Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
215. "i once said in a class that a significant difference between the spoken word and the written word was one of permanence. a student, an inupiaq-english bilingual woman, said that that comment had explained something she had tried to explain to us for a long time. as she put it, 'when you say something, that's permanent; it doesn't go away. but when you write it, it's just on a piece of paper which anyone can tear up and throw away.' the permenance this student was talking about is not the physical or technological permanence of the word separated from teh body which has so attracted those of us who study and use literacy[, but]...one of committment"
216. 2 "of the features on which our contrast with the athabaskan tradition were based: the pluralism in the roles of author and reader and a face relationship of solidarity between the roles of implied author and implied reader" --b/c they "assert a nonplural, holistic person" and "we assert a pluralistic complex of social roles" our conceptions of being a reader vs. being an author, and of reader/author as somehow distinct or isolated pieces of ourselves don't make sense to their sense of self--there's no such thing as a you on the page. you're the you speaking or not speaking, in moments.
217. "i belive the problem...is with literacy itself; it is a problem with the separation of the word from the body. i believe that navajo woman was telling us something much more improtant than she did not want us to read her story. she wanted us to think about what our literacy was doing to us."
218. & face: "when i make the faice claim that you and i have a great deal in common," the common rhetorical move writers in western culture are assumed to be making in order to make their work accessible to readers, "i am emphasizing the involvement aspect of communication. that emphasis comes at the expense of granting you the right to assert that you, in fact, do not see things the way i do. this is the aspect of face that we believe athabaskans find they are unwilling to assert. traditional athabaskan narratives...take the stance of severely restricting the author's control over the interpretation made by the listener."
221. "one of [the] other dimensions is the contrast between symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships. asians are almost stereotypically hierarchical in their interpersonal relationships" & establishing/noting hierarchical arrangements is important. unlike western culture where "negotiation of relationships lies at the heart of communication," though, asian & athabaskan communication "functions more to ratify existing relationships than to negotiate them."
222. also in asian cultures, & where lies the slippery slope toward charges of plagiarism in american schools, "the primary problem of authorship is the relationship between an author and the tradition of scholarship, not between the author and the reader," which occasions the "skill in adopting the voice of others" that denotes, culturally, "an author seeking the highest form of authorial identity by losing one's own uniqueness in the language of a tradition."
224. argument: "authorship cannot be taken as a concept that can be used uniformly and universally in disucssions of literacy....if such cultural comparative analyses of face show authorship to be considerably more complex than we might have supposed it to be, then literacy itself must be too loosely constructed a term to be of much value in talking about either personal or cultural identity"