Summary
“Anthropology of reading” in this paper means conceptions of the reader as a person and how reading shapes personhood. I attempt to deal with these questions both cross-culturally and diachronically, with the aim of asking what is peculiar about modern conceptions of reading, how they have affected the reading of ‘classics’, and how ‘classics’ might contribute to a new conception of reading.
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Notes
- 1.
While I agree with Steiner (1989) on the harmfulness of modern ‘interpretation’ (see also Fotiadis, this volume), I focus on action rather than transcendence.
- 2.
See e.g. Chartier 1995; Cavallo and Chartier 1995. Jacob and Giard 2001, 2003 is a comparative study of ancient civilizations; there is as yet no equivalent for the modern period. See also Chatterjee 1995 for Bengal; Yu 2003 for China; Messick 1993 for some aspects of Islamic textuality; and further bibliography cited below.
- 3.
The storage function is stressed by Assmann 1983; speech is “deposited” in writing to maintain its existence between performances. Assmann also emphasizes the materiality of writing (it has often been noted that in archaic Greece the stone on which a law has been inscribed ‘is’ the law). The “performance score” image is used by Assyriologists in discussing the origins of writing, and by al-Azmeh 1998 in relation to the lack of vowel notations in Arabic.
- 4.
See Fotiadis’ paper here on the need to train students to “read” images. The “do-it-yourself” handbook is a very modern genre; studies of the history of ‘technical’ literature (an interesting topic which I cannot here explore at any length) often recognize that it had to be used in association with practical training (apprenticeship) or in directing the work of employees whose skills had been acquired through practice.
- 5.
On the exaggeration of the ‘destruction’ of the library of Alexandria see Canfora 1987.
- 6.
On the relations between ‘classics’ and performance, and especially the relative neglect in modern research of liturgical performance, see Humphreys in preparation.
- 7.
For China see e.g. Gardner 1989; Yu 2003; for Islam e.g. Mottahedeh 1985, Messick 1997; Duverdier 1971 for Tahitians being taught to ‘read’ who memorized instead. Note also Furet and Ozouf 1977 on early modern readers, especially women, able to read the Bible but unable to write; K. Thomas 1986 and Daly 1967 on the slow development of alphabetization, in societies where education did not necessarily begin with (or even include) learning letters in a fixed order. We do however have early abcedaria from Greece: Langdon 2005.
- 8.
See Dehaene 2007 for modern educational debates. While progression in reading skills would eventually require the ability to decipher unfamiliar words, and teaching by the alternative “letter-sound correspondence” method is explicitly attested for ancient Greece (Manacorda 1983; Svenbro 1995; Cribiore 1996), training in whole-word recognition, plus the fact that Greek and Latin are more highly inflected than modern Western languages, may well have a bearing on the absence of word-division and punctuation in many ancient texts on stone or more perishable materials (the use of punctuation decreases over time, although by the Hellenistic period there is a move towards avoiding word- or at least syllable-division at the end of lines in inscribed texts). See also Gavrilov 1997.
- 9.
See Gardner 1989 for debates in China. ‘Wisdom’ literature seems to play a larger role in the formation of literate persons in Egypt than in the ancient Near East, perhaps corresponding to a clearer division of ‘scribal’ functions between temple personnel and other officials. There may also have been a clearer idea in both China and Egypt of correspondences between cosmic order, ‘classic’ texts, and the fully developed ethical personality (Gardner, op. cit.; Wagner, this volume).
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
Writing was a skill, and most probably a rare one, in Minoan and Mycenaean palaces, but there were no scribal book-collections. Cyprus in the Late Bronze Age had at least one ‘scribe’ capable of dealing with foreign correspondence in Akkadian, the diplomatic lingua franca (Moran 1992).
- 14.
One Cretan community c. 500 appointed a poinikastas—“Phoenicianizer” or “writer in red paint”—who was a public servant, was to pass his position to descendants, and had to record community decisions in writing (probably on stone or bronze), but one scribe does not make a scribal culture; other Cretan cities had “memorizers” (mnāmones). Supplementum epigraphicum graecum 27.631; Bile 1988 no. 28.
- 15.
There have been many suggestions about Greek reasons for adopting writing, e.g. to record oral poetry (Powell 2002); to call gods’ attention to dedications (Willi 2005). It is possible that intensive research in Greece has led to the discovery and publication of more pieces of casual writing than we have for other areas (but do we have scraps of playful demotic writing from Egypt?). See also Langdon 2005 on casual writing on rocks by shepherds. Larsen 1987 suggests that too little research has been done on casual writing in the ancient Near East.
