Introduction

In the preceding chapters we have engaged with a number of complex conceptual issues concerning literacy, in particular those of text, power, and identity, and we have developed our arguments via a wide range of ethnographic and historical cases. What we wish to do at this point is revisit certain of those issues, developing arguments and questions further, making connections between chapters, cases, and conceptual positions. That is, and against convention, we will try to make this conclusion an opening as much as a closing. Because the theme of the “origins” of literacy continues to fascinate both scholarship and popular culture, we will return to this topic by means of the Tolowa case with which our book opened. As we examine the late-twentieth-century advent of writing among these Northern California native people, we are brought to issues and questions raised by Derrida about the theme of origins in writing as well as to recent criticisms made by Goody about Derrida's relativist arguments concerning writing, reading, and books.