Ethnography and Literacy

One of the most basic elements of any functioning society is the ability for its members to read and write. Throughout modern times, both reading and writing have been commonly thought of as skills necessary to participate and interact with others so that a person could earn and sustain a suitable living. In this case, Szwed describes literacy as something commonly mistaken as something that is black and white, “either one reads and writes or one doesn’t.” The concept of illiteracy currently carries a highly stigmatized notion of an unskilled poverty class unable to transcend and progress, but Szwed encourages all of us to take a closer look at what exactly it means to be literate, and how those skills translate into social contexts and functional purposes. He also contends that most societies have produced specialists that “handle many of the necessities of literacy” through his example of the countless immigrant neighborhood where many of these specialists function as “interpreters of law, as well as readers and writers of letters and public documents.”
With the example of our public school system, Szwed highlights the importance of taking social context into account when determining if a student is capable of reading and writing. He points out that “non standard” forms of reading and writing are also acquired skills, such as a student that might have considerable skill reading and interpreting comics that shows little interest for assigned reading content. These discrepancies between literate and illiterate are merely different “configurations” of literacy, or by what level literacy is functioning, rather than imagining the concept of literacy being on a single, collective, and absolute measure. Continuing this notion of what makes a person literate, Szwed wishes to look closer at what exactly do people read and why, beyond the conventional mediums, such as novels, books, and other mass printed media for society to consume, but to break reading and writing down further into functional or artistic purposes. He wishes to include other forms of reading and writing such as “handbills, signs, graffiti, sheet music, junk mail, cereal boxes, captions on television, and even pornography.”
Szwed also sees the significance in differences amongst public and private literacy, between what is read at school or work and what is read at home in a private setting outside the public sphere. His example of the ability of a person being able to read and comprehend street signs outside in the public is requiring a different set of skills that are used than private reading, and reflects the importance of recognizing the distinct types of reading and writing involved with a variety of tasks and contexts. Szwed continues to look at this relationship through a variety of cases, such as in advertising, where non-standard text is used to invoke specific emotions towards a product, or the process by which an author’s book is published through a collaborative effort, rather than mastered by one single person; Szwed is interested in studying and observing the relationship between school and the outside world.


I believe that Szwed brings up several different concepts that are important to take note of, most importantly by which the levels that literacy operates within us and a society as a whole. Academically speaking, literacy is a skill needed to enter into a professional, specialized workforce, we acquire through formal education and earned credentials, but it should be thought of as a form or an example of literacy, rather than being thought of as literacy itself. At multiple levels I think that we all function as being literate, but it is unfair to declare one’s ability to demonstrate their skills of reading and writing through one absolute set of conventions, and we should work to understand how literacy works within our own social context to better understand just what it means to be literate, and what literacy itself means. More often than not, we are surrounded with “non-standard” texts that we habitually assess and interpret without much reflection and thought of what and why we are reading it, but either way we are demonstrating our ability to acquire meaning through written graphics, just in a different context than the student who is assigned to read out of his textbook for homework. I view Literacy as a multifaceted skill that is determined by function and context in the relationship between the reader and writer.