A Case Among Cases, A World Among Worlds: The Ecology of Writing Among the Kashinawa in Brazil

Abstract

Abstract This article discusses the conflict between local knowledges and global knowledges in the specific case of indigenous literacy in northwestern Brazil, where global knowledges are represented by the "ideological" (Street, 1984) theories of literacy and "utilitarian" models of writing (Scollon & Scollon, 1995), and local knowledges are represented by the multimodal texts produced by the Kashinawá indigenous community. Whereas "ideological" theories of literacy purport to take into account local knowledges and practices, they are in this case incapable of understanding indigenous multimodality due to what I call a graphocentric habitus. I read this as an indication of the extent to which prevailing literacy theories are not sufficiently aware of their localness; this may be due to their insertion within the colonial difference (Mignolo, 2000) power and knowledge collusion, which tends to "universalize" dominant knowledges and subalternize local knowledges