Roots of Identity: Language and Literacy in Mexico 9781503623651

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Roots of Identity Language and Literacy in Mexico

LINDA KING

Roots of Identity Language and Literacy in Mexico

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

1994

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1994 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

CIP

data are at the end of the book

For Juan Jose and Natalia Fiona

Preface

This book is based on my doctoral thesis in Social Anthropology for the University of Oxford.* That thesis grew out of my work with Mexican illiterates between I98I and I986, when I was employed by the National Literacy Program in Mexico, first as research coordinator and then as coordinator of the literacy project for Mexican Indians. Most of my material was collected during this period, and I owe a special debt to the National Institute of Adult Education for giving me the opportunity to work in the field of adult literacy in both Indian and mestizo communities and for granting me a leave of absence in I984-85. I hope this volume will contribute to the development and definition of adult education policy, specifically as it affects Mexico's indigenous population. The book is a continuation of a concern with Mexican cultural and educational policy that began when I first went to Mexico to study anthropology as a British Council scholar in I972-73. I returned there in I 97 4 to work for a year as a teacher in the state educational system. In I 97 5 I undertook fieldwork in Indian primary schooling in the Highlands of Chiapas that was written up and presented at Oxford as an M.Litt. thesis in Social Anthropology in I978. The book thus represents the culmination of many years of work and research into the problematic nature of Mexican identity and its relation to the national education system-an area of study so complex and multifaceted that the book touches only the roots of the problem, namely language and literacy. I am particularly grateful to Peter Riviere for his constant support and invaluable supervision throughout the preparation of my doc*On deposit at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, shelfmark MS. D. Phil. c. 6647.

viii / Preface toral thesis. Without the understanding of my husband, Juan, and my daughter, Natalia, it is unlikely that the book would ever have reached completion. I should like also to express my gratitude to the British Council and to the trustees of the Radcliffe-Brown Memorial Fund for support during the final stages of the doctoral dissertation. Finally, I should like to thank Stanford University Press and in particular Bill Carver, who took the time and trouble to consider an obscure British doctoral thesis for publication in the United States. His contribution reshaped the original text not only structurally but, in certain parts, theoretically. I should also like to thank Karen Brown Davison for her patient and informed suggestions for editing the text. And I would especially like to thank Lynn Stewart for her meticulous revision of the text and for making the final publication of the book a reality. L. K.

Contents

Introduction PART I I.

I

Literacy: Myth and Reality

The Social Nature of Literacy

5

II

2. Pre-Hispanic Writing

24

3· Maya and Nahuatl During the Colonial Period

42

4· Contemporary Indigenous Literacy and the

Growth of Ethnicity PART II

s.

Language, Literacy, and Education

Language Groups in Mexico

56

79

8I

6. The Pattern of Illiteracy

IOO

7· Literacy Training for Mexican Indians

II3

PART III

The Discourse of the Illiterate

131

8. Indigenous Representations of Language and Literacy

135

9· The Expression of Illiteracy in the Mestizo World

153

Conclusion

167

x / Contents APPENDix:

Interviewing Sites

173

Glossary

177

References Cited

179

Index

189

Tables, Maps, and Figures

Tables I.

2. 3· 4· 5· 6. 7· 8. 9· 10.

II.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Chronology of Pre-Hispanic Civilization The Traditional Classification of Mexican Languages (As Employed by the National Census) The Groupings of Amerind Languages in Mexico (As Postulated by Current Linguistic Scholarship) Indian-Language Speakers in Mexico, 1980 Indian-Language Speakers in Mexico, 1990 Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers of the Main Indian Languages in Mexico, 1990 Historical Trend of Bilingualism and Monolingualism in Mexico Adult Illiteracy in Mexico, 1930-90 Adult Illiteracy in Mexico by Age and Sex, 1990 Distribution of Illiteracy in Mexico by State, 1980 and 1990 Mexican States with Highest Rates of Illiteracy Ethnic Groups Registered in the Mexican National Literacy Program Monolingual and Bilingual Adults Registered in the Mexican National Literacy Program Language Use in Literacy Classes in Mexico Monolingual Indians Registered in Literacy Classes in Mexico Oppositions in Mexico Between Native Languages and Spanish

26 84 8s 87 88 94 96 102 102 103 104 124 124 126 128 144

Maps I.

2.

Pre-Hispanic Production of Paper in Mexico The Languages of Mexico

27 86

xii / Tables, Maps, and Figures

Figures r.

Emblem Glyphs from Classic Maya Monuments Mayan Text from Yaxchilan 3· Examples of Aztec Glyphs 4· Textile Motifs from the Highlands of Chiapas

2.

32 33

40 76

Roots of Identity Language and Literacy in Mexico

This object in which power is inscribed, for all of human eternity, is language, or to be more precise, its necessary expression: the language we speak and write. -Roland Barthes Actually, the peoples said to be "without writing" lack only a certain kind of writing. -Jacques Derrida

Introduction

This book focuses on the relation between language and literacy in Mexico. It attempts to explain why the many Indian groups are today largely agraphic despite an indigenous literary tradition in both the pre-Columbian and colonial periods that is traceable through to the early years of this century. Today, most of Mexico's Indians, descendants of the pre-Hispanic peoples who settled in Mesoamerica, live in remote highland regions where access by road-if roads have been built at all-is impossible for as much as six months a year when the rains wash away the modest tracks. These regions can often be reached only by mule or on foot, and few strangers ever visit villages other than a cabecera municipal, the main town or village of the municipio, the local political unit. Because communications and transport are so limited in these regions and these Indian groups are so isolated culturally and linguistically, it is no surprise to find that the National Census records an illiteracy rate of over 70 percent in most Indian communities. In the Indian regions, the written word is of little importance as a means of communication. Of far greater impact is the radio. The National Indian Institute has set up radio stations that broadcast in several of the main Indian regions, both in Spanish and in the local Indian languages, and radio is frequently used by families and communities to exchange messages. Apart from the naturally hostile environmental conditions of the Indian regions, which make the transport of printed materials extremely difficult and thus impede the extension of writing as a mode of communication, the persistence of the Indian languages primarily explains the high illiteracy rate. Although alphabets have been created for most of Mexico's indigenous languages, there is no longer a literate tradition in these

