Volume 28, Issue 5

The present article is an analysis of the scribal and lectoral activities of crypto-Muslim minority communities within sixteenth-century Aragon (Spain). Looking specifically at traditional Islamic texts translated into Ibero-Romance and copied out in Arabic script (a largely ad hoc writing system that modern scholars have termed aljamiado [pronounced: al-xam-yAH-ðo ]), this article focuses on the ways in which these texts index specific frameworks of lectoral performance and mediation that lie at the very center of processes of textual interpretation and cultural practice within the clandestine religious communities that made use of them. Central to this study is an analysis of the different forms of deictic reference encoded within these texts. The specific argument that underlies this article is that such reference links these written texts—which functioned as complex symbolic tools—to the social world of scribes, readers, and the listening public in profound and concrete ways. Looked at in this manner, the extant manuscript texts of Aragonese crypto-Muslims allow modern researchers a powerful form of access to the micro- and macro-level social practice of this large, sixteenth-century minority community.

In this article I investigate the convergence of a number of linguistic, interactional, and textual resources employed in religious reading activities in Spanish-based Catholic religious instruction ( doctrina ) for school-age Mexican immigrant children. I examine the use of these resources through an analysis of the reading and memorization of the Act of Contrition (AOC), a prayer said during the religious ritual that involves the confession and absolution of sins. I discuss examples of a classroom reading activity that centers on the interactions of four female students and their teacher as they read the AOC. The analysis of their interactions illustrates the ways in which their collaborative reading engages a ritualization process that focuses and constructs text as sacred. The reading activity supported this ritualization process through (i) parallel reframing and interpretation of the words being read and (ii) verbalizations of cognitive activity related to ways of reading text. I also discuss how the activities of ritualization socialize attention to both text and other participants in the activity. Descriptions of doctrina instruction and the origins of the AOC are also provided.

In this article it will be argued that the Menippean satire (broadly understood in Bakhtinian terms) provides a most, if not the most, significant formal and perhaps historical context for reading the Babylonian Talmud (ca. sixth century after Christ). Some theoretical considerations on the role of agency in dialogism (intertextuality) are lifted up as well.

In this article literacies are defined as a set of interconnected signifying practices interpreted by semiotic ideologies, that is, cultural beliefs about signs. This approach integrated with a language socialization approach to literacy provides a way to go beyond the reproduction of the normative social scientific categories of religious or secular literacies, orality and literacy, tradition and modernity. The focus of the article is the literacy practices of Hasidic Jews, an example of a nonliberal (fundamentalist) religious community. Hasidic Jews present a particularly relevant case study because their critique of secular modernity includes efforts to dismantle distinctions between the secular and the religious, thus creating an alternative religious modernity. This becomes evident through an exploration of multilingual (Hebrew/Aramaic, Yiddish and English) literacy socialization practices between women and girls. The article focuses on how girls begin to acquire literacy in Hebrew/Aramaic in kindergarten, comparing and constrasting girls' simultaneous acquisition of Yiddish and English literacy. Included are an examination of leisure literacy practices and new genres of English-language books for children. Across contexts, languages, and genres of Hasidic literacy socialization, distinct semiotic ideologies share an interpretive project: to teach girls to decode signs as nonarbitrary, that is, as divinely intended, and to turn what seem to be arbitrary or Gentile/secular signs into Jewish ones.

In this article, I present a language socialization approach to the study of Qur'anic schooling. Integrating insights from holistic study of the community and the institution, analysis of video recordings of Qur'anic school interaction, and video playback and interviews with community members, I describe the apprenticeship of Fulbe children into Qur'anic orality and literacy as a gradual transfer of responsibility for rendering the sacred text. I describe the organization of Qur'anic schooling at three levels: the stages of the curriculum, the phases of a lesson, and the turn-by-turn organization of child–teacher interaction. I present fine-grained analysis of video to illustrate how teachers and children used specific practices of body positioning, pointing, and eye gaze in conjunction with the written text and utterances in Arabic and Fulfulde to manage the transfer of the text during the first phase of a lesson. I then discuss perspectives on these multimodal practices articulated by Fulbe concerning how these practices contributed to the achievement of desired outcomes of Qur'anic schooling. I conclude by discussing how the language socialization perspective and attention to multiple modalities increase our understanding of Qur'anic schooling as an activity setting in which Muslim subjectivities come into being.

This article offers a historical perspective on reading as a situated activity through an examination of the medieval devotional practice of reading the book of hours. My historical investigation opens with an analysis of key pedagogical treatises and religious essays popular in the Middle Ages, which provided instruction on reading, its sensori-motor enactment, its interpretive procedures, and its ultimate goal. These texts, which portray reading not as a self-contained and intrinsically motivating activity but rather as a necessary component of a broader spiritual project, offer precious clues about how medieval readers approached the reading activity, the ways they engaged with the book, and their expectations pertaining to the scope of the reading practice. In the second part of the article, the focus turns to the book of hours. We will leaf through folios of these devotional manuscripts and examine their format, semiotic configuration, and textual and visual content. This analysis will show how textual and illustrational features of the book of hours reflect and foster the ideology and practice of reading as meditative and prayerful activity.

In this article I provide a short critical review of the main contributions in this Text & Talk special issue. This afterword offers an anthropologically oriented reassessment of traditional views of writing and reading. After a discussion of some basic concepts such as readability, legibility, and visibility, a new model of the functioning of reading scripts is mentioned—a basically context-grounded, interpretive, and situated perspective. From the analysis of cross-cultural settings and situations provided by the articles in the issue, we learn that a new, flexible idea of reading as an integrated practice dismissing the notion of text as a given, context-free written sign structure can also be a key tool for a better understanding of contemporary communicative frameworks.