Fixing the Books: Secrecy, Literacy, and Perfectibility in Indigenous New Mexico (Resident Scholar Series)

In Fixing the Books, Erin Debenport presents the research she conducted on an indigenous language literacy effort within a New Mexico Pueblo community, and the potential of that literacy to compromise Pueblo secrecy. She analyzes the decision to produce written materials in a historically oral language and whether that decision is at odds with the linguistically and culturally conservative reputation of Southwest tribes, and potentially disrupts the control of both the intra- and intercommunity circulation of cultural knowledge. Debenport concentrates on the role of literacy in the formation of groups and the ways such groups have been connected to political participation, using the case study of San Ramón Pueblo (she uses pseudonyms throughout) as a counterexample to some of the prototypical cases of textual circulation. She concludes that an apparent contradiction surrounding this pueblo s literacy effort is actually a reflection of the often unexpected uses of texts that occur in contexts of revitalization and emergent literacy and the multiple language ideologies being utilized by community members. Fixing the Books is replete with tensions and paradoxes that simultaneously illuminate and challenge what we think we know about indigenous literacy, language revitalization, and the formation of publics. Erin Debenport has pulled off an ethnographic tour de force: discovering and reporting on language, cultural knowledge, and text-making in a setting shaped by ideologies and regimes of secrecy and restrictions on the dissemination of information. All aspiring ethnographers, wherever they plan to work, will have much to learn from this fascinating book. Fixing the Books is a deep and thought-provoking study. Not only is it a landmark in Puebloan scholarship, it is one of the most important analyses in our literature of the complex ways that language is embedded in culture, and culture in language.