Practice and the Problem of Complexity

This chapter asks what it would mean to approach the ‘uses and acts of aksara’ from the previous chapter under the description of practice. To this point the book has used the term practice rather loosely to mean something like ‘what people do’. The primary aim in so doing was to shift attention away from the scholarly abstractions of literacy and language onto historically situated uses of script and writing. This chapter and the next aim to give a more precise account of this crucial term. Chapter Four focuses in particular on the use of written instruments in the performance of a rite known as the Caru Rsi Gana. If previous chapters emphasized the disjuncture between two contrasting styles of writing, and their corresponding styles of reasoning, the Caru Rsi Gana suggests an even wider range of purposes, many of which appear to be contradictory.