This post is going to be a bit incoherent because it's largely a literal "note to self". I've had some pretty vague thoughts on this topic for a while but after reading the first chapter of James C. Scott's "The art of not being governed: an Anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia" I realised that perhaps there is something to write more about after all.
Scott argues amongst many other things that the societies of what he calls "Zomia"—basically everyone living more than 500 metres above sea level in what is known as Southeast Asia plus the far east of India and south-west of modern China—were, at least until very recent times, largely non-literate, and were so by choice. He argues that a significant proportion of the lifestyles of the people living in this area—including oral culture—were deliberate strategies to avoid becoming legible to the lowland states nearby.
It might seem odd that I have thought about this sort of thing prior to starting Scott's book, but his earlier book, "Seeing like a state", has come back to me again and again since reading it. However it was actually a man who grew up in Zomia who first posited something like this to me. Baruk, who I met as part of the INELI program for public library "innovators", posited to me several years ago that public libraries trying to be "inclusive" of every part of their local communities was actually a colonial imposition. I struggled to understand what he was saying, but I keep thinking about it. Scott seems to be arguing much the same thing. Some people, and some peoples, WANT to be "invisible", "unconnected", and unknown. They want to be illegible.
Paul Kingsnorth, in his essay for Emergence Magazine, "The language of the master", quotes Lakota man Russell Means who stated in 1980 that "I detest writing". In Means' view, writing is an imperialist imposition that privileges abstraction over relationships. This is not merely an expression of a difference preference in communication style. It is a fundamental difference in worldview.
I remember struggling when I was working in Melbourne's western suburbs, full of the city's most "expendible" people: low paid, insecure in multiple ways, refugee communities, the unemployed and chronically ill. The library I worked at was extremely keen to help local people with English language and literacy, which could hardly be argued is a terrible thing. But the prism in which English language skills were taught was almost exclusively one of "employability". The library, a tool of government at the local level, saw its role as primarily one of preparing potential workers for menial jobs inside the broader capitalist system. And of course as an individual librarian, it would seem rather churlish and perverse to argue that the library should not assist community members keen to improve their English, or tidy up their resumé. But at a systemic level, this seems ...well, at the very least, somewhat unsatisfying, and avoiding any systemic solutions to the problem of a racist, violent system of resource allocation that leaves families hungry and desperate.
So, the thing I want to think through more is the value of literacy. We can "problematise" the dominant assumption that increasing literacy rates is an uncontroversial good. But that doesn't seem satisfactory as a statement on its own. What do we do after we "problematise" it? I don't think literacy and literate culture is "bad" — I very much enjoy both reading and writing, and the benefits of recording knowledge (and just, information) in this way. But it also seems increasingly clear to me that it's also not always "good". Perhaps that's all we need to understand — like everything else in the world, the context matters, and things aren't and maybe don't need to be consistent.
Anyway, I promised this would be messy and inconclusive, and here we are. More to think about, and possibly a future post on the big blog. I probably should call Baruk and have a chat.
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