letter-writing wallahs

[Allen Grimshaw]

This is an extremely interesting topic and likely to be a productive one.

The phenomenon of scribes-for-hire is probably current wherever societies
have a sort of literacy diglossia--with persisting categories of people who
are or are not literate. Forty years ago there were such specialists in
India in both urban and rural areas. I have no idea of how competent the
practitioners may have been. If letters were putatively written and no
response ever received did the hopeful sender and hirer of a letter writer
blame the  scribe? the addressee of the letter? Fate?

I would hazard that there is stuff on letter-writers in some of the South
Asia or more generally comparative  social science literatures--possibly in
places such as the Journal of Asian Studies or Comparative Studies in
Society and History. Similarly, in other region-focused literatures.

A productive place to look for possible leads is in the stuff on the
roles/functions, etc., of translator-interpreters. R. Bruce W. Anderson
wrote some pioneering stuff on this in the 1960s (e.g., "On the
comparability of meaningful stimuli in cross-cultural research," Sociometry,
30, 1967). Anderson's point is straightforward and persuasive. If there are
two true monolinguals and a competent bilingual interpreter, the interpreter
may be in a position of very considerable power. There are, of course,
manifold complications, as when one of the putative monolinguals actually
has non-trivial competence in the other monolingual's language. Many of us
believed that this was often the case when American officials interacted
with supposed monolinguals who actually knew more than minimal English (with
the usual caveats about differences in productive and receptive
competences). 

Anderson had other pieces on the topic. Cicourel's notion of interpretive
procedures may be helpful here--where quite different cultural surrounds may
be affect all the participants in the four person chain of a letter for hire
(sender, receiver, and two scribes). I've dealt with some of these and
related complexities in some of my writing over the years. I'd be happy to
send your student a vita and note some stuff which might be helpful.

There are other interesting dimensions. Letter are personal--for literates.
But what about the circumstance of injured military casualties. I don't know
about more recent wars but in WW II volunteers often wrote letters for
disabled military personnel.

Your student has hit upon a rich topic. I hope she will be encouraged to
work on it.

If you have students with these sorts of curiosities, Drexel must have
changed very considerably since I was a graduate student at Penn in the
1950s. Best good wishes to both of you,

PEACE AND JUSTICE!

ALLEN D. GRIMSHAW
2211 WOODSTOCK PLACE
BLOOMINGTON, IN  47401
USA
812-336-3771/grimsha at indiana.edu


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