From Literacy/Literacies to Graphic Pluralism and Inscriptive Practices

Abstract

This article considers the ongoing importance of studying writing practices within and beyond anthropology. The works included here concentrate on scholarship that has appeared since the productive yet divisive debates that established literacy as a plural phenomenon that is best studied ethnographically. It focuses on research that surveys the multiplicity of graphic forms, the changing notions of literacies, and the ways that literacy is implicated in and constitutive of sites of power. In addition, the cited works engage with the linguistic and semiotic ideologies that inform such literacy practices, the various aesthetic sensibilities that shape writing, and the physicality/materiality of inscriptive practices. Considering the effects of previously theorizing writing as a single, uniform phenomenon and the shift to research that characterizes inscriptive practices as multiple makes possible an argument for moving beyond multiplicity to question what writing is and can be, looking to works on "inscriptive practices" and "graphic pluralism.".