Oral Culture in Pre- and Post- Literate Societies Ben LeMaster LIS 60001

Question: Writing doesn’t 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gutenberg’s Printing Press Changes Everything

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

Were now replaced by books, which were relatively easy and inexpensive to produce

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.

“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

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.

Which leads to the condition of linear space

Oral cultures perceive a curved acoustic space, reflecting the contours of sound

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Pathways Project HomePagehttp://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.

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