ABSTRACT
Literacy is usually taken to be a descriptive, not a normative concept, but the use of the term in everyday life tells another story. The effect of these presuppositions is to obscure the historical character of literacy—the fact that, as for all cultural phenomena, social and material causes propel the transition from pre-literacy to literacy and that there is thus nothing natural or inevitable about the transition. Even more importantly, the fact is obscured that as historical and material factors have unmistakably influenced the origins of literacy. Certainly, the details of that history would provide important information about the social transformations that those (or any) cultural needs and the responses to them might undergo. Only Pollyanna would be confident that the answers to these questions will be reassuring—but at least we should know better now than to recommend the features of our own culture as necessary or natural to all culture.
