Ethno-Graphies: An Introduction

'Literacy is a remarkable term. While seeming to refer to simple individual possession of the complementary mental technologies of reading and writing, literacy is not only difficult to define in individuals and delimit within societies, but it is also charged with emotional and political meaning. It was not long ago that newspapers and scholars referred to whole societies as 'illiterate and uncivilized' as a single referent, and 'illiterate' is still a term which carries a negative connotation.