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Ethos. 2025;53:e70015.
wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/etho
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https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.70015
Received: 5 August 2024
Accepted: 5 May 2025
DOI: 10.1111/etho.70015
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Literacy and illiteracy, its relational other: A key topic
for collaboration between psychology and
anthropology
Erdmute Alber1
Carlos Kölbl2
1Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Chair
for Social Anthropology, University of Bayreuth,
Bayreuth, Germany
2Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Chair
for Psychology, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth,
Germany
Correspondence
Erdmute Alber, Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences, Chair for Social Anthropology, University
of Bayreuth, D 95440 Bayreuth, Germany.
Email: Erdmute.alber@uni-bayreuth.de
Funding information
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Abstract
Collaborative work between anthropology and psychology on
literacy and particularly on illiteracy helps to rethink general
disciplinary backgrounds, concepts, and complex empirical
phenomena in the field of (il)literacy. Since the formational
period of the social sciences, the concept of literacy has been
key to the self-understandings of anthropology and psychol-
ogy. However, it was long neglected in empirical research.
Nonetheless, implicit and explicit assumptions about the
role, history, and distinctiveness of writing systems and their
presence or absence in various societies were central to disci-
plinary understandings of societies, individuals, and humanity.
To this day, literacy and especially its relational other—
illiteracy—have not received the attention they deserve from
either empirical or conceptual research. This article begins
with their histories in anthropology and psychology and
argues that illiteracy, in particular, has been neglected in their
debates. It then offers a framework for literacizing and illitera-
cizing, conceptualizes both illiteracy and literacy as multiple
and relational phenomena, and discusses methodologies and
preliminary results from our collaborative research project
on processes of literacizing and illiteracizing in urban liter-
ate environments in Benin and Bolivia. It concludes with a
discussion of the potential of research on literacy and illiter-
acy as a model for transdisciplinary work, especially a more
intensive collaboration between our disciplines.
KEYWORDS
Benin, Bolivia, illiteracy, literacy, multiplicity, relationality, transdisciplinarity
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any
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© 2025 The Author(s). Ethos published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Anthropological Association.
LITERACY AND ILLITERACY, ITS RELATIONAL OTHER
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INTRODUCTION
Historically, only exceptional people have been able to read and write, and thus to act as autonomous
authors of books or letters, and as late as the mid-20th-century, more than half of the world’s population
was considered illiterate (Lyons, 2022, 1). Depending on how classifications of literate and illiterate are
determined or perceived and where boundaries are drawn, these numbers might be higher or lower, but
even today numerous people in both industrialized and less industrialized countries—possibly still even
half of the world population—are not able, for example, to fill out bureaucratic forms without help.
At the same time, the production of academic scholarship about humanity and its history, for obvious
reasons, takes place from the perspective of what Lyons (2022, 1) has called “graphocentric western intel-
lectuals”: people whose profession was and is to read and write and for whom literacy is standard. It may
be due to the inherent bias of such intellectuals that much more has been written on literacy and literates
than on processes, situations, or people for whom writing was or is (largely) absent, not necessary, lacking,
or even something to refuse and combat.
This epistemic bias towards literacy, which assumes it to be the norm for human society, can be traced
in the histories of our disciplines as well. Since the formational period of the social sciences in the 19th
century, literacy has been important for an epistemic self-understanding of various disciplines and has
been important in defining the boundaries between them. Certain implicit or explicit assumptions about
the roles of writing systems, histories, and distinctiveness—including their presence or absence in any
given society and a tendency to see illiteracy as a deviation from the norm of literacy—were central to
disciplinary understandings of societies, individuals, and humanity. This holds particularly for both our
disciplines, social anthropology and psychology, even if literacy as a genuine and explicit research topic has
not been central to them like kinship, religion, and economy or attachment, intelligence, and aggression.
However, we want to demonstrate in a short epistemic history of (il)literacy in our disciplines that literacy
and illiteracy are key to an often-unspoken self-understanding. While in social anthropology looking at
(il)literate societies and the assumed transformation to literate societies was central, in psychology individual
development from illiteracy to literacy was key to understanding human individual transformation from
childhood to “real” adulthood. In both disciplines and others (for example, for history, see Lyons, 2022,
and for linguistics, see Gee, 1991), there was a tendency to connect literacy to the “mature,” “real,” or
“developed” way of being human.
Our collaboration as an anthropologist and a psychologist working together on a project on illiteracy in
Benin and Bolivia and joint reflections on our disciplinary backgrounds have shown us that illiteracy—or
better: processes of illiteracizing—may have been blind spots in the debates. This is not only helping us
to rethink our disciplinary backgrounds but also to better understand the complex realities in both of our
case studies.
Our article is based on these reflections. We want to demonstrate that the often-neglected field of
(il)literacy might be an exceptionally rich field of inquiry to bring anthropology and psychology together,
both methodically and conceptually. What we have learned in this way is presented in this article.
In the following, we first look at the histories of literacy in anthropology and psychology; next, we con-
ceptualize illiteracy and literacy as multiple and relational phenomena. We then present our collaborative
research on processes of literacizing and illiteracizing in urban literate environments in El Alto/La Paz
(Bolivia) and Parakou (Northern Benin) and conclude by discussing research on literacy and illiteracy as a
potential model for transdisciplinary work.
