Technology, Culture, Education: Literacies
From Studyplace
This page was composed by Aaron Hung on the basis for the lectures notes as they were in the Summer 2008. I want to thank him for the work. I am making some changes for the Summer 2009. The notes on the main web site for the course will generally be more up to date.
Everyone is welcome to use and edit these pages, perhaps on the basis of your own notes (since sometimes I do not follow my own notes).
Link to Professor Varenne's notes for this course.
Contents |
Class Outline
- Technology: possibility and determination?
- (Ethno-)Methodology for (de)constructing human production
- Human (dis-)abilities: expansions through tools and institutions
- Hoes, plows and familial strategies
- Irrigation: Power and social structure
- The power of the printed word
- Possibilities in print: Play and control
- Industrialization I: The imagination of the machines
- Industrialization II: The experience of machines
- Living with the bomb
- The body and the machine
- Further reading
Readings
- Conklin , Harold "Bamboo literacy on Mindoro" Pacific Discovery 2: 4-11. 1949
- Gundaker, Grey "Hidden Education Among African Americans During Slavery" Teachers College Record 109, 7: 1591-1612. 2007.
- Kuipers, Joel, and Ray McDermott "Insular Southeast Asian scripts." in The world's writing systems. Edited by P. Daniels and W. Bright, 474-484. New York: Oxford University Press. 1995
Discussion
Communication
- how to make sure people respond to what you are talking about
- what kind of (deictic) markers do you use to refer back to the conversation
- face to face conversation has to be improvised; is also a technological issue
- Internet technologies allow for asynchronous conversations, such as chats, emails, etc.; all of which have their constraints regarding how to maintain a coherent dialogue
- Youtube requires 25 power plants to power data centers, cool servers, etc.
Class
- what happens to land in a classless society?
- optimists of the Internet believe that it democratizes information and speech
Class notes
Conklin
- collected everything in his studies
- observed people who wrote love songs on bamboos
- picked up by McDermott, who was interested in disabilities, and used it as an anthropological veto against Western notions of literacy
- critics question whether you can generalize from these studies
- Hanunoo had borrowed a script that was ill-suited to their language, but somehow made it work and adapted it to their local practices, e.g. love letter writing on bamboo
McDermott
- how did Hanunoo taught themselves bamboo literacy?
- informal learning occurred when adolescents watched their uncles write on bamboo
Gundaker
- based on oral histories and diaries of slaves that were collected in the 1920s
- literacy among slaves was forbidden, but some still found ways of learning
- sometimes they feigned ignorance to hide their knowledge
- "passing": pretending to know (or not know) something in order to fit in
Links
- Attali, J. (1985). Noise: The political economy of music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0816612870
- Rancière, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation (K. Ross, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804719691
Except where