Oral Culture in Pre- and Post-Literate Societies

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Oral Culture in Pre- and Post-Literate Societies

• Ben LeMaster
• LIS 60001

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Question Writing doesnt exist. How are you
supposed to pass important information on to
others? Think about it

• Answer You package it in a memorable form, so
  not only can you pass it on to posterity, but so
  can the entire community.

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In pre-literate cultures, this memorable form is
called Oral Narrative

• Oral Narrative is poetry performed in
  accompaniment with music and subject to strict
  metrical conditions.
• These conditions allow poets to develop and
  memorize versatile phrases that, when repeated
  fill beats in a line.
• By filling out the line in this fashion, the poet
  gives themselves time to improvise the details of
  their story.

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• Over centuries, these phrases change, and an
  entire system of phrase repetition develops.
• The phrases organize concepts within the
  narrative, as well as
• filling empty beats.
• Which allowed poets like Homer to improvise
  enormous narratives in the midst of performance.

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Oral Culture is fluid and Participatory

• After studying Homer, Milman Parry studied
  Eastern European oral poets in their own element.
• He learned that the culture was highly
  participatory, that poets borrowed from one
  another and that the idea of individual
  authorship so common to us had no currency in
  oral culture.

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What happens when people start writing?

• Bookmaking is slow and expensive.
• Only the social elite can afford to read books.
• So, only the social elite read (and play these
  strange games).
• In the meantime, common people keep oral
  tradition alive.

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HOWEVER!!

• In the schools where reading and writing are
  taught, rhetoric (itself an aspect of oral
  tradition) continues to command respect.
• Even though writing is taught, speaking and
  hearing are prized.
• To this day, PhD candidates defend their
  dissertation orally.

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Gutenbergs Printing Press Changes Everything

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Books, which had been slow, difficult and
expensive to make

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Were now replaced by books, which were relatively
easy and inexpensive to produce
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Marshall McLuhan Argues That

• Technology externalizes the abilities of the
  human body the wheel externalized the work of
  our legs while language externalizes, transmits
  and stores internal information.
• If a technology stresses the use of one of our
  senses over the others, the ratio of use among
  all of our senses is altered.

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• This reduction of all experience
• to the scale of one sense is the effect of
  typography on the arts and sciences as well as
  human sensibility.-Marshall McLuhan

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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has
been typographic

• The habit of a fixed position is natural to the
  reader of typography.
• Typography is a consistent series of static shots
  or fixed points of view.
• A fixed point of view becomes possible with
  print.

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Which leads to the condition of linear space
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Oral cultures perceive a curved acoustic space,
reflecting the contours of sound
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Acoustic space is prevalent in medieval art

• Medieval culture was primarily oral. Writing was
  seen as training for rhetoric.
• Oral cultures perceive a unified visual field of
  spatiality, rather than a focused point of view.
• In this picture, notice how the separate elements
  work together as a whole image.

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The Primacy of Sound

• Walter Ong studied the unique qualities sound
  imparted upon consciousness in oral cultures.
• No other sense is as strictly bound up with time
  as sound it exists only as it is leaving
  existence, indicating that something in the
  present moment is occurring. The Hebrew word
  dabar means both word and event.
  Considering that sound indicates action is afoot,
  this is rather apt.
• Sound is force. When we speak, we can feel the
  muscles inside our throats expelling the sound.

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Sound reveals interiors because its nature is
determined by interior relationships

• . If we rap against a wall we can hear the
  reverberation. Musical instruments sound because
  they are hollow.
• . In this way, sound reveals information about
  the structure of objects.
• Sound is uniquely suited among the senses to
  transmit thought.

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Peter Ramus

• Peter Ramus was a major educational reformer
  during the renaissance. His idea that the
  audience (the classroom of students) was an
  adversary has had major impact on educational
  systems in the following centuries.
• Under the oral medieval scholastic system of
  education, students were expected to participate
  and contribute to discussion. Under Ramus, any
  participatory behavior was eliminated.
  Essentially, he classifies the classroom as a
  group mules that need to broken in.

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The Electric Age

• With the arrival of electricity came immediate
  oral communication between two or more people at
  a time.
• Not just the telephone, but radio and television
  signaled the beginning of a new shift in media,
  and consequently perception and consciousness.

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Sound and Vision

• Radio brought the human voice into mass media,
  while television and film fused sound and vision.
• Although reading books seems to be in decline,
  the creation of television and film was a natural
  outgrowth of the visual bias engendered by print
  culture.

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John Miles Foley

• John Miles Foley studied oral poets in Serbia,
  carrying on the work of Milman Parry (who
  originally determined the nature of oral poetry).
• Considered the foremost authority in the world on
  comparative oral traditions, he has recently
  founded The Pathways Project.

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The Pathways Project

• http//pathwaysproject.org/pathways/show/HomePage
• The Pathways Project is designed to chart and
  study similarities between oral and internet
  technology.
• Like oral tradition, the web is a participatory
  medium. Various media can be cut up, remixed and
  made to say entirely different things than they
  previously did.
• The Pathways Project gives credit to the printed
  word, but integrates its character into those of
  oral tradition and web culture.

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Credits

• The Singer of Tales by Albert Lord
• The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan
• Presence of the Word by Walter J. Ong
• Walter Ongs Contributions to Cultural Studies by
  Thomas J. Farrell
• All the other stuff by Ben LeMaster