them as communicatively unresponsive,
LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY zy
thereby making them so.
Stylistically, however, Language and Human
Nature is a giant step backward. And substan-
tively it offers too little. The busy reader may
extract the best of it from Stokoe’s foreword
zyxwvut
zyxw
before turning elsewhere for intellectual nour-
ishment.
zyxwvuts
Learning Without Lessons: Socialization
and Language Change in Norway. Karen A .
Larson. Lanham, MD: University Press of
America, 1985. 144 pp. $19.75 (cloth), $9.25
(paper).
SUSANGAL
Rutgers University
This slim book is a case study of dialectal
variation, its use and social meaning, in two
communities of central Norway. Larson com-
pares the social networks and language use of
speakers in Svorkmo, an agricultural village of
about 600 people, and in neighboring Orkan-
ger, a growing industrial town ofabout 4,000.
The stated aim is to understand how social
networks influence the way in which children
acquire and learn to use linguistic markers
that signify social relationships in speech. Sur-
prisingly, the analysis of social networks does
not make use of the quantitative methods that
are current in sociolinguistics. Similarly, al-
though Larson has interesting insights into the
patterns and “ethics” of code-switching, one
misses a discussion ofdefinitions and the usual
quantitative information that provides ac-
countability to the data.
Larson observed three families in each com-
munity making a total of 29 speakers, with
children ranging in age from six to 16 years.
Participants provided diaries of their network
contacts and, in addition to interviews, it was
possible to tape conversations in homes and in
schools. Larson shows that villagers have
smaller and more homogeneous networks, use
more dialect forms, and have less variation in
their speech than those in town.
Although explicit values in these commu-
nities support loyalty to one’s local dialect and
exclusive use of it with co-locals, the standard
language is required in school and has come to
convey a positive social authority. This famil-
iar sociolinguistic situation is a result of in-
creasing social and geographical mobility and
sets up a conflict of identity for the children.
Larson argues that as the village children’s
networks expand, especially upon entering
school in town, their contact with a wider
zyxwvuts 1023
range of people leads to ever greater use of the
standard variants, even at home. For speakers
in town, contacts with non-locals lead to dia-
lect “dilution.” According to Larson, the
young people’s usage represents the direction
of long-term social change. However, there is
no historical evidence provided to support this
argument, nor systematic comparison be-
tween children of different ages and networks.
The possible interaction of speakers’ social
status, residence, and network in determining
linguistic variation is not discussed.
Larson sensitively describes the conflicts
that village children experience as their par-
ents press them to use only local variants,
while in school they feel pressure to present
themselves as standard speakers. Switching as
the situation changes is not the usual way out
of this dilemma. Rather, Larson gives many
vivid examples to show that “metaphorical”
use of some few standard forms in dialect con-
versation is the frequent solution and consti-
tutes a situated claim to authority. However,
some children attempt what Larson charac-
terizes as a new strategy. They try to “blend”
standard and dialect forms “and adopt a pat-
tern of situational variability which slides
along a continuum of dialect-standard fea-
tures, thereby engag[ing] in ‘passing’ both at
school and at home” (p. 102). T o separate
“switching” from such “blending” both so-
cially and linguistically, or to relate the two, is
a central problem in studies of variation. Yet
in this study we are not told how the investi-
gator identified or distinguished them.
Thus, Larson’s study provides some useful
ethnographic information on language use
among children in Norway but its picture of
change is not well supported and it sidesteps
some important methodological issues.
Literacy in Theory and Practice. Brian V.
Street. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1984. 256 pp. $34.50 (cloth), $10.95
(paper).
RONALDKEPHART
University of Florida
Anthropologists and others involved with
“development” often describe Third World
countries in terms O f annual personal income,
unemployment, infant mortality, and illiter-
acy. For many, illiteracy is the causative fac-
tar: ifenough people can be taught to read and
write, development will “take off’ because
people have acquired the cognitive skills
needed to participate in modern industrial
1024 zyxwvutsrqp
zy AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
economies. This reification of literacy as a
neutral technical skill Brian Street calls the
autonomous model of literacy.
