather than image theme, and do not seek cards in pristine condition. Our primary criteria for inclusion are simply that the cards are clearly dated and contain some written text. The overwhelming majority, 94 per cent of our sample, are generally neat and readable. Our collection is fairly randomized in that the cards have been acquired in many different places and from many different dealers and collectors; to a large extent it is time that has randomized them. Our collection of 2000 cards is inevitably only a minute quantity of the six million posted during the Edwardian period and we do not pretend that our collection is statistically representative of all Edwardian cards. Rather, we seek to examine the range and nature of our collection as evidence of the writing practices among Edwardian postcard writers. For the purposes of this article we concentrate on a sample of 100 cards for which we have developed and implemented many analytical categories and transcribed the texts. Ultimately all the cards (and as the collection grows, many more) will be analysed in the same way. Three quarters of our sample are views or buildings; there is a scattering of other topics including comic subjects, photographs of ordinary people and representations of fine art. We have categorized two thirds

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as essentially ‘photographic’ and almost all the rest as ‘professionally illustrated’ although the boundary between the two is impossible to draw finitely. Very many cards feature adapted images: for example, personal photographs turned into postcards or, very commonly, professional photographic images that have been coloured, tinted or ‘improved’ in some way. So we see that a great deal of the image editing that goes on today as part of both professional and personal practices has clear ancestry in the practices of the Edwardians. Occasionally we suspect that the image selected was of secondary importance; the message was vital and the writer sent the first card that came to hand. However, far more frequently, there is some relationship between the image and the reason for sending it; some cards make explicit reference to supplying the card as a gift to supplement the addressee’s collection. Others draw some feature of the illustration to the addressee’s attention, for example: ‘Do you not think this is a saucy card’ or ‘My house is further along on the right.’ The very way that the limited space of the card is used demonstrates choice. Our collection features great variation in orientation of the writing with every possible way of using the space being demonstrated; fewer than half in our sample simply write from top to bottom; some write upside down, or diagonally, annotate the picture side as well as write in the space allocated for the message, or start the message in one direction and later decide to cram an additional line or two in with another orientation. The evidence from our collection suggests that postcard writing was more common among women than men, although it is also clear that men participated in both writing and reading postcards. Our sample contains explicit references to collections held by females and males, yet it is constituted by many more cards addressed to women than to men. However, it is often unclear whether those cards written to women are from other women or from men. External reference occasionally suggests that picture postcard writing was more popular among women, such as an article in The Postcard Collector of September 1903 (p. 227) which remarked that in breach of Post Office regulations young women were crowding the counters of the Llandudno Post Office to write their postcards. Before exploring the range of written messages on Edwardian postcards we will present some analysis of one randomly selected card in more detail (see Figure 9.1).

Edwardian Postcards

Figure 9.1

An Edwardian postcard, picture side

Figure 9.2

An Edwardian postcard, message side

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The card (as in Figure 9.1 ) has on one side a poor quality colour reproduction of a church, St Peter’s in Bramley, Leeds. This church still exists, now serving Anglican and Methodist communities although it was ‘re-ordered 30 years ago’ according to its web presence. There are probably no contemporary postcards featuring this church. In its day however, an extremely local publisher of postcards, Fairbank’s of Bramley and Pudsey issued the card which was sent by a ‘Rob C’ to a Mr Harry Jones of 47 Ermine Road, Hoole in Chester. The illustration is not mentioned at all by the writer.

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On the address side Rob C stuck the stamp on upside down, whether by accident or intent. The postmark is of Bramley, Yorkshire, at 9 p.m. on 29 August 1907, a Thursday (see Figure 9.2). We have began calculating the distances between sender and addressee on a random sample of our cards and the distance of this one, 86 miles is actually very typical of our results of this exercise so far. The layout of the card illustrates the regulatory framework within which some elements of postcards continued to be controlled after 1902 in specifying very clearly where the message and address were to be written. The card was ‘inland use only’ as some other countries had different regulations about how cards were to be laid out. The writer has stuck very precisely to the framing of the card, although he does write right down the bottom edge of the card. The cursive handwriting, written in ink, is fairly neat and very legible (save for one word). The message contains 69 words. Mr H. Jones 47 Ermine Rd Hoole Chester Dear Harry Pleased to hear that you have had such a pleasant holiday. We were quite expecting to see you on your way through, and were very much disappointed you did not turn up. I had a grand holiday & will let you know all about it soon. My people are all well & join me in kindest regards. Will write soon. Yours to a cinder (Rob) C. The card begins with a salutation which both marks it as an epistolary genre, clearly drawing from letter writing conventions, and informalizes the rendition of the addressee’s name elsewhere on the card intended for the Post Office’s use. Such salutations shift the tone from (relatively)

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public to (relatively) private, personalizing the communication. Typical of postcard authors is the elliptical omission of self-reference in the opening sentence, going straight into ‘Pleased to hear;’ this structure is mirrored in the pre-pre closing at the other end of the message: ‘will write soon’ (symmetries of structure in openings and closings have been noted as characteristic of telephone conversations, [Hopper, 1992]). As with contemporary written communications constrained by extremely limited use of space, there is some use of abbreviation and short forms: here use of the ampersand rather than spelling out ‘and’. The body of the message, as typically with our sample, consists of fairly short sentences, lacking amplification and moving rapidly from one topic to another; underlying may be a sense that the receiver will make use of their background knowledge in interpretation. The card contains an interesting phrase at the end: ‘Yours to a cinder’, a friendly catch -phrase of the Edwardian period. Although not appearing in the 1898 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable it was used in the following decade by Lord Fisher in many letters to Winston Churchill and by Banjo Patterson, the Australian bush poet. In 1907 the phrase appeared in a postcard at the centre of a notorious cause celebre: it was written by a young commercial artist Robert Wood on a card to Phyliss Dimmock who was murdered soon afterwards; he was tried for the crime but eventually acquitted (Hogarth, 1954). Perhaps one of the most significant aspects of this text is how it vividly demonstrates the ways in which postcards sustain personal relationships. Each of the sentences, while brief and unrelated to surrounding sentences, nevertheless affirms the relationship between the writer and the receiver. The writer points to a shared past and the imputation of a connected future; he involves a broader web of involved connections; besides the two characters involved in the implied continuing dialogue there is also mention of ‘we’ and ‘my people’. So the personal relationship between the two men, confirmed and developed through this dialogue, with its two promises of future continuation, is also placed within a sense of its broader social networks.

The Postcard and Domains of Everyday Life Barton and Hamilton’s study of Local Literacies (1998: 247) identified six areas of everyday practices where reading and writing were of central

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importance. It seems to us that people’s ordinary writing using postcards can be considered in these ways, although, just as in Barton and Hamilton’s empirical investigation not necessarily equally and equivalently. In what follows, we examine a selection of our sample using five of their areas of practice. However, while considering our sample against these categories provides a useful way of considering practices involving postcards we would not suggest that the practices and hence categories are wholly separable.

Personal communication Vernacular literacies are generally concerned with writings at a personal level and this is typical of those in our collection. Postcards are generally used as a quick and relatively easy way to maintain and solidify social relations with other people. Lehtonen, Koskinen and Kurvinen (2002) point out that even the most mundane card, or even one without a message, serves as a link in the chain of personal communications. A very typical example of the postcard that conveys good wishes and appears designed to cement already existing relationships, in a chain of communication both written and face-to-face, reads: Dr R.Thanks very much for 2.P.C.s sorry I have not dropped you a line before but I guess you get all the new, glad to hear you are coming over to see us all again, we had a very nice week end at Millers Dale. Glad to say we have been very (?) for Whit week. Hope you are in the Best of health. Best wishes and Kind regards from all yours sincerely (CHW) Postcards then are examples of vernacular literacies and as such are ‘located in reciprocal networks of exchange’ (Barton & Hamilton,

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1998: 254). The postcards are located in material networks of exchange specifically and explicitly. Indeed one fifth of our sample mention either having received from or sent to the current correspondent another postcard. I hope you enjoyed yourself at London, thanks for P.C. I wish that I could see the Exhibition, The postcard may be seen as an easy alternative to writing a letter, but our sample suggests that postcards were not replacements for letters but had a place alongside them. A quarter of the sample make explicit reference to receiving a letter from the sender or promising them one. However, postcard practices are clearly separated from letter writing practices, for while some cards featured formal salutations, dates, senders’ addresses and other letter-related conventions, most did not. There are many other references to exchanges of postcards, as well as face-to-face meetings; the postcard, very often represented as in some way as standing in for a letter, was a quick way of maintaining a relationship. Perhaps the promised letters did not always materialize in the course of the correspondents’ busy lives. A whole subgenre of postcards arose, that on the pictorial side contained versions of the message, ‘Why haven’t you written?’ and another subgenre had variations on the message, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t written’ (Hall & Gillen, 2007). Postcard writers show themselves then as sensitive to the nature of the medium, making a clear differentiation between the kind of fast, ephemeral approach to ordinary writing appropriate to the postcard and the somewhat more considered approach apparently reckoned appropriate to the letter, with its socio-historical conventions. Of course, we are not suggesting that every letter in Edwardian times was formal and lengthy and every postcard informal and short, but it is evident that different expectations existed around the two media. So Georgie writes to Miss Cassidy in Morpeth: How’s everybody at the station. Very quiet here just now though I am settling down very nicely

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I get home both to dinner & tea. Remember me to all the boys. Will probably be at Morpeth in about six weeks time. Kind Regards from Georgie, x Organizing life In their personal communications, writers (and, it may be deduced, their readers) were often concerned to arrange their affairs in the here-and-now, in ways rather similar to those discovered by Barton and Hamilton (1998). Postcards are frequently used to arrange or confirm meetings, to initiate or respond to inquiries. In 1909 ‘Charley’ with what we surmise is likely to be intentional humour appears to parody a conventional structure for a short business letter, while giving his mother the information she seeks: Dear Mother Thanks for letter recd. today. I note the contents. I take a 16 collar that means ½ inch less for Neck Band. I remain Yrs affect Charley Occasionally these communications explicitly demonstrate the rapidity of these written communications. There were up to six deliveries a day in major cities and so in this era, before mass use of the telephone, arrangements could be set up quickly, or failed meetings apologized for, as in: I am awfully sorry I gave you all that trouble this

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afternoon. I waited under Boots for half-an hour & then I strolled about a bit (hoping to meet you) & came home. With the exception of the telegraph, the speed with which messages could be exchanged with ease was not to be matched, let alone exceeded, for many decades, until the arrival of digital communications and specifically the text message. The following is a marvellous example of the rapidity of written communication possible at the time: Dear Mother just a line to tell you if George is not coming today our George will come and fitch the peelinges and bring you a bit of pork so don’t get any meat hoping you are all well Mother xxxx to Doris So many writers made efficient use of the affordances and constraints of the postcard. In extremely tiny yet wholly legible writing M.B. fitted all this into the message space when writing to her uncle in York: My Dear Uncle. Many thanks for letter, it’s the unexpected which always happens. Do not trouble yourself about visit. Blessed is she, who expecteth nothing verily she shall not s/be disappointed. & I did not think it would be possible to get what you suggest trying to get. My visit in Dec. will be short. I shall leave here by 2.25p.m. on Monday 11th. & shall

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finish Wednesday afternoon. Whether I may legitimately stay in York until Thursday remains to be seen. I shall get a longer time in, at the April Exam I hope; that is if I pass this one. Hope you are better ere this. Love to all from M.B.

Social participation Barton and Hamilton (1998) note that vernacular literacies are often involved in acts of social participation and so our card writers sometimes make mention of social activities held as common interests between writer and sender. FS writes, . . . just a few lines two let you no that we won the cup quite easy by 79”35 (754) A Reverend Swanzy typed his postcards to relatives that included such suggestions as: . . . Can you come over for the opening of my new Mission Room on the 20th? R.H. Wilson is to be the preacher. The bonds between people may stem from various kinds of shared interests. While on a walking holiday on the Isle of Wight in 1904 a Mr Anson sent a postcard back to a work colleague, at the American Radiator Company in London. On the picture side he wrote, ‘Did not go to Wantage as expected. I have walked’ and then in the message space continued: nearly all over Isle of Wight. It is a beautiful place, quite a change

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from the stuffy old office. Had any answers yet or seen anything decent? To-day I walked from Sea.View to Ryde then to Newport (Carisbrooke C.) thence to Cowes. Mr Anson’s shared concerns, sandwiched between the reports of his doings, were sufficiently pressing to make his message dialogic; he might even be expecting a reply while he was still on holiday. The efficiency of the Post Office during this period meant that postcard interaction could be considerably greater than would be possible later in the century. From our collection we know that it was common in the Edwardian era for people to exchange cards while still on holiday. We have many cards addressed to people ‘care of’ some kind of holiday accommodation, for example, boarding houses in Blackpool.

Private leisure Many postcards document and share experiences of private leisure pursuits and events, another of the domains of everyday life where Barton and Hamilton (1998) found rich and diverse literacy practices. C. Hudson alluded to a previous shared journey to another East Anglian village when he sent this card from East Dereham: The Tomb of St Withburga daughter of (?) king whose tomb (from) showed us last week. The very practices themselves of getting, sending and often keeping postcards in themselves constituted a fashionable leisure pursuit in the Edwardian Age. Magazines sprang up especially for collectors, and these led to the formation of postcard collecting clubs (Carline, 1971). When general newspapers and magazines ran competitions, it became the norm for participants to send in their answers in on postcards. Publishers promoted competitions to reward collectors of their cards; in 1902,

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Mrs Eaton of Norwich won £100 for her collection of 20,364 Tucker’s cards (The Picture Postcard, no. 23, vol. III, May 1902). Many people today are familiar with chain letters and emails, and the Edwardians had chain postcards. Some could claim respectability by association with charitable causes. In our sample, A. Harrison wrote to Miss Smith: Please buy a packet of six Tuck’s Post cards and contribute to Tuck’s Post Card chain for Children’s Hospital Ealing to help it to £1000 prize and £50 for yourself. Post the cards according to Rules supplied free by all dealers The lack of any salutation or other personalization suggests that perhaps Mr Harrison is making use of a ‘chain’ formulation proposed by Tuck’s in its entirety, copying out a set message rather than originating it. This writing is ‘ordinary’ in the sense it is replicable, very possibly thousands of times over, yet nevertheless illustrative of how it is valued at the least by its writer.

