mydibits & ~pieces of reading, writing and meaning

(...) I find it necessary to counter the lingering anthropological prejudice that literate cultures are somehow less authentic, less "anthropological," than cultures that rely strictly on oral communication. I found that I was not the only researcher questioning the very distinction between oral & literate cultures. (...) The question of meaning in reading as collective recitation, where comprehension per se is not the issue, should pose a particularly compelling challenge to the still-prevalent literary tendency to analyze reading in terms of disembodied decoding of inherent meanings. (...)

Evocation of the particular power of reading names leads us to the larger insight that "the claims we might make of knowing about (compre-hending) things by way of generalizing principles can never be divorced from the persuasive efforts, at a social interactional level, of acknowled-ging (apprehending) what particulars there are worth knowing and remembering." (...) Literary scholars are a type of native informant, professio-nally concerned with not only practicing but understanding the topic at hand in this collection. (...) There is a particular poignancy to the way we trace the modern ideology of masterly critical reading to a representation of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke: this kind of ability to commit oneself to strong readings ~ rich, daring, and innovative interpretations ~ while simultaneously acknowledging and examining the contingency of those rea-dings, should encourage more anthropologists to look for similar double optics in the reading situations they study. (...) I noted that while anthro-pologists and critics had taken to the analysis of ethnography as a cultural practice, they needed similarly to examine reading "out there" in eth-nographic context: much attention has been paid in the last several years to the insight that literary methods and questions can provide concer-ning the implication of anthropology in power-laden representations of difference. (...) We have only (just) begun to explore how the kind of at-tention to the shifts of meaning in context that characterize the best ethnography can complement the new sense literary scholars have of rea-ding as culturally and historically determined. (...) Aside from its focus on something that almost all human beings do, rather than on a compre-hensive and objectified representation of a "primitive culture," the ethnography of speaking was an important early exploration of the notion that social practices could be compared by anthropologists as processes carried out by active subjects and not merely enactments of a super organic structure. (...) Genoeg voor nu: wat me opviel in de betekenis van spreken, lezen & schrijven in de afgelopen halve eeuw, was vooral de mense-lijke capaciteit tot eigen interpretatie van woord, tekst & zin. Overal waar we spraak, tekst & inhoud ontmoeten interpreteren we op eigen wijze de betekenis van wat we horen, lezen, schrijven & associëren: wat gehoor & zicht op eigen wijze verklaren, zien we ook in gesproken woord & de op schrift gestelde teksten ~ we hebben 'n onstilbare behoefte tot 't "vergaren van betekenissen", zelfs daar waar begrip afwezig is. Ik blijf zo dus ook vermoeden dat ons brein ongeveer hetzelfde doet zonder onder wakkere bewustzijn terwijl we dromen: 't geven van "vrije betekenissen"!