- 16.
- 17.
See Most 2006 for Hesiod; Slings 1990 for first-person statements in lyric poetry; Bowie 1986 on poems attributed to “Theognis”; Lefkowitz 1981 on deduction of biographical information from poems (cf. Laks, this volume, for philosophers). Competitions at both public festivals and private symposia (Bowie 1986) helped to construct this authorial persona.
- 18.
- 19.
Thucydides was condemned for failing as a general, and went into exile, before the oligarchic coups of 411 and 404, but was writing his history through the following decades. Xenophon and Plato were suspect because of their associations with Socrates and with the oligarchy. See also Yunis 2003b.
- 20.
See Houston 2009 for book collections in Egypt; Milnor 2009 for Pompeii. The Athenian institution of ostracism presupposed that a quorum of 6,000 citizens could write (or find a friend to write for them), and many did, but some in the early fifth century had a very shaky grasp of spelling: Lang 1990, Brenne 1994 (on the “quorum” see Rhodes 1981). See also R. Thomas 2009 on “democratic literacy.”
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
Commentary on behaviour came earlier in letters from Paul and other leading figures, read out to congregations. Written versions of sermons, for circulation, were presumably selected and edited, perhaps removing more local and ‘occasional’ references; thus our evidence for Islamic sermons, which comes from writers concerned with maintaining orthodoxy (Berkey 2001) or with politics (Mottahedeh 1985), may give us an exaggerated idea of difference.
- 24.
- 25.
It should be noted that the connection between textual formation and character was expanded in imperial China through the efforts of large numbers—a high proportion of whom failed, especially at the higher levels— to pass the examinations and attain an official position: Yu 2003.
- 26.
Taylor 1989 suggests that Augustine wanted to represent the parts of the soul as corresponding to the persons of the Trinity—but Augustine’s terminology was not very consistent.
- 27.
Le Roy Ladurie 1975 has no section on books and reading (and no index!), but Graff 1987 counted four passages implying ability to read. L. presents the villagers in an ethnographic ‘dream-time’, and has no interest either in the sources of their ideas or in the effects of the inquisition process. Cf. K. Thomas 1986 on heterodox illiterates; on heretical reading see also Grafton 1991: 204, 211–12.
- 28.
Moss 1996; Sharpe 2000; there were also texts with instructions on how to read (for similar practices going back to antiquity see Easterling 2002). When being trained to write Greek and Latin proses, and to study classical texts, c. 1950, I was still told to keep a commonplace book. Sherman 1995 (a valuable account) calls early modern reading “adversarial” (from the use of the title Adversaria for collections of textual notes), but not all marginalia related to textual or interpretive problems. Readers also marked elegant phrases, useful arguments, etc., and indexed texts to facilitate future use. Cf. Grafton 1997, and Céard 2003 on Budé’s notebooks.
- 29.
- 30.
Cf. Zipser 2003, treating a medical text as example of an anthology or florilegium.
- 31.
- 32.
- 33.
- 34.
See Howard 2006: 84–5 on eighteenth century Academies as representing modern, scientific thinking, in opposition to universities.
- 35.
As an 8-year-old in a PNEU school in the 1940s I was taught “civics,” which was entirely about ancient history (cf. McElduff 2006).
- 36.
- 37.
- 38.
Including colonial government; the French, especially, liked to see themselves as the new Romans.
- 39.
- 40.
The weight of these factors, and the chronology of changes in weighting, varied from country to country: see Bollack 1984 on the defence of classical studies in late nineteenth/early twentieth century France and Germany.
- 41.
- 42.
At least in Britain. For “poor students” in Germany see La Vopa 1988.
- 43.
‘Escape’, ‘fantasy’, and ‘realism’ may be problematic categories in cross-cultural analysis. Joshi 1998 notes Indian readers’ preferences in the colonial period for melodramatic rather than ‘realistic’ English novels, English life being in any case not ‘real’ to them (and melodrama more like Indian stories?). See also perhaps Messick 1997 on Yemeni reception of the American “southern novel;” James T. Siegel 1997 on reading in modern Indonesia; Mrazek 2002 on modern technology and fantasy.
- 44.
- 45.
- 46.
- 47.
Lloyd 2009 notes that the model discipline for India was linguistics; but his analysis too often assumes that modern disciplinary categories are unproblematic.
- 48.
See Fotiadis, this volume. Apparently English schoolchildren all now learn to use PowerPoint.
- 49.
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Humphreys, S.C. (2013). Towards an Anthropology of Reading. In: Humphreys, S., Wagner, R. (eds) Modernity's Classics. Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33071-1_9
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