Mine Cooker Paramathi Velur

The Light of Knowledge

Since the early 1990s hundreds of thousands of Tamil villagers in southern India have participated in literacy lessons, science demonstrations, and other events designed to transform them into active citizens with access to state power. These efforts to spread enlightenment among the oppressed are part of a movement known as the Arivoli Iyakkam (the Enlightenment Movement), considered to be among the most successful mass literacy movements in recent history. In The Light of Knowledge, Francis Cody’s ethnography of the Arivoli Iyakkam highlights the paradoxes inherent in such movements that seek to emancipate people through literacy when literacy is a power-laden social practice in its own right. The Light of Knowledge is set primarily in the rural district of Pudukkottai in Tamil Nadu, and it is about activism among laboring women from marginalized castes who have been particularly active as learners and volunteers in the movement. In their endeavors to remake the Tamil countryside through literacy activism, workers in the movement found that their own understanding of the politics of writing and Enlightenment was often transformed as they encountered vastly different notions of language and imaginations of social order. Indeed, while activists of the movement successfully mobilized large numbers of rural women, they did so through logics that often pushed against the very Enlightenment rationality they hoped to foster. Offering a rare behind-the-scenes look at an increasingly important area of social and political activism, The Light of Knowledge brings tools of linguistic anthropology to engage with critical social theories of the postcolonial state.

A Complete Grammar of Esperanto (illustrated)

Illustrated with 10 images. This book will be a descriptive grammar of the Esperanto language invented by L. L. Zamenhof, which will be complete and comprehensive in regards to a) the grammar of Esperanto as first outlined by Zamenhof in Fundamento de Esperanto and other foundational documents, and b) Esperanto as it is spoken today by the most committed Esperantists. (Proposed reforms to the Esperanto language will be discussed if they have serious support from a significant fraction of Esperanto enthusiasts). This book was started practically on a dare from the August 2006 issue of Bob's Poetry Magazine, in which Robert Happelberg boasted that he could print a complete and comprehensive grammar of Esperanto in just one 6 by 7 inch page. While this is obviously wrong, it's not too far off the mark. When completed, this book will require several standard size (8.5 by 11 in the USA) pages, but will still be much shorter than a complete grammar of a natural language like English or Slovene. In view of this goal, the number of examples provided for each concept will be kept to a bare minimum. Those wishing to build their Esperanto vocabularies are also referred to the Esperanto textbooks. It is acceptable in the beginning to word the text in an accessible manner like in a textbook, but the goal should be for all the text to be technical with a full command of linguistic jargon.

Synodorum generalium, ac provincialium decreta, et canones