LITERACY AND ILLITERACY IN THE EPISTEMIC HISTORIES OF OUR
DISCIPLINES
Assumptions on writing systems and literacy—as well as illiteracy, its relational other—have long been
present in—even foundational to—the historical development of the social sciences. However, until the
late 20th century, they remained largely implicit. The discipline of social and cultural anthropology, for
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instance, assumed a distinction between “illiterate” societies, seen as stateless and often as lacking history
and “civilized” societies with state structures and bureaucracies—and thus writing systems (see below).
These were either seen as “modern” (Europe, the United States), or as ancient civilizations (China, India,
etc.). In postcolonial critique, this assumed “great divide” (Bartlett et al., 2011, 155)—whose prominent
exponents included Eric Havelock (1903–1988), Walter J. Ong (1912–2003), and Jack Goody (1919–2015),
at least in his early work—has often been labeled as the divide between “the West” and “the Rest” (Hall,
2019). It remains productive in many disciplines and, despite much criticism (see, for instance Ferguson,
2011), continues to be reproduced in para-academic writing (see, for instance Sewpaul, 2016). The pre-
sumed binary opposition between literate and illiterate societies or literate and illiterate minds that lies at
the heart of this distinction remains productive, not only outside but often also inside academic research.
In its formative era, the discipline of anthropology came to understand itself as responsible for the
study of “illiterate” societies, with disciplines like sinology, Indology, or Islamic studies studying “societies
of ancient literacy” (and, in their later shape, also modern “oriental” societies), and the emerging discipline
of sociology analyzing “modern” literate societies. This anthropological perspective depended on defining
literacy as a characteristic of whole societies, with the existence of a writing system indicating a literate
society and its absence an illiterate one. This self-understanding was accompanied by an evolutionist tem-
poral framework that imagined human history as a development from “illiterate” to “literate” societies
and from a mythical or primitive logic of “savage minds” (Lévi-Strauss, 1966) to the rational, literate mod-
ern individual. Although this evolutionist discourse has been widely criticized and structuralist approaches
rejected, its dichotomy between logic based on literacy and mythical thinking based on illiteracy continued
to be seen as a principal distinction of the human brain (Lévi-Strauss, 1966) or (in structural functional-
ists’ somewhat “softened” version) as distinct but not as a part of human temporal development (Goody,
1969). Thus, binaries between “us” and “them,” “the rural” and “the urban,” “the ones in the centers” and
“the ones in the peripheries,” “the educated” and “the ignorant,” or the “West” and “the Rest” took the
place of the temporal narratives of “before” and “after” and “traditional” and “modern,” while perpetuat-
ing binaries between distinct ways of reasoning. Of course, we do not mean to imply that literacy does not
affect minds and societies at all (for one differentiated conceptualization of the “literate mind” or “literate
consciousness,” see Jens Brockmeier, 1997; for the complex role of literacy and literacies on identity and
subjectivity, see Collins & Blot, 2005). However, the idea that literacy itself determines specific mentalities
or societal formations, which Brian Street (1993, 5) has called “the autonomous model of literacy” (see
also Bartlett et al., 2011, 156), must be rejected.
The attribution of literacy to whole societies in the discipline of anthropology is contradicted by his-
torical research showing that the ability to read and write has often been limited to a rather small part
of the population around the world, including Europe. Rather, the vision of a whole society being literate
accompanied the large-scale introduction of universal compulsory schooling in the 18th and 19th centuries
(Lyons, 2022, 59–77).
Similarly, literacy rates did not necessarily correlate with high social status: in early-twentieth-century
South Africa, for instance, Black migrant mine workers were more likely to be able to read and write,
and to correspond with their families, than Boers (Krüger, 2009). Such historical work has also radically
challenged another narrative about illiterate societies: that of “people without history” (Wolf, 1982) char-
acterized by a strictly oral transmission of knowledge from the past (although this again does not imply
that the prevalence of specific forms of literacy in a society has no significance in shaping uses of the past).
This narrative of a “great divide” in humanity based on an opposition between literacy and illiteracy also
contributed greatly to what Graff (1979) has called the “literacy myth”: the attribution of a wide variety of
social, political, and economic goods and societal markers to literacy (Graff 1979; see also Bartlett et al.,
2011, 156; and Lyons, 2022, 1–15, for corresponding “illiteracy myths”), as if it were some kind of universal
key.
However, even though foundational concepts for the discipline of anthropology, like illiterate societies
and a “great divide,” were organized around notions of literacy and societies without history, for a long
time there was little intensive empirical field research on this subject, even after the empirical turn to
fieldwork following Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) and the important work of Jack Goody. The topic
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only really took off with the (New) Literacy Studies in the late 20th century. We will return to this later,
after looking at the role of literacy in the discipline of psychology.
Mainstream psychology has historically ignored literacy and illiteracy: literacy was just taken for granted,
which to some extent remains the case today. For example, in the formative decades of scientific psychol-
ogy at the end of the 19th century, the Würzburg School of Oswald Külpe (1862–1915), Karl Marbe
(1869–1953), Narziß Ach (1871–1946), Karl Bühler (1879–1963), and others conducted experiments
whose participants had to have specific and wide-ranging qualifications to generate “valid” data through
introspection. This method was always controversial: in effect, only psychologists themselves could be
proper research subjects, and only members of the Würzburg School itself could participate in each other’s
experiments (Holzkamp, 1983, 544).
