The Ethnography of Reading

Writing, the subject of much innovative scholarship in recent years, is only half of what we call literacy. The other half, reading, now receives its due in this collection of essays. The essays move well beyond the simple rubric of literacy in its traditional sense of evolutionary advancement from oral to written communication. Some investigate reading in exotically cross-cultural contexts. Others analyze the long historical transformation of reading in the West from a collective, oral practice to the private, silent one of today, or demonstrate that in certain Western contexts reading is still very much a social activity. The reading situations described here range from Anglo-Saxon England to contemporary Indonesia.