2

I Introduction

languages, and writing is associated with the official and dominant language, Spanish, and, by extension, with the introduction of schooling. Moreover, although official rhetoric pays lip service to the concept of bilingual education in Spanish and in a local Indian language, and officials have gone so far as to produce local-language textbooks, in practice the Indian languages are subordinated to the official language, and few Indian children ever learn to read their mother tongue. The question of writing in the indigenous languages of Mexico is thus a polemical one, and an examination of the history of official language policy reveals a conflict centered on cultural identity and the place of the Indian in the emerging nation. During the course of Mexican history, whenever an indigenous literacy developed, it met one of two fates: it was outlawed, as was the case with hieroglyphic writing under Spanish rule, or the conditions for further development were lacking, as is the case with modern attempts to create writing systems for the Indian languages where the lack of modern printing techniques in the regions themselves or simply the economic inability to buy printed material has thwarted the extension of written texts. A common thread runs through the discussion on indigenous literacy, from the time of the earliest Spanish contact through to the present day. I argue that language and literacy have been a constant theme in the ideological debate over cultural identity, and despite the rhetoric of ethnic pluralism, many of the ideas and practices of the first colonizers continue to be reproduced-not at a conscious level, necessarily, but nonetheless via a consistent pattern that emerges and reemerges over time. One idea recurring throughout this book, then, both in the context of the historical development of writing in Mexico and in that of the contemporary educational projects that seek to extend written communication, is the equation of literacy with knowledge, and consequently with structures of power within society. Hence language, and by extension writing, is the expression of a group's accumulated knowledge over the dimensions of time and space, and the struggle for political power between different groups inhabiting the same geographical territory may turn upon the struggle for linguistic and literary ascendancy. In Mexico, writing and power have been associated with the Spanish language, while the lack of writing and a consequent powerlessness are symbolically tied to the indigenous population. Since the Conquest, the dominated ethnic groups and the ethnic group in power, whether the Spaniards, the creoles, or the mestizos,

Introduction I 3 have been engaged in a dialectical struggle for power, sometimes actively and openly but more often passively and covertly, and this conflict has yet to be resolved, particularly in the linguistic sphere. I suggest further that rather than succumbing to what many have seen as an inevitable cultural and linguistic assimilation, various of Mexico's ethnic groups are acquiring new power in the national political context and that the arena for the expression of these aspirations is, precisely, education. Young Indian intellectuals and bilingual schoolteachers-themselves, ironically, products of the state education system-are actively participating in the definition of official policy toward the Indians and exerting concomitant pressure on both mestizo intellectuals and the political system. There are over 6 million Indians in Mexico, constituting 58 different ethnic groups. Their particular will to survive is witnessed by their sheer numbers and by the fact that their identification rests more than anything else on the fact that they do not speak or write the dominant language as their mother tongue. The strength of these indigenous groups resides moreover in their ability to maintain (albeit in modified and acculturated forms) their essential cultural practices, at the core of which is language. Thus although in both colonial and modern Mexico the elite has debated the future of the Indians, the latter have continued to reproduce their group identity through the maintenance of linguistic and cultural boundaries. How these boundaries have been built over time and how they continue to be maintained throughout the twentieth century form the substance of this text. From a methodological point of view, and in terms of the study of ideology, the structure of the book broadly follows three levels of analysis, corresponding to Parts I, II, and III. In Part I the main concern is to place the understanding of language and literacy in Mexico in its social context. First, I address the problem of defining literacy and the often exaggerated claims that have been made for its introduction into previously nonliterate groups or societies in relation to theories of social and economic development and with regard to language and literacy. Second, I trace the indigenous literary tradition in Mexico from the earliest development of Mesoamerican writing systems to the linguistic and cultural conflict that followed the Spanish colonization and that may still be observed today. Various themes that recur throughout the analysis at different points are introduced, namely, the "problem" of the Indian from the mestizo viewpoint, indigenous resistance to the imposition of alternative forms of social organization, the quest for national identity and the internal contra-

4

I Introduction

dictions it imposes, the importance of writing as an expression of a group's accumulated knowledge over time, the nature of literacy as a culturally embedded mode of communication, and the relation between language and power. This section establishes, therefore, the spatiotemporal setting of the study of language and literacy in Mexico, its relation to the Mexican state, and the conditions for the reproduction of specific ideologies with regard to writing, language, and identity. Part II is concerned with showing the way in which the mestizo classes create and reproduce the dominant ideology with regard to the nature of literacy and language use through social institutions such as the educational system and the official census on population. Specific themes introduced in the previous section are reconsidered from this perspective. These themes include the problem of defining (or failing to define) the "Indian"; the linguistic conflict present in Mexico and reflected in the complex pattern of bilingualism, mono lingualism, and linguistic diglossia; the relation between writing and power implicit in the way in which the educational system seeks to promote the use of written Spanish at the expense of the Indian languages; and the importance of considering literacy as a cultural practice rather than a neutral skill. Part III analyzes the ideology of language and literacy from the point of view of the subordinate groups involved, that is, the illiterate of Mexico, both Indians and mestizos. This third level of analysis relies on a detailed examination of the discourse of the illiterate recorded at different times and in different areas of the country. It attempts to link up the first two levels of analysis to present a complete vision of the way in which ideology is created and diffused and of the complex organization and interplay of ideas that may revolve around the question of language and literacy and the related themes presented in the first and second parts of the book. It is in this third part that many of the themes explored earlier find their crystallization in the expression of the illiterate: the relations between language and identity, language and power, and writing and knowledge; the linguistic and cultural conflict in Mexican society; and the place of the Indian in the national context.

