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[et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”]Key Theme: “Lettered Society”
This concept is mentioned in Brooke Larson’s article “Forging the Unlettered Indian”, in Joan Rappaport’s book “Politics of Memory,” and in Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s article “The Notion of Rights and the Paradoxes of Postcolonial Modernity.” Through these texts, the written word and literacy are conveyed as powerful tools for colonization, which are used as an exclusionary tool kept away from Indigenous communities and used to control, oppress, and set them apart. Because literacy played such an important role throughout colonization and subsequent law and land reforms, it is important to understand how literacy operated in this historical context and how it was used as a tool to oppress Indigenous communities and later as a tool by Indigenous people to empower themselves and stand up against their colonization.
In Larson’s article, she discusses how “lettered elites” were in control of the government and made Bolivian legal, political, and economic decisions. Because literacy was seen as such a powerful tool in this society, it was kept from many indigenous people. Larson describes an education reform in which a “dissident group of intellectuals hijacked the liberal idea of universal literacy and schooling to push forward a model of Indian schooling that subordinated universal literacy to specialized labor.” This supports that literacy was used as an exclusionary tool to maintain that those in power remain in power. Cusicanqui’s article discusses how it was the literate apoderados in Bolivia who were empowered to voice complaints and demands for their communities. She discusses how it was the literate who were able to contribute to political discourse and decision making and it was through this discourse that a “literate public opinion” and “literate culture” developed. Exclusion from literacy perpetuated indigenous exclusion from these spheres as well. Finally, Rappaport discusses the weight put on literacy in her book Politics of Memory. She uses the term “fetishization of the written word” to emphasize the priority and power placed within the ability to read and write. She also discusses Quintin Lame’s use of the written word to gain a voice in the society and to gain legitimacy for the history he writes down about his people. He is able to find power for himself and his community through his literacy.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column]
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