Géographie de la littéracie

• Main Author: Frédéric Barbe
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: UMR 245 - CESSMA 2012-09-01
• Series: Carnets de Géographes
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/cdg/985

Littéracie, from the English word « literacy » (gallicized in Quebec back in 2002), designates in its widest sense the reading-and-writing actors, usages, objects and policies from all over the world. Practicing literacy as a geographer or even militating for it means accepting to distance oneself from the simple register of grande culture as a whole and from literary faith in order to take over a fabulous subject, a globalization monste, the « world library », and its endless resources (from our scale of perception). It means using various scales, alternating from single work to mass-production and edition, from the close to the distant. It also implies widening the value measures to an informal extent, to the widely-spread languages (from the international to the domestic aspect), to the margin form, far away from the huge primitive/civilized division which still lies in many people’s mind. A 2011 study on Malian literacy means to suggest that both the great normality of the Malian cultural system and the power of the Malian transcolonial system contributed to the failure of Independence scholar utopia. A critical geography, when applied to culture, and in spite of active mythologies, enables to spot the obstacles to the formation of a coherent literacy national market and to recommend that public action be taken in a more aware way in terms of territory and society, favoring at the same time a universal access to the whole reading-and-writing subject in Mali.