A register perspective on historical change and the linguistic correlates of literacy

The studies discussed in chapters 6 and 7 have all been synchronic, identifying the dimensions of variation in four languages and describing the systematic similarities and differences among present-day registers in terms of those dimensions. This same analytical framework can be used to study historical change among registers, using the previously identified dimensions of variations to address two major research issues:

1. the linguistic development of an individual register – comparing the linguistic characteristics of a register along multiple dimensions across time periods;

2. historical change in the relative relations among registers – the diachronic patterns of register variation. For example, do spoken and written registers develop in parallel or divergent ways? Over time, do they become more similar or more distinct?

Investigations of this kind are especially important for literacy issues, considering the ways in which a language changes following the introduction of literacy and the early development of written registers. Specific research questions of this type include:

1. What are the linguistic characteristics of written registers when they are first introduced into a language? What linguistic models were used for written registers at that historical stage? Did written registers evolve from pre-existing spoken registers, from similar written registers in other languages, or from other sources?

2. How stable are written registers in the early stages of evolution? In what ways do they develop, and what are the motivating factors influencing change?

3. Do written varieties evolve independently or in shared ways? Do they evolve at a constant or variable rate? Do they evolve over time to become more different from spoken varieties and from one another?

Letter writing and reading are of relevance to several aspects of Nukulaelae social life. First, letters play an important role in monitoring economic exchanges between members of the community and the outside world. Second, letters are embedded in information-sharing networks, which weave in and out of orality and literacy and connect Nukulaelae people over large distances. Third, letters can carry moral messages that resemble in some respects the moral content of certain genres of face-to-face communication, but differ from them in other respects. Fourth, letters emerge as emotionally cathartic communicative events, a characteristic that colors all the other functions of letter writing. The social role that a particular letter plays depends in large part on the relationship of the writer and the addressee, and on whether the letter is sent to or from Nukulaelae. Furthermore, all letters, other than brief notes scribbled as the ship departs, straddle several functional categories: moral, economic, informational, and affective dimensions of letters are often inextricably interwoven with one another.

Letters and economic life

By far the most salient motive for writing letters is to monitor, record, stimulate, and control economic transactions associated with the exchange of gifts between Nukulaelae residents and their off-island relatives. As such, letter writing has become thoroughly incorporated into the socioeconomic life of the community and in the economic ties between the community and the rest of the world. Hand-delivered letters frequently accompany food baskets, packages, or gifts of money.

In Chapter 6, I analyzed the formal structure of written sermons and their relationship to oral performances, church services, and other forms of public discourse. In particular, I tackled the vexing problem of why written sermons exist at all, since there is ample evidence from other contexts in which public speaking figures prominently that many Nukulaelae preachers are accomplished orators with little use for written prompts. I demonstrated that written sermons are not just mnemonic tools, but that they carry a variety of more or less explicitly articulated cultural associations: they contribute to the sense of order in the church service; they are embedded in patterns of commodity exchange; and they have pedagogical functions. Yet their meaning is even more complex. In this chapter, I demonstrate that sermons (be they in oral or written form) have a particular relationship to the truth. Furthermore, the context of sermon performances is characterized by peculiar authority relations between participants and distinctive ways of defining personhood. Through an analysis of sermons as performances and texts, I will show that sermons contribute to the distinctiveness of the social context in which they are embedded.

In the following, I explore sermons as both literacy and orality events. When my discussion applies equally to both, I do not distinguish between them, and I illustrate my arguments with excerpts from both written and oral sermons without discussing the mode in which the data were produced.

Anthropological perspectives on literacy

Literacy has occupied a central position in the historical development of anthropological thought. During the formative decades of the field and its allied disciplines, literacy was implicated, more or less explicitly, as a determinant of differences between “civilized” and “primitive” thought and action (Durkheim and Mauss 1903, Maine 1873, McLennan 1876, Tylor 1874), scientific mentalities and prelogical thinking (Cassirer 1946, Lévy-Bruhl 1910, Luria 1976), open and closed systems (Popper 1959), pensée domestiquée and pensée sauvage (Lévi-Strauss 1962), and context-free and context-bound cognitive processes (Vygotsky 1962). Until the turn of the twentieth century, pointing to literacy as the pivot between “us” and “them” was a relatively simple task: literacy was defined as a more or less exclusive feature of Western life. Where it existed in the non-Western world, it had characteristics that gave it an inferior quality: for example, it was thought that learning to read and write in China required years of apprenticeship because of the apparently complex and unwieldy nature of the writing system. Similarly, in much of the Islamic world, literacy was described as being in the exclusive hands of a social élite, which prevented it from giving rise to an enlightened society. Only in the West, early anthropologists maintained, did literacy reach its apogee and thus enable the “general improvement of mankind by higher organization of the individual and of society, to the end of promoting at once man's goodness, power, and happiness,” as Tylor defined the rise to “civilization” (1874:1:27).

In the foregoing chapters, I investigated the social, ideological, and textual characteristics of literacy on Nukulaelae, and explored the implications that the two principal types of literacy have for a theoretical understanding of literacy in its social and ideological context. In this conclusion, I turn to the questions that an examination of the full panoply of Nukulaelae literacy practices and events raises. In other words, having presented an event-centered examination of literacy on the atoll, I now analyze the same material from what I called in the introduction a comparative-ethnographic stance.