Likewise, the tradition of genetic structuralism principally inaugurated by Jean Piaget (1896–1980) and
Bärbel Inhelder (1913–1997) never questioned literacy as a given. Only later, when the universalist claims
of Piaget’s developmental cognitive theory were tested in cultural contexts beyond Geneva and other Swiss
cities, was the dependence of this stage theory on formal schooling and literacy questioned more and more
insistently. Examples include Gustav Jahoda’s (1920–2016) relatively early studies in Ghana in the 1950s
(Jahoda, 1958a, 1958b) and Patricia Greenfield’s later research in Senegal with the Wolof (Greenfield,
1966; Greenfield et al., 1966). The latter was closely linked to the work of Jerome Bruner (1915–2016),
with whom the educational psychologist David Olson—who himself developed into an important voice
in research on literacy—was then associated (see e.g., Olson, 1994).
Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) is among the rare psychologists whose research agenda included literacy
as such. On the one hand, his conceptual and empirical work on the relationship between literacy and
thinking in the development of children was published posthumously in Thinking and Speech (Vygotsky,
1987/1934, 167–267). On the other hand, he and Alexander Luria (1902–1977) planned cross-cultural
and cross-historical research in Central Asia, more precisely in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, to demon-
strate the main assumptions of cultural-historical psychology regarding the socio-cultural formation of
mind. Although Vygotsky’s poor health prevented him from participating personally in this work, Luria
and a number of young assistants carried it out at the beginning of the 1930s. However, for political
reasons, its full results were only published decades later (on the complicated role of Luria as a cultural
psychologist within his life-writing, see Kölbl & Métraux, 2025). The renowned Gestalt psychologist Kurt
Koffka (1886–1941) was also part of this team, although he only participated in one rather short expe-
dition. Although Luria and Vygotsky also wanted to include anthropologists, these efforts failed. Their
empirical analyses argued that key issues in thinking, imagination, perception, and other psychic functions,
far from following universal laws, were narrowly tied to sociocultural contexts—including the presence
or absence of formal schooling and literacy (Luria, 1976). These studies retain great interest, despite their
simplistic view of Islam, uncritical position towards collectivization and Soviet literacy campaigns, and pos-
tulation of a rather linear teleological collective and individual development from an illiterate to a literate
person and from an illiterate towards a literate society (see also Proctor, 2020, 71–116). It is certainly no
accident that the issue of literacy and illiteracy became a relatively prominent research subject in psychology
in post-revolutionary and post-war Russia/early Soviet Union (as opposed to Switzerland or Germany),
given the massive literacy campaigns in large parts of the new Soviet republics and the omnipresent bespri-
zornye (children without guardians) roaming the streets who had little or no formal school education at all
(Mecacci, 2019). Drawing on Sheila Fitzpatrick’s (1979) work on education in the Soviet Union between
1921 and 1934, Lyons emphasizes that “in the terminology of literacy drives, there is often a very fine line
between eliminating illiteracy and eliminating illiterate people” (Lyons, 2022, 34).1
Luria’s work was an important inspiration for cross-cultural and cultural psychology in general and
research on literacy in the Global South in particular. Michael Cole’s work with the Kpelle in Liberia, for
example, is closely related to Luria’s early research in Central Asia: it tried to disentangle the effects of
formal schooling from those of literacy on cognitive development (which Luria never did) by comparing
groups with various levels of formal schooling and literacy skills. The telling—and apt—subtitle of this
seminal monograph is “An Exploration in Experimental Anthropology” (Cole et al., 1971).2 Hence, Cole et al.
and Luria’s work was already unconfined by rigid disciplinary boundaries.
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A further step concerning transdisciplinarity was undertaken in the (New) Literacy Studies, which also
constituted an important specific turn towards empirical research on literacy. The work in anthropology
and psychology reviewed above aimed mainly at formulating grand theories, but from the 1980s, this
new approach focused on concrete daily practices and the formulation of middle-range theories. Brian
Street, who played a critical role in this endeavor (Street, 1984), criticized what he called the “autonomous
model” of literacy that positioned literacy “as independent of social context, an autonomous variable
whose consequences for society and cognition can be derived from its intrinsic character” (Street, 1993, 5).
He contrasted this with the “ideological model,” which positioned “literacy practices as inextricably linked
to cultural and power structures in society and recognize[d] the variety of cultural practices associated
with reading and writing in different contexts” (Street, 1993, 7). This empirically informed critique opened
the way for a larger strand of literature that was not realized by anthropologists or linguists alone, but
often through transdisciplinary approaches based on empirical research that situated and solidified the
concept of literacy in actual everyday practice (Collins, 1995; Gee, 1991; Rowsell & Pahl, 2020). We position
ourselves in this line of transdisciplinary research focused on concrete daily practices and middle-range
theories and seek to contribute to its further development (Alber & Kölbl, 2023a, 2023b, 2025; Kölbl &
Alber, 2025). The twist towards a more dynamic and processual understanding of literacy in the (New)
Literacy Studies, undertaken among other things, by looking at “literacy events” (Street, 2000), needs to
be enlarged, we would like to argue, by looking more intensively at the dynamics of illiteracy. That could be
done by conceptualizing illiteracy events as well, or, as we demonstrate in the next section, by focusing on
processes of literacizing and illiteracizing. Or, as we argue as well, by conceptualizing illiteracy and literacy as
relational phenomena that mutually constitute each other.
Other recent work in what is now often labeled just as Literacy Studies—for example, on literacy as
social practice and its relevance for work with deaf students—demonstrates that the field is developing in
a variety of directions (Papen, 2023). Further work aims at a novel synthesis between classic universalist
claims and the contextualizing purposes of Literacy Studies (Collins & Blot, 2005).