Documenting life The postcards that we have in our sample were preserved for many years before we possessed them and so were certainly valued beyond the point of receipt by their original addressees. It seems that holding onto the cards was a practice of constructing a personal history, of building up a sense of identity through the images and/or texts. Often the picture side is referred to explicitly, especially when of a view, linking it with the writer’s presence, although rarely in as much detail as the following, sent from London to Manchester: My Dear Louis, Thanks for paper. Looking from (erasure) left to right on picture you see

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National Gallery. St. Martin’s s/be Church, Morley’s Hotel, Strand, Grand Hotel + Northumberland Avenue on the right curve of the Grand Hotel + Whitehall behind you as you stand facing the statue of Charles I in the centre of picture. Cockspur St. Haymarket Pall Mall + Regent St to my office behind bus on left. Been very seedy lately [change to side] Love to (Jamey) + all from L (+) W. The domain of ‘documenting life’ is perhaps especially pertinent to postcards as they were collected in albums, both those without writing and those that were collected solely for their images, but then placed in albums sometimes as reminders of past events, past communications and at the very least as somewhat treasured objects that are set aside from the flow of everyday correspondence into this special medium. Sometimes, clearly, the main purpose of sending a card appears to be to contribute to a collection. Thank you so much for the P.C you sent. Ada thanks you also. How do you like this? I prefer. coloured views, but you should not send them or else I shall feel in your debt again. The fact that so many millions of postcards appear in fairs today testifies to their significance in documenting friendships, family relationships and personal events.

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Conclusion Earlier in this chapter we considered ‘ordinary writing’ as explored by Sinor and ‘vernacular’ or ‘everyday writing’ as discussed by Barton and Hamilton. What these characterizations have in common is the attempt to unpack written language that has often been seen as inconsequential. Written language that does not usually conform with the more literary standards and expectations that are usually brought to examining written texts is often described as banal or mundane and perceived as having little or no value. We hope we have begun to demonstrate that ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ writing is in fact both complex and interesting. The authors of the postcards in our collection demonstrate diverse intentions and produce texts appropriate to a rich range of social functions. They write not under pressure but for enjoyment and satisfaction of their own needs and interests. It seems clear to us that the popularity and persistence of the practices of writing, receiving and keeping postcards testify to the value of ordinary writing in making sense of one’s everyday life in the Edwardian age. In 1907 a London journalist wrote, When the archaeologists of the thirtieth century begin to excavate the ruins of London, they will fasten upon the Picture Postcards as the best guide to the spirit of the Edwardian era . . . (Douglas, 1907, cited by Staff, 1979: 76) Our own twenty-first century excavation of Edwardian postcard messages suggests that these previously ‘discardable’ texts are actually dynamic, engrossing and purposeful representations of social life at the beginning of the twentieth century.

References Anon. The Picture Post Card, July 1901, 101. Barton, D. & N. Hall (eds.) (2000), Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Barton, D. & M. Hamilton (1998), Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community. London: Routledge. Bernard, Captain (c.1908), The Postcard Code: A Novel and Private Method of Communicating by Postcard. (British Library: 012331.de2301233).

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Brooks, Fletcher, F. & B. Lund (1982), What the Postman Saw. Nottingham: Reflections of a Bygone Age. Carline, R. (1971), Pictures in the Post: The Story of the Picture Postcard and its Place in the History of Popular Art. London: Gordon Fraser. Hall, N. & Gillen, J. (2007), ‘Purchasing pre-packed words: complaint and reproach in early British postcards’. In M. Lyons (ed.), Ordinary Writings, Personal Narratives: Writing Practices in 19th and Early 20th-Century Europe. Berne: Peter Lang, 101–118. Hogarth, B. (1954), ‘Robert Wood, 1907’. In J. Hodge (ed.), Famous Trials 4. London: Penguin Books, 176–221. Hopper, R. (1992), Telephone Conversation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. How, J. (2003), Epistolary Spaces: English Letter Writing from the Foundations of the Post Office to Richardson’s Clarissa. Aldershot: Ashgate. Kress, G. (1998), ‘Visual and verbal modes of representation in electronically mediated communication: the potential of new forms in texts’. In I. Snyder (ed.), Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. London: Routledge, 53–79. Lehtonen, T., I. Koskinen & E. Kurvinen (2002), ‘Mobile Digital Pictures – the Future of the Postcard?’ In V. Laakso, & J. Östman (eds.), Postcard in the Social Context. Korttien talo. Hämeenlinna. Monahan, V. (1980), Collecting Postcards in Colour 1914–1930. Poole: Blandford Press. Phillips, T. (2000), The Postcard Century. London: Thames and Hudson. Post, E. (1969[1922]), Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage. Facsimile of 1st edn., New York: Funk & Wagnalls, by Cassell, London. Poster, C. & L. Mitchell (2007), Letter Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Sims, G. (1900), Untitled article in The Picture Postcard, January, 22. Sinor, J. (2002), The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray’s Diary. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Sokoll, T. (ed.) (2001), Essex Pauper Letters 1731–1837. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Staff, F. (1979), The Picture Postcard and its origins 2nd edn. London: Lutterworth Press. Thurlow, C., A. Jaworski & V. Ylänne (in press), ‘“New” mobilities, transient identities: holiday postcards’. In C. Thurlow & A. Jaworski (eds.), Tourism Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter Ten

Lawful and Unlawful Writings in Lyon in the Seventeenth Century Anne Béroujon

Introduction The city of the early modern period has been described by historians of written culture as the ‘refuge of the written word’ (Chartier, 1981: 151). This writing is apparent in various forms: books, pamphlets, journals and manuscripts, as well as public notices and inscriptions (Roche, 1993). However, unlike writing emanating from the private sphere, which is now the subject of a great deal of research (Bardet & Ruggiu, 2005; Mouysset, 2008) and extensive cataloguing endeavours, displayed writing represents a field of study that is still largely unexplored in France. By contrast, bibliographical traditions have become established in Italy and the Iberian peninsular, since the pioneering work of Armando Petrucci (Petrucci, 1993; Castillo Gómez, 1997 and 2006; Gimeno Blay, 1997). Defined as ‘any type of writing designed to be used in open spaces, or even in enclosed spaces, to allow a text written on an exposed surface to be read collectively from a distance, either by small groups of people or by crowds’ (Petrucci, 1993: 10), displayed writing is to be found everywhere in the city; it saturates the citizen’s field of vision, and constitutes a favoured mechanism of acculturation. It may be looked at from two sides: the readers’ and the commissioners of inscriptions. First, from the readers’ viewpoint, as it catches the eye, and invites the passer-by, whose ‘visual sense’ has been stimulated, to decipher it (McLuhan, 1971: 6). However, here we come up against the problem of deficiencies in the available sources, which offer little help in deciphering lettering inscribed in public settings (Chartier, 1993: 87). The deciphering gleaned from studies of bibliographical material can only ever be an interpretation as to how the words were received at the time (Jouhaud & Viala, 2002: 9). But we can consider the matter

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from the viewpoint of those who commissioned the inscriptions, and analyse the practice of inscribing or commissioning lettering within public spaces. Three types of writing may be distinguished, according to the degree of legitimacy accorded to them by institutions. First, there is official writing, inscriptions on public buildings, on festive decorations, notices issued by the authorities, which are read aloud in several city squares and then put up on display, signs accompanying the condemned man’s walk to his place of execution, etc.; secondly, lawful writing produced by members of the public, such as epigraphs negotiated with churches and convents, the notices produced by certain guilds (such as the booksellers’ guild) for publicity purposes, and shop signs authorized by the municipality. This category of ‘lawful writings’ also includes tolerated writing, such as signs displayed on houses offered for sale or rent, job advertisements, etc. Finally, there is unlawful writing covered by the term ‘defamatory libel’. By focusing on a particular form (monumental inscriptions, shop signs, libel documents) representing each type identified in this way, this contribution seeks to ascertain the extent of displayed writing, the people behind it and the motives driving them. The sequence adopted, from legal through to illegal, should not imply that the trend towards appropriation of the written word by private individuals stems from an imitation of or reaction to the authorities’ own writing practices. These forms of writing are concomitant. If there is a trend, it tends to be one of heightened control of scripts produced by members of the public, which may be explained by a desire to harmonize and discipline the city, and the municipal institution’s attempts to create a monopoly and oust competing powers. It is therefore a question of combining cultural, social and political approaches. The city of Lyon in the seventeenth century may serve as a case study. During a period traditionally regarded as that of mass development of the written word (an increase in registration, control and paperwork, creation of archives by institutions and private individuals), the second city of the kingdom is distinguished by the fact that it is undergoing extensive building work (Bologne-Piloix, 1990), and thereby renovating its graphic spaces (Béroujon, 2009: 25), and at the same time experiencing strong demographic growth (its population rose from 30–35,000 to 100,000 inhabitants between 1600 and 1700), mainly through migration, that is, it is becoming a melting pot for a variety of populations, with strong social and cultural differences (Bayard &

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Cayez, 1990). The city has a mercantile tradition; it lacks a parliament and a university, but it has a prestigious college, which was handed over to the care of the Jesuit Fathers at the start of the century. It also has a network of small schools for the poor, which was established at a very early stage, and a dynamic printing industry. The city is governed by a consulate consisting of a merchants’ provost and four aldermen, elected by part of the population of Lyon. However, as the absolutist monarchy affirms its position, the municipality’s power faces increasing competition by the men of the King, mainly the governor and his representant, the lieutenant-general. In Lyon, they are chosen from an influential family of lords, the Villeroy. While elsewhere the governor and lieutenantgeneral are assigned to military and honourable tasks only, in Lyon they are strongly present on the political scene and frequently they are in conflict with the consulate over questions of authority and competence (Lignereux, 2003).

The Authorities’ Own Writings The city is adorned with numerous inscriptions. Those of which traces remain emanate primarily from the authorities, either because they are listed in their archives,1 noted down by local historians or remarked upon by a few travellers in their printed guide. For the seventeenth century as a whole, we have been able to find 73 such ceremonial inscriptions emanating from an institution.2 Their solemnity is characterized by their setting, which is usually high up on a prestigious building, by their subject matter, form and language, in gilded capital letters, set in black or white stone, usually in Latin.

The boom in epigraphs (1644–1670) These inscriptions are particularly abundant during the 25-year period between 1644 and 1670, which accounts for one half of the century’s inscriptions. This period corresponds to the construction of a number of public buildings, the most prestigious of which is the town hall in the place des Terreaux (1646), to the creation of communication routes (rue Sainte-Marie, l’Archevêché bridge, Port Dauphin) or to the rebuilding and embellishment of a number of pre-existing structures (Hôtel Dieu, Aumône Générale, la Trinité college, Saint-Just church, fountains,


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etc.). However, all these construction, renovation or extension projects are not peculiar to this quarter century. What distinguishes this period is that any new or renovated construction projects are frequently ‘marked’ by the highways authority, that is, the consulate. These inscriptions offered a convenient way for it to affirm its political aspirations, to the detriment of competing authorities, such as the finance officers who also tried to control the road network (Bayard & Cayez, 1990: 101), but mainly the governor and his second-in-command, the lieutenantgeneral. Previously, the municipality had not been so systematic in pursuing its epigraphic policy. From the 1640s onwards, the consulate appears to commemorate each of its construction or repair projects with an inscription. In 1652, for example, it insists that the rector of la Trinité college, in return for the ‘sum of 6,000 livres awarded for the completion of the establishment’, should ensure that the coats of arms of this said city and community are prominently displayed, with an inscription stating that the said college has been completed at the expense of and from the communal finances and city tolls levied by the consulate of this said city, being the founder and benefactor of the said college.3 From 1648 onwards, the consulate employed an engraver to execute these epigraphic works (the first one, Pierre or Louis Lalyame, was granted free accommodation at the town hall – Rondot, 1889). When it comes to designing the text of some Latin inscriptions, that is, those adorning prestigious monuments, like the town hall’s fountain,4 he is assisted by the Jesuit Fathers of la Trinité college, who enjoy an undisputed intellectual authority, and usually organize the city’s festivities, royal and princely entrances, receptions and merrymaking (Van Damme, 2005). These Jesuits take charge of the policy of consular representation, via their publications, which are subsidized by the consulate. Here, Father Claude-François Ménestrier plays a key role: in a book of imposing thickness and format, which appeared in 1669, entitled Eloge historique de la ville de Lyon, et sa Grandeur Consulaire sous les Romains, & sous nos Rois5 and for which he was presented with 2,500 French livres, he listed all consular inscriptions produced since 1595. The left-hand page shows the year and the names of that year’s consuls, their works (mainly on the highways) and the inscriptions commemorating these, in capital letters. The right-hand page features their personal coats of arms.

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The explanation put forward for the consulate’s strategy of deployment on the city walls and the pages of books, from the 1640s onwards, has long been one of vexation: a policy of making formal assertions of power, it is claimed, was merely a substitute for the loss of real power to the kings’ men since 1595, clinging on to a lost glory, and exercising an authority which by now only existed in the consulate’s imagination. Arthur Kleinclausz writes: ‘from an artistic point of view, the consulate played an important role, because given its declining political role, it now contented itself with wallowing in luxury and ceremonial, even though the satisfaction it found in works of art was based on self-love rather than genuine aesthetic pleasure’ (Kleinclausz, 1948: 118). This explanation may be true, but we should still regard it as only a partial explanation, as it does not take account of the desired effects of such a policy: the epigraphic policy is not just a sterile refuge but seeks to create belief, and convince people of the merits of the municipality’s urban policy (Turgeon, 1990: 10). It forms part of the ‘visual strategies deployed by those who held power to legitimize their authority and invite the populations to submit to them’ (Christin, 2004: 7), and uses central display locations to pursue a communication policy played out in two registers, aimed both at the literate and illiterate populations. The first register is a symbolic one, contained both in the act of inscription and the public ceremonial sometimes accompanying this, and in the imposing look of prestigious writing (capital letters and expensive, gilded inscriptions), which is designed to last (Fraenkel, 2007: 104). Secondly, there is a verbal register, related to the text itself. Scrutinizing this more closely may provide a better insight into the writers’ intentions.

