Technology, Literacy, and the Evolution of Society

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Writing and Kinship in Northern Ghana: From Cowry Payments to Paper Documents

Sean Hawkins

Department of History, University of Toronto

In Tristes Tropiques Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1997) claimed that the Nambikwara of Brazil did not understand writing when it was first introduced to them, but during a discussion of “the violence of the letter” in Of Grammatobgy Jacques Derrida (1976) challenged this claim. The anthropologist described in his thesis that they had quickly used the example of this new medium to make their own diagrams “describing, explaining, writing, a genealogy and a social structure.” According to the philosopher, this merely confirmed “unquestionable and abundant information” that “the birth of writing (in the colloquial sense) ...