Abstract
The literacy action can be analyzed as a ritual of passage from oral culture to written culture, in which a new identity is attributed, the literate subject, as is a new social relationship, from the statement "I can read". In this article, from an analysis of the registers of opening and closing ceremonies of Youth and Adult Literacy courses, under the notion of ceremony from the field of social anthropology by Stanley Tambiah, in convergence with the way of problematizing rituals by Michel Foucault, it was possible to identify how, because of their performative effect, such ceremonies are an important apparatus in the production of the educated subject.
Keywords
adult literacy; ceremonies; performativity