From Vinyl Records to Audiobooks: An Anthropological Excursion into the History of Family Reading

   The article examines modern family reading in the form of listening to vinyl records and other audio media. Reading is analyzed in its everyday life in the family environment using anthropological methods of material collection and interpretation.

   The purpose of the study is to test the hypothesis about the continuity of forms of family reading. Individual or group listening to audio recordings of literary texts can serve both group integration (including family) and disintegration (individual reading escapism).

   Listening to books forms individual and group cultural experience, which in mutual family narrative can be interpreted as specific, representing the (cultural) community of a particular family ("we are all reading people"). The same purpose is served by including listening in the process of routine activities: cooking, leisure time (board games, drawing, handicrafts). Material media (players, records, audio cassettes) in family narratives become a part of the family heirloom, passed on from one (usually older) relative to another, just like the collections of family libraries. The similarity of this practice of inheritance testifies to the common mechanisms of preserving cultural heritage in the family. At the same time, the spread of modern technological solutions (digital formats) does not mean that this kind of inheritance is interrupted: collections of digital a­books are passed on to other family members. The stable reproduction of this mechanism for transmitting cultural experience shows that the phenomenon of the home library (on different types of media, including paper) remains one of the most important ways in which the tradition of family reading exists.

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