•  Kalmar, Tomás Illegal alphabets and adult literacy: Latino migrants crossing the linguistic border. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 2001

1. The anthropology of reading (literacy)

   Reading (or literacy) and the call for careful descriptions of the social ordering of communicational media
   1. Dell Hymes, "ethnographies of speaking," and the rethinking of what to study when studying human languages:
      1. there is an order to speaking that traditional linguistic never focused on
      2. discovering this order requires accumulating detailed descriptions of how people actually talk to each other (when, with whom, in what ways...)
   2. ethnographies of reading
      1. by analogy to speaking and in reaction against mechanistic, or historically materialistic, theories of the relationship between literacy and social order.
         1. literacy can be used in a multitude of ways, some liberating, some enslaving.
         2. actually it is difficult to count what is to count as "literacy" given the fact that reading's reality as a mental skill says nothing about the use of this skill (by whom, when, to what effect, etc.)
            1. people who "know how to read" may not readwhat some might wish they read or for expected purposes;
            2. people who "do not know to read" may have access to others, including subalterns, who do know
         3. it is necessary to understand the social positioning of any particular form of literacy. Thus the need for ethnographies.

2. Ideologies of acquisition and its problematics (a recap and initial expansion)

   1. Discourses about acquisition (Schieffelin, Ochs, etc.)
   2. Deliberate organizing of acquisition in everyday life
      1. Rancière (and Jacotot): philosophical exploration based on history and proposals for research
      2. Kalmar (and others) as providing evidence of systematic work of exploration, analysis, instruction outside (and against?) the state and charitable mechanisms that produce schools and then The School (Varenne & McDermott 1998)
         1. and also:
            1. Adely (2012): on education about women possibilities in another Muslim population (in a small town in Jordan)
            2. Samaddar (2015): on education about women possibilities in one Muslim population (in Detroit, MI)
            3. Velasquez (2014): a direct use of Kalmar in Queens, NY.

3. The production of difference: from 'class' to 'culture'

   Shirley Brice Heath' Ways with words as the most celebrated a long list of works (Brian Street)

   1. a classic comparison of three ways through a focus on "language habits"

      The place of language in the cultural life of each social group is interdependent witht the habits and values of behaving shared among members of that group. Therefore, any reader who tries to explain the community contrasts in this book on the basis of race will miss the central point of the focus on culture as learned behavior and on language habits as part of that shared learning. (p. 11)

   2. "Patterns of Southern culture" -- The basic implicature of Heath's formulation

      With these accounts ... cross-cultural comparisons of the variations of language socialization in the predominant groups of the region would be possible. (p. 4-5)

      1. Trackton and "learning how to talk" (Chapter 3) in "a working class black community" (p. 29)
      2. Roadville, and "teaching how to talk" (Chapter 4) in a white working class community" (p. 28)
      3. "the town" and the black and white "main stream" (p. 236)
   3. Do note the extent of specific instruction (p. 50) and elaborate discussion of each way, including comparatively, in all settings
   4. Differentiation: from class to culture
      1. class:
         1. Lareau and, before her, Basil Bernstein: class differences produce
            1. a critique by Hill and Varenne (1981)

      note that the shift to 'class' as explanation was a major advance from using biology ('race') or cognitive deficiences

      distinct local conditions for social interaction that have distinct consequences for communicational patterns (what Bernstein called "codes") with further consequences when children socialized into these patterns come to schools where communicational patterns have a different class base.

   5. culture:
      1. in a reaction to the altogether deterministic nature of the class arguments (even though this argument was supported by ethnographic description as well as large scale sociological and socio-psychological research), anthropologists, mostly, pointed out the extent to which communicational pattern differentiation mapped ethnic origin.
         1. The most obvious examples was produced by the reinterpretation of the difficulties experiences by immigrants to the United States (e.g. people from the hispanic Carribeans) as well as the internally quasi-colonized (e.g. American Indians, people of Mexican origin in the South West, etc.). From a focus on processes of transformative assimilation ("melting pot" theory) social analysis shifted to a focus on the maintainance of alternative ways -- a maintainance that some political groups argued should be fosterd.
            1. William Labov on Black English
            2. John Gumperz
            3. Susan Philips on silence in the Warm Spring researvation (1972)
         2. and the consequences for teacher/student relationships in the classroom (Cazden et al.1972)
   6. The return to schooling and curriculum policy
      1. "multi-culturalism" and other forms of state control of cultural awareness
   7. The, minority, critique
      1. By emphasizing the differences in the three "communities," Heath assumes a theory of culture as an ensemble of that which is shared, in the plural of each of the "members of the group", and is differentiated at some historical moment from what the "members" of other groups share. This is a direct echo of Ruth Benedict theory of culture as developed by the first generation of Boas's students.
      2. This emphasis leads to a de-emphasis of
         1. evidence of contact between the groups throughout their history
         2. all issues of political and economic power that, in that region were manipulated to divide the working class into white and black groups made to struggle about race
            1. (controversially: are slaves culturally different from their masters? or are both caught by the same "system" of historical conditions with their constraints, openings, and other affordances?)
         3. it may also lead to not noticing or discounting the efforts by everyone to maintain privilege, or struggle against it.
            1. Heath may or may not have noticed the appearance of private academies which, in the South flourished when public schools were integrated.
            2. by now, the development of charter schools (parental choice) is producing surprising political alliances as some unpriviledged groups are seeing them as ways to escape public schools which they may have understood (Kalmar, Rancière, Varenne) are the mechanisms that may reproduce their subaltern position.
   8. A note on metholodogy
      1. again, generalization from case studies
         1. descriptive generalization
         2. generalization to policy recommendations
      2. on anthropological representation of anthropological work