[iDC] iDC Digest, Vol 79, Issue 4

Mon Sep 5 17:15:39 UTC 2011

Yes I fully expected to be taken to task for suggesting that India was
colonized by a literate culture, but I still maintain that this is the case.

It is of course true that literacy existed in India thousands of years
before it did in what became Britain. Yet literacy belonged almost
exclusively to elite castes throughout Indian history, and the great bulk of
popular culture and society remained very much oral even as periodically
great literatures flourished. Significantly, the printing press did not
appear in India until it was imported from the west in the mid-19th century.
And in the 18th century, as Britain gained political and military control of
India, the relative rates of popular literacy in India and England were
massively tilted in favour of England, a disparity that would only intensify
over the next two centuries. I believe that it was precisely that disparity
in popular literacy that enabled the colonization of oral India. For
example, England's (also Scotland's) unprecedented rates of popular literacy
in these years fuelled the Industrial revolution, among other literate
social developments, which made even starker the difference in economic and
administrative (and of course military) power between oral India and
literate England. In the end it took someone of Ghandi's unique genius, able
to understand and bridge both oral and literate political cultures and
social dynamics, to successfully lead mostly oral India out from under the
colonial thumb of literate imperialism.

Yet I maintain that in the realm of food, for example, this same process -
western literate colonization of oral India - is happening today, with
highly literate transnational (but based in the west) corporations like
Monsanto and Cargill, whose every atom is defined by literate thinking and
practices (patents, factories, genetic science, financial systems, etc.) and
shaped by university-trained MBAs and statisticians and agronomists and
marketers and lobbyists, actively attacking and usurping ancient Indian oral
agricultural practices, communities and cultures with truly catastrophic
results.

And this is happening because even if rates of popular literacy are much
closer today than they were centuries ago, the popular deployment of complex
literate systems in daily life is still very unequal. (At least that is my
impression based on a modest degree of traveling in India. Even if,
increasingly, there are urban centres in India that are - in some respects
anyway - as literate as Paris or London.) And the solution to this problem
is not the upgrading of oral Indian systems to match western literate
systems. On the contrary, that is suicide, because those literate systems
are unsustainable and are in the process of killing our planet. In my
opinion what is needed are bridges between users of oral and digital systems
that make use of literacy but are not ruled by it, to create a sustainable
future

One small example of a community moving in this direction is described in my
blog post of yesterday, titled Array of Words and the Manilla Street Kids
Digital Gift Economy.

Regards,
John
--
blog: www.youareyourmedia.com

On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 11:18 AM, Simon Biggs <simon at littlepig.org.uk> wrote:

> I've not been following this thread but this email jumped out.
>
> Surely India has been one of the world's most sophisticated and continuous
> of literate cultures, along with China. India and China were literate
> thousands of years before Britain existed as an idea, much less as an
> empire. However, this notion of literacy evokes a very narrow conception of
> what it is and what it can be. You might want to look at this:
>
> Garcia, O (2006) with Bartlett and Kleifgen; From biliteracy to
> pluriliteracies, in Handbook of Applied Linguistics on Multilingual
> Communication, Mouton.
>
> also at:
>
>
> http://www.tc.columbia.edu/faculty/kleifgen/tech_n_lit/pluriliteraciesfinal.pdf
>
> best
>
> Simon
>
>
>
> On 3 Sep 2011, at 15:18, Doug Belshaw wrote:
>
>  Wow. "India was not primarily colonized by Britain but by literate
> culture." Now *there's* an unwarranted assertion, John.
>
> I agree we don't need more labels but, if we did, I think I'd find Dave
> White's 'Visitors and Residents' concept more persuasive:
> http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2009/10/14/visitors-residents-the-video/
>
> ---
> Doug Belshaw
> http://dougbelshaw.com
>
> This email is:
>
> [  ] Bloggable
> [x] Ask first
> [  ] Private
>
> On Saturday, 3 September 2011 at 13:00, idc-request at mailman.thing.netwrote:
>
> India was not primarily colonized by Britain but
> by literate culture
>
>
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> Simon Biggs | simon at littlepig.org.uk | www.littlepig.org.uk
>
> s.biggs at ed.ac.uk | Edinburgh College of Art | University of Edinburgh
> www.eca.ac.uk/circle | www.elmcip.net | www.movingtargets.co.uk
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