The consulate’s position within inscriptions In the early inscriptions, in 1600 and 1604, the consulate merely appears as an institution, and in abbreviated form (‘coss.’ for ‘consules’), whereas the king’s name in first place, and the governor’s name in second, are written out in full. From 1610 onwards, its members are named individually: thereafter, the name of the provost and of each alderman is cited in all inscriptions. From the outset, the provost is entitled to have his stately titles spelt out in full, and is favoured with the title of ‘illustrissimus’, whereas the aldermen are merely named (‘Alex. Bollioud, Hor. Cardon, Cl. Pellot, Ant. de Pures’). In 1622, the first alderman sees his title spelt out in full (‘Iean Guignard, adviser to


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His Majesty and Controller General of the war levy from the people of Lyonnais. From 1644 onwards, all aldermen receive a brief mention with their individual details, that is, title of nobility, any estate they own, or important office they hold. A description is gradually added to their position, setting out their merits, and taken from the former Roman titles: ‘clarissime’, ‘illustrissime’ (which was glorious enough for the Archbishop of Lyon to adopt it too), ‘vigilantissimes’, ‘dignissimes’, etc. All of these are combined at the end of the inscription in a ‘Consules’, which is frequently written out in full from 1659 onwards. These successive additions swell significantly the number of lines, words and letters devoted to the consulate, and explain the increased length of inscriptions, which on average were 204 characters long in the first decade of the century, 739 in the 1640s, and around 500 during the period 1660–1690. By way of comparison, we may take the inscriptions on the 1611 Ainay gate and the 1670 Chana fountain, as in Figures 10.1 and 10.2. The first one, which is affixed to a large black limestone tablet (measuring 1.3 meter high by 2.3 meter wide), on the pediment over the door (Commarmond, 1846: 197), positions the consulate last, after the king, his mother the regent, inscribed in the centre of the stone in large letters (10 centimeter high), and the governor Charles de Neuville. On the second inscription, engraved on the Chana fountain, the consulate is described in 64 words and thus takes up more than one half of the inscription; it has no rivals.6

Figure 10.1

Inscription on the 1611 Ainay gate

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Figure 10.2


Inscription on the 1670 Chana fountain

There is a striking contrast between the first one third of the century, when virtually all inscriptions brought together the names of those in power, displaying a concord which, if not genuine, appeared to be a discursive necessity, and the period commencing in the second half of the seventeenth century, when the consulate’s details alone appear on the city walls. The municipality’s epigraphic offensive, to the detriment of other political authorities (the reigning monarch and his representative, the governor), is accompanied by a semantic change. The meaning of the term ‘public’, which is used in 25 monumental inscriptions, undergoes a transformation. From the second half of the century onwards, ‘public’ no longer simply denotes an undifferentiated community, but in adjectival form, the term starts to refer to the built environment, and to space. The first inscriptions used it as a grouping of people, a community aspiring to security (‘seurté du public’, 1619), to whom the provost and the aldermen offer practical and agreeable benefits (‘for the convenience, necessity and adornment of the public’, 1629, ‘tum ad ornamentum, tum ad usus publicos’, 1646, ‘Utilitati publicae’, 1669). In 1659, the expression ‘monumentum publicum’ marks a change: henceforth


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‘publicum’ denotes the space itself, and not just any space – the town hall, which is the quintessence of the consulate. Twenty years later, the place Saint-Georges is ‘hanc publicam aream urbis’. At the same time, a distinction starts to be made between the term ‘communis’, or ‘communal’, which in this same inscription denotes the recipient (‘pro communi’), in place of the former ‘public’, and that of ‘publicus’, referring to the space (‘publicam aream’), a developement that is also mentioned by Anne Montenach (Montenach, 2009: 143). From this time forward, the consulate has the public nature of certain monuments and spaces inscribed on their walls, both in Latin and in French. And it is the consulate, via the triple imprint of its coat of arms, the institution’s name, and the names of its members, which confers this public nature on them. In a way, the names of the provost and of each alderman, inscribed individually, have become synonymous with ‘public’. The political struggles between the consuls and the traditional representatives of royal power thus prompt the consulate to elaborate its own epigraphic language of legitimation: in its dealings with other powers, and with members of the public, it needs to affirm both the coherence of a separate space, serving the public and needing to be managed by a public authority, and its own pertinence to be that authority. Its grip on the city’s writings is also asserted via heightened supervision of the inscriptions produced by members of the public.

Lawful Writings The municipality not only marks the city with its members’ names, but it also regulates any scripts displayed by members of the public, as is evident from the signs erected outside shops and houses.

Regulated signs In the seventeenth century, signs in a variety of forms, usually combining an image (sculptured, engraved or painted) and an inscription mounted on a wooden, metallic or stone base, suspended from a bracket or fixed to the wall, indicate a shop or house. They are a long-established tradition, but take on particular importance in the 1660s, at least in the eyes of the consulate. Like any architectural feature along the highway, they are managed by the municipality, via the road surveyor, who is appointed by the consulate.

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The matter gradually starts to preoccupy the municipality. It is not until 1636 that we find any trace in consular deliberation registers of the first instance of permission to erect a sign,7 granted to a merchant whose shop, on the bridge over the River Saône, had burnt down. Previously such permission was issued orally by the road surveyor. In 1644, the consulate issues a second written authorization, but the length of the text and the need for the arguments to be discussed in detail, indicate that such instances of written permission are still exceptional in nature. There appeared before the court Claude Bonnet, being a merchant and master dyer of fustians and buckrams of this said city, who represented that for the past fourteen years or so, he had been engaged in the manufacture of the said fustians and buckrams, and long before the heirs of the late Sieur Pincetty or anyone else from this said city began to work in this trade since around the year 1636, he had had this shop in his house located in the rue de la vieille monnoye, and particularly since the said street is little frequented by merchants & that there is no workroom or shop on the street to make the nature of his occupation better known, he had begged the consulate to allow him to erect a sign in front of it [. . .] and forbidden any other persons to erect a similar sign, and the consulate had verbally agreed to his request, but since no legal deed had been drawn up confirming this, he begged the consulate to do so, so that he could enjoy the favour they had been kind enough to bestow on him, the said gentlemen having taken the above into consideration & after mature deliberation, have given and give permission to the said Bonnet to erect the said sign with the said inscription, and forbidden any other persons to erect a similar sign, on pain of such penalties as they may see fit, as witnessed by this deed.8 Signs continue to be logged occasionally, sometimes in the consular deliberation registers, and sometimes in the highway registers, which are kept from 1617 onwards, and sometimes they are duplicated. It is only from 1664 onwards that the number of permits recorded really takes off, as can be seen from a systematic study of highway registers (see Table 10.1).9 We find 35 permits granted for that year alone, compared to just three in the preceding four years. This peak does not indicate any sudden

Table 10.1

Number of shop signs 1650–1700 Shop signs in highway registers (DD)

45


40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 1650

1655

1660

1665

1670

1675

1680

1685

1690

1695

1700

no. of signs per annum

199

200


increase in the number of signs but shows the consulate’s determination to supervise the erection of signs, by keeping meticulous records. So why does the municipality take over responsibility for dealing with this matter? Several explanations may be advanced. First of all, it takes account of the demand from merchants and master craftsmen who want the consulate to play a regulatory role, notably by ensuring that no two similar signs appear in the same street. The competitive thinking motivating applicants for signs is obvious, and is clearly perceptible in Claude Bonnet’s application in 1644. The situation remains like this until the end of the century. Here is one example: in March 1664, a cutler obtains permission to erect a sign outside his premises. Four others submit their applications over the next 5 months.10 Subsequently, just one more is recorded through to 1700. The Lyon consulate then falls into line with what is happening in Paris, where the authorities are introducing regulations to standardize signs (Farge, 1979: 241; Roche, 1981: 231). The width, depth and height of shop signs are standardized by rules laid down in 1658, 1665, 1666, 1669,11 and subsequently 1683. Likewise, as early as 1664, a permit to erect a sign in Lyon comprises an extensive series of obligations, covering its maximum height (10 feet, that is, approximately 3 metres), projection into the street (3 feet), its width, safety and uniqueness. In 1694, in a police order, the consulate once again denounces the disobedience of those who are failing to comply with these obligations.12 The systematic recording of shop signs may thus stem from thinking at both local and national level, regarding the importance of urban signs and the need to have supreme control of them. What does the sign say? In addition to the standards imposed by the municipality, specifying how much room these signs are allowed to take up, we may also wonder about the inscriptions themselves. What does the sign say? The permit registers of the highways department record the title obtained by the applicant, so the 614 titles granted during the period 1650–1700 can be related to their applicants, regarding whom a few details are available: their surname and forename, place of residence, and occupation in one third of cases. Even if they do not construct the sign themselves, we may assume that they designed its text. In some cases of course, the applicant is merely taking over a pre-existing sign, either because he is


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becoming the owner or tenant of a dwelling that already has a sign, and he wishes to take it on for himself, or because he has procured a sign in the second-hand market, either at an auction or from a dealer. However, this scenario does not encompass every single applicant. What themes emerge? The most obvious one is tradesmen advertising their occupation via the selected title, and this is the second-most recurrent theme after religion: 77 signs relate to the applicant’s known occupation (there are 202 known occupations), via a description of his trade, or the adoption of a particular patron saint, object or quality associated with that trade. Thus, three tailors take a needle, scissors and a shoulder sash as their shop sign. However, the signs also reveal phenomena associated with conveying identity (Garrioch, 1994), which are less immediately apparent. We find word play involving the applicants’ forenames or surnames, which may also duplicate the advertisement for their trade, as demonstrated by two examples of applicants, who were probably shoemakers: Jean Picquant, who obtains a sign entitled ‘à la botte beaujolaise picquante’ [‘at the Beaujolais picquant boot’], thus combining his name with an indication of his speciality, and Jean Bourgeois, who thinks up the title ‘la botte bourgeoise’ [‘the bourgeois boot’]13 for his sign. The name can thus be used as a framework, in compositions of varying complexity. This is the case with the ‘Fresne d’or’ sign belonging to Jean Dufresne; ‘les quatre fils Aymond’ [‘the four Aymond sons’] (knights whose heroic deeds are recounted in literature) belonging to the Emond brothers; ‘saint Benoît’ belonging to Isaac Beaunois; ‘l’Annonciation de la Vierge’ [‘the Annunciation of the Virgin’] belonging to Jacques Gabriel; ‘le Panache’ belonging to Pierre Escoffier (whose name means ‘to conquer’ in old French), etc. This link applies to the signs in at least 24 cases. A saint with the same forename as the applicant is chosen in 39 cases, that is, slightly less than one half of the signs bearing a saint’s name (97 occurrences). This assertion of the owner’s name via their shop sign is a continuation of the mediaeval tradition in which certain objects, coats of arms and seals, for example, were favoured vectors for conveying nominal identity. There is a continuity from coats of arms through to shop signs, within a long-established culture of homophony, assonance and word play (Carruthers, 2002). The name is not the only identity-conveying mark on which the sign plays. It is striking to note, for example, the extent to which women apply mainly for female sign names (Sainte-Vierge, Reine, Victoire, Baleine, Tête de mort, Chapelle d’or, Ancre, Brebis couronnée, Cloche

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d’argent), and floral themes (e.g. bouquets of roses). We are familiar with the example of a woman called Claudine Riboud, whose husband Gilbert Glodin dies in 1697, 3 years after applying for a sign with the title of ‘la Roche des liqueurs’ in rue Saint-Marcel. He ran a shop selling spirits. Her late husband’s shop sign is brand-new, yet just a few months after his death, the widow submits an application to replace it with another, that of ‘Sainte-Barbe’. The convent of the nuns of Sainte-Barbe is to be found a few streets before the rue Saint-Marcel, going upstream along the Saône. The choice of a female sign may also be a revisiting of the story of Saint Barbe, who is associated with thunderbolts: it may be an allusion to the powerful intoxicating effects of some spirits.14 The sign may also be modelled on a denominational identity. At least two shop signs sound like reformed faith professions. First, the sign of ‘le Petit Suisse’, belonging to Jacques Golais, and secondly ‘la Ville de Genève’, belonging to the Calvinist Philibert Terroux,15 a title which was discontinued, 11 years later, in favour of the less compromising name of ‘la Fleur de lys’ (a possible allusion to the Protestant temple called the fleur de lys in Lyon). A few Catholics also display religious zeal, as is apparent from signs entitled ‘l’Hollande rendue’ [Holland handed back], ‘le Triomphe de la foy’ [‘the Triumph of Faith’] belonging to the tenant of a canon of Saint-Nizier, ‘l’Assomption de Notre-Dame’ belonging to three private individuals, and at a more general level, the many signs depicting scallops, saints and Notre-Dame. Needless to say, not all Protestants and devout Catholics have a sign with a religious identity, nor do signs necessarily reveal a sexual identity. Yet the shop sign seems to be growing increasingly personal in nature. This functional duality of the sign, depicting both the occupant’s vocation and his or her identity, also emerges from the study of dictionaries. While Furetière reduces the definition of the French word ‘enseigne’ [meaning a ‘house or shop sign’] to a ‘public token’ enabling people to ‘find someone or something’,16 Menage spoke of a ‘particular token’ helping to ‘distinguish someone or something’, to ‘make them known’,17 thus leaving some latitude as regards the identity-conveying function. It is perhaps this trend towards the creation of a distinctive identity for premises that the municipality wishes to clamp down on, even though the archives do not state that shop sign titles come under its control. We may surmise that the consulate, which as we have seen, posted its members’ names at strategic locations within the city – such as the approaches to the law courts, the Archbishop’s palace, the main college, squares,


203

quaysides, gates, etc. – does not wish to allow signs specifying names to spring up, even in their own veiled way. Thus, it does not like to allow premises to give themselves a distinctive identity, particularly since, in the absence of any house numbering system, signs were frequently used to identify addresses. Quite simply, the consulate did not allow any rival scripts to assert themselves within the urban space. There are also considerations linked to aesthetics (echoed in the theatre of Molière, for example18), safety and prescribed standards. Consequently, any affirmation of a person’s vocation and/or identity within Lyon’s open spaces is subject to approval from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards. Municipal supervision of shop and house signs indicates a lower level of tolerance towards scripts produced by members of the public. As master of the highways, the consulate does not intend to relinquish control of a field that it has gradually taken over, that of displayed writing. It is assisted in its efforts to discipline the urban space by Lyon’s main judicial authority, which, for its part, pursues the perpetrators of unlawful writing.