The ethnographic study of literacy is part and parcel of the broader concerns that have driven anthropological thought since its early formulation (cf. Tambiah 1990): do modes of thought (or “mentalities”) share a common core in all societies? If so, what is this common core, and where is it located? If not, what is the quality of differences across modes of thought? What types of groups do the differences define? And are the differences mere elaborations of a universal grounding? To apply these questions to the investigation of literacy, one must first recognize that literacy, rather than transcending the social and the cultural, is embroiled in social and cultural processes. That literacy is entangled in social processes is demonstrated by the important role that it commonly plays in the formation and maintenance of inequality between social classes, women and men, and the center and the periphery.

Continuing in the historical vein of the previous chapter, I now turn to what can be termed loosely the “domains” of literacy on Nukulaelae. I first identify the languages with which literacy is associated. I then discuss the social history of schooling since the 1860s; while the rest of this book is primarily concerned with literacy outside of schools, a brief description of school literacy is nevertheless relevant. I then attend to the historical context of literacy, insofar as it can be distinguished from the historical evolution of schooling and religious conversion. The last section is an overview of the range of social settings in which reading and writing take place on the atoll. In this overview, I pay particular attention to “non-textual” literacy practices, i.e., the production and consumption of lists, slogans, notices, and other written materials of lesser substance and importance than letters, to which I devote Chapters 4 and 5, and sermons, the topic of Chapters 6 and 7.

Languages

Nukulaelae Islanders speak, write, and read a dialect of Tuvaluan. Other dialects of this language are spoken on seven of the eight other islands of the Tuvalu group (the inhabitant of Nui speak a dialect of Gilbertese, a Micronesian language). Its closest relatives are members of the Samoic-Outlier subgroup of Polynesian, which includes Samoan, Tokelauan, Futunan, Uvean (Wallisian), and the languages of all Polynesian Outlier societies enclaved in Melanesia and Micronesia (Pawley 1966, 1967).

No social arena is as suffused with literacy on Nukulaelae as religion. The religious service is the only regular occasion in most Nukulaelae Islanders' weekly routine during which they read from a book, and carrying a Bible to church is a must (a hymnalis optional but desirable). On Sunday mornings, just before the beginning of the service at 9 a.m., a familiar domestic scene takes place in many Nukulaelae homes: as household members adjust their Sunday best and finish combing their hair, much good-natured bantering takes place over who will get to take the family's Bibles to church, since there usually aren't enough copies for every adult and child. Even four-year-old Semi in our household knows the particular relevance of books to church contexts: on many Sundays, to everyone's amusement and feigned indignation, he quietly sneaks away to Sunday School (held at the same time as the service in a thatched building adjacent to the pastor's house) clutching his father's Bible under his shirt, and hoping to be at a safe distance from the house before the disappearance of the Bible is noticed. Some Nukulaelae Islanders also bring to church books that are not generally used there, like an English Bible (a high prestige commodity), copies of religious pamphlets gleaned from various sources, or other printed materials of no obvious religious relevance, which they may or may not open during the service.

The arguments developed in this book rest heavily on the empirical analysis of both written texts and transcripts of spoken discourse produced in the Polynesian language in common use on Nukulaelae Atoll, Tuvalu Group, Central Pacific. This approach foregrounds two questions of particular concern: how spoken discourse should be transcribed; and what orthographic conventions should be adopted in light of the fact that there is no standardized orthography for the language in question. I have adopted a number of conventions in answer to these questions, which are described here.

Transcripts and written texts

Transcribing spoken discourse is an analytic act, as many scholars have demonstrated (e.g., Edwards 1993, Gumperz and Berenz 1993, Ochs 1979a, Tedlock 1983); the selection of linguistic and extra-textual information to be included in the transcript from a very broad range of possibilities, as well as their visual presentation, involve decisions that predetermine how the transcripts are read and what categories become the focus of analytic scrutiny.

Many spoken excerpts cited in this book are not the object of detailed grammatical analysis, although I do pay attention to formal features in my analysis of the meaning of many excerpts. I have therefore adopted transcription conventions that represent a compromise between the fine-grained transcription system used in Conversation Analysis (e.g., Atkinson and Heritage 1984) and the selectively translated paraphrases with which social anthropologists are commonly satisfied.

Nukulaelae

Nukulaelae is an atoll in the South-Central Pacific, part of the island group and nation of Tuvalu, formerly known as the Ellice Islands. This chain of nine low-rising coral atolls and islands spans 400 miles, between the latitudes of 5°S and 11°S, and the longitudes of 176°E and 180°. The group is situated on the outskirts of Triangle Polynesia, close to the Gilbert Islands (Kiribati), which lie to the north and are the easternmost island group of Micronesia (see Map 1). Tuvalu can be subdivided geographically into a northern group, made up of Nanumea, Nanumaga, Niutao, and Nui (phonemically, Nuui), and a southern group, which includes Vaitupu, Nukufetau, Funafuti (phonemically, Funaafuti), Nukulaelae, and the southernmost and smallest island of the group, Niulakita. This last was not settled permanently until the twentieth century and is used today as copra-producing grounds by Niutao Islanders. The group's total land area is 10 square miles.

As a typical atoll, Nukulaelae consists of an oval-shaped string of islets that surrounds a lagoon and is itself surrounded by a coral-reef ring (see Map 2). Submerged reef platforms and sand bars bridge the breaks between the islets. The entire atoll, including the lagoon, is about 2 miles at its widest and 6 miles long. Even by atoll standards, it is very small: its dry-land area is 449 acres, and its maximum elevation rests a few feet above sea level. It is surrounded by deep seas, which provide rich harvesting grounds for pelagic fish.