CONCEPTUALIZING ILLITERACY AND LITERACY AS MULTIPLE AND
RELATIONAL PHENOMENA
Literacy and illiteracy should never be conceptualized in isolation from each other, at either a societal or
an individual level. As outlined, our disciplines have long conceptualized this relatedness by locating two
apparently independent antagonists on a historical or biographical timescale (from illiteracy to literacy)
or geography (the West as literate, the rest as illiterate) and thus assumed that literacy might sometimes
exist without illiteracy and vice versa. As outlined, this dichotomy has already been criticized and largely
rejected, but the two concepts’ assumed independence also needs to be challenged. We conceptualize
literacy and illiteracy as intrinsically related and argue that this relationality is key to defining both since
empirical research has demonstrated that neither exists without the other. It is only with the introduction
of literacy that illiteracy emerges as its relational other; the concept would be useless in a space where
nobody read, wrote, or knew about writing. This relationality is key to any definition of literacy or illiteracy.
We thus define (il)literacy as a relational societal or personal distinction between the presence and absence
of skills and knowledge related to both existing writing systems and their use (Alber & Kölbl, 2025). Part
of this relationality is the not universal but often important distinction between attributing (il)literacy to
oneself or to others. As notions and perceptions of (il)literacy depend on time and place, they vary in not
only vernacular but also academic and policy discourses. Our definition accounts for how the distinction
is so highly dependent on context that the same ability can be labeled as an indicator of literacy in one time
or place and illiteracy in another.
For instance, in the Republic of Benin in West Africa, literacy is largely defined in both vernacular
discourse and official documents of the state bureaucracy by the ability to read and write French, the
current national and former colonial language. Some literacy programs make use of local languages, but
only as a stepping stone towards learning to write French. The fact that a large fraction of the population
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LITERACY AND ILLITERACY, ITS RELATIONAL OTHER
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has studied at Qur’anic schools for years, a standard feature of Muslim children’s education, is largely
ignored: people who can “only” read Arabic are still seen as illiterate. However, in Arab countries, reading
and writing Arabic, of course, counts as literacy.
Our definition can be expanded, or it can be narrowed to specify, for instance, “digital literacy” (Abou
Moumouni & Krauß, 2023) or “health literacy” (Bello, 2014) as the capacity to understand medical treat-
ments and health communications. These specifications are especially important because they demonstrate
that reading and writing or understanding are always related to specific domains. Institutional changes to
these or the introduction of new technologies may contribute to the creation of new (il)literacies. How-
ever, we oppose expanding the concept to apply to any kind of knowledge whatsoever and argue that a
link to writing systems (albeit in a broad sense) is always crucial. Such systems may vary widely: for exam-
ple, they may depend on textiles and weaving (Arnold, 2023), knots and cords (Salomon, 2013), pictures
(Gaillemin, 2022), signs written in sand, or digital devices. In any case, however, they must be shared within
a community or society.
And finally, our understanding of (il)literacy is shaped by a processual perspective: it is not static but
constantly remade and changed, not only over individual life courses but also through societal actions. For
instance, some of our research partners in Benin and Bolivia learned to read and write a little during their
short school careers and later lost these abilities simply through lack of practice. Others, such as some in
Benin, did not attend school but learned to understand and speak French by watching television and later
to read through self-study or by practicing on signs in the streets. Of course, such processes also happen
on the societal level when states initiate schooling campaigns or make schools accessible and mandatory,
resulting in an increased level of reading and writing ability among youth. Similarly, if schools are closed or
girls are excluded, the opposite might also happen.
Taking this processuality seriously at the individual as well as on the societal level, we suggest comple-
menting the concepts of literacy and illiteracy with the concepts of literacizing and illiteracizing. We define
these as processes of learning and unlearning reading and writing skills and assume that they happen in
any phase of the life course. For example, someone may have learned to read and write in school but
then lost these skills due to living conditions and biographical situations that offered no opportunity—or
even need—to practice them. Later, they might need to review or relearn what they once knew to cope
with changing environments or life situations. Besides defining (il)literacizing as processes to learn and
unlearn reading and writing skills, we assume that it can happen in any language or script that is seen
as relevant in a society. Furthermore, processes of literacizing and illiteracizing both take place in com-
plex and intermingled ways, both diachronically over the course of someone’s life and synchronically as
they move between different social settings. The process of (il)literacizing is neither limited to the acts of
completely autonomous subjects nor one in which persons are merely subjected to all-powerful external
forces. Instead, it happens in a continuum of self(il)literacizing and hetero(il)literacizing, sometimes on a
discursive level (for arguments in favor of a “literacy continuum,” see also Lyons, 2022, 99–108).
Like literacy and illiteracy, processes of illiteracizing are relational. We regard all forms of illiteracizing in
a given society as related to its standards of literacy and processes of literacizing. For example, the global
standards of literacy explicitly referred to in the UN Millennium Goal of “education for all” and promoted
by UNESCO policies (UNESCO, 2010) lead to processes of literacizing while simultaneously also creating
what they seek to eradicate: in setting a new standard of literacy, they also label those who do not meet it
as illiterate and thus illiteracize them.
As suggested above, the (New) Literacy Studies starting in the 1980s (Street, 1984, 1993; Bartlett et al.,
2011; Rowsell & Pahl, 2020) helped to overcome notions of literacy and illiteracy as static entities by
conceptualizing literacy as “literacy events” that take place within complex webs of societal and social
practices (Heath, 1982; Street, 2000). Looking back at this work and taking up the idea of “literacy events”
(or maybe, emphasizing the dynamic and processual dimension, in our terminology, “literacizing events”),
we suggest, as mentioned, also paying attention to “illiteracy events” (or “illiteracizing events”) to under-
stand the societal and personal processes through which subjects are rendered illiterate in specific settings
(Alber & Kölbl, 2023b).3 Here, one might think of persons who are confronted with recently changed
and unfamiliar bureaucratic arrangements (perhaps due to shifts in technology; see Abou Moumouni &
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Krauß, 2023) or workers required to sign employment contracts that they are unable to read. These exam-
ples show that processes of illiteracizing can happen not only in societies with low literacy but in any place
described or perceived as literate.