Unlawful Writings Where legal action is taken against displayed writing, it is on the grounds of defamation by libel. Such writings come within a legal category that also includes libel documents which are not publicly displayed, but are either printed in a book or on a loose sheet of paper, or are handwritten and brought to the attention of a small group of people by way of a legal deed, letter or memorandum.

How Lyon’s courts deal with crime Defamatory libel cases receive their own legal classification at an early stage (Mermet, 1890: 89), but it is during the period when civil wars are undermining the royal power that we find the most abundant and harsh legislation (pain of death is stipulated in 1561 and 1563, and subsequently in the reign of Louis XIV, in the post-Fronde period, Feyel, 2000: 325). The application of such legislation is probably limited in the case of libel disputes between members of the public only, as with cases tried before the Lyon seneschal’s and presidial court, both existing since 1551. These two courts which judge civil and criminal cases, are

204


the highest legislative institution in Lyon, but their decisions can be overridden by the parliament in Paris. Few sentences are recorded in the archives of this court, because its registers have been lost. We only know of one judgement on the grounds of defamation by letter, through the whim of an insult: banishment for a fixed period of time.19 In all likelihood, pain of death remains a distant prospect, yet Lyon’s courts show themselves to be extremely vigilant in dealing with this crime. Twenty-two defamatory libel cases are brought before the seneschal’s criminal court over the course of the seventeenth century,20 and 14 of these involve cases of publicly displayed writing, which is a fairly small number. In contrast, Peter Burke identified 89 cartelli infamanti lawsuits in Rome between 1565 and 1666 (Burke, 1989: 50). The way in which the case proceeds shows that the lieutenant-general of the Lyon seneschal’s and presidial court dealt with them effectively: just a few days separate the time of the complaint and his ‘permis d’informer’, his decision to investigate based on the sworn witness statements and crossexamination of the accused. Cross-examinations take place in 9 of the 14 cases mentioned (whereas most cases that come before the criminal court go no further than the complaint stage). The seriousness of the crime is apparent from the number of documents kept. From 1668 onwards, the exhibits, that is, the libel documents themselves, are carefully attached to the investigation file. The judicial archives contain five of these (including one that was due to have been made into a notice before going on display21) up to the late seventeenth century. In addition to these cases dealt with by the seneschal’s court, there is a case of graffiti on the new town hall. This problem is dealt with ‘internally’ by the consulate, which appoints a concierge to watch over the building.22 Criminals and their writing skills Who are the presumed authors of these defamatory libel documents, which are scrupulously archived at the office of the clerk of the seneschal’s court? What skills do they possess, and what forms do they choose? The most popular forms are printed notices (two monitories, a judgement, an announcement of a public demonstration) and écriteaux (public signs). There are also a number of one-off forms, such as a face with writing beneath it, a ‘note’ written to someone, a ‘song’, ‘letters’, a requisitioning order still at the handwritten stage (the defendant appears to have intended to turn this into a public notice), graffiti


205

sketched in coal or red and black chalk on the town hall’s walls, but without any particular description (‘[unknown individuals] write on the walls & cover them with rude comments’23), and unspecified writing. The most rudimentary forms, such as the hastily sketched face of a husband bedecked with horns, with his name and that of his wife written beneath it,24 are to be found alongside the most sophisticated ones, for example, a printed public notice bearing official coats of arms. This reflects the wide range of people accused of this crime: artisans form the largest contingent (six cases, ranging from the lowliest trades, such as shoemakers, to those most highly ranked within the hierarchy of occupations, for example, printers and gold-wire drawers); next come the merchants (an orvietan seller, a fishmonger, a broker); and lastly we find a scribe, a surgeon and probably one or more religious figures. In most cases, plaintiffs and defendant are engaged in the same occupation, which tends to indicate that there are economic motives behind the attempted defamation, and the perpetrator’s main aim is to damage a competitor. We may pause to consider the writing practices revealed by the handful of defamatory documents added to the file and signed by the judge, focusing on the effects of the methods selected to gain publicity. How did the accused try to attract attention, and whose attention was he seeking? What visual and textual processes are used? Two public signs (placards) have been kept: one monitory and one announcement. Put up in the public square, the public notice is guaranteed maximum visibility. The alleged perpetrators by adopting this method seek to publicize their defamation on a vast stage, therefore employ its traditional form, and are probably guided by the (unknown) printer of their libel document. The coats of arms of several authorities appear at the top of the page, followed by the text. For example, in 1669, a monitory – a solemn appeal issued by a priest from his pulpit, and subsequently published in the form of an official notice, calling on the faithful to divulge any information in their possession regarding a legal case that might otherwise be dismissed due to lack of evidence – bears the coats of arms of the Pope and the Archbishop of Lyon, accompanied by their name in capitals at the start of the printed text. In violation of the rules, it bears the name of the person suspected of plundering the estate of a deceased person.25 Displayed by a master scrivener (the accused) at the city’s crossroads, in the rue Ferrandière and on the doors of the Fourvière, les Célestins and les Cordeliers churches, it is

206


particularly damaging to the plaintiff insofar as it is given credence by the names and coats of arms of the ecclesiastical authorities. The second ‘defamatory public notice’ signed by the judge and kept at the office of the clerk of the seneschal’s court26 also emanates from a profession familiar with the written word: an ‘empiric’, a charlatan, advertises a public demonstration to prove the excellence of his remedy and disparage a rival. Here again, the printed advice shows an excellent grasp of the codes governing public notices (see Figure 10.3 below).

Figure 10.3 Defamatory public notice Arch. Dép. Rhône, BP 2898, 1685


207

It is surmounted by four coats of arms: the arms of the king, the governor and the Archbishop of Lyon, Camille de Neuville, are depicted within a banner, while the city’s arms appear below, in the centre, in a cartouche supported by two lions. Once again, the number of patrons and their importance is apparent at the beginning of the text (‘Mr de Belletour, a favoured servant of the King, of His Grace the Archbishop & of this celebrated City of Lyon’); this endows the document with an authenticity and guarantees its content, which is summarized in the celebration of science issued by ‘Mr de Belletour’, who will put his orvietan (an antidote) to the test in a theatre erected in the place Confort, and demonstrate that, in contrast to him, a rival who is trading across the road from his shop is totally incompetent, and is deceiving his customers. This rival is identified by the location of his shop and insulting descriptions (‘a charlatan’, ‘fallacious and deceitful experiments’, ‘trickery’, ‘pure mischief’, ‘abuse of strangers, whose only virtue is the right of novelty’). The names and coats of arms of the authorities undoubtedly prompt people to read the notice: no-one is supposed to ignore a text emanating from sources like these. Nevertheless, the fact that he is seeking to reach as broad a public as possible is apparent from the apostrophe at the beginning of the notice, the simple title ‘messieurs’ written in capital letters, in a font five times the size of the lower-case letters, which is addressed to everyone (further on he addresses the readers more specifically as ‘Messieurs les Habitants de cette Ville’ [‘Gentlemen of this City’]), and via a constant appeal to the public (‘warns the public’, ‘publicly speaks out’, ‘public kindness’, ‘publicly maligns’, ‘in public’, ‘enthusiasm for the public good’). The notice seems to have achieved its purpose and created quite a stir, which extends through to the Presqu’île area of the city and beyond, because one person who witnesses the spectacle lives in the SaintGeorges district.27 The handwritten defamatory song, several copies of which are collected by the plaintiff, shows a similar degree of skill. It appears to have been written by a surgeon seeking vengeance on a debtor who failed to pay him his due. It is very clever, both in the way rhymes are invented, and in its grasp of writing (see Figure 10.4).28 Only the final exhibit appears inconsistent with the rest. It shows that even modest and barely literate categories of the population plan to use the instrument of public writing. This is a public sign: in itself, its form is already far-removed from the learned public notice or the clever,

208


Figure 10.4 Defamatory handwritten song Arch. Dép. Rhône, BP 2942, 1691

artistically written song. A public sign (‘écriteau’) is defined as a ‘title or inscription in large letters, placed on something in order to provide information about it’.29 In the case in point,30 it comprises just 18 words, written in capitals, interspersed with lower-case letters (see Figure 10.5). This appears on a relatively small piece of paper, measuring 28 centimetre long by 22 centimetre wide, but it is still legible at a distance of around 10 metres, in view of its large letters: the first three lines are 4 centimetre high, while the last three are around 2 centimetre high,


209

Figure 10.5 A public sign Arch. Dép. Rhône, BP 2851, 1668

that is, much larger than the letters on any official notices. The text is brief, and the form chosen is also one traditionally employed by the persons being defamed: here, those who are attacking them turn it round and use it as a way to slander them. In 1668, the libel document is attached to the door of an inn, called the Chasse Marée, on the place des Terreaux, to which the new town hall has just moved. It starts out as an offer of employment: ‘ceans on prend quiziniers’ [‘cooks wanted here’]. The presumed writer of the defamatory libel, a rival cook according to the plaintiffs, is therefore using a well-established formula, which is typical of their trade. Several clues indicate that he is semi-literate. The writing is poor: the words are separated by crosses or stars, as in mass-produced printed forms; the letter ‘I’ is surmounted by crosses or strokes instead of a dot; the letter ‘e’, which the writer appears to find difficult to execute, appears first in capitals, then in lower case. From the fourth line onwards, as the letters move closer together, the lower case ‘r’ is joined up to the ‘e’, giving the capitals an imperfect look. The spelling also becomes careless in this second part, though admittedly no firm rules were laid down at that time (leurs rather than leur used for ‘their’, maistre rather than mettre used for ‘to put’, san rather than sans used for ‘without’), and by the very end it is completely phonetic (lorsquillaisout for lorsqu’il est saoul [‘when he is drunk’]?). Once recreated,

210


the message appears to be as follows: ‘Ceans on prend quiziniers pour leurs evaser le coup le viedaze de maistre [mettre] san ious [joues] lorsqu’il laisout [lorsqu’il est saoûl]’, with a presumed English rendering of ‘Cooks wanted here to have their heads chopped off and their sex cut off cheeks when they are drunk’.31 The popular insult ‘Viet d’aze’ (‘viedaze’), which is frequently encountered in the work of an author like Rabelais,32 denotes the donkey’s male member (‘vit d’âne’). Yet this does not seem to be consistent with the ‘cheeks’ referred to later on. The writer seemingly changed his mind as he wrote the text, and by way of some kind of phonetic contiguity, pursued the idea of ‘viedaze-visage à mettre sans joue’ [‘donkey dick-face with his cheeks sliced off’]. When read, the notice gives the impression of being a joke (an allusion to drink and virility, using assonance with the ‘ou’ sound, that is, ‘cou’, ‘joues’, ‘saoûl’ [neck, cheeks, drunken]), but it is also menacing: the next cook is threatened with beheading and emasculation. Yet the persons who testify that they have seen this text do not read the libel. Taking it as a job offer, they would have looked no further,33 demonstrating how hard it is to retain the reader’s attention. The seventeenth century city seems to be overloaded with signs on display, such that the form they take allows instant recognition (both of the nature of the document issued and the social position of the person advertising themselves), and also that some individuals do not hesitate to remove a neighbour’s sign so that people can see their own.34 Faced with open writing practices, which are accessible to the greatest number, including those with only limited skills, the municipality seeks to turn the urban space into a disciplined space, and, in its dealings with other political authorities, a reserved space. It marks the names of its members on the city, and exercises closer control over private scripts, while Lyon’s courts move to stamp out defamatory writing. In due course, the eighteenth century would turn its attention to inscribing and civilizing street names, numbering houses, banning suspended signs and only allowing signs mounted on walls, before the Revolution sought to turn a journey through the city into a didactic experience (Milo, 1986), dedicated to the glory of revolutionary heroes and values.

Notes 1

Register DD 369 of Lyon’s Municipal Archives (AML).

Lawful and Unlawful Writings in Lyon 2

3

4

5

6

7 8

9

10 11

12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19

20

21 22

23 24 25 26

27

211

For details of these inscriptions, please refer to our thesis: Béroujon, A. (2006), L’écrit dans la ville. Espaces, échanges et identités à Lyon au XVIIe siècle. Typed thesis: Lyon 2 University, appendix No. 13, 497–500. AML, BB 206, 455–456, 5 December 1652, appearance in court by the Rector of la Trinité college. Bussières, J. de (1661), Basilica Lugdunensis sive domus consularis. Lugduni: Guillelmus Barbier, 36–44. Ménestrier, C.-F. (1669), Eloge historique de la ville de Lyon. Lyon: B. Coral, 1669, 418. We do not know the format of the 1670 inscription, other than the line breaks. The inscription recreated here should therefore be viewed as hypothetical (AML, DD 362, p. 30, s.d.). The underlining corresponds to the section occupied by the consulate. AML, BB 189, f° 55, 13 March 1636. Ibid., BB 198, f° 38–38v°, 26 February 1644, permission granted to Claude Bonnet. Ibid., DD 26 to DD 45, 614 permits granted between 1650 and 1700. Permits to erect signs gradually disappear from the records of the consulate’s deliberations. Ibid., DD 26, 4 March 1664; 13 March 1664; 6 May 1664, 10 July 1664. Continuation du traité de la Police, Vol. 4, De la voirie. Paris: J.-F. Hérissant, 1738, 336–337. AML, BB 252, f° 85–86, 5 August 1694. Ibid., DD 29, 9 August 1667, permission granted to Jean Bourgeois. Ibid., DD 41, 4 October 1697, permission to erect a sign. Ibid., DD 31, 28 August 1670; DD 45, f° 274 v°, 15 July 1659. Furetière, A. de (1690), Dictionnaire universel. The Hague: A. and R. Leers, n. p., ‘enseigne’. Menage (1750, 1st ed. 1650), Dictionnaire Etymologique ou Origines de la langue française. Paris: Briasson, 534. Molière (1662), Les fascheux. Paris: G. de Luynes, Act III, Scene II, 60–62. Departmental Archives of the Rhône (ADR), BP 2898, 16 January 1685, complaint lodged by Jean-Baptiste Boudrenet, master scrivener, referring to the case of a defamatory letter 3 years earlier. All of the criminal archives have been examined (ADR, BP 2838 to BP 2955, 1609–1700). ADR, BP 2930, 30 January 1689, beginning of the Dodat case. AML, BB 206, f° 262 and sq., 18 June 1652, consular order declaring that Severin de Bauze will be appointed as concierge and receive a salary of 600 livres per annum plus accommodation in the town hall. Ibid. ADR, BP 2925, 18 May 1688, complaint lodged by Andrée Desvignes. Ibid., BP 2853, 13 April 1669, appearance in court by Pierre and René Vérard. Ibid., BP 2898, 1 January 1685, complaint lodged by Joseph Toscan Ferrante Orvietan. Ibid., BP 2898, 2 January 1685, sworn statement by Antoine Rivière, of rue Saint-Georges.

