Literacy, speech and shame: the cultural politics of literacy and language in Brazil

This article examines the relationship between shame, literacy and social relations by analyzing shame narratives told to the author by youth and adult literacy students during a 24‐month ethnographic research project conducted in two Brazilian cities. Employing Bourdieu’s theoretical framework and literature from the anthropology of emotions, the article asks: What is accomplished through the micropolitics of shaming? What can it teach us about theories of literacy, language and power more broadly? The article shows how speech shaming in Brazil contributed to the cultural production of inequality by individualizing, psychologizing and embodying responsibility or blame for illiteracy. It argues that sociocultural theories of literacy, language and power need to account for the influence of emotions in communicative interactions.