Ethnographies of Reading: Beyond Literacy and Books

Abstract

This social thought and commentary makes an argument for ethnographies of reading in an age of widespread literacy and global communication. The choice of method I propose is to start with the concrete practices of everyday readers. To situate this proposal in a specific ethnographic context, I draw on material from my research among a community of readers who spend time in a network of “footpath libraries” (vāchanālaya) in Pune, India. I then step back from ethnographic reporting to consider the topic of reading more broadly as an object of anthropology. I begin by situating the ethnography of reading in a range of everyday sites and historical locations. I next trace a condensed history of reading as a topic in anthropology—from its absence by definition in the foundation of a discipline that would study “the people without writing” to its emergence in the 1990s as a legitimate area of research. The discussion concludes with an analysis of the social reading of a “human-interest story” appearing in a Pune newspaper. My aim here is to show how the ethnography of ordinary reading can yield unexpected insights into larger issues—in this case, the changing social fabric of a once-provincial city in western India.

The Day We Were Dogs: Mental Vulnerability, Shared Reading, and Moments of Transformation

“…One example of a recent development is the rapid, worldwide increase of digital text reading (see Allington and Pihlaja 2016). However, the ethnography of reading and literature is still underdeveloped (Rosen 2015; Reed 2018, 34). In his recent review article, Reed calls for further studies of reading, in particular on character reading, and studies “contemplating the kind of time that reading invokes or actually enacts” (2018, 41).…”

Reading Nearby: Literary Ethnography in a Postsocialist City

“…My decision to “make a field” in the garden of the bookshop was shaped not only by practical concerns, as Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson have observed of field sites more generally, “but by its suitability for addressing issues and debates that matter to the discipline” (Gupta and Ferguson :10). What drew me to this site, in short, was the promise of a location that would permit attention to scenes of “ordinary reading” (Rosen ) that fall outside the more formal zones—such as literacy instruction, reading clubs, and religious discussion groups—that have been established as sites for the ethnography reading (see, e.g., Boyarin ; Cody ; Reed ). As it happened, my regular presence and attention to the goings on at the bookshop proved necessary both for building rapport with the main subjects of this account and for figuring out, through error and through trial, the kinds of questions I wanted to ask them about “the role that literature plays” (Rapport ) in their lives.…”

“…Finally, because reading nearby is also a reading “that reflects on itself” (Chen :87), it is not enough here to consider only my interlocutors’ passion for reading, their ethics, their idealism, and their dream “that some of the people reading the books we're publishing, the future generation, will normalize institutions, and with better institutions, we'll sell more books.” I also need to reflect on my own quixotic pursuits in literary anthropology and the ethnography of reading. Having worked earlier on street libraries in India (Rosen , ), I have now gone into this project on publishing in Albania. This is also a little like Don Quixote, who went on one long adventure, got beat up a lot along the way, came home, and then went on another adventure, where he got beat up even more.…”

Reconnecting Language and Materiality in Christian Reading: A Comparative Analysis of Two Groups of Protestant Women

“…Beginning with the foundational volume The Ethnography of Reading (J. Boyarin 1993a), scholars have traced the shifting interrelationships of texts, readers, and acts of knowledge-making as written works are accommodated to different culturally located reading situations. This work has shown that anthropological questions can be asked about how written texts are dynamically interwoven with the spaces and relations in which they are read (Rosen 2015; Reed 2018). In doing so, ethnographic studies have drawn attention to and amply disputed one prevailing cultural ideology of reading: the notion that reading is a uniform, unmediated or functional practice of drawing out the meaning of a set of fixed words on the page.…”

“…In this article, we explore one of these problems by studying comparatively across two sites how reading is embodied or, in other words, what relationship emerges between bodies and texts in the act of reading. Recent work has sometimes framed the relative lack of emphasis on the embodied dimensions of reading as an argument for attending to the practice rather than the content of reading (Rosen 2015). Here, we instead aim to develop an approach that explores the mutually reinforcing dimensions of textual interpretation and embodied practice.…”