Part I

LITERACY: MYTH AND REALITY

If in the pre-Hispanic world the production and reproduction of the written word was widespread, following the Conquest and indeed up until the present day the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica have survived in both written and oral form through mechanisms of subterfuge and dissimulation in the face of the imposition of the Spanish language. A discussion of indigenous literacy in Mexico therefore requires an analysis of the linguistic conflict that occurred following the colonization of the Americas by Spain and that continues largely unresolved in many parts of the continent. Although the official language of the colony and the independent nation was Spanish, this meant little to the Indians, whose ultimate loyalty lay with the community and its leaders. Even in contemporary Mexico the idea of national unity is alien to individual Indians, whose allegiance is to the endogamous community and who express their identity through language. Tzeltal Indians, for example, refer to themselves as Tzeltal-speakers of a specific community; other Tzeltal-speaking communities are classified as "foreign" although linguistic similarity is recognized. The majority of indigenous groups commonly conceive "Mexico" as a powerful people with whom it is important to negotiate, for which purpose Spanish is a useful linguistic tool. In this sense there is a historical continuity between the preHispanic and the contemporary situations. Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the home of the Mexica peoples of the Aztec Triple Alliance, extended its influence throughout Mesoamerica not through enforced linguistic assimilation but through intermediaries who practiced a restricted literacy in the language of the empire, Nahuatl. The analysis of this linguistic conflict in the particular context of the discussion of indigenous literacy provides an illuminating perspective from which to view the meeting of cultures-the Spanish will to conquer versus the indigenous refusal to submit.

6 I Literacy: Myth and Reality

The pre-Hispanic peoples of Mesoamerica made extensive use of writing in both secular and religious affairs, and the Spaniards, like other colonial and usurping powers, were quick to realize the dangers inherent in the literary preservation of indigenous knowledge. They therefore set out to destroy it. The response of the colonized, however, was to reproduce these forms secretly. Though the invading culture could physically destroy the material manifestations of Mesoamerican society, it could not suppress them completely. Books were burned, whole cities were razed, and intellectual leaders were tortured and assassinated. Yet the Indians survived, mainly because of the linguistic barriers between the two cultures that resulted in a form of cultural apartheid. From the outset, New Spain was a fiction, existing only in the eyes of the Crown. The geographical and social separation of the Indians and the Spaniards enabled the majority of the inhabitants of the newly acquired territory to adhere to forms of pre-Hispanic organization and belief, resulting in separate republics of the Indians and the Spaniards. It was true that economic organization changed to suit the requirements of the European market, and that the Catholic church undertook the spiritual conquest of the Indians, but the fact that the indigenous population was intentionally isolated from the colonial Spanish society, subject even to different legislation and administration, ensured its development and reproduction as a culturally distinct category. New Spain was superseded by the independent nation, Mexico, and the internal contradictions posed by the existence of millions of non-Spanish-speaking Indians created a crisis of identity that in many ways continues in Mexican society today. If independence was the negation of the Conquest, it had to derive its legitimacy from the precolonial past; ironically, however, the independence movement was led by creoles, sons of Spaniards born in the New World. The Revolution did little to solve the essential dilemma, for the group that emerged as dominant following the revolutionary movement was composed of mestizos, descendants of both Spaniards and Indians. But the Indian past refused to submit; indeed, the national symbols of Mexico are the heroes of Mesoamerica. The country's very name derives from its Aztec heritage and reflects the ancient Nahuatl-speaking group's allegiance to Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Emblazoned on the Mexican flag is an eagle perched on a cactus and holding a serpent in its beak, illustrating the Aztec myth regarding the origins of Aztec civilization. Yet the true survivors of Mesoamerica do not recognize the existence of the nation. To claim legitimacy,

Literacy: Myth and Reality I 7 therefore, the Mexican state must incorporate the Indians and integrate them into the mainstream of Mexican national identity based on mestizo culture. The political and ideological necessity of this fusion of the Indian with the mestizo led to the establishment of the indigenista movement, which sought to integrate the Indian through the gradual eradication of specific cultural practices, principally language. But the indigenista theory was founded on an essential misunderstanding of the cultural reality of Mexico. The term "Indian" was a hangover from a colonial past that designated the non-Spanish, the Other, the colonized, as Indian. The Indian, however, came into existence as a historical error; from the moment that Columbus claimed to have charted a shorter sea route to the Indies while in reality" discovering" America, the inhabitants of the new lands were designated "Indians." The category persisted because the colonizers needed to name the inhabitants of the New World they had founded. It was unimportant that the natives of Mesoamerica did not themselves identify as a specific group; what mattered was that they were different from the Europeans. Hence the diverse cultural and ethnic groups living in Mesoamerica were grouped generically together as "Indians." In an attempt to come to terms with the cultural contradictions imposed by independence, the term "Indian" came to be replaced by that of indigena. The new constitution declared all citizens of Mexico equal before the law regardless of racial mixture. And the term "Indian" was considered to imply racial prejudice. The replacement of "Indian" by "indigena," however, did little to resolve the essential dilemma, which resided in the dominant mestizo group's need to define itself. Classifying the non-Spanishspeaking population of Mexico based on difference, on the fact that it does not form part of the discourse of power but is rather the silent and the unknown, negates the essential diversity of Mesoamerican culture. The ruling elites at national and regional levels are largely unaware of the extreme complexity and diversity of cultures to be found in the national territory, and Indians are referred to in the diminutive as inditos, objects of pity or curiosity for foreign tourists and anthropologists, remnants of Mexico's pre-European history, and targets for modernization and development programs. The term indio, moreover, has come to be used as an insult, implying that someone is slow or stupid. Nevertheless, and partly as a result of the limited fruits of the indigenista policy, a new class of Indian representatives is emerging and appropriating the discourse of power for ends of political control.

