Autonomous and Ideological Models of Literacy: approaches from New Literacy Studies

What has come to be termed the ‘New Literacy Studies’ (NLS) (Gee, 1991; Street, 1996) represents a new tradition in considering the nature of literacy, focussing not so much on literacy as a ‘technology of the mind’ (cf Goody, 1968, 1977) or as a set of skills, but rather on what it means to think of literacy as a social practice (Street, 1984). This entails the recognition of multiple literacies, varying according to time and space but also contested in relations of power. In this paper I will outline the main positions offered by NLS, consider their relationship to earlier anthropological interest in literacy and take account of recent critiques regarding ‘the limits of the local’ that have implications for both ethnographies of literacy and for anthropological interest in this field. I conclude with a brief account of the contiguous field of Multimodality and ask how these two fields relate to and offer a way of commenting upon the debates about ‘media’ in the EASA media anthropology network.