Language is in everything. It is verbal.
It is written in poems, novels both fiction and nonfiction, on Billiton boards
and street signs, and even in a unique way, language is unspoken and written.
There is a saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Pictures can say
a whole lot if one simply takes the time to examine a photographer’s or an artist’s
work. As a class we have seen language used in many different ways that forms of
any language can go beyond ordinary symbols, grammar, and form.
Language provides expressing feelings,
as an art through literature, and communication among people. Language is a
concatenation; it has an interconnection with words—transforming people into
culture. Writing is one form that involves personal and public records.
Journals, though there are individual ones, have a form to them. Journals are
just one example of how language is used in a private sector. Governmental
documentation, religious rituals, and family history all require some sort of linguistic
structure to properly function. Governments in every country uses phonological
ways to promote themselves to a particular position in that specific
government.
Language whether spoken or written is also
a means of communicating between teacher and student, school administer and the
teacher, etc. etc. Success in school depends on language as well as everything
else in life. In order to succeed, students need to stay in constant
communication with their instructors, so they can continue knowing what they
are expected to accomplish in a short period of time. Teachers must be in
contact with administrators, more so in the lower education part. Administrators
have to or should know exactly what is going on in the classroom and offer help
to the teacher, if it is necessary. Otherwise, there will be conflict within
the school system. Teachers cannot run their classroom without the
administrators involving themselves with what they actual criteria is, educate
what is like to be in a class full of students and not just stand out giving
orders, and talk with the parents about what is being taught to their children.
From the various texts used in my Anthropology class,
language controls not just the matrix of life, but it also has a matrix within
itself. We are the participants in this game. To further establish how we are
as a chess piece in the game of language, Magical
Writing in Salasaca explores the importance of writing. The Salasacans
understand what writing means to their people. In the beginning of the novel,
the idea of a “God’s book” comes into play. Wogan’s editor Edward Fischer added
in the series editor preface that although the friend of a friend relates his
story of going to “a hell-like place and on to Heaven, where God checked his
book…” this should not be dismissed as an “apocryphal story inspired by
religious fervor” (xi). Instead, Mr. Fischer points out, this novel should be
seen as what Wogan tries to bring up in his points about how writing is a form
of “…state control, techniques of surveillance and documentation, and the nexus
of power and literacy” (xi).
Wogan begins his tale of the people in
Salasaca of visiting the woman who was one of the three sisters who were in
charge of the witch-saint San Gonzalo’s books. He goes into personal detail
about having to “pore over for twenty minutes” just to search for he and
another man, Jorge’s, name in the book after the daughter of the woman brought
back nine books filled with names of people requesting San Gonzalo’s services
(34). However, the search for their names were futile, until the woman told
them to stop, get up, and left the home. She brought back “a much more
impressive” book that is “a foot high, heavy and made with sturdy, blue covers
and large, lined paper” within it (35). Within the book, discovered by the
daughter, both Jorge and Wogan had their names written among others.
Wogan, Peter. Magical Writing in Salasaca. Westview Press. 2004. Print.