8

I Literacy: Myth and Reality

Since the mid-1970's semiofficial and independent organizations have sprung up, and language has been a central organizing factor around which political loyalties group at a regional rather than community level. Foucault (1972) maintains that power is inherent in discourse, not only in content but also in the possibility of expression. Discourse is both subject and object of power: it is the means by which struggles are expressed but also the arena in which ideological debate takes place. The right of expression therefore becomes a power within societyi it not only accedes to the legitimacy of what is expressed, but also provides the possibility of dominating through discourse. This approach is useful in analyzing the linguistic conflict in Mexico. Historically, the possibility of expression in the indigenous languages, and particularly in their written form, diminished as the power of the dominant language increased. Mechanisms of exclusion determined the nonparticipation of Mexico's indigenous population in the discourse of power, especially in matters that affected their interests. Only recently has the bureaucracy that grew up around official indigenista policy begun to take account of the Indian in the determination of specific policies. This new approach, indigenismo de participaci6n (participatory indigenismo), however, was made possible only by the increasing number of Indian organizations demanding a say in their own affairs and directly challenging the authority of the dominant mestizo intellectuals in their interpretation of the linguistic and cultural conflict in Mexico. This is not to say that there was no previous resistance to the structure of power relations by indigenous groups in Mexico. On the contrary, there were innumerable uprisings against Spanish rule until the early r 9oo's, and this dissension is still expressed in local conflicts with mestizos. Furthermore, the very continuance of alternative forms of social organization is proof of resistance to the cultural and linguistic integration sought by the mestizo majority. Hence "power is not an institution, nor a structure, nor a possession. It is a name we give to a complex strategic situation in a particular society" (Foucault 1979:93). The entrance of certain Indian groups into the arena of power relations that control the official discourse on Indian policy was ironically made possible by one of the main arms of the indigenista movement, an educational system that sought to control through assimilation. Hence the educational system became a means of appropriating discourse, with the knowledge and power this brought with it. And it is precisely because they have appropriated the dominant mode of discourse that these new Indian represen-

Literacy: Myth and Reality I 9

tatives have been able to exert an influence over government policy. The most articulate of these groups represent bilingual schoolteachers and ethnolinguists employed in government departments, and it is in the sphere of education and language policy that they have presented the greatest challenge. An examination of indigenista discourse, as contained in official declarations and legislation, shows it to have alternated ever since the Conquest between two dialectical positions: the recognition of indigenous languages and their place in a pluricultural nation, including the right to education in the mother tongue, and the gradual elimination of the native languages in favor of the national language, principally through the employment of the official language in the schools. Historically, government policy has tended to veer between these two extremes, but ever-present in the intellectual and bureaucratic discourse has been an ambiguity of meaning with regard to the future of the Indian population. This dualism or conflict within the discourse of power is an ideological reflection of the cultural reality of the country, of its unique historical development, and of its quest for identity as a nation. Mexico is a fusion of Mesoamerican and European civilizations, and modern Mexicans consider themselves the descendants of both cultural traditions. The present is the meeting ground for both. In Part I, I place the discussion of literacy in the context of Mexican history. Chapter r discusses some of the most important theoretical approaches to the nature of literacy in society, and Chapters 2, 3, and 4 describe the place of writing in pre-Hispanic, colonial, and contemporary Mexico.

CHAPTER I

The Social Nature of Literacy

THE DEFINITION OF LITERACY

Literacy has become so inextricably tied to definitions of "civilization," "development," "modernization," "rationality," and the like that it is automatically associated with alphabetic writing and the mass-produced printed word. Yet writing has existed in many different cultural and linguistic forms throughout history. In Mexico, writing had developed well before the Spaniards introduced an alphabetic script and the printing press. Nevertheless, Europeans dismissed the Mesoamerican books as "paintings," despite the fact that mere paintings would not have required deciphering, as these books did; in some cases, such as that of the Mayan writing system, this deciphering is not yet complete. Even contemporary anthropologists and historiographers of writing have fallen into this ethnocentric trap, which derives not only from the European model of writing but also from evolutionary thinking, which requires the necessary development from the "simple" to the "complex," the "inferior" to the "superior," the "savage" to the "civilized," and, inevitably, the "preliterate" to the "literate." Much of the modern insistence on the need for mass campaigns to extend literacy as a universal mode of communication derives from certain assumptions about the nature of alphabetic writing, in particular its supposed influence on social and economic development and its relation to modes of thought. By the same token, illiteracy is a problem to be "eradicated," "combated," "eliminated." It is a black spot on a country's development record and is perceived as a social disease of which modernizing countries desperately seek to rid themselves. 1 Yet in a sense illiteracy does not exist, for it is the absence or r. See UNEsco (1957) for an example of the way illiteracy is commonly described in these terms in the literature.

I2

I

LITERACY: MYTH AND REALITY

negation of writing. Hence to be illiterate implies that literacy, or the social practice of reading and writing, is central to any given society, a measure against which its members are classified. Although literacy may be the norm in Western industrialized nations, in that the written word is commonly and extensively used as a mode of communication, there are many societies that are nonliterate. They are nonliterate, however, only by differentiation from our own, in which an alphabet produces texts that operate as a mode of communication independent of speech. Illiteracy exists, therefore, only by virtue of contrast and opposition to literacyi the condition for its disappearance or elimination is the emergence of literacy, that is, the predominance of the written word as a form of communication at a specific moment and in a specific society. Writing has been used as a boundary marker between the "primitive" and the "civilized" since the beginnings of anthropology, and it still features either explicitly or implicitly in most anthropological theory. Morgan, for example, identified writing as one of the chief factors in determining the transition to civilization: "The use of writing, or its equivalent in hieroglyphics upon stone, affords a fair test of the commencement of civilization. Without literary records neither history nor civilization can properly be said to exist" (1964: 34). Tylor likewise expressed the view that civilization was ushered in with the invention of writing. He was one of the first to suggest that writing evolves over time and that "primitive" forms such as the "quipu" or knotted string were replaced by pictographic writing, which in tum was superseded by the development of phonetic writing, which he considered the highest form (1964: 60-90, 133). The Boasian school of cultural relativists rejected the notion of "preliterate" societies with their introduction of the term "nonliterate." "Preliterate," they maintained, implied an evolutionary process, suggesting that societies without alphabetic writing were at an earlier, and therefore inferior, stage of development. Nevertheless, even the cultural relativists took writing, or rather the absence of writing, to be the distinguishing feature of those societies most warranting anthropologists' attention. Levi-Strauss, for example, states explicitly that writing marks the point at which Western civilization "took off": "We must refer to an essential acquisition of culture which was the pre-condition of that totalization of knowledge and utilization of past experience that we feel, more or less intuitively, to have been the source of our civilizationi the conquest to which I am referring is writing" (Charbonnier I 969: 26). It is, moreover, a major factor in distinguishing what we mean by "primitive": "There have been primitive societies with

