Le fil de l’écrit: une anthropologie de l’alphabétisation au Mali by Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye (review)

A few decades ago, it was believed that learning to read and write structurally changes an individual’s consciousness by developing cognitive and mental skills, and thus by increasing agency. The idea inspired not only development projects for adult education, but also emancipation movements such as Latin American liberation theology. The idea of the power of literacy education gradually lost dominance, and it is now common knowledge that the impact of reading and writing depends on contextual variables. Cultural, educational and political norms and ideas attributed to writing determine its impact. Hence, something often used in present-day analyses of literacy is the concept of the ‘literacy event’– a term that invites researchers to an anthropological or ethnographic approach.

This concept of the literacy event is Mbodj-Pouye’s analytical starting point in her study of the Malian village of Fana. She describes a wide range of texts produced by people who had acquired various literacy levels from school education (in French and/or Bambara), adult education in Bambara, or Koranic teaching in Arabic, or a combination of all three. The connecting historical ‘thread’ in this study is cotton, a product that introduced major changes to local agriculture and taught people systems of bookkeeping and record holding that they applied creatively in personalized genres, such as a (literary) genre called ‘book of secrets’.

Mbodj-Pouye convincingly shows why people decide to write about a particular issue or event as well as which textual formats or literary genres they use, and her study presents a fascinating variety of texts that people write and keep. I most liked the individuals’ notebooks, some of them published in full by Mbodj-Pouye. The books are not only rich ‘literacy events’ in themselves but also evidence of the high level of intimacy the author shared with her informants. In that respect, the study is a most welcome and inspiring contribution to Karin Barber’s ‘grand project’ on ‘everyday literacy’ in Africa.

Mbodj-Pouye also discusses, although rather indirectly, why people write at all. She doubts (correctly) that writing changes the consciousness, thus rejecting the ‘classical’– and false – 1970s and 1980s dichotomy between orality and literacy, although her suggestion that writing inspires individualization (and personal ambition through the Mande concept of fadenya (rivalry)) leans perhaps too heavily on the – typically Western – dichotomy of public versus private. For Mali, the qualities the author attributes to writing (keeping secrets, helping to document a personal account of an event) are also ascribed to memory and speech by those, such as griots, who take pride in oral knowledge.

However, the author gives another, rather more plausible, explanation for why people write, in a remark offered by one of her interviewees who said that writing ‘favorise le progrès’ (p. 166). Mbodj-Pouye notes that, with the decline in cotton production in the 1980s, literacy became a skill that people acquired with the idea of using it after a successful migration to town. This reminded me of James Ferguson’s Expectations of Modernity (University of California Press, 1999), where he describes people developing a ‘cosmopolitan style’ in order to keep their lives open to progress and modernity, even though they live in a context of decades-long economic decline. The textbooks described by Mbodj-Pouye are a fine example of the material culture that people may produce as part of such cosmopolitan ambitions.

While cotton is the historical thread running through this study, unfortunately the impact of social media has not been woven in. In 2009, when the author finished her fieldwork, people in the Malian countryside were already making ample use of mobile phones, and observations of text messaging activity would have given the author relevant data, for instance on the subject of literary creativity, or for her discussion of the cultural dominance of the French language. This absence of attention to social media might...