ABSTRACT
By closely engaging with Michael Warner's analysis of the differences between various understandings of "publics", the author uses ethnographic examples from San Ramón Pueblo in two ways. First, he contrasts current and future indigenous language audiences with those non-indigenous, academic audiences from the salvage era. Second, he draws on popular and scholarly understandings of publics as modern, imagined groups constituted through literacy practices in order to critique characterizations of writing in the West that hinge on the unregulated, anonymous circulation of identical text objects, using Pueblo writing as an example of political participation through private sphere interpellation or, the summoning of audiences by various methods. This makes clear that there are not only private sphere and "counterpublic" practices with texts that figure in the creation of groups and forms of political practice, but also the presence of counter-privates, forged in response to private sphere practices with literacy and other technologies of circulation.