The Social Nature of Literacy I r 3 a caste system. India, which is not a 'primitive' society since it had a form of writing, is certainly not the only society of this type" (p. 34). Primitive societies are by definition, therefore, preliterate. Writing assures a society's claim to civilization. The role of writing is something that Levi-Strauss reflects upon throughout his thinking on the dividing line between the "primitive" and the "civilized" mind. On another occasion he goes so far as to state: "After eliminating all other criteria which have been put forward to distinguish between barbarism and civilization it is tempting to retain this one at least: there are peoples with or without writing." But Levi-Strauss resists the temptation to go the whole way, for in the same breath he continues: "Yet nothing we know about writing and the part it has played in man's evolution justifies this view" (1978: 391 ). Goody, who has been influential in British anthropology for calling attention to the importance of writing in traditional societies and particularly its role in shaping the patterns of human thought, has accused fellow anthropologists of "neglecting to examine the implications of the very feature which is so often used to define the range of societies with which they claim to be dealing, namely, the presence or absence of writing" (r968: r). Yet he does not question why writing more than any other feature of technology or intellect should be taken as the dividing line between what constitutes the "savage" and the "domesticated." His argument, in both Literacy in Traditional Societies (r968) and The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), revolves around the distinguishing features of human thought that may be associated with literacy, and yet he uses these features to explain the very division that he is suggesting. Street, one of Goody's principal critics, has argued that anthropologists would do well to move away from the dichotomy between oral and literate societies and examine instead the interrelations between these two modes of communication. Citing Finnegan's work, he maintains that the division of societies between oral and literate proves on closer inspection to be false. Societies that were commonly assumed to be primarily oral have been influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the presence of the written word or of individuals who were literate. Though this may be true, it does not tell us much. Mere contact with the written word does not of itself guarantee a mixing of the modes of communication in society, and it does not explain why writing should be considered so crucial as a form of symbolic communication. What Street seems to be arguing is that the dichotomy between oral and literate cultures commonly presented in the anthropological literature is an artificial division because sup-

I4

I

LITERACY: MYTH AND REALITY

posedly "oral" cultures were all the time in contact with a written culture. Nevertheless, by questioning the preeminence of writing as a measure for defining "other cultures," he brings us back to what should be the central concern of the anthropologist, that is, the understanding of modes of communication in their specific cultural context. Traces of evolutionary thinking in both anthropological and historiographic texts on the subject of writing abound. If writing is not credited with having pushed Western civilization into existence, it is at least cited as the boundary marker between "them" and "us." Even attempts to examine cultures on their own terms come perilously close to establishing taxonomies of predominantly oral and predominantly literate cultures, with cultures in which the two are mixed operating at some intermediate stage of development or evolution. Most histories of writing take the view that pictographic writing is an earlier and less developed form than the alphabetic or phonetic script (Diringer 1953; Gelb 1952; Moorhouse 1953) and typically represent the history of writing as having passed through the following stages: pictographic, logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic. But although one can point to the derivation of alphabetic writing from the Semitic syllabaries created during the second millennium, it is quite another question to assume that because the Greek alphabet grew out of earlier systems, all writing systems have an inherent tendency to develop toward the phonetic script. As Derrida has forcefully argued, this interpretation indicates not only an ethnocentric bias but, by implication, a phonocentric or logocentric mode of thought (I 984: 3 ). Although, for example, Mayan and Aztec scripts presented certain features of phonetic writing systems, it does not necessarily follow that they would have become completely phonetic had they not been abruptly prohibited by the Spanish colonizers. We may argue, then, that where there is still a strong emphasis on memorized oral narrative to accompany the written text, such as in Maya and Aztec societies, the need for a script such as the alphabetic, which would directly represent speech, may not be felt. Hence, although the technical possibility of phonetic writing may be present, as was the case with Mesoamerican scripts, that fully phonetic systems did not develop was a result of the demands and tradition of writing in these cultures. It would appear that alphabetic writing, once it did make its appearance, was still closely connected to the oral tradition. Clanchy's analysis (1979) of the introduction of literacy into the medieval En-

The Social Nature of Literacy I

I

5

glish world would suggest that there was a continuing mix of modes of communication until the written mode, legitimized by the Normans as the only valid proof of title to inheritance or landholding, gained prominence. Furthermore, it was only with the introduction of the alphabetic letterpress that the idea of text as something separate from oral narrative came into being. Handwritten manuscripts, probably because of the uniqueness of each page of writing combined with the slowness of reproduction, continued to be largely orally based. Memorization was common, and the patterning of the text followed the earlier mnemonic tradition (Ong 1982: II9). It was not so much writing, therefore, as the transcription of writing into the printed word that had such a momentous impact upon modes of communication. The tendency to isolate the absence or presence of writing as a variable that would explain differences between societies has led to exaggerated claims for the consequences of literacy by the different academic disciplines. These claims have influenced the orientation of planned social change in developing countries. More often than not, however, theories have been colored by the personal convictions of individual researchers rather than by substantiated evidence. In his analysis of academic research on literacy, Street (1984) has argued for the distinction between what he terms "ideological" and "autonomous" models of literacy. By the former, he means theories that consider the culturally embedded nature of literacy; by the latter, the more common practice of separating writing from other social practices and considering it a neutral skill that is context-free. In general, most theories supporting the view that literacy may effect changes either at an individual, psychological level by fostering abstract, logical thought or at a social and economic level by promoting modernization and development correspond to the "autonomous" model. Only recently have the assumptions behind this notion of literacy as a technical skill been reconsidered, principally among anthropologists and social historians who have sought to demonstrate that there is no necessary causal connection between literacy and cognitive structure or between literacy and economic development (Graff I979; Clanchy 1979; Street 1984; Finnegan 1973). LITERACY AND DEVELOPMENT