212 28 29

30

31

32

33

34


Ibid., BP 2942, 9 June 1691, complaint lodged by Claude Guérin. Furetière, A. de (1690), Dictionnaire universel. The Hague: A. and R. Leers, n. p., ‘escriteau’. ADR, BP 2851, 29 October 1668, summons to appear in court sent to Antoine Bard. Translator’s note: This translation is uncertain, but it is likely that at first the writer had put viedaze as an insult but because viedaze sounds similar to visage [‘face’] he then carried on with a different idea, that of ‘visage’. Viedaze was commonly used as an insult. It is encountered early on, in the preface of Gargantua: Rabelais, F. (1993, 1st ed. 1534), La vie treshorrificque du grand Gargantua. Paris: Flammarion, 39. ADR, BP 2851, 17 November 1668, testimony signed by Claude Fricholet (he ‘saw a notice between the passageway leading to the said house and a saddler’s shop, and the friend that he was with told him that he believed the house attached to the said Inn of the Chasse Marée was available to rent’). Ibid., BP 2886, 18 February 1683, complaint lodged by Jean-Baptiste La Chapelle.

References Bardet, J.-P. & F.-J. Ruggiu (eds.) (2005), Au plus près du secret des cœurs? Nouvelles lectures historiques des écrits du for privé. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris Sorbonne. Bayard, F. & P. Cayez (1990), Histoire de Lyon du XVIe siècle à nos jours. Lyon: Ed. Horvath. Béroujon, A.(2009), Les ecrits de Lyon au XVIIe siecle. Espaces, echanges, identites, Grenoble: PUG. Bologne-Piloix, S. (1990) Lyon au XVIIe siècle ou la métamorphose d’un paysage urbain. Typed thesis: Lyon 2 University. Burke, P. (1989), ‘L’art de l’insulte en Italie aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles’. In Injures and Blasphèmes. Paris: Ed. Imago, 49–62. Carruthers, M. (2002), Machina memorialis. Méditation, rhétorique et fabrication des images au Moyen Age. Paris: Gallimard. Castillo Gómez, A. (1997), Escrituras y escribientes. Praticas de la cultura escrita en una ciudad del Renacimiento. Gobierno de Canarias-Fundación de Enseñanza Superior a Distancia: Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Castillo Gómez, A. (2006), Entre la pluma y la pared. Una historia social de la escritura en los siglos de Oro. Madrid: Akal. Chartier, R. (1981), ‘La circulation de l’écrit dans les villes françaises, 1500–1700’. In Livre et lecture en Espagne et en France sous l’Ancien Régime. Colloque de la Casa Velasquez. Paris: A.D.P.F., 151–156. Chartier, R. (1993), ‘Du livre au lire’. In R. Chartier (ed.), Pratiques de la lecture. Paris: Payot and Rivages, 79–113. Christin, O. (2004), ‘Comment se représente-t-on le monde social?’ Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, September 2004, 154, 3–9.


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Commarmond, A. (1846–1854), Description du Musée lapidaire de la ville de Lyon. Epigraphie antique du département du Rhône. Lyon: Imprimerie F. Dumoulin. Farge, A. (1979), Vivre dans la rue à Paris au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard-Julliard. Feyel, G. (2000), L’annonce et la nouvelle. La presse d’information en France sous l’Ancien Régime (1630–1788). Oxford: Voltaire foundation. Fraenkel, B. (2007), ‘Actes d’écriture: quand écrire, c’est faire’. Langage et société, 3–4, 121–122, 101–112. Garrioch, D. (1994), ‘House names, shop signs and social organization in western european cities, 1500–1900’. Urban History, 21, 20–48. Gimeno Blay, F.M. (ed.) (1997), ‘Los muros tienen la palabra’. Materiales para una historia de los graffiti. Valencia: Seminario Internacional de Estudios sobre la Cultura Escrita. Jouhaud, C. & A. Viala (eds.) (2002), De la publication entre Renaissance et Lumières. Paris: Fayard. Kleinclausz, A. (1948), Histoire de Lyon de 1595 à 1814. Lyon: Masson. Lignereux, Y. (2003), Lyon et le roi. De la ‘bonne ville’ à l’absolutisme municipal (1594–1654). Seyssel: Champ Vallon. McLuhan, M. (1971), La galaxie Gutenberg. La genèse de l’homme typographique. Montreal: Hurtubise HMH. Mermet, E. (ca. 1890), La presse, l’affichage et le colportage. Paris: C. Marpon and E. Flammarion. Milo, D. (1986), ‘Le nom des rues’. In P. Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire, II, La nation. Paris: Gallimard, 283–315. Montenach, A. (2009), Espaces et pratiques du commerce alimentaire à Lyon au XVIIe siècle. Grenoble: PUG. Mouysset, S. (2008), Papiers de famille. Introduction à l’étude des livres de raison (France, XVe-XIXe siècle). Rennes: PUR. Petrucci, A. (1993), Jeux de lettres, formes et usages de l’inscription en Italie (XIe-XXe siècles). Paris: Ed. EHESS. Roche, D. (1981), Le peuple de Paris. Essai sur la culture populaire au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne. Roche, D. (1993), ‘Les pratiques de l’écrit dans les villes françaises du XVIIIe siècle’. In R. Chartier (ed.), Pratiques de la lecture. Paris: Payot and Rivages, 201–263. Rondot, N. (1889), Les sculpteurs de Lyon du XIVe au XVIIIe siècle. Lyon: Pitrat. Turgeon, L. (ed.) (1990), Les productions symboliques du pouvoir (XVIe-XXe siècle). Sillery: Septentrion. Van Damme, S. (2005), Le temple de la sagesse. Savoirs, écriture et sociabilité urbaine (Lyon, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle). Paris: Ed. EHESS.

Chapter Eleven

Sexuality in Black and White: Instructions to Write and Scientia Sexualis in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century1 Philippe Artières

The circumstances under which texts are produced, meaning the ways in which writing is requested, or in extreme cases, demanded, have been a major focus of work on personal writings in France for some years now. There have been studies of a variety of situations where the act of writing is not spontaneous but encouraged by a third party: thus Béatrice Fraenkel has done work on the French President François Mittérrand’s invitation to his fellow citizens to write to him, showing how the presidential mail service is organized and its different functions in the relation between the President and citizens (Fraenkel, 1997); Anna Iuso has been interested in the many autobiography competitions that have been launched in Europe (Iuso, 2005); Jean-François Lae has studied the self-evaluation reports of patients in alcohol treatment centres (Lae, 2008), while others have looked at how autobiography is used in university courses (Simonet-Tenant, 2002). The majority of this anthropological and sociological research has involved what Daniel Fabre and his fellow anthropologists in France have termed ‘ordinary writings’, that is, uses of writing that are defined as specifically nonliterary, as domestic, work related or personal (Fabre, 1993; 1997). What these researchers mean by ordinary writings are the result of a variety of practices and take many different forms: office paperwork2 (notes, administrative or commercial forms, contracts, etc.), personal papers and records (letters, diaries, autobiographies) and work-related writings (files, etc.). They were particularly concerned with the nature of the writing acts performed within vast apparatuses of command such as the State, the workplace or the school. From a historical point of view, this work came from a new and rather different perspective, adopting Foucault’s positions on the power of

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writing to demonstrate that writing practices had not necessarily always been on the side of liberation and the construction of intimacy but were also a disciplinary tool for the production of power and knowledge. The first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, The Will to Knowledge (1977), suggested that power did not limit itself to prohibiting, preventing, or destroying, but also had an extraordinary ability to produce: to produce new objects and new subjectivities. The dominant approach during the 1980s was to see personal writings of the past as privileged sources for documenting a history of the subject, of the individual rather than the collective. The issue of writing on command allows us to reconnect with a particular social history. Whether in the practices of writing demanded by parents, like the young girl’s diary studied by Philippe Lejeune (1993), or by academics in search of biographical material (e.g. the use of autobiography in social science), but mostly by social care institutions, the act of writing has been at the centre of a microphysics of power. Before writing apparatuses can be analysed, research is needed in order to document and reconstitute all the stages of this process. In methodological terms, this usually entails taking a corpus of manuscripts and looking at the acts of writing performed, in order to understand how, in material terms, this writing was produced: With what tools? On which materials? But it also involves asking questions about how these writing practices relate to their contemporary writing culture: What kind of events are they? What are their effects and what knowledge(s) do they produce? And what do these writings tell us about the history of literacy in European societies? This kind of historical investigation invariably means confronting the problem of sources; the archives of this microphysics of power were rarely preserved, and when they exist they are widely scattered. Often they are what I have termed minor archives (Artières & Lae, 2003): documents which were not thrown away only because they were part of a valuable collection – that of a writer, an intellectual or a scientist. These ‘other archives’, often relegated to the bottom of the box or drawer, are seldom properly inventoried. Moreover, it is sometimes difficult to find the traces of these writings ordered into being in the past. A favourite location for forced autobiographies in the nineteenth century was the prison. The prisoners, a captive population, were subjected not only to detailed study of their bodies, their speech and their feelings, but were also often encouraged to become observers of

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themselves, as recommended by the criminologists of Lyon and Turin (Renneville, 2003). Although there was no question of force being used, their captive situation made it virtually impossible for them not to comply with the writing exercise demanded by the doctor. Dozens of prisoners filled school exercise books with poems, songs and drawings, but also with autobiographical writings for doctors in the institutions where they were held (Artières, 2000). In parallel to the books of guilty lives based on accounts written and collected in prison, there were other books being written, but because they were not written within the prisons which kept the other writings, they are more difficult to find. These are the diaries written by afflicted men, like the one Michel Foucault cites in The Will to Know, whom doctors compelled to write a series of accounts not of their crimes but of their sexuality. In fact, within the extraordinary enterprise of research on sexualities which developed from the mid-nineteenth century, we find the invention of new apparatuses of discursive production, particularly of writing practices. What was then being invented, and whose traces are recorded in the monographs of this scientia sexualis and the archives of its theorists, has had a long history which includes very different actors. Far from being anecdotal, this history constitutes the archaeology of a little-known aspect of contemporary literature and social science. For at least a hundred years, in France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe, doctors, writers, and latterly sociologists in the age of AIDS have been soliciting autobiographical writing about sexuality.

Georges and His Doctor This case history, which began at the beginning of 1902, features a doctor and a young man; it is certainly one of the first occasions on which the practice of inviting patients to write became visible. The fact that the doctor was a famous professor of legal medicine in Lyon, France, Alexandre Lacassagne (1843–1924), an expert in the major criminal cases of his era who had examined the corpse of the president of the French Republic Sadi Carnot no doubt accounted for this visibility. How did the doctors’ demands operate? During the consultation a number of issues were raised which the patient subsequently expanded


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on in writing. These ‘instructions’ thus took the form of letters relating to the young man’s ‘sexual biography’ and also a table of auto-erotic practices and their relationship with his thoughts. The subject was not browbeaten into carrying out either operation: it was important that he felt he was carrying out this research on himself as a free agent. ‘You were true and you understand our nature so well, for you grant to those who consult you regarding their sexual nature that independence of thought, encouragement, and aimiability which give courage to this feeble homosexual nature – a step towards a cure.’ Thus Apitztch thanked him in a letter written on the 16th of March 1903. The young German placed all his trust in this attentive doctor. Apitzsch even surpassed his doctor’s expectations and adopted a medical form of notation in the table of his masturbationary episodes and other auto-erotic practices during a specific period. This list itemizes Georges Apitszch’s sexual practices: hence each night he notes the number and time of his masturbations and nocturnal emissions and relates them to his erotic thoughts. The list is written with a lawyer’s meticulousness in black ink on a page folded in two (nothing is crossed out). No doubt this is a clean copy that the young German made in June 1904 to send to his doctor. 1 January 1904 } 1 pollution 26

‘’

4 February 12 ‘’ 18 ‘’ 23 ‘’

at the beginning of the month sexual state quite good, the second half very good, the end bad (very excited) 4 February 2X } 2 pollutions { 21 February beginning of the month: excited, my surroundings sometimes calm, sometimes excited. At the end, busy, so things go better 12) I receive a letter from my brother. He tells me of his love affairs. This excites me greatly. Violent yearning to be with soldiers.

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18) conversation with my brother on sexual matters. 23) excited by an excess of prostatic liquid. The young patient wants to go even further as he decides that, given the paucity of ‘same-sex’ literature, he should take up his pen to show ‘the life of a serious-minded invert, a male who is respectable and has retained his dignity [. . .] Why not recount the joys and sorrows of a man who lives truly, seriously, who does not waste his time in childish pursuits [. . .] perhaps I shall find time to publish some truthful impressions, generally on the love of soldiers.’ (Letter of 23rd July 1904). To the best of my knowledge he never did this. Nevertheless, once he had been encouraged to write, he began to encourage Lacassagne to read. Apitszch stopped writing to the doctor about his own life story, but he regularly sent him books which he thought would be useful and enlightening for him to read. He sent them to the scholar in Lyon so that when Lacassagne wrote a new article on sexual perversion he would have available the most relevant documentation. It is as if we are seeing a gradual reversal of the original instructions to write: the homosexual becomes the doctor’s informant and it is the latter who is henceforth obliged to write in response to his patient’s instructions to read the books he sends him. If the Apitzsch case whose letters I have edited is valuable, it is precisely because of this reversal and the fact that the archive of this two-way instruction has been preserved. It is very rare for documents like these to survive; more often we only have the resulting article published by the doctors, as in the famous case of Charcot and Magnan (Charcot, Magnan 1873). Moreover, this is an exchange of letters, that is, personal writings, which are not normally included in medical archives, and most probably a number of such letters have not been preserved or else are in private archive collections. However, instructions like these, forming part of a medical investigation of sexuality, were not always in the medium of letter writing.

