“Literacy is Functional for the State. Society does not need Literacy.” Bureaucratic Encounters and (Il)literacy in El Alto

This paper examines how adults with little or no competence in reading and writing engage with bureaucratic paperwork in El Alto, Bolivia. Residents of El Alto complain about having to deal with excessive bureaucracy in state institutions such as municipalities, police, and courts when they apply for pensions, file for divorce, or struggle through judicial processes. Although oral and textual practices other than standard literacy dominate in many everyday settings (such as markets or artisans’ workshops) in El Alto, people must engage with documents and paperwork when they encounter bureaucracy. Following the experiences of some participants in my fieldwork in El Alto, I focus on literacy demands experienced in highly emotional proceedings within the justice system and ask how people with little or no literacy confront a literacy-oriented bureaucratic state. How do they deal with various public authorities to pursue their aims and claims? Are there certain strategies for confronting different literacy challenges and bureaucratic procedures? Which kinds of patterns and processes of unlearning and learning literacy (“illiteracizing” and “literacizing”) can be identified? It is in just such highly emotional proceedings that research participants have also acquired reading and writing abilities. I ask whether literacy, in Bolivia at least, might be not an end in and of itself but rather a means to act in relation to the state.