Street sees a parallel here with Bernstein’s
“elaborated” and “restricted” codes, except
that by making the essential contrast “liter-
ate” versus “illiterate” the people involved are
no longer permanently handicapped; they can
acquire “literacy,” get good jobs, and climb
the social ladder. In the first section, “Liter-
acy in Theory,” Street offers a contrasting
“ideological” model of literacy in which the
practice of reading and writing can never be
separated from the social, political, economic,
and cultural context in which it is “embed-
ded.” This leads to the concept of “literacies”
and away from that of a single “literacy.”
Street draws on the work of anthropologists,
linguists, and social historians, with examples
ranging from Iran to the Carolina Piedmont,
to show that everybody who speaks a language
can think abstractly and logically, that the
“great gulf’ between oral and literate culture
does not in fact exist, and that ‘‘literacy’’ can
be used to impede as well as to facilitate up-
ward social mobility.
In the second section, “Literacy in Theory
and Practice,” Street provides examples illus-
trating the ideological aspects of literacy. In
Medieval England, the Normans introduced
written titles to landownership, which for-
merly was symbolized by knives, medals, or
personal witness. As Street says, the native
English “found themselves having to produce
and even forge written records that were
embedded in an alien system in order to main-
tain holdings that provided their livelihood”
(p. 112). In Iran, where Street did fieldwork
in the 1970s, specific “hidden” literacy skills
learned in their religious schools enabled fruit
growers to “cash in on the urban boom of the
1970s” (p. 179). Some of these people might
have been classified “functionally illiterate”
by UNESCO standards, but they were “com-
mercially literate” in terms of their own needs.
Finally, in “Literacy in Practice,” Street
discusses examples of literacy campaigns that
exemplify the autonomous model (Tanzania)
and the ideological model (Nicaragua and
adult education in Britain). I n Nicaragua, as
with the earlier Cuban campaign, the Sandi-
nistas state up front that their goal is to teach
literacy within the framework ofthe revolution
and thus to draw people into the revolutionary
process. While some may not like the leftist
orientation of the materials, at least there is no
attempt to hide that orientation. And the San-
dinistas adapt their materials to peoples less
touched by the revolution, such as those along
the isolated Atlantic Coast. I n England, the
[88, 19861
A d u l t Literacy a n d Basic Skills U n i t
(ALBSU) teaches adults the “literacies” they
perceive as valuable to them, rather than im-
posing a single “literacy” on them (a prelimi-
nary list of ALBSU skills is offered as an ap-
pendix).
Street does not address the psycholinguistic
aspects ofliteracy, which might be the level on
which an “autonomous” literacy skill could be
demonstrated. But this in no way detracts
from the value of the book, which is well or-
zyx
ganized and clearly written. It should be read
by all educators, psychologists, anthropolo-
gists, linguists, and others involved with lit-
zyx
eracy and development, whether in the Third
World or among linguistic and cultural mi-
norities in the “developed” world.
zyxwvu
The Mythology of North America. John
Bierhorst. New York: William Morrow, 1985.
270 pp. $13.00 (cloth).
M. JANE YOUNG
zy
University of Texas
Well known for his other compilations of
Native American oral literature-including
Four Mmtenuorks of American Indian Literature, In
the Trail of the Wind,and The Red Swan-in this
book Bierhorst presents a systematic view of
the entire corpus of North American Indian
mythology. Since no such overarching de-
scriptive work has appeared in nearly 70
years, Bierhorst’s book is timely, adding
breadth to the knowledge of Native American
narrative.
I n the volume’s introduction Bierhorst
briefly traces the history ofscholarly studies of
North American Indian mythology, outlining
the various schools of thought that shaped
these endeavors. He concludes this section
with high praise for recent research by “per-
formance ethnographers” who “dignified the
Indian storyteller in a way that had never
been done before and so made a timely, ifsub-
tle, political statement” (p. 4).
Bierhorst then turns his attention to the dis-
tinction between myths and folktales. Al-
though he notes the difficulty in distinguishing
myths from other kinds of narrative, he pro-
ceeds to develop a rather rigid dichotomy that
would benefit from an acquaintance with re-
cent folklore scholarship. Contemporary folk-
lorists deemphasize analytic categories based
on the fieldworker’s own cultural grid, stress-
ing instead the distinctions made by the folk
groups themselves, and paying particular at-
tention to the various contexts in which nar-