With the emergence of literacy as part of human cultural evolution, new kinds of relations and activities formed that have created structures of participation in larger and more distant organizations, relying on accumulating knowledge and mediated through genre-shaped texts. It is for these activity contexts that individuals must produce texts, mobilizing the resources of language, and it is within these contexts that the texts will have their effect.

This second, companion volume to A Rhetoric of Literate Action supplies the theoretical understanding of what written language is and does which underlies that volume’s practical advice. But far from being a mere appendix, this survey of psycho-social theories of media and culture serves well as a compelling introduction to the theory of language in general and its place in society.

The first four chapters of this volume provide a framework for identifying and understanding the situations writing comes out of and is directed toward. The next four chapters then consider how a text works to transform a situation and achieve the writer’s motives as the text begins to take form. The final four chapters provide more specific advice of the work to be accomplished in bringing the text to final form and how to manage the work and one’s own emotions and energies so as to accomplish the work most effectively. The advice of this book is for the experienced writer with a substantial repertoire of skills, who now would find it useful to think in more fundamental strategic terms about what they want their texts to accomplish, what form the texts might take, how to develop specific contents, and how to arrange the work of writing.

For a deep exploration of the theoretical understanding of written language undergirding this book, see its companion volume, A Theory of Literate Action.

The tip of a pencil with a bit of graphite can hold within its pointed space all the potential words you can think of! I can produce a whole book with that pencil point! […] Right now I am just hyper-visualizing the tip, learning how to look; concentrated world of language on that tip.

Call it hyper-vision. Call it unrealistic. I follow the gypsy air.

All our two times two and definitions of photosynthesis, our political understanding and complaining cannot free us from the boundary of a dusty earth and so much brown of it.

Forget what the experts say about Autism; their knowledge is anything but solid. Autism flows: it doesn’t settle; it doesn’t shape.

This episode was previously called, “The City That Never Sleeps.”

Nuosu manifest potency by writing it into religious scriptures and handwrought effigies, piercing it into embroidered clothing and tattooed bodies, shaping it into public statues, and taming it into animals, all of which bring animate powers and presences to life.

On the mystical power of writing.

What does it do to a person to study delight? Or, as it emerges, to study joy every single day? What do you discover?

These arguments and cultural practices point to complexities of concepts on authorship in Thai Buddhism and strongly invite an analysis and deconstruction of ideas of ‘authorship’ as a clear-cut category.

Stories don’t just kick you over the head with a new idea but they embed these ideas in a richly imagined world. When you read a text, you’re not just influenced by a pet theory some character may be peddling but you’re much more influenced by the kind of world that is being created: what kind of rules does this world follow? A story always has an implicit theory of causality.

He never wrote to me about his insecurities. In my 20s and 30s, I would have loved to know that he had this feeling, to hear him talk about the weight of being a newish adult so disappointed with yourself after imagining greatness…

… and he does all this by forcing us past our accustomed conceptual language to unaccustomed words, words that gain vividness and specificity by the contrast with that accustomed language.

Thirty one years after the publication of The Forest Monks of Sri Lanka, the author reflects on its public life and on the philosophical nature of anthropology books in general.

You will also need a writing implement and a blank sheet of paper, and you should find the darkest spot possible…

Take a few minutes to copy a text by candlelight 🕯️ and reflect on the experience 🪞.

A model lab report for this exercise can be read here.

Gazing at a massive dam as it holds forth against the huge forces of a river, can we doubt that we are witnessing a marvelous feat of engineering, a triumph of human ingenuity over nature? Yet what a receipt does is no less remarkable and no less powerful, even if it is less immediately apparent, for it is holding forth against the ravages of time.

A history of “the document” and writing in all its forms.

Everything’s been said
But one last thing about the desert,
And it’s awful: …

Among the Dunhuang documents, when examining some of the monk signature lists, name list of monks copying scriptures and name list of monks chanting scriptures in monasteries, we can estimate a relatively accurate literacy rate of the Buddhist sangha. Generally speaking, the literacy rate of the sangha during the Guiyi Army 歸義軍 period (851–1036) was lower than that during the Tibetan occupation period (786–851). The reason for this change is closely related to each regime’s Buddhist policy, the size and living situation of the sangha, and the Buddhist atmosphere.

The truth is
money is in war, not poetry…

This study examines the phenomenon of borrowing and reusing portions of texts without attributing them to their ‘legitimate authors’ within the Buddhist world of contemporary Tibet. It shows that not only is such a practice not at all infrequent and is often socially accepted, but that it is used in this case as a platform to advance specific claims and promote an explicit agenda. Therefore, rather than considering these as instances of plagiarism, this essay looks at the practice of copying and borrowing as an exercise in intertextuality, intended as the faithful retransmission of ancient truths, and as an indication of the public domain of texts in Tibet.

Two of these carry extracts from the Abhidhamma; the third gives a syllabary followed by the recollection formulas of the Three Gems. The other two epigraphs are written not on stone slabs but are inscribed on small gold leaves; they contain the heart formulas of the books of the Tipiṭaka and the qualities of the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha.

I suggest that they are the products of widespread and enduring Buddhist cultures of inscription, installation, and consecration, as well as of customs of condensation and abbreviation that have have been intrinsic to Thai liturgical and manuscript practices up to the present.

Dōgen’s calligraphy is a carefully orchestrated performance. That is, it does precisely what it asks its readers to do: it sits calmly, evenly, and at poised attention in a real-world field of objects. The manuscript’s brushstrokes and entire aesthetic layout enact seated meditation.

The Fukanzazengi falls into a completely different genre of Zen writing from the sorts of expressive and creative manifestations, much-favored in museum exhibitions, in which dynamic interpretation is paramount. Instead, the Fukanzazengi is a pedagogical and didactic guide in which legibility is crucial, the function being to teach adherents, clearly and methodically, how to do seated meditation. In support of this assertion, I offer an extended visual analysis of the performativity of the manuscript’s calm and measured calligraphy.

you spoke of dancing. And the Baltic
Sea you placed in tiny glasses
what you knew of Kosovo
and how our students marched…

In 1911, a Native American man, the only member of his community to survive a genocide, encountered the new Anthropology department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Writing often is sloppy, even when it records very sacred texts

We wrote our names all over the city because we felt invisible. And it was fun. I existed when I did graffiti.

all those bodies in Departures
are naked under clothes and scarred

When I took the stand at the trial in San Francisco in 1993 I could not have done worse…

A writer for The New Yorker gets a second chance to prove her innocence.

… how do you come to understand, make sense of, listen to, take seriously the observations and the reflections that come from people’s lived experiences?

She hides in the room she painted for herself,
tuning, listening…

I use Weberian definitions of authority, and the modern notion of privilege, to point to the dynamic connection between public persona, gender, and religious authority in the 18th century hagiography of a Buddhist nun.