2.5 Literacy in the Community: The Interpretation of “Local” Literacy Practices Through Ethnography

Abstract

In this chapter I look at the interpretative practices that are involved when an ethnographer investigates local literacies in home and community settings. I draw on the tradition, from Elizabeth Campbell and Eric Lassiter (Anthropol Educ Q 41(4);370–385; 2010) of collaborative ethnography and the process of doing ‘reciprocal analysis’. I use this mode of analysis to create grounded interpretations which then enabled me to construct a shared epistemological space in which to make sense of these interpretations. I describe ways of interpreting and understanding data which were collaborative and situated within the everyday. Drawing on an ethnographic study of literacy in homes and communities, I developed a situated understanding of the data, employing reciprocal ways of knowing and understanding. I argue for an embodied and intuitive mode of understanding that constructed an interpretative framework from arts practice and ethnography. This framework could be described as a crafting of practice that was situated, contingent and rested on epistemologies and knowledge construction that, in many cases, lay outside of University domains of knowledge.