Literacy is usually singled out as one indicator of a country's development, along with per capita income, modernization, and technological advance. The major and perhaps most influential pro-

r6 /

LITERACY: MYTH AND REALITY

ponent of this view has been Anderson (1966), who has argued that a 40 percent literacy threshold must exist before economic development can take place. Anderson analyzed historical evidence from four industrially developed countries: Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, and France. His conclusion regarding the relation between a literacy threshold and economic growth has been applied to other countries, and educational level is now seen as an important prerequisite of economic development in the Third World. Blaug, for instance, writing on the economics of education in developing countries, uses Anderson's conclusions in his discussion of the cost-benefit advantages of planning adult literacy campaigns (r 97 4: 64, 2 54). He suggests that literacy may contribute to economic development by raising productivity, reducing the cost of transmitting information, stimulating the demand for vocational training, and strengthening economic incentives (p. 248). Illiteracy, therefore, equals underdevelopment, and, depending on whether planners in developing countries opt ,for rapid or gradual economic growth, they may choose between launching a mass literacy campaign or expanding primary schooling. This association of literacy with economic development was one of the motivating forces behind the creation of the Mexican National Literacy Program in 1981. Fernando Solana, secretary of education at the time, described the aims of the program: If we can make one million adults literate, they can use this skill to learn other trades, to increase productivity, or for recreation. In short, they will improve the quality of their lives and we will have significantly reduced the rate of illiteracy. Even more important is the fact that we will have given new life to one million of our countrymen. We will all benefit from their greater participation in the economic, political, and social life of the nation. (sEP 1981:5)

The equation between national and economic development is particularly important in the context of literacy in Mexico. The 1984 Literacy Plan, for example, states the question as a national political problem: "It is difficult to speak in terms of strengthening local government or decentralizing national life and above all of national unity when one in every seven Mexicans is unable to read and write" (INEA 1983a: 8). Literacy is viewed as a panacea not only for creating national unity, enabling communication between individuals andregions, but also as a means of increasing productivity and the technical efficiency of the work force.

The Social Nature of Literacy I I7

Schmelkes (r98r) has outlined four conceptions of the relation between literacy and development, with particular reference to Latin America. First is the notion that literacy is a good in itself, "the first rung in the possession of basic culture." Second is the assumption that literacy is an independent variable of development. Hence the ability to read and write is seen as crucial for the implementation of development programs but is only one important factor among many. The third position maintains that literacy is an intervening variable in the process of economic development. This premise that literacy is specifically related to changes in social and economic organization and should therefore be an essential component in development programs is behind most programs of work-related literacy campaigns. The fourth conception sees literacy as a dependent variable, that is, a consequence of the development process itself. This final conception is the one that has been most readily supported by recent empirical research. The more contact a person has with an urban culture, the more likely he or she is to be literate. Nevertheless, this relation has been largely ignored in the planning of literacy campaigns, and it has unquestionably been assumed that if rural adults were taught to read and write, they would become literate. Literacy, however, requires a cultural context in which to prosper, and rural areas of Mexico and other parts of Latin America are composed of small-scale societies dominated by oral communication. The point is not that rural people are illiterate but rather that urban societies have needed to develop universal literacy in order to establish communicative links between individuals participating in a constantly shifting and changing large-scale community. Hence it is only when rural illiterates come into contact with urban culture, as in the case of migrant labor, that they experience the urgent need to learn to read and write. Many of the claims made for the relationship between literacy and development have more to do with the establishment of a system of universal education than with the extension of writing as a means of communication. Hence economic growth is not fostered by literacy per se but by schooling that is closely connected with industrial modes of production (see Bowles and Gintis 1976). Graff (1979), for example, believes that it was not literacy in itself but literacy training that was crucial in the industrialization process in Canada. The hidden curriculum of schooling prepared the working class for integration into the factory and eased the transition from rural agri-

r8 /

LITERACY: MYTH AND REALITY

cultural labor to the shop floor. 2 Likewise, it was no coincidence that in England, the Factory Act of r 802 required owners of cotton and wool mills to establish schoolrooms in their factories (Cipolla 1969: 67). A parallel in contemporary Mexico is the law that makes it compulsory for companies to provide work training for their employees. The underlying assumption behind the thesis that literacy promotes economic development has its origin more in certain conceptions regarding the nature of a" developed" society, with all the traces of evolutionary thinking that this implies, than in the proven worth of reading and writing for spurring productivity and economic growth. In much the same way, countries that have recently undergone radical social and political changes organize mass literacy campaigns as symbolic proof that oppression has been eliminated and a new society is arising. There is no necessary relation between universal literacy and political democracy, yet one of the first acts of revolutionary governments in many parts of the world is to teach the illiterate population to read and write. The alphabet is frequently referred to as the democratic script, in contrast to logographic or hieroglyphic scripts, which tended to be controlled by priestly or intellectual classes. Its extension as a mode of communication, therefore, is associated with human equality and the right of access to information. Undeniably, however, the motives of different political regimes in launching literacy programs must also be seen in terms of their efforts to spread political propaganda in written form, thus ensuring the "democratic" participation of the electorate within the nation-state. LITERACY AND COGNITION

The separation of literacy as an independent variable has also been used to explain features of thought in certain societies. Approaches range from those of anthropologists, who associate the qualities of writing with structures of the mind, to those of psychologists, who identify literacy as a means of promoting abstract, logical thought. Goody has been the most influential proponent of this view within social anthropology. In an article written with Watt in 1963, he argues that literacy promotes a more complex relationship to language than does oral communication, in which the word is more closely linked to its referent in a process of direct semantic ratifica2. Bernstein's (r 966) research into ritual practice in schools illustrates this point further.

