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08302_Field_TCGG T67.txt
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16 lines
as “governed and conceived on highly social lines.” For nothing
can exceed the automatism and rigidity of an oral, nonliterate
community in its non-personal collectivity. As Western literate
communities encounter the various “primitive” or auditory
communities still remaining in the world, great confusion
occurs. Areas like China and India are still audile-tactile in the
main. Such phonetic literacy as has penetrated there has
altered very little. Even Russia is still profoundly oral in bias.
Only gradually does literacy alter substructures of language
and sensibility.
Alexander Inkeles in his book on Public Opinion in Russia
(p. 137) gives a useful account of how the ordinary and
unconscious bias, even of the Russian literate groups, has a
direction quite counter to anything a long-literate community
would consider “natural.” The Russian attitude, like that of any