ABSTRACT
This chapter is a scrutiny of a way of writing history that is called the historical anthropology of literacy. The chapter is centered on how the connection between writing and history has been configured since the advent of the human sciences, through concepts such as prehistory, preliterate mind, and analogies between prehistoric people and people from contemporary oral societies. These ideas are employed in a vast range of evolutionary anthropological work, such as in the work of Jack Goody and Walter Ong. With Jacques Derrida, I show what it means to seek a responsible response to absent anthropological others in our writing and reading about the past, taking into account the risk of violating them in their absence.
