Conference presented during the workshop Exchange and Circulations: Cultural Contacts and Processes of Transfer organized by IGK 56 Kulturtransfer und ‘kulturelle Identität’ (Freiburg) and CEFRES, in partnership with Charles University. 27/11/2015

Cécile Guillaume-Pey (Cefres, Toulouse CAS-LISST)

Among colonised societies, we find numerous cases of the appropriation of literacy, a symbol of power-knowledge associated with colonial administration, Christian missions, and the education given by the latter. My research, based on recent ethnographic fieldwork I completed in rural India, focuses on the worship of an alphabet created by the Sora, a tribal group of central eastern India that speaks an Austroasiatic language. Nowadays, in Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Assam, Sora are followers of Matharvanam, a religious movement born in the late 1930s and whose founder, Mangaya, designed an alphabet to transcribe his mother tongue. Continuer la lecture de Writing from the Margins. Appropriation of Literacy and Emergence of religious movements in India →