LITERACIZING AND ILLITERACIZING IN URBAN LITERATE
ENVIRONMENTS
Our conceptual focus on entangled and coeval processes of literacizing and illiteracizing is based not
only on theoretical reflections but also grounded in empirical work. Following how local actors cope with
literate environments in globalized situations of illiteracy in urban contexts in Benin and Bolivia allowed
us to better understand the life worlds of our research partners and their everyday struggles with these
literate environments and how they constantly live through processes of literacizing and illiteracizing. In
the following, we present our empirical approach, followed by some selected findings on practices and
discourses of (il)literacizing.
We chose two urban sites, Parakou in Northern Benin and the La Paz-El Alto metropolitan area in
Bolivia, with the aim to disentangle the widespread association of illiteracy and the countryside that char-
acterizes many literacy programs, including those in Benin and Bolivia. At the same time, our decision to
accompany research partners older than 25 years allowed us to overcome another shortcoming of these
programs, the idea that illiteracy can be eradicated by working with youth. In fact, we acknowledge that pro-
cesses of literacizing do not end with the end of schooling or formal education, just as those of illiteracizing
can also be observed at any moment in the life course.
Both countries share some features with regard to (il)literacy, which helped us to discuss and sometimes
compare (see below) the findings. In both Benin and Bolivia, literacy is mainly associated with skills in a
dominant national language introduced under colonialism (Spanish and French, respectively), even though
much of the population are native speakers of indigenous languages (Aymara or occasionally Quechua in
El Alto and La Paz and Baatonum, Dendi, or Fulfulde in Parakou). Both sites are also characterized by
strong rural ties based on migration and other mobility patterns, and both countries are among the less
literacized of their continents, despite official statistics sometimes suggesting otherwise, as is the case in
Bolivia. However, despite these similarities, we did not aim to produce systematic anthropological compar-
ison or systematic cross-cultural psychology (Matsumoto & van de Vijver, 2010) or to make hierarchical
comparisons between the sites. Our research methodology foresees analyzing a specific phenomenon,
namely, that of coping with illiteracy, based on two field studies. In doing so, we take the specific prac-
tices of each research site very seriously and are able to do some “fluid comparisons” (Schnegg & Lowe,
2020). At the same time, conducting research at two sites in the Global South has allowed us to take
each urban context—hermeneutically speaking—as a comparative horizon (Straub, 2006), identify com-
monalities and differences across different geographical spaces and cultural contexts, and generate and
empirically saturate hypotheses about their emergence, persistence, and dissipation.
In both Benin and Bolivia, we followed about 20 research partners from 25 to 50 years old who have
completed no more than 3 years of formal schooling. We studied how they, their kin and co-workers,
state actors, literacy mediators (Kölbl & Alber, 2025), and others cope with various forms of (il)literacy in
the workplace. Following how these shape social relationships and interactions with (state) bureaucracies,
as well as how these appeared in everyday situations, we could detect that although literacy and illiteracy
were crucial for these interactions, especially illiteracy was often made invisible, not only by the actors
themselves but also by state institutions and the social environment. We were accompanying our research
partners through their respective familial, occupational, and other relevant social contexts over the course
of approximately three years using informal conversations, interviews, and participant observation, includ-
ing biographical interviews as well as conversations with the social environment of our research partners.
We also understood participant observation as “thick participation” (Spittler, 2014). This allowed for a
twofold diachronic perspective, including both retrospective biographical reconstructions and a forward-
looking longitudinal approach. In both, the temporal dimension of coping with situations of illiteracy in
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LITERACY AND ILLITERACY, ITS RELATIONAL OTHER
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a world shaped by literacy was omnipresent. This also included various forms of learning, unlearning,
and forgetting while facing, circumventing, and avoiding situations of illiteracy in both institutional and
non-institutional contexts and on both more individual and more societal levels.
This methodological approach, which could be summed up in George Marcus’s (1995, 106) maxim of
“follow the people,” led us to make visits to the villages where our research partners were born or from
which they migrated to the city. We combined this with a second methodological approach: participant
observation, interviews, and ethnographic studies in selected field sites that we identified as highly rel-
evant to processes of coping with (il)literacy. These included markets, driving schools, literacy courses,
workplaces like construction sites and tailors’ and carpenters’ shops, cemeteries, churches and mosques,
hospitals, courthouses, union halls, political offices, and polling places. In thus methodologically realizing
ethnographies of spaces, we observed and analyzed concrete and everyday actions in these spaces and thus
how illiteracy events were made and reproduced there: in fact, what spaces of coping with illiteracy are. Inter-
views with various experts from sectors such as education, health services, and the judiciary have further
enriched our empirical material.
As we developed our methodological approach on-site, inspired by Grounded Theory, we sought to
identify similarities and differences. In both places, we thus included phases of collective research inspired
by the ECRIS—Enquête Collective Rapide d’Identification des conflits et des groupes Stratégiques (Rapid Collective
Inquiry for the Identification of Conflicts and Strategic Groups)—a method developed in the Republic of
Benin (Bierschenk & de Sardan, 1997). This allowed us, as a multidisciplinary team, to gain deep empirical
insights in both places, which helped the theoretical work afterwards.
