14
The Documentary Tradition in Mind and Society
I paused a little while to think
About this older age of ink.
—Guest
That’s the age we live in. The documentary age.
—Shields
The literacy episteme (Brockmeier, 2002), the series of theories and conjectures about the nature, significance, and implications of writing, took its modern shape in the hands of Jack Goody who proposed that writing and literacy may be one of “the mechanisms behind sociocultural change” (Goody 1991, p. 18).
In fact Goody explained social structure and social change primarily in terms of three major factors. The first was the development of intensive forms of agriculture that allowed for the accumulation of surplus—this was used to explain ...
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