The Social Nature of Literacy I 19

tion (in Goody, ed., 1968: 28). Language is conceived as an essential element of a homeostatic model of society in which what is stored or forgotten is processed through language, principally vocabulary. In a literate society, however, there emerge successive layers of historically validated meanings that depend on writing for their reproduction. Words no longer refer to the immediate concrete situation in which they are used but are displaced through the written sign over space and time. The development of writing, and here Goody and Watt refer specifically to the alphabetic script, in turn fosters the development of logic, which they see as arising out of the more general and abstract relationship established between a word and its referent (p. 44). Moreover, it was the alphabet that permitted the manipulation of ideas and premises central to forms of logical reasoning such as the syllogism. The "process of dissection into abstract categories," by the same token, "leads to the Greek division of knowledge into autonomous cognitive disciplines which has since become universal in Western culture and which is of cardinal importance in differentiating literate and non-literate culture" (p. 54). In his later work on the relation between writing and cognitive structures, however, Goody attempts to move away from a strictly casuistic interpretation toward an understanding of the implications of changes in the means of communication in specific societies. In general terms he reiterates much of the argument of his earlier work: writing changes the nature of discourse, eliminating the necessary personal contact of speech and increasing the potential of cumulative, abstract knowledge (1977: 37). The setting down of language on paper, moreover, permits the analysis of inconsistency and contradiction within discourse in a way that would be impossible in the analysis of an oral statement (pp. 49- 50). 3 Goody extends the notion of literacy to include not only the essence of alphabetic or phonetic writing but also the graphic devices employed by literate cultures-tables, lists, and the like-which, he argues, reduce oral complexity to graphic simplicity. These devices also reflect fundamental changes in the nature of cognitive processes, which arose out of the new "technology of the intellect" (p. 8 r ). Hence the presentation of information in the form of lists requires a kind of mental processing distinct from other means of linguistic communication. Ac3· The essential function here, however, is one of recording rather than specifically of writing. Hence it must be assumed that fixing oral discourse in time on a cassette recording, for example, permits the same kind of analytical activity. What is significant may not be the specific tool employed (that is, the pen or the cassette recorder) but rather the purpose for which it is used.

20

I

LITERACY: MYTH AND REALITY

cording to Goody, the list makes categories more visible and more abstract; it establishes the necessity of boundaries and of a beginning and an end to the information being communicated. This process, however, is possible only with an alphabetic script (p. r ro). Goody thus concludes that writing plays a special role in what he terms the "domestication" of the savage mind, for writing encourages special forms of linguistic activity associated with raising and solving problems, in which the list, the formula, and the table play a seminal part (p. r62). Goody's critics, principally Clammer and Street, have accused him of overstating the case. Whereas Goody claims that he is not offering a unicausal explanation for the development of, among other features of human thought, logic, they argue that a technological determinism runs throughout his work on literacy. Features of human thought that Goody and Watt associate specifically with the literate mind are also present in many so-called oral cultures. The savage mind is no less likely to use lists and formulas than the domesticated. Indeed, taxonomies, genealogies, mnemonic formulas, and the like are cognitive features of cultures that lack the written technology to record crucial information by any other means. Hence the question must surely be not whether literacy established or encouraged certain features of human thought such as list making but rather whether this tendency to order information may have spurred the development of forms of graphic representation. Furthermore, the list, or its representation in written form, does not rely exclusively on an alphabetic script. One has only to refer back to the Aztec custom of recording tribute lists in their mixed pictographic and phonetic script for an example of nonalphabetic list making. A further problem associated with claims for the influence of literacy on forms of human thought is that there is no such thing as an exclusively literate society. All human society is based on speech, in its different cultural and linguistic manifestations. It is, therefore, exceedingly difficult to isolate those features of cognitive processes that may or may not have arisen from the development of writing in any given society. And of course within the so-called literate society there may be many groups or individuals who are not literate or are only partially so. I would suggest, then, that many of Goody's claims for the universal role of writing in determining certain features of human thought may be more fruitfully examined from the point of view of language itself, in terms of the relation between language and cognitive processes and of the way writing affects linguistic structure and vice versa. This perspective helps clarify both the slowness with which many oral cultures adopt literate modes of communication,

The Social Nature of Literacy I

2I

even when writing may have made its appearance generations previously, and the tendency to reject literacy in the previously unwritten language on the grounds of its unsuitability to written form. From an individual, as opposed to a social, perspective, many developmental psychologists have associated literacy with changes in the cognitive structures of those who have recently learned to read and write. The founding father of this approach within psychology was Luria (1971), who carried out research among illiterate and literate Uzbek peasants of Central Asia during the 1930's. He found that literate peasants were capable of forming abstractions and of making logical, syllogistic inferences, whereas illiterate peasants were unable to give words any abstract value, relating them only to the objects for which they stood. The problem with Luria's thesis, like those of many later developmental psychologists (see, for example, Bruner and Greenfield I974i Modiano and Maccoby 1966), is that it fails to deal adequately and distinctively with the variable of schooling. In other words, literacy, that is, the social practice of reading and writing, is used synonymously with schooling, and writing is held to account exclusively for differences in cognitive styles and processes between the schooled and the unschooled. 4 This view has much in common with the exaggerated claims of the developmentalists, who see in the simple ability to read and write the conditions for future social and economic development. It is my argument that writing is part of a set of socially induced forms of language use that determine the particular cognitive strategies employed by members of literate societies. Hence I suggest that it is not so much writing as a technical instrument that effects changes in cognitive strategies, but rather, in line with Bourdieu, that the particular culture in question promotes forms of language use intimately related to thought processes. Those whose "culture" (in the ethnologist's sense) is the academic culture conveyed by the school have a system of categories of perception, language, thought, and appreciation that sets them apart from those whose only training has been through their work and social contacts with people of their own kind (1971: 200). This in turn brings us back to the notion of the culturally embedded nature of writing and literacy practices in different societies. Thus it is not so much the isolated skill of learning to read and write that may influence changes in thought processes but rather the way the new skill is employed. 5 4· For a more detailed discussion of these arguments, see King (1978). 5. One must also be aware of the difficulties imposed by "translating" cultural content into abstract thought processes. See, in this respect, Horton (1971).

