Literacy, Emotion and Authority
Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll

This 1995 book is a study of the development of literacy in the Polynesian community of Nukulaelae.

Niko Besnier (Author)

9780521480871, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 August 1995

256 pages, 7 b/w illus. 2 maps 2 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.51 kg

"Niko Besnier's Literacy, emotion and authority is abrilliant and painstaking ethnographic study of literacy on Nukulaelae Atoll, Tuvalu (formerly Ellice Islands)....Niko Besnier has produced a probing and exceedingly useful study of the highest caliber." Kenneth M. George, Cultural Survival Quarterly

Literacy continues to be a central issue in anthropology, but methods of perceiving and examining it have changed in recent years. In this 1995 study Niko Besnier analyses the transformation of Nukulaelae from a non-literate into a literate society using a contemporary perspective which emphasizes literacy as a social practice embedded in a socio-cultural context. He shows how a small and isolated Polynesian community, with no access to print technology, can become deeply steeped in literacy in little more than a century, and how literacy can take on radically divergent forms depending on the social and cultural needs and characteristics of the society in which it develops. His case study, which has implications for understanding literacy in other societies, illuminates the relationship between norm and practice, between structure and agency, and between group and individual.

1. Introduction
2. The ethnographic context
3. The domains of reading and writing
4. Letter writing and reading
5. Letters, economics and emotionality
6. Between literacy and orality: the sermon
7. Literacy, truth and authority
8. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Sociolinguistics [CFB]