This combination of collective fieldwork in both places, and the longer-term participant observation in
form of individual fieldwork enabled us to reconstruct a great variety of practices and discourses around
(il)literacy in both places, some of them very similar, others more specific to one place. These include
specific mnemonic and learning strategies, interactions with various types of literacy mediators (see Alber
& Kölbl, 2023b, and Papen, 2010, for this concept), face-work in the classic sense of Goffman (Goffman,
1955), and coping with emotions of shame. In the following, we want to illustrate our basic findings
that processes of literacizing and illiteracizing are constantly interwoven in individual biographies as in
societal constellations and in diachronic processes as well as synchronic societal fields. We thus present the
biography of Jesús, a young man of Aymara descent living in El Alto, one of our research partners.4
Jesús, in his twenties at the time of this study, had been born in a Bolivian village near Lake Titicaca. He
had started school—and thus, a process of literacizing—rather late, at the age of 10, but detested it and
left 3 years later with rather rudimentary Spanish. Before entering school and after leaving it, Jesús worked
with his father in the fields and helped him sell the harvest at the market. Of course, here he learned as
well to express himself and to count; thus, these activities could also be described as part of processes of
(il)literacizing. As a teenager, he moved to La Paz, where he lived with an aunt for a while, earning money
from various low-paid jobs. During this time, he hardly ever practiced reading or writing, which can be
defined as processes of illiteracizing. At the same time, being in La Paz, he was surrounded by letters—in
the streets, markets, and everywhere, far more than in his home village in the Bolivian Altiplano.
Later, he began to work in El Alto, adjacent to La Paz, for a franchise of a company that sold dietary sup-
plements and organized sport activities. His then-girlfriend played an essential role as his literacy mediator
and helped him with all the aspects of his job that involved reading and writing, as well as calculations. He
also received support from his employer, which provided him with audio and print materials that helped
him with his reading and writing abilities, although this was supposedly directed mainly at improving his
motivation and self-esteem. This period in his life was broadly characterized by processes of literacizing.
However, his girlfriend left him due to a dispute about her pregnancy, and he not only lost his life partner
but also the key person who enabled him to work with letters and numbers. During the COVID-19 pan-
demic, he was laid off and left El Alto to return to his village. It is quite possible that this new phase of his
life will feature new processes of illiteracizing.
In Jesús’ life, alternating phases of literacizing and illiteracizing have been introduced by both personal
decisions, such as leaving school, and societal conditions, like the pandemic—and very often by a com-
bination of the two. And even though they broadly alternated, at any time in his life elements of both
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9 of 14
ETHOS
could be detected, as when he was more than ever surrounded by writing in La Paz, even though after
leaving school he was going through processes of illiteracizing. Looking at several similar biographical
accounts, we see that they, too, often reflect a broader history of events like new political regimes (and
corresponding changes in the national politics of education5), new opportunities, changing labor condi-
tions, the presence of new media, or the pandemic. Such societal changes with far-reaching consequences
for processes of (il)literacizing are not restricted to the present. Processes of colonization in our two
research countries contributed to specific forms of literacizing their indigenous populations through the
introduction of the Latin alphabet and Spanish and French languages (for the Andean region, see e.g.,
Rappoport & Cummins, 2011). Colonialism thus also contributed to illiteracizing the colonized people. In
the Andean case, for example, the introduction of letters contributed to marginalizing textile-weaving as
a specific writing system (Arnold, 2023); for the (also pre- and post-Inka) history of the cord- and knot-
based medium khipu, see Salomon (2013). A further step was the introduction of compulsory schooling,
which obviously literacized much of the populations while also illiteracizing others who did not attend
school or left it after a short period. In colonial Dahomey, the later Republic of Benin, the introduc-
tion of colonial schools went hand in hand with a colonial classification and distinction between the
so-called evolués and so-called indigènes, which also meant that the former were seen as legally treated
by French law, the Code Napoleon, and the latter as legally situated in the indigenous law. In fact, not
belonging to the very small minority of persons being educated and literacized in colonial schools, meant
not only being illiteracized but also being excluded from privileges and benefits in the colonial order
(Alber, 2023).
In contrast, before colonialism, illiteracy in the language of the former colonizers was previously not an
issue in the large parts of each country, where virtually no one used this language, but the introduction of
compulsory schooling resulted in standards that defined some as literate and others as illiterate or semi-
literate. Missionary activities within and beyond colonial periods are also an important context in which
complex processes of (il)literacizing took and take place. Gaillemin (2022), for example, shows how native
Quechua speakers in the Potosí region (Bolivia) still represent today Christian doctrine using pictorial signs.
As mentioned, (il)literacizing could also be studied from a synchronic perspective. For example, Ibrahim
is a man in his thirties who lives and works in Northern Benin.6 He never attended school and never
learned to read and write French in any formal educational setting but still has a successful small business
repairing electronic devices, including radios, televisions, mobile phones, and computers. Nonetheless, he
describes himself as—and is considered by others to be—illiterate. While he did not attend state schools
(like many Muslim Beninese boys and even more girls at his time), he learned Arabic writing at a Qur’anic
school. Thus, the same person who is considered literate in the mosque can be considered illiterate outside
the mosque. The ascription of being literate or being illiterate varies across social spaces and social roles.