22

I

LITERACY: MYTH AND REALITY

Perhaps the most extreme version of technological determinism in the psychology of literacy derives from McLuhan's early theories about the effect of the printed word on sensory perceptions. Here we are dealing not so much with the nature of alphabetic writing as with the mass-produced printed text. McLuhan (r 962 J asserts that the medium of communication defines the ratio among the senses, so that whereas nonliterate cultures are predominantly oral-auditive, literate Western culture is dominated by the visual component at the expense of the other senses. McLuhan fails, however, to substantiate his claims for the nature of the relationship between the medium of communication and the particular sensory development that may occur. An earlier writer on the relation between mental categories and the written word, J. C. Carothers (1959), bases similar conclusions on research carried out among nonliterate African peoples. He claims that the African world was largely dominated by sound, in contrast to the visual world of the European. This difference was, moreover, fundamental for the nature of the development of thought processes. Nevertheless, he maintains that the introduction of the written word into previously nonliterate African cultures disturbed this balance, leading to the loss of the magical power of words when the immediacy of pronunciation was replaced by the distance of the written word. Pushing this point to an extreme, Carothers suggests that the presence or absence of the written word in a particular society may determine the nature of its collective psychology and subsequent patterns of mental disturbance. A later version of the McLuhan thesis appears in the work of Ong (r982), who attributes socially acquired sensory experiences to the presence or lack of writing: It will be seen that most of the characteristics of orally based thought

and expression ... relate intimately to the unifying, centralizing, interiorizing economy of sounds perceived by human beings. A sounddominated verbal economy is consonant with aggregative (harmonizing) tendencies rather than with analytic, dissecting tendencies (which would come with the inscribed visualized world). (p. 73)

In the light of this kind of determinism, it is perhaps reassuring to discover that psychologists such as Scribner and Cole have refuted many of the earlier exaggerated claims made for the introduction of writing into agraphic societies. In their analysis of the place of literacy among the Vai peoples of Liberia, where an indigenous writing system has flourished independent of formal schooling in which either English or Arabic is taught, they came to the conclusion that

The Social Nature of Literacy I 23

there was no fundamental psychological difference between literate and nonliterate peoples (I 98 I: 25 I). In their study of Vai literacy they were able to eliminate the variable of schooling from their research, something that had been impossible in earlier development psychology studies. Moreover, their research techniques were inspired more by the principles of anthropological fieldwork than by supposedly neutral and objective clinical tests. Their conclusions bring us back to one of the central premises of this book, namely, that literacy is a culturally embedded practice that may vary in its organization and function in different societies. To interpret writing as a neutral skill capable of exerting a transcendental influence over social, economic, and intellectual development is both to misinterpret history and to distort the future of nonliterate peoples.

CHAPTER 2

Pre-Hispanic Writing

ORIGINS OF THE MESOAMERICAN WRITING SYSTEMS

By the time of the Spanish Conquest in I 5 I 9, the Mesoamerican peoples had been versed in the art of writing for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. The earliest deciphered glyphs correspond to the Olmec period at Monte Alban in Oaxaca and have been dated at 6oo years B.c. Both the archaeological evidence and the accounts of later Mesoamerican peoples point to the invention of writing by the Olmecs, a mysterious civilization that developed on the Atlantic coast of Mexico and left its mark in other parts of the region, notably Oaxaca. The oral tradition of the Aztecs as related to Sahagun (one of the missionaries who sought to record the history and culture of the Aztecs following the Conquest) recalls the arrival of a people who inhabited the Gulf Coast and who brought with them the art of writing: A long time ago A time that no one can remember A time that no one can count The ancestors came Over the sea they came in many groups And they disembarked on the Northern coast And there they left their boats In the place called Panutla And they set off along the shore They went in search of mountains Some looked for the snowy mountains And the smoking mountains. Their priests guided them And showed them the way of their god

Pre-Hispanic Writing I 25 And they arrived later To the place called Tamoanchan Which means "we look for our house" And there in Tamoanchan were the wise men The so called owners of the codices. The owners of the black and red ink. 1

The Olmecs were the first to use the system of bars and dots for recording dates; their writing system was composed of at least I 82 glyphs (Davies I983 :46). Olmec civilization grew and declined between woo and 400 B.c. (see Table I). But from the beginning of the Christian era other cultures grew in Mesoamerica that likewise made use of the written word and valued books and intellectuals as the source of knowledge. The great city-state of Teotihuacan in central Mexico flourished from the first century B.c. to the ninth century A.D. Teotihuacan culture used not only ideographic glyphs but also the Mesoamerican calendar system, or Count of the Days. Sahagun, in Book X of the Codex Florentino, describes how, after the fall of Teotihuacan, "The wise men remained not long; soon they went. Once again they embarked and carried off the writings, the books, the paintings." (Davies I983: II2). This knowledge was passed on to other cultures developing in the Mesoamerican region: to the Mayas of the southeast by way of the Izapa culture on the Pacific coast, and in central Mexico to the Toltecs, Mexicas, Tetzcocans, and Tlaxcaltecs, among others. Toltec culture flourished between the ninth and eleventh centuries A.D. According to Leon Portilla, there are numerous references in the Aztec accounts describing the Toltec centers of learning where a great book called the Teoamoxtli (the divine book) was studied (I984: I6). And it was the Toltecs who passed on the art of writing to the Tezcocans and to other Nahuatlspeaking peoples, including the Mexicas, more commonly referred to as the Aztecs. 2 Hence by the time of the first European contact with the indigenous cultures of Mesoamerica, the Olmec, Teotihuacan, Toltec, r. Indian informants of Sahagun, recorded in the Codice Matritense de la Real Academia, fol. 191 v, cited by Le6n Portilla (1984: 19). 2. The Mexicas were one of three peoples, including the Tezcocans and the Tlacopans, who joined forces to conquer neighboring peoples and establish the Aztec Empire. The Mexicas referred to themselves as such, but it has become conventional usage to refer to them as Aztecs. The Mexicas were by the beginning of the sixteenth century the most powerful element in the so-called Triple Alliance, and historians have therefore tended to obscure the difference between Mexica and Aztec.

TABLE I

Chronology of Pre-Hispanic Civilization ~ ~,

~~M·=·,_,~~-~v-~

Middle Pre-Classic 1000-300 B.C. '"·"~~~--·~o ~o -~

~oo~·-~,~=ooo~~·•W'

Central Highlands

A.D. '''''~""-

·~ooo

-~~O>>~'M'


A.D.

~'>'~'''~ >~•'•'•'•'•M•~

,_

Aztecs enter Valley of Mexico, ca.l247; Aztec Empire, 1426-1519

Coast Olmec civilization, ca. 1000-400 B.c.

,._,,_,.,.

Peak of El Tajin Classic period ·--~~---

-----·--~·""""'""""'"""''"'~'"'~·~~=~»

-~~~--"'-"""'

Oaxaca Monte Alban, Phase I

,_.-=~--~-,,,,,

Monte Alban Phase II

''

-.-.,,,~"