Scholars and Patients The psychiatrists Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld utilized the same practice of soliciting writings which the young Apitzsch


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might have encountered in his native country, Germany, where he also consulted doctors and scholars. In particular, Hirschfeld was engaged in building up his Museum of Homosexuality in Berlin at that time (burned down by the Nazis in 1938, see www.hirschfeld.in-berlin.de) (Wolff, 1986) and he was also the originator of a questionnaire containing over a hundred questions (as discussed in Hirschfeld, 2000: 290–315), from which the historian Laure Murat has published extracts (Murat, 2006: 188–189). ‘Question 35: Do you indulge in ipsation, that is, in satisfying yourself by means of onanism? When did you begin to masturbate? How did you acquire this habit? Were you impelled into it by persons of your own age, or by those of a different age, by persons of the same sex as yourself or those of a different sex? [. . .]’. In this case the instruction to write comes in the form of questionnaires where the subject has to answer each question. We can see here the similarity to nineteenth century interrogation forms and even guides for confessors which have been preserved. These questionnaires do not yet come in the format of a form with limited spaces for the answers, but the sheer number of questions discouraged the subject from expatiating at length in their written replies. The German doctors hoped that the boredom, tiredness and lassitude resulting from this lengthy writing exercise would discourage their patients from excessive personal expression. The solicited autobiography, on the other hand, did not take the form of a questionnaire; it took quite diverse and unexpected forms. Thus, in the course of certain doctors’ enquiries into tattooing among prisoners, sailors, soldiers in punishment brigades and prostitutes (Caplan, 2000; Artières, 2004), their questions on this topic are interspersed with those on sex between men: often, getting people to talk about the writings on their bodies meant asking them to engage in sexual confessions. This time the consultation, this private interview between doctor and patient, becomes the opportunity to solicit an autobiography. Of course, this same demand was sometimes made in the theatrical setting of a lecture where the professor would interrogate a naked patient in front of the assembled students. The notes and medico-legal observations of a certain Dr Boigey on ‘tattooed inmates’ published in 1910 are good examples of this type of enquiry. A typology of sexual attitudes and behaviours emerged from his presentation of 23 observations which detail at some length the designs and inscriptions borne on the skin of a sample of the prisoners

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whom Boigey, a military doctor, examined. He concluded that in conditions of imprisonment there emerged an occasional homosexuality which was the result of the imprisonment itself, as opposed to ‘true homosexuals’. The doctor himself committed these life stories to writing but he had also asked some of the tattooed men to write their own memoires (Boigey, 1910). The context of such encouragement of writing was sometimes broader than the doctor’s consulting room or the lecture theatres of medical faculties, and some journals also adopted these practices. We know that at the time of the First World War some publications (e.g. the famous Revue Blanche)3 frequently initiated surveys among their readers. This also occurred in the case of the journal Archives d’anthropologie criminelle (Archives of Criminal Anthropology). Several surveys were launched during the last decade of the nineteenth century at the request of the journal’s sponsors. Thus, in 1895 André Raffalovitch published an appeal for replies to a questionnaire on ‘the development and manifestations of the sexual instinct in the blind-from-birth and deaf-mutes’. The first of the nine questions is: ‘No. 1 Are there boys blind-from-birth and deaf-mute boys who show a particular predilection for and who seek out persons of their own sex, either adults or children?’ (Raffalovitsch, 1895: 764). But it is particularly the survey on sexual perversion launched the previous year, in 1894, with its ‘questionnaire’ which is of interest here. Prefaced by a letter to the readers which emphasized the importance of this question, it continued as follows: Therefore, Monsieur, we sincerely hope that you will find it in your heart to assist us, at the earliest date you may find convenient, with the observations, notes, documents, confessions garnered by you in the circumstances in which your talents as writer, lawyer or doctor . . . have led you to observe or to study [. . .] We are counting, Monsieur, on your willingness to reply to the first paragraph. We have followed this with a form for replies, designed to facilitate the relation of the facts which you may be willing to communicate to us, but which you are at liberty to depart from and to ignore in whole or in part. (Laupts, 1894: 106) And this letter goes on to give very detailed instructions to the respondents: write answers, if possible, only on the back of the page,


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mark clearly the passages for which they wish to remain anonymous, or whether they wish the whole to remain so. There follows a very detailed questionnaire from Dr St Paul (known as Laupts) at the end of which he makes clear that the survey will use all the replies sent in, even if they relate only indirectly or to a limited part of the programme of Archives d’anthropologie criminelle. We can see here how in this type of survey the doctor veers between very clear instructions and wide-ranging enquiries, as demonstrated by the first question: ‘What are your ideas, your theories, your hypotheses on the issue? What do you think are the causes of the malady, its extent and its remedies?’ It was in response to this survey that Emile Zola, the author of Germinal, sent Dr St Paul a series of letters written to him by a young Italian homosexual which were published in the journal under the title Le Roman d’un inverti-né (The Tale of a Born Pervert) (Lejeune, 1987). The apparatus which produced these letters was soon forgotten although the letters themselves were to become classics, no doubt because of the writer’s concern for precision and exactitude in writing about his sexuality, beginning with his childhood memories. What is interesting in this apparatus compared to that of the young German and his doctor is that the instruction to write is mediated by a third party, who is none other than another writer: the novelist. The young Italian felt inspired or invited by Zola’s reputation as an author to write to him. It is as though this encouragement to write comes not from its instigator, the doctor, but from literature itself as an institution of writing. We should recall how central the figure of Zola was within French intellectual and political life – the Dreyfus affair had further radicalized his position. But it was in the wake, at the edges of the famous writer that the ordinary writer set pen to paper. This is no doubt one of the strongest examples of encouragement to write that we find in the last years of the century. An impressive discourse emerges at this time, which we can term the literature of testimony or the case study for which literature formed the receptacle. To express oneself by describing one’s experience in writing down to the least detail and to entrust it to a writer seems to have been a common practice if we are to believe the historians of sexuality. (See, for example, the work on Raffalovitch by Cardon, 2008, and on Georges Hérelle by Goldschläger & Thomson, 1998).

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Uses and Researchers We should not think that these invitations to write about one’s sexuality have disappeared today along with the Scientia sexualis: not only have they survived but some social scientists do not hesitate to use them as a methodological tool. Witness the instruction to write about sex that has emerged from the AIDS epidemic, particularly in relation to individual prevention: making people write to gain information on whether they are taking protective measures or not. The British researcher A.P.M. Coxon thus developed a sexual diary which he used during his work on English male homosexuals (Coxon, 1999). See also the website of that Coxon Project: www.sigmadiaries.com. He emphasizes that self-completed sexual diaries have the advantage of reducing retrospective bias. In a validation study of homosexual behaviour, sexual diary counts and subsequent questionnaire estimates (together with ratings of the reliability of the estimates) referring to the same month are compared and the discrepancies analysed. Main findings include: questionnaire data yield consistently higher average estimates than diary counts, but have the same ordinal profile; individual difference (diary-questionnaire) scores show that 55% of questionnaire estimates of acts are higher than diary counts, 20% are identical and 25% are under-estimates; discrepancies are differentially located in different sexual acts. Masturbation and fellatio are systematically overestimated in questionnaires and anal intercourse without a condom is the major source of inaccuracies. (Coxon, 1999: 221) The sociology of health has been highly receptive to such uses of writing and some researchers have tried to promote interest in them. Milligan, Bingley and Gatrell stress that ‘To date, solicited diaries have been relatively neglected as a social science research method. This is particularly true within the field of health research. Yet these narrative approaches can provide invaluable insights into the health behaviours of individuals and how these are played out across time and space’ (Milligan, Bingley and Gatrell, 2005: 1883). Therefore, the researchers draw on recent research in the north west of England that investigated the potential benefits of communal gardening as opposed to other social activities in maintaining the health and emotional


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well-being of older people. As part of a wider study using largely qualitative techniques, our analysis revealed that, contrary to the findings of earlier studies, diaries can be used effectively over relatively long periods of time and are equally effective in exploring health issues amongst both older men and women. With the benefit of good researcher support, we argue that diary techniques can offer some unique insights into the ongoing health routines and coping strategies of older people and can prove invaluable in uncovering those, often hidden, aspects of their daily lives and routines that impact on their health histories. Through the gathering of chronologically organized data about daily activities, diaries can act as both a record and reflection of the health experiences, activities and life-worlds inhabited by older people. (Milligan, Bingley & Gatrell, 2005: 1883) Hence, we can see how the apparatuses of command of autobiographical production were gradually refined, although there was no change in their goal, which was to produce new knowledge about an individual’s behaviour, based not on statistics but on the analysis of a cohort. While at the beginning it was the notion of the case study which was important, later it was the set of writings as a whole that created meaning. There was a shift from the control of individuals to the management of populations. From the individual case to the group, there was a change in how the data and the norms were interrogated. In conclusion, I want to emphasize the strength of this practice of invitation to write as a tool of knowledge production. One of the reasons it is interesting to examine this specific aspect of the history of sexuality in Western Europe is because of its move from medicine to social sciences. It shows how ordinary people become the producers of new knowledge, how by reversing the ‘disciplinary dispositif’ of Foucault, it becomes an extraordinary tool for investigating human beings. The most important aspect is that this transformation has writing as central.

Notes 1

This chapter has benefited from the comments of David Barton and Uta Papen. I’m also grateful to David Pontille and Aissatou Mbodj.

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3


The French term ‘paperasse’ translated here as ‘paperwork’ has similar derogatory connotations to those of the slang term ‘bumf’, used of paperwork perceived as unnecessary A famous literary and artistic magazine (1891-1903) founded by the Natanson brothers which featured the work of artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard, and published work by prominent foreign authors including Tolstoy, Checkov, Ibsen, Kipling and Wilde and French writers such as Gide, Proust and Mallarmé as well as Zola. (Translator’s note) See www.sdmart.org/lautrec/ RevueBlanche.html

References Apitzsch, G. (2006), Lettres d’un inverti allemand au professeur Alexandre Lacassagne (1903–1908), Philippe Artières (ed.), Paris: EPEL. Artières, Ph. (2000), Le Livre des vies coupables: Autobiographies de criminels (1896–1909), Paris: Albin-Michel. Artières, Ph. & J.-Fr. Lae, (2003), Lettres perdues. Ecriture, amour et solitude, XIXe-XXe siècle, La vie quotidienne, Paris: Editions Hachette, 268. Artières, Philippe (ed.) (2004), A Fleur de peau, Médecins, tatouages et tatoués (1880–1910), Paris: Editions Allia. Boigey, Dr (1910), ‘Les détenus tatoués; Leur psychologie’. Archives d’anthropologie criminelle, 439–457. Caplan, J. (ed.) (2000), Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cardon, P. (2008), Discours littéraires et scientifiques fin de siècle. La discussion sur les homosexualités dans la revue Archives d’anthropologie criminelle du Dr Lacassagne (1886–1914). Autour de Marc-André Raffalovitch, Paris, Orizons, collection Homosexualités, 2008. Coxon, A.P.M. (1999), ‘Parallel accounts? Discrepancies between self-report (diary) and recall (questionnaire) measures of the same sexual behaviour’. AIDS Care, 11(2), 1 April 1999, 221–234. Fabre, D. (ed.) (1993), Ecrits ordinaires. Paris: POL, BPI. Fabre, D. (1997), ‘Introduction’. In Daniel Fabre (ed.) Par écrit, ethnologie des écritures quotidiennes, MPE Cahier 11, 1997, 1–59. Fraenkel, B. (1997), ‘“Répondre à tous”. Une enquête sur le service du courrier presidentiel’. In Daniel Fabre (ed.), Par écrit, ethnologie des writings quotidiennes, MPE Cahier 11, 243–273. Goldschläger, A., & C. Thomson (eds.) (1998), Le Discours scientifique comme porteur de préjugés? Scientific Discourse as Prejudice Carrier? London: Mestengo Press. Hirschfeld, M. (2000) The Homosexuality of Men and Women. Amherst, NY: Prometheus. Iuso, A. (2005), ‘L’exile et le temoin. Sur une enquête autobiographique et son oubli’. Genèses, 61, 2005/4. Lae, J.-Fr. (2008), Les Nuits de la main courante, Paris: Editions Stock. Laupts (St Paul) (1894), Enquête sur l’inversion sexuelle, questionnaire-plan suivi de guide destiné à faciliter les réponses. Archives d’anthropologie criminelle, Paris: Masson and Lyon: Storck, 105–108.


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Lejeune, Ph. (1987), ‘Vies d’homosexuels’. In ‘Autobiographie et homosexualité en France au XIXe siècle’. Romantisme, no. 56, 95–100. Lejeune, Ph. (1993), Le Moi des demoiselles. Paris, Seuil. Milligan, Ch., A. Bingley & A. Gatrell (2005), ‘Digging deep: Using diary techniques to explore the place of health and well-being amongst older people’. Social Science & Medicine, 61(9), 1882–1892. Murat, L. (2006), La loi du genre. Paris: Fayard. Raffalovitsch, André (1895), ‘Questionnaire sur le développement et les manifestations de l’instinct sexuel chex les aveugles-nés et les sourds-muets’. Archives d’anthropologie criminelle, p. 764. Paris, Masson and Lyon, Storck. Renneville, M. (2003), Crime et folie. Deux siècles d’enquêtes medicales et judiciaries. Paris: Fayard, 527. Simonet-Tenant, Fr. (2002–2003), ‘L’injonction autobiographique à l’école’. L’Ecole des lettres (second cycle), no. 10, 65–79. Wolff, Ch. (1986), Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology. London: Quartet.