Literacy and French competency are viewed as roughly equivalent in Beninese society, as can be observed
in the almost exclusive focus on French throughout the educational system. Observations in our ECRIS in
Parakou (see above) confirm this: when we asked several people what they would call an illiterate person in
their local language (such as Baatonum, Dendi, or Fulfulde), every single interviewee told us expressions
that literally meant “a person who has no ability in French.”
We return to Jesús to show that processes of (il)literacizing happen not only through practice but also
discourse (though of course there is no sharp distinction between the two). In sketching his biography, we
mentioned that he left school rather early. Why was this? According to him, his schoolmates, but also his
teacher, constantly persecuted him because he looked obviously “Indio,” which they equated with a sort of
innate ignorance and illiteracy. The mere fact of being perceived as Indio set processes of illiteracizing into
work. Such accounts are quite common in other parts of our empirical material, too. Moreover, racism in
Bolivian society has continued and—despite changes and various political efforts—can still be observed
today (see, for example, Canessa, 2023; from the perspective of political Indianism, see Reinaga, 1970).
Sometimes such equations of “Indianness” with ignorance and illiteracy are also camouflaged and come
across as a kind of “benevolent racism.” When the Aymara Víctor Hugo Cárdenas became vice-president
in the 1990s, for example, Goedeking reports that members of the social elite in La Paz described Cárdenas
as an “Indio culto” (cultivated Indio) (Goedeking, 2003, 218).
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LITERACY AND ILLITERACY, ITS RELATIONAL OTHER
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RESEARCH ON LITERACY AND ILLITERACY AS A MODEL FOR
TRANSDISCIPLINARY WORK
Academic work in the interstices between anthropology and psychology has long existed. The above-
mentioned research in Liberia by Cole et al. is but one example; others include studies of the Culture
and Personality School by Ruth Benedict (1887–1948), Margaret Mead (1901–1978), Gregory Bateson
(1904–1980), and others; the Harvard Department of Social Relations by Jerome Bruner (1915–2016),
Clyde Kluckhohn (1905–1960), John and Beatrice Whiting (1908–1999; 1914–2003), and others; and the
Saarbrücken Working Group of Ernst Boesch (1916–2014), which also included Lutz Eckensberger, Bernd
Krewer, and Sigrid Paul (1929–2014). Recent efforts aim at further diversifying psychological anthropology
and integrating academic landscapes where it is less prevalent (see, for example, Beatty, 2017; Funk &
Stodulka, 2023).
Cooperation between our disciplines can take very different forms, depending on epistemological
assumptions, methodological approaches, empirical interests, and the awareness of the history of the dis-
ciplines. Our specific cooperation in the interstices between social anthropology and cultural psychology
aims at not only better understanding our own research (by reflecting it through the lens of the other
discipline) but also at detecting blind spots in our disciplines due to our reflections on methodological
approaches and the histories and epistemologies of both disciplines. This is especially true for (il)literacy,
which we experienced in fact as a blind spot in both disciplines, albeit on different levels.
Some years ago, Bartlett et al. (2011) argued that anthropology is pivotal in research in the (New) Liter-
acy Studies because it analyzes societal processes and “helps seeing” (Bartlett et al., 2011, 165). Therefore,
they regard ethnographic methods as particularly important in research concerning digital and multilingual
literacy—topics they identify as central areas for future investigations. They further argue that ethno-
graphic methods are also essential to research on the reproduction of illiteracy. Our experience confirms
the importance of ethnographic methods. In particular, the ECRIS phases in which we tested and reflected
on different approaches were of utmost importance in our collaboration. Here, we also experienced that
cultural psychology can offer illuminating analyses of individual or subjective processes by conceptualizing
them as inextricably linked with sociocultural contexts rather than isolated elements in a societal vacuum.
The same logic of highlighting different focuses without reifying them holds true for social anthropology,
which emphasizes societal processes without disregarding individual actions, processes, and perceptions.
Therefore, we experienced as our common ground a single but multifaceted empirical research approach
developed together and shared by all project members. It was based on the two disciplines’ theoretical
and epistemological perspectives, which we experienced as complementary, however both speaking to our
common empirical ground. It is deeply rooted in hermeneutics and helps us to refine existing and develop
new qualitative methods suitable for their research on (il)literacy.
Let us turn one last time to one of the cases described above and give a hint as to what our collaboration
taught us and where further analyses could lead to. When reflecting on the processes of (il)literacizing in
the life of Jesús, one can also rethink concepts of learning: The processes of (il)literacizing are obviously
closely linked to processes of learning and unlearning. As we have seen above, Jesús learns the basics
of reading and writing in school but again unlearns these competencies at least partially after having left
school and while working in a field where writing and reading are not needed or can relatively easily be
circumvented. This changes again when moving to El Alto and working for the company selling dietary
supplements, where writing and reading are demanded. This learning and unlearning is linked to action.
Learning here is certainly nothing that just could be described via stimuli and responses, as classic behav-
iorist learning theories would suggest. Rather, it makes sense to regard learning in this case as action and
as a quite specific form of action, namely, action directed towards literacy (see also Kölbl & Alber, 2025;
Krüger, 2009, 25). Action is, in psychology, usually limited to goal-directed action. But action can also
be thought of as norm- and rule-oriented action and as action within stories and history and action as
story itself (Straub, 2006). In doing so, temporality and creativity in human action are highlighted. And as
we hope to have shown, Jesús’ learning certainly cannot be reduced to goal-oriented action. By includ-
ing learning as action within history, Jesús’ biography gains further contour, and we evade the trap of a
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psychology, which all too often reduces itself to an individuocentric project. Social anthropology, with
its high sensitivity for the historical dimension and the societal embeddedness of every action, and a wide
understanding of action and agency, is a good antidote here. On the other hand, psychological perspectives
have been useful in our project to get a more fine-grained understanding of individual learning pro-
cesses and their cognitive dimension, including mnestic processes. Here, anthropology would have focused
much more on the societal level. For the research topic of illiteracy—as should be the case for other
research topics, too—is open to perspectives focusing more on society or on persons. In joint projects as
ours, the complex entanglement of both should become much more visible than in “mono-disciplinary”
research.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
An intensive collaboration between cultural psychology and social anthropology that examined literacy
and illiteracy not only contributes to the further development of the (New) Literacy Studies but may also
serve as a model for increased collaboration between our disciplines.
