Literacy is a linguistic innovation characterised by the encoding and decoding of language into a system of visual signs whose
relevance to daily life in most societies cannot be overstated. Understood to be both a technology and a social practice, literacy
has been the subject of anthropological inquiry since the late nineteenth century, with protracted debates about its effects on
human consciousness and social life. This entry tracks the development of literacy as a concept.
Initially dominated by technologically deterministic assertions that literacy was a tool for sociocultural and cognitive
development, anthropology would later embrace the more culturally relativistic perspective advanced by the New Literacy
Studies movement of the 1980s and 1990s. This movement sought to understand how cultural logics and norms informed the
development of localised literacy practices, thus creating variations of ‘literacies’ which were themselves embedded within
ideologies and structures of power relations. Coming to recognise the marginalising power of standardised literacy,
anthropology turned its attention to education.
Anthropologists and educators have become partners in research dedicated to developing pedagogical practices that draw upon
the unique linguistic resources and practices that students bring with them into the classroom to cultivate inclusivity and
empowerment. The increasing prevalence of digital technologies in all aspects of daily life have challenged earlier notions of
literacy, inspiring anthropologists to investigate how people draw upon multiple modalities to encode and decode meaning,
thereby fundamentally reshaping our understanding of what it means to ‘read and write’.