Afterword Brian Street

It is interesting to see colleagues from different disciplines – such as applied linguistics and history – and different countries – such as France as well as the United Kingdom and United States – expanding what is meant by an ‘anthropology of writing’. Barton and Papen in the first chapter track what the terms mean in both the Anglophone and Francophone traditions and indicate how many of the contributors to the present volume might be located with respect to such labels. The book is termed ‘the anthropology of writing’ rather than the ‘anthropology of literacy’ because the authors with whom Barton and Papen are concerned – both those who contribute to this volume and those on whom they are drawing in their accounts – are focussing in particular on ‘writing’. This is evident in the historical tradition prominent in France, where historical interest in the uses and meanings of writing has been especially influenced by the work of Chartier. Many of the authors in the present volume build on that historical perspective but also link it to contemporary studies of the kind prominent in the Anglophone tradition. Within UK anthropology, the issue of writing has been part of a wider interest in ‘literacy’. Debates in this field were for a long time dominated by the supposed ‘great divide’ between oral and written culture, particularly highlighted by the Cambridge anthropologist Jack Goody. This was, however, supplanted in both the United Kingdom and the United States – the ‘Anglophone tradition’ – by what came to be termed the ‘New Literacy Studies’ which offered contemporary ethnographic accounts of literacy practices in a cross cultural perspective. In Francophone studies, Goody’s work continued for a time after it had been sidelined in the United Kingdom, and the volume attempts to demonstrate how these different ‘traditions’ are moving on, as authors build upon what they perceive to be the most productive aspects of the field across both time and space. For both traditions, as Barton and Papen point out, the notion of literacy practices is crucial, whether dealing with contemporary or with

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historical uses of reading and writing. Bourdieu here is clearly significant and we are called upon to consider whether he is appropriately located in the sociological or the anthropological tradition. A forthcoming volume that considers ‘Bourdieu and Literacy Studies’ (Grenfell et al.) notes that Bourdieu felt the need to distant himself from the contemporary French tradition of anthropology which was dominated by Levi-Strauss and the structuralist approach. Being more committed to a social practice account, Bourdieu referred to himself as a sociologist in order to avoid the structuralist brand. But to many looking back – and also looking across from the United Kingdom – it was always apparent that he belonged to the more social dimension of the anthropological tradition as his ethnographic work in both Morocco and in the French education system demonstrates. Here he addressed issues of writing directly, especially the French Academy’s use of particular kinds of academic writing to stratify and control. This strand of the ‘anthropology of writing’ tradition meshes very closely with the New Literacy Studies approach, which focuses especially on literacy and power and on the ‘ideological’ model of literacy and has in recent years developed a particular strand on writing in Higher Education referred to as the ‘academic literacies’ approach (see Lillis & Scott, 2008 for a comprehensive summary of this approach). Barton and Papen show how, in addition to Bourdieu’s seminal contribution that is recognized equally strongly in the Anglophone tradition, the work of other scholars in the Francophone tradition, such as Chartier and Lahire, can be seen to mesh with this movement. The reader of this volume, then, is provided with a kind of trajectory that points them from previous major figures in the field across both traditions and across historical and anthropological studies, to the current work of the authors in this volume as they take those traditions forward. For such scholars, everyday literacy in distinct contexts – whether within contemporary France (as in Lahire’s work and here evident in the accounts by Fraenkel, Pontille and Joly), England (as in Barton and Hamilton’s earlier work), Africa (as in Papen, Bourdieu, Mbodj-Pouye, Prinsloo and Breier, etc.) – has become the central focus of the anthropology of writing and the present volume then offers us a contemporary but historically grounded view of how this tradition is going forward. Some of the new researchers in the Francophone tradition, then, can be seen to be calling upon not only these French historians (as in the chapters by Anne Béroujon (Chapter Ten) and

228


Philippe Artières (Chapter Eleven) in this volume) but also on Goody and on the New Literacy Studies (as with the work of Pontille (Chapter Three) and Mbodj-Pouye in this volume). One gap, then, that the editors hope the volume will fill is exactly the relationship between these different traditions. Partly perhaps because of language differences, authors on both sides of the Anglophone and Francophone traditions have not tended to cite each other very much. Ironically, given his rejection by many in the Anglophone tradition, Jack Goody has been one of the few authors to bridge the divide and Barton and Papen point out how it is different aspects of his work that have been prominent there – his call for close attention to ‘inscription’ and to specific local practices (Goody himself worked in West Africa and was also involved for a time in the study of Vai literacy by Scribner and Cole that became one of the earliest testimonies to the social practice approach). At a conference in Paris convened by Béatrice Fraenkel and Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, contributors to this volume, and held at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales where the research group ‘Anthropologie de l’écrit’ is located, Goody gave a keynote address in French that was a tribute to such cultural and methodological bridging. And the editors of this volume indicate their desire to further such bridging: ‘Part of the aim of this book is to make the work of Francophone researchers more widely known and to promote dialogue between French and English speaking academics interested in writing as a social and cultural practice.’ A measure of the timeliness of this volume is that similar contributions are to be found in other parts of the world. A volume recently published in Spanish (Kalman & Street, 2009) addresses Latin American Literacy Studies, bringing together in a similar way to the present volume new social practice approaches to reading and writing across a range of contexts in that continent. That volume is shortly to be published in English also and I would hope that, likewise, the present volume edited by Barton and Papen, can be published in both of the languages of the various contributors, in this case French and English. It is indeed in such ways that the cultural and intellectual bridging which the editors are aiming for can be accomplished. I also look forward to future volumes of such studies, in other parts of the world across other traditions, exploring what the notions of literacy and of writing mean to both researchers and to people on the ground – a classic anthropological approach that addresses comparative and contrastive

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cases and suspends and problematizes key organizing concepts – such as ‘reading’, ‘writing’, ‘literacy’ – as it attempts to develop a language of description for such contentious but seminal meanings. One might envisage a series – ‘The Anthropology of Literacy’ – with sub headings to address the different traditions; ‘writing in the Francophone and Anglophone traditions’ as with the present volume; ‘reading and writing in Latin America’ for the Kalman and Street volume (currently entitled in Spanish ‘Lectura, escritura y matemáticas como practices Sociales; Diálogos con América Latin’ where exactly the linguistic dimension of how to translate terms such as literacy and writing are addressed); ‘anthropology and the multiplicity of writing’ as Eduardo Archetti (1994) terms the field, publishing in Scandinavian but referring to writing practices both there and in Latin America, the South Pacific, the West Indies, etc. The uncertainty regarding translation of terms and the associated question of how international policy might address ‘literacy’ issues that the present volume raises, are apparent in the tensions to be found between the research approaches signalled here and the dominant policy perspectives evident for instance in Global Monitoring Reports by UNESCO (EFA, 2006) and ‘literacy’ policy pronouncements by the World Bank. Whilst researchers have moved on and mostly now subscribe to a social practice view, or what I termed back in 1983 and would still maintain, an ‘ideological’ model, policy accounts still tend to subscribe to what I termed the ‘autonomous’ model of literacy. The ‘autonomous’ model, as Barton and Papen make clear in their Introduction, highlights a deficit view of literacy and ‘illiteracy’, measuring the number of ‘illiterates’ in a given country and proposing policy for ‘overcoming’ ‘illiteracy’ and improving the statistics – an issue addressed by Hamilton and Barton (2000) in an earlier critique of the IALS scheme, with its attention to measurement of decontextualized literacy skills and the ranking of individuals, groups and whole nations on scales. The ‘autonomous’ model drawn upon in such policy approaches is, of course, itself ideological. As Bourdieu amongst others has powerfully demonstrated, one of the major features of ideology is its use of the strategy of appearing to be neutral, of denying its own ideological preconceptions; indeed much of the power of dominant positions derives exactly from their appearance of neutrality and universality rather than particularity, of offering a view of the world – whether regarding literacy, education, gender, religion, etc. – that hides its local and cultural positioning and

230


claims to be general and beyond partiality. Education is especially prone to such moves and the ways in which Literacy is addressed within educational institutions and policy pronouncements offers an extreme example of such a tendency. Many of the chapters in the present volume address this tension and build upon the explicit recognition of an ideological model of literacy. Indeed, one of its contributions is in building on such theoretical grounding to help us move beyond the present somewhat narrow agenda of Education Policy, whether at national or at international level. One of the centres for UNESCO work in the field of literacy across international boundaries is, as it happens, in Paris where the current Decade of Literacy initiative is housed. A recent Global Monitoring Report on Literacy (EFA, 2006), produced by a different group also in Paris, illustrates the level of complexity that this research/policy tension has entered, as different chapters and different authors advocate traditional measurement scales on the one hand and social practice approaches on the other. All find themselves struggling with the translation issue – a focus on ‘écrit’ for French authors, on ‘escritura’ for those in the Spanish speaking world, on ‘letramento’ as opposed to ‘alfabetização’ in Brazil. In the Middle East and Asia very often there has been no single term for what in English is referred to as ‘literacy’ and indeed avoidance of the term altogether amongst many agencies, such as ASPBAE, the Asian South Pacific Bureau of Adult Education and its partner organizations such as Nirantar in India, Plan in Bangladesh, Bunyad in Pakistan, etc. all concerned more with ‘Education’, often of an ‘informal kind’, than with ‘literacy’ as such. How academic researchers can help these policy debates, regarding both the object of study and the terms used to describe it, is a theme for many of the authors in the present volume and readers from both academic and policy perspectives will find much of value here. The present volume, in this sense, offers a pointer to future work in the field that can extend its specific focus on Francophone and Anglophone traditions to wider international comparison with respect to both academic research and ‘Literacy’ policy.

References Archetti, E. (1994), Exploring the Written: Anthropology and the Multiplicity of Writing. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.

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EFA (2006), Global Monitoring Report; Literacy for Life. Paris: UNESCO. www.portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.php-URL_ID=43283&URL_DO=DO_ TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html Grenfell, M., K. Pahl, J. Rowsell & B. Street (forthcoming), Language, Ethnography and Education: Bridging New Literacy Studies and Bourdieu. London: Routledge. Hamilton, M. & D. Barton (2000), ‘The International Adult Literacy Survey: What does it really measure?’ International Review of Education, 46, 377–389. Kalman, J. & B. Street (2009), Lectura, escritura y matemáticas como practices Sociales; Diálogos con América Latin. Mexico City: Siglo XXI editores, and CREFAL. Lillis, T. & M. Scott (2008), ‘Defining academic literacies research: Issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy’. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 4, 5–32.


Index Note: Page references in italics refer to figures and illustrations. academic literacies approach 226 accountability of work 67, 103n. 1 in agriculture 91–2 in early years education 69, 73 enforcement 90–1 farmers’ existing system of records and 91, 100–3 actants 21 activity theory 81–2 actor network theory (ANT) 13 acts of writing 24, 39 encouraged/demanded by third party 26, 213–15 graphic force of 33–6, 39 official performative force of 36–7, 39 performative force of 36–9, 42n. 3–4 power and 213–14 adult literacy Individual Learning Plan 85 in Mali 128–9, 130 AIDS solicited writings on sexuality in the context of 221 Ainay gate (Lyon) epigraphic language 195, 196 anglophone writing research 3, 11–14, 225 francophone influences 20–1 francophone writing research vs. 15–16, 18, 21, 23, 24 ANT see actor network theory anthropology classical structural-functionalist period 4–5 contemporary 5 anthropology of writing 3, 225–6 methodologies 9–10 need 6–7

notion 8–9 scope 10 Apitszch, Georges solicited sexual biography of 215–17 Artières, P. 23 Austin, J. L. 34, 42n. 2 on normative writings 37–8 autobiographical writings forced 214–15 solicited 215–17, 218–19 Barton, D. 19 areas of everyday practices 179–80, 188 notion of literacy event 87 notion of vernacular literacy 174 Bernard, Captain 172 bibliography 17 biographical interviews farmers 100 biomedical database writing practices 24, 47–8 backup of database 61–2 data collection 49–50 data consolidation 53, 55–8 ethnographical perspective 51–3 quantitative and qualitative variation in collected data 53 spatial organization of documents 53–5, 63 transformation of data into reliable information 58–62 updation and 50–1, 64–5 birth records notebook keeping on 137 blogs 112 Blommaert, J. 127, 139 Boigey, Dr. 218–19

234

Index

book of reason 96 Bourdieu, Pierre 13–14, 226 conception of ‘pratiques’ 16 ‘cultural field’ 18 British Post Office efficiency 169–70, 182–3, 185 regulation of postcard use 169, 174 Bühler, K. ‘attachment at a distance’ 38 bureaucratic influences childcare workplace writings 69, 70 farmers’ writings 91–2, 100–1 healthcare related writings 156–9 calendars farmers’ writings 99–100 Camitta, M. 111 ceremonial inscriptions 192 chain postcards 186 Chana fountain (Lyon) epigraphic language 195, 196 Chartier, Roger 8 influences of 15–18, 20, 225 childcare daily feedback sheets 73 childcare individual play plan 73 childcare observation sheets 70–3 challenges in writing 77–9, 80–1 longer-term policy systems and 83–6 childcare workplace writings 24 attitude of local management 75–7 audit culture and 69, 73 data collection on 68 demands on staff and 74, 79, 84, 86–7 difficulties 68, 87 interruptions by children 79–81 material realities 73–7 multiple activities and goals 83–6 paperwork types 73 Clifford, J. 5 CMDT see Compagnie Malienne pour le Développement des Textiles codex 140 Cole, Michael 11 collective forms of writing 22 commissioners of inscriptions 190–1 17th century Lyon consulate 193–4

17th century Lyon consulate, position within inscriptions 194–7 Common Agricultural Policy (2003) 93 Compagnie Malienne pour le Développement des Textiles (CMDT) 139 role in fostering literacy in Mali 128–9, 130 context-specific practices 17, 18, 20 culture notion 18 study of writing and 18–19 data collection on childcare centre writings 68, 77–9 on notebook keeping practices 129 on online writing practices 115 on patient cohort construction 49–50 Davies, K. Swedish day nursery paperwork study 86–7 defamatory libel cases 202–3 people accused of 204 defamatory libel documents 25–6, 191, 203 forms of 203–4 writing practices 204–9 defamatory public notices 205–6 defamatory songs 206 Denis, J. 22, 23 diaries farmers’ 95–7 patients’ 160–1 solicited 221–2 displayed writings 17th century Lyon 25–6, 192, 209 commissioners of inscriptions viewpoint 190–1 definition 190 readers’ viewpoint 190 typology based on legitimacy 191 doctor–patient interaction bureaucratic medical rituals and 156–8 role of written-texts in 146 schema-driven 155–6

