Literacy, Power, and Agency: Love Letters and Development in Nepal

Abstract

In this paper, a case study of women's incipient literacy in Junigau, Nepal, I argue that literacy can be both a catalyst for social change and a result of numerous other types of social transformation. The increase in female literacy rates in Junigau in the 1990s made possible the emergence of new courtship practices involving love letters and facilitated self-initiated marriages, but it also reinforced certain gender ideologies and undercut some avenues to social power, especially for women. Thus, this study reminds us that literacy is not a neutral, unidimensional technology, but rather a set of lived experiences that will differ from community to community. The new practice of love letter writing in Junigau facilitated not only a shift away from arranged and capture marriage toward elopement but also a change in how villagers conceive of their own agency (i.e., their socioculturally mediated capacity to act). Through a close reading of the most salient written sources of development discouse in the village – government textbooks, female literacy textbooks, novels, magazines, and love letter guidebooks – this paper analyses some likely sources for these new ideas about agency and identifies some prototypes for the development discouse so prevalent in Junigau love letters.