Introduction

From the very beginning, soon after Goody and Watt's (1963) classic paper, the arguments of the literacy thesis had been challenged. In a volume entitled Literacy in Traditional Society Goody (1968) reprinted his article with Watt along with a series of articles which criticized various of the claims made in that early paper. These included, for example, Gough's article on literacy in Ancient Indian and China and how those literate traditions undermined arguments about “alphabetic” and “restricted” literacy (Gough, 1968). During this same period – from the mid-1960s into the 1970s – a number of anthropologists were engaged in ground-breaking research based on extensive fieldwork in areas as diverse as the southern US, Iran, and West Africa. The results of this research, the strongest ethnographic challenges yet to the Goody–Watt thesis, were to appear in publications in the early 1980s. This work provided alternative models for understanding literacy, and has had considerable influence on subsequent work by educators, anthropologists, and historians.