ABSTRACT
John: ’dyw! John: no! Stan: os wyt ti heb . Stan: if you haven’t got. John: heb un o’r rhain? John: haven’t got one of these? Stan: . heb y fform wedi llenwi ynde Stan: . haven’t got the form filled in John: mae ’di mynd yn rhyfedd .. John: it’s got awful.. Stan: o mae ’di mynd yn of nadwy hefo fforms wan
Stan: oh it’s got dreadful with forms now
Transcribed excerpt of a conversation between two livestock auction staff (30/3/95)
English version of a conversation between two livestock auction staff
In this chapter, my purpose is to show how the processes of ‘globalisation’ and ‘disembedding’ that are characteristic of contemporary society are realised in part through discursive practices and, specifically, bureaucratic literacy practices. I draw on my own empirical research with Welsh farming people in north-east Wales to make connections between the local historic literacy practices of their day-to-day farming activities and larger national and international social processes. I also show how written texts and literacy practices are constitutive of the social practices of organisation and control as they are realised by transnational bureaucratic systems. The data that I am using in this chapter come from a cattle sale at the Ruthin Farmers’ Auction where Stan and John, quoted above, were working. I look closely at how the organisational procedures of the livestock auction are carried out linguistically through people’s use of talk and texts. The notion of ‘talk around texts’ is used within New Literacy Studies to emphasise how reading and writing are often inseparable from talk. I think it is important to be more precise about what ‘talk around text’ involves and from my data, I have identified text articulation, negotiation and inscription as being strategies people accomplish through talk to mediate textual bureaucracy.