Our empirical research, as well as the above-mentioned reflections on the histories of both disciplines,
have helped us identify a shared blind spot—illiteracy—which we might have overlooked without this
transdisciplinary focus. Our common discussions made us aware of similarities and differences concern-
ing this blind spot between the two disciplines and helped us understand the often-overlooked centrality
of illiteracy in the history of both, empirically as well as epistemologically. Teleologically devalued by both
disciplines as merely literacy’s opposite, illiteracy received even less empirical attention than literacy. Con-
sequently, (New) Literacy Studies conceptualized literacy events and the societal production of literacy
but tended to overlook the continuous production of illiteracy until today in a world that sees itself as
globally literacizing. This production of (il)literacy happens simultaneously in individual life courses as in
societal processes such as the building of educational systems (for a classic in the production of literacy
in school, see the seminal volume of Cook-Gumperz, 1986). Talking conceptually about processes of illit-
eracizing acknowledges that it is deeply entangled with literacizing, that the two go hand in hand, and
that literacy (and processes of literacizing) can only adequately be described by looking at its relational
other, illiteracy (and processes of illiteracizing). It was only our transdisciplinary conversation and research
that made us aware of these blind spots and helped us to understand the similar biases shared by our
disciplines.
The productive cooperation we experienced could illuminate many other research topics as well.
(Il)literacy, however, is certainly a research subject that is key to both of our disciplines. As we have argued,
this is the case for concrete empirical analyses in our contemporary world, in which multiple forms of
hetero- and auto-(il)literacizing can be observed that have both high societal and high subjective relevance,
in multiple ways and with multiple effects. But this is also the case in historical perspective. Looking back
on our disciplines’ respective ways of thematizing literacy while often overlooking illiteracy, we see both
phenomena, in their relationality, not only at the heart of both disciplines but also as constitutive in the
formation of disciplinary similarities and boundaries in the social sciences.
In our experience, cooperation between social anthropology and cultural psychology offered richer and
more multifaceted empirical and conceptual results in a specific and central field of research than we could
have obtained on our own. In all modesty, this already is no small achievement. If our argument is not
going in completely the wrong direction, however, we would further claim that such cooperation has the
potential to bring deeper insights into the very fabric of which both our disciplines are made.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article is the outcome of research conducted in the research project “Learning Beyond the Classroom.
Coping with illiteracy in urban literate environments in Benin and Bolivia,” directed by Erdmute Alber and
Carlos Kölbl, within the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, funded by the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence
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LITERACY AND ILLITERACY, ITS RELATIONAL OTHER
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Strategy—EXC 2052/1—390713894. Other members of the research project were Rebekka Krauß, who
realized, with the support of Evelyn Apaza Huanca and Magali Saavedra Alacama, the study in Bolivia, and
Issifou Abou Moumouni, who realized, with the support of Daouda Thanmou, the study in the Republic
of Benin. Not only both empirical examples, but also reflections from the common project discussions
are important sources for the text. We thank our project members for that as well as for a critical reading
of the text. Besides we extend special thanks to Dr. Marianela Díaz Carrasco for her invaluable help in
getting access to the field in Bolivia. Finally, we wish to thank Daniel Flaumenhaft for language editing.
Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
ORCID
ErdmuteAlber
https://orcid.org/0009-0002-4078-4391
CarlosKölbl
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3205-2043
ENDNOTES
1These lines can be found in a subdivision of a chapter entitled “The war on illiteracy,” and it is noteworthy that the imagery,
metaphors and associations applied to illiteracy very often have to do with war and fighting and elimination and eradication, as well
as disease, darkness, and blindness.
2For a psychology of literacy also based on cultural psychological research, see Scribner and Cole (1981).
3In a similar vein but ultimately resulting in a different conceptual offer, the historian Martyn Lyons proposes the term “acts of
illiteracy”: “Whereas the proponents of the ‘New Literacy Studies’ talk of literacy events or literacy acts to describe an individual’s
engagement with a text, I wish to turn this vocabulary on its head to consider ‘acts of illiteracy,’ that is to say acts which illustrate an
incomplete level of literacy competence in one dimension or another” (Lyons, 2022, 6).
4We would like to thank Evelyn Apaza Huanca for gathering the data concerning Jesús.
5The impact of new political regimes is very present in the biographies of our research partners. On the Bolivian side, the efforts
of alphabetization programs in the era of Evo Morales are mirrored in the biographical narrations. In Benin, the Marxist-Leninist
phase of Mathieu Kérékou, and therewith, the first large alphabetization campaigns had a similar impact.
6We thank Dr. Issifou Abou Moumouni for having followed Ibrahim over a period of time and produced this case study.
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How to cite this article: Alber, E., and C. Kölbl. 2025. “Literacy and illiteracy, its relational
other: A key topic for collaboration between psychology and anthropology.” Ethos 53: e70015.
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