Abstract of

Vernacular Literacy on the Lake Titicaca High Plains, Peru

Frank Salomon, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Emilio Chambi Apaza, Universidad Nacional del Altiplano, Puno

Ethnographic “New Literacy Studies” question the idea that literacy as such has any uniform effects, arguing instead that effects of literacy inhere in the social practices that impart it. What change, then, does literacy produce where it arrived from two opposed sets of practices? In Quechua- and Aymara-speaking villages on the high plains of Lake Titicaca, universal public schooling is a relatively recent innovation. It overlays an unofficial literacy that racially and linguistically stigmatized peasants acquired up to a century ago as cultural contraband and as a tool of conflict. Field research in 2000–2002 in Azángaro province focuses on Quechua households' memories of acquiring literacy and their ways of reading, making, using, and curating the documents resulting from it. A team of locally rooted researchers interviewed rural herder-farmers about past and present literacy practices. The papers in their household archives, almost all in Spanish, stand poles apart from indigenous Quechua speech. Moreover, the Spanish household papers' use is diglossic as compared to rural Spanish. Yet despite this double dissociation from speech, writing has become deeply involved in traditional practices of social reciprocity, ritual, and song. Writing has somewhat the status of a “parallel language,” useful precisely because of its separateness from the hazards of unequal bilingualism. Schools take little notice of these informal traditions. Attention to them might work in favor of improved classroom achievement.

Abstract from Salomon, F., & Apaza, E. (2006, July/August/September). Vernacular Literacy on the Lake Titicaca High Plains, Peru. Reading Research Quarterly, 41(3), 304–326. doi: 10.1598/RRQ.41.3.1