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In even stronger terms, Raymond Williams challenged the class-based arrogance of scriptocentrism, pointing to the “error” and “delusion” of “highly educated” people who are “so driven in on their reading” that “they fail to notice that there are other forms of skilled, intelligent, creative activity” such as “theatre” and “active politics.” This error “resembles that of the narrow reformer who supposes that farm labourers and village craftsmen were once uneducated, merely because they could not read.” He argued that “the contempt” for performance and practical activity, “which is always latent in the highly literate, is a mark of the observer’s limits, not those of the activities themselves” ([1958] 1983:309). Williams critiqued scholars for limiting their sources to written materials; I agree with Burke that scholarship is so skewed toward texts that even when researchers do attend to extralinguistic human action and embodied events they construe them as texts to be read. According to de Certeau, this scriptocentrism is a hallmark of Western imperialism. Posted above the gates of modernity, this sign: “‘Here only what is written is understood.’ Such is the internal law of that which has constituted itself as ‘Western’ [and ‘white’]” (1984:161). Only middle-class academics could blithely assume that all the world is a text because reading and writing are central to their everyday lives and occupational security. For many people throughout the world, however, particularly subaltern groups, texts are often inaccessible, or threatening, charged with the regulatory powers of the state. More often than not, subordinate people experience texts and the bureaucracy of literacy as instruments of control and displacement, e.g., green cards, passports, arrest warrants, deportation orders—what de Certeau calls “intextuation”: “Every power, including the power of law, is written Ž rst of all on the backs of its subjects” (1984:140). Among the most oppressed people in the United States today are the “undocumented” immigrants, the so-called “illegal aliens,” known in the vernacular as the people “sin papeles,” the people without papers, indocumentado/as. They are illegal because they are not legible, they trouble “the writing machine of the law” (de Certeau 1984:141). The hegemony of textualism needs to be exposed and undermined. Transcription is not a transparent or politically innocent model for conceptualizing or engaging the world. The root metaphor of the text underpins the supremacy of Western knowledge systems by erasing the vast realm of human knowledge and meaningful action that is unlettered, “a history of the tacit and the habitual” (Jackson 2000:29). In their multivolume historical ethnography of colonialism/ evangelism in South Africa, John and Jean Comaroff pay careful attention to the way Tswana people argued with their white interlocutors “both verbally and nonverbally” (1997:47; see also 1991). They excavate spaces of agency and struggle from everyday performance practices—clothing, gardening, healing, trading, worshipping, architecture, and homemaking—to reveal an impressive repertoire of conscious, creative, critical, contrapuntal responses to the imperialist project that exceeded the verbal. The Comaroffs intervene in an academically fashionable textual fundamentalism and fetish of the (verbal) archive where “text—a sad proxy for life—becomes all” (1992:26). “In this day and age,” they ask, “do we still have to remind ourselves that many of the players on any historical stage cannot speak at all? Or, under greater or lesser duress, opt not to do so” (1997:48; see also Scott 1990)? There are many ethnographic examples of how nonelite people recognize the opacity of the text and critique its dense occlusions and implications in historical processes of political economic privilege and systematic exclusion. In Belize, for 148 Dwight Conquergood example, Garifuna people, an African-descended minority group, use the word gapencillitin, which means “people with pencil,” to refer to middle- and upperclass members of the professional-managerial class, elites who approach life from an intellectual perspective. They use the word mapencillitin, literally “people without pencil,” to refer to rural and working-class people, “real folks” who approach life from a practitioner’s point of view.2 What is interesting about the Garifuna example is that class stratiŽ cation, related to differential knowledges, is articulated in terms of access to literacy. The pencil draws the line between the haves and the have-nots. For Garifuna people, the pencil is not a neutral instrument; it functions metonymically as the operative technology of a complex political econ- omy of knowledge, power, and the exclusions upon which privilege is based. In his study of the oppositional politics of black musical performance, Paul Gilroy argues that critical scholars need to move beyond this “idea and ideology of the text and of textuality as a mode of communicative practice which provides a model for all other forms of cognitive exchange and social interaction” (1994:77). Oppressed people everywhere must watch their backs, cover their tracks, suck up their feelings, and veil their meanings. The state of emergency under which many people live demands that we pay attention to messages that are coded and encrypted; to indirect, nonverbal, and extralinguistic modes of communication where subversive meanings and utopian yearnings can be sheltered and shielded from surveillance.