Index document handling updation of biomedical database and 53–5 documenting life postcards’ role in 186–7 Douglas, J. 172–3 early years education accountability 69 continuous provision approach 69 Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Anthropologie de l’écriture 23, 227 ‘Ecologies and Politics of Writing’ project 23 Edwardian postcards 25 chain of 186 documentation of everyday life 180–7 explosive use of 169–71 ‘new communication landscape’ 171 popularity amongst women 176 privacy issue 172 research sample 175 texts on 175–9 electronic communications and Edwardian postcards compared 171, 176, 186 Eloge historique de la ville de Lyon, et sa Grandeur Consulaire sous les Romains, & sous nos Rois (Ménestrier) 193 emotional writing of patients 159–60 Engeström, Y. 82 epigraphs 192–4 language of legitimation 194–7 ethnography 9–10, 17 biomedical database updation practices 50–3 healthcare related writing practices 147–8 personal writing practices 126–8 Every Child Matters 69, 70 everyday writing see vernacular writing exercitives 37–8 Fabian, J. 127 Fabre, D. notion of écritures ordinaries 19–20

235

farm diaries nature and style 95–6 temporal buffers 96–7 farm list making 97–100, 102 farmers’ writings 22–3, 24–5 bureaucratic influences 91–2, 100–1 case study 92–3 incompleteness of daily records 101 language and style 103 plethora of documents 101–3 types of documents 93–100 fieldnotes on childcare workplace writing 77–9 Flickr (photo sharing website) 109, 112–13, 122, 123 imagined audience 119–20 language choice 118–19 new practices 116, 121 profiles 114–15, 117–18 reasons for using 120 researching 115–16 sets 117, 121 tags 117, 121 writing on 113–15, 116–18 folksonomies 117 forms patient 158–9, 162–3 Foucault, Michel 213–14 Fraenkel, B. 20, 213 francophone writing research 3, 12–13 anglophone influences 21–2 anglophone writing research vs. 15–16, 18, 21, 23, 24 major themes 22–3 theoretical concepts used in 15–22 Global Monitoring Reports 228, 229 glocalisation 124 Goody, J. ‘great divide’ between oral and written culture 14, 225 influences on francophone research 21–2, 225, 227 graffiti 33–5, 39, 203–4 green notes 157, 158

236

Index

Hamilton, M. 19 areas of everyday practices 179–80, 188 notion of literacy event 87 notion of vernacular literacy 174 healthcare related writings 25, 145–7, 162–3 bureaucratic influences 156–8 empowerment of patients and 160, 163 ethnographic perspective 147–8 forms as symbols of state power 158–9, 163 internet sites 161–2, 163 paternalistic model of healthcare and 145, 158 Heath, Shirley Brice 11 definition of literacy event 87 Heaton, J. Henniker 174 Hermant, E. 38 highways department (Lyon) marking of monumental inscriptions 193–4 position within monumental inscriptions 194–7 regulation of shop and house signs 198–9, 201–2 Hirschfeld, M. 217, 218 historical studies 7–8, 9, 15 Hymes, Dell 11 IALS see International Adult Literacy Surveys identity childcare workplace writing and 74–5, 85 healthcare related writing and 155–6, 158–9 online writing and 118–20, 123 shop signs and 200–1 urban spaces and 201–2 illiteracy Lahire’s critique of dominant discourses of 18–19 immutable mobiles 13 inscriptions 48 inscription devices 21

on monuments see monumental inscriptions institutional sponsors 12–13 instrumental writing of patients 159–60 International Adult Literacy Surveys (IALS) 19 interpersonal relationships childcare centres 84 interviews farmers 100 health-related writing practices 147–8 notebook keeping practices 129 Iuso, Anna 213 Joly, N. 23–4 judicial culture polygraphy and 41 knowledge construction role of writing in 24 transformation of data into reliable information 58–62, 63 Koutsogiannis, D. 124 Krafft-Ebing, R. von 217 Kress, G. 171 labelling practices notion 38 personal notebooks 134–5 road signs and signposting 37–9 laboratory technicians document handling 53–5, 63 ethnography of writing 51–3 identification of relevant data by reading 55–8 invisible work 62–4 production of reliable information 58–62 writing and scientific contribution 48, 64–5 Lacassagne, Alexandre 215–16, 217 Lae, J.-F. 213 Lahire, B. 15, 20, 23 criticism of dominant discourses of illiteracy 18–19 Goody’s influences 21

Index Lalyame, Louis 193 Lalyame, Pierre 193 language and style farmers’ writings 95–6, 103 French epigraphic language of legitimation 194–7 online writings 115–16, 118–20 personal notebooks 132–3 Language and Work network 48 Latour, B. 13, 21, 38 Laupts, Dr. 220 lawful public writings 191 17th century Lyon 197–202 learning of vernacular literacy practices 110, 120, 122–3 leisure documentation in postcards 185–6 Leont’ev, A. N. 82 letters medical investigation of sexuality and 215–17 libel documents see defamatory libel documents linguistic anthropology 6, 127–8 linguistic ethnography 14, 68, 127 lists farmers’ 97–100, 102 literacy 8 autonomous model 18, 19, 228 ideological model 18, 226, 228–9 in Mali 128–9, 130 literacy events 11, 12, 13 definition 87 in Mali 129 literacy practices 11–12, 126, 146, 225–6 Bourdieu’s conception 16, 226 healthcare related 146 in Mali 128 notebook keeping and 133 notion 11 see also pratiques de l’écrit literary studies 7 Luria, A. R. 82 Lyon 191–2 17th century displayed writings 25–6, 192, 209

237

magical incantations notebook keeping 137 Marcus, G. E. 5 McKenzie, D. F. 17 medicine package inserts 153–4 memorials in public spaces mass writing and 40–1 Ménestrier, Claude-François, Father 193 methodologies 17, 20 in anthropology of writing 9–10 ‘minor archives’ 214 Mitsikopoulou, B. 124 Mittérrand, François 213 monitor posters 204–5 monumental inscriptions 191, 193–7 multilingual literary practices notebook keeping and 132–3 online writing and 115–16, 118–20 multimodality 14 emails 171 online writings 113–15, 171 postcards 171–2 multiple activities and goals 81–2 childcare centres 83–6 naming of shops 38, 200–1 new literacy studies 3, 225 overview 11–14 notebooks 24, 126, 127, 142 ethnographic perspective 128–9 genres used 137–8 graphical separation of entries 135–7 languages used 132–3 materiality of 139–41 models for 138–9 organization of entries 140–1 patient 160 as personal property 141 thematic heterogeneity 130–2, 135 titles of 134–5 obituaries notebook keeping on 137–8 observation 20

238

Index

observations of children in childcare centres 70–3 challenges 74, 77–81 longer-term policy systems and 84–5 official displayed writings 191 17th century Lyon 192–7 Ofsted 69, 73 online writing practices 25, 109 healthcare and 161–2, 163 identity and 120, 123 imagined audience 120 multimodality 113–15, 171 as voluntary and self-generated 121–2 see also Flickr (photo sharing website) oral texts 4 ordinary writing see vernacular writing La Panetière Gaec 92–3 paperwork see farmers’ writings Papen, Uta 127 patient(s) authority of health practitioner and 149–50 disability allowance forms 159 informed view 150, 153 passive view 145, 153–5 patient labelling 155–6 texts generated by 159–62, 163 patient information leaflets 145, 148–53, 162 imposed texts 155–6 performative utterances 34, 42n. 2 personal communication 180–3 personal writing 126, 134 ethnographic perspective 127–8 models of 139 notebooks and 25, 127, 131, 135, 141 Phillips, T. 174 photography social uses of 122 see also Flickr pixaçao graffiti 34, 35 political activism writing acts and 33–4, 35–6, 39 polygraphy city-wide scale 40–1 judicial culture 41 Pontille, D. 22, 23

postcard(s) criticism 172–3 multimodality 171–2 ordinariness of writing 25, 170 representation of epistolary space 170–1, 178, 181 use in Britain 169 see also Edwardian postcards The Postcard Century (Phillips) 174 The Postcard Code: A Novel and Private Method of Communicating by Postcard (Bernard) 172 postcard code books 172 pratiques de l’écrit 15–16, 126 see also literacy practices prisoners forced writings on sexuality 214–15 privacy Edwardian postcards and 172 professional identity childcare workplace writing and 74–5, 85 public signs definition 207 libel 207–9 subways 22, 23 public writings 22, 23 see also displayed writings questionnaires on sexuality 218 Raffalovitch, André 219–20 rational thinking writing impact on 21, 22 reading Chartier on 15–16 identification of relevant data and 55–8 relational goals 84 road signs 37–8 Rolin, J. 34 school notebooks as model for personal notebook keeping 138 scientia sexualis 215–20 scientific management 104n. 2

Index Scribner, S. 11 September 11, terrorist attacks memorials in public spaces 40–1 sexual biographies 26, 214–17, 218–19 sexual diaries 221 shop signs 38, 191 female sign names 200–1 functional duality of 200–1 regulation and standardization 197–9, 201–2 signs road 37–8 shop 38, 191, 197–202 street 38–9 subway 22, 23 Sinor, J. 173 notion of ordinary writing 173, 188 slogans 34, 35–6 Smart, Graham 13 Smith, Dorothy 13, 18 social networking impact of new technologies on 121 social networking websites 112 social participation documentation in postcards 184–5 social standards postcards and 172–3 solicited diaries healthcare research and 221–2 solicited writings 26, 213–14, 222 on sexuality 215–17, 218–19, 221 speech act theory 34, 42n. 2 Street, Brian 11, 18, 19, 23 street signs 38–9 subway signs 22, 23 surveys on sexuality 219–20 Taylor, Frederick 104n. 2 technologies globalizing effects of 123–4 role as active agents 21 tolerated writings 191 UNESCO 228, 229 unlawful displayed writings 191 17th century Lyon 202–9

239

urban writings anthropological perspective 41–2 graffiti 33–6 labelling 37–9 polygraphy 40–1 regulation in 17th century Lyon 23, 201–2 vernacular languages vernacular literacy and 133 vernacular writing 10, 12, 109–10, 111–12, 213 Camitta’s conception 111 dominant literacy vs. 110–11 Fabre’s conception 19–20 informal learning of 110, 120, 122–3 language choice and 118–19, 133 multiplicity of 19 new technologies impact on 21, 109, 112 postcards as 25, 170, 173–5, 180–8 post-colonial societies 23, 127 re-evaluation of 25, 120–4 Sinor’s conception 173 Vygotsky, L. S. 82 Wenger, E. 13 What the Postman Saw 173–4 Whitehand, Kelly invisible contribution 50–65 widgets 115 wikis 112 Wittgenstein, L. 38 women informed view of healthcare 150, 153, 160, 163 passive view of healthcare 145, 153–5 patient labelling 155–6 postcard writing practices 176 pregnancy and health related information 148, 157–8, 160–2, 163 shop sign names and 200–1 workplace writings 24–5 accountability and 67, 90–1, 100–3 impact on professional identity 74–5, 85

240

Index

workplace writings (Cont’d) material and mundane features of work organization and 86 research studies 20, 22–3 writing as an act see acts of writing impact on rational thinking 21, 22 role in knowledge construction 24 as social practice 16–17, 18, 20, 24, 121 ‘Writing Culture’ (Clifford and Marcus) 5 writing events polygraphy and 40–1

writing on command 26, 213–15, 222 writing research approaches 7–9 cross-cultural and global phenomenon 5 cultural and intellectual bridging 226–8 relevance 5 traditions 3, 226–7 Yahoo 122, 124 Zola, Emile 220

Anthropology of Writing: Understanding Textually-Mediated Worlds

Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories

Medical Anthropology (Understanding Public Health)

Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories

Anthropology off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing

Anthropology off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing

Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration

Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science Fiction Writing

Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk

Anthropology and development: Understanding contemporary social change

Young Children Learning (Understanding Children's Worlds)

Exoplanets: Finding, Exploring, and Understanding Alien Worlds

Children Doing Mathematics (Understanding Children's Worlds)

City Worlds (Understanding Cities (London, England).)

Children and Play: Understanding Children's Worlds

Caribbean Genesis: Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds

Writing the World: Understanding William Stafford

Writing the Qualitative Dissertation: Understanding by Doing

Worlds

Dangerous Writing: Understanding the Political Economy of Composition

Essentials of Physical Anthropology

The Anthropology of Welfare

The Anthropology of Iceland

Anthropology of Religious Conversion

The Essence of Anthropology

The Anthropology of Organizations

The Anthropology of Ireland

The Anthropology of Experience

The Anthropology of Iceland

The Scope of Anthropology

The Anthropology of Magic

Anthropology of Writing: Understanding Textually-Mediated Worlds

Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories

Medical Anthropology (Understanding Public Health)

Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories

Anthropology off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing

Anthropology off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing

Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration

Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science Fiction Writing

Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk

Anthropology and development: Understanding contemporary social change

Young Children Learning (Understanding Children's Worlds)

Exoplanets: Finding, Exploring, and Understanding Alien Worlds

Children Doing Mathematics (Understanding Children's Worlds)

City Worlds (Understanding Cities (London, England).)

Children and Play: Understanding Children's Worlds

Caribbean Genesis: Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds

Writing the World: Understanding William Stafford

Writing the Qualitative Dissertation: Understanding by Doing

Worlds

Dangerous Writing: Understanding the Political Economy of Composition

Essentials of Physical Anthropology

The Anthropology of Welfare

The Anthropology of Iceland

Anthropology of Religious Conversion

The Essence of Anthropology

The Anthropology of Organizations

The Anthropology of Ireland

The Anthropology of Experience

The Anthropology of Iceland

The Scope of Anthropology

The Anthropology of Magic

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