From Needs to Arts - Oral Mnemonics Bing Xi

2 Reasoning How did we start to know the world? If you were a parent, what would you do to introduce the world to your baby who did not knew reading and writing? What is the best way to develop children’s knowledge before they learn to read and write? I remembered hearing stories from my grandmother, when I was a child.

3 Primary Oral Culture Primary oral culture – a culture untouched by writing. a culture with no knowledge whatsoever of writing or even of the possibility of writing. The expression “to look up something” is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning. Without writing, words have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds.

4 Primary Oral Culture There is no way to stop sound and have sound. But, purely oral cultures could generate sophisticated verbal art forms. However, Ong seems to contradict himself by assuming…

5 Ong’s Assumptions Oral folk have no sense of a name as a tag, for they have no idea of a name as something that can be seen. (Is this true? Does a tag have to be seen to be a tag? What if it can be heard? So oral folk do not know that a name is a tag of the object, then they must not be able to speak of someone or something that is not present, for they can not use names as tags, but only actual objects.)

6 Ong’s Assumptions Chirographic and typographic folk tend to think of names as labels, written or printed tags imaginatively affixed to an object named. (Quite contrarily, we do not think this way. Actually there is very little difference between a tag and the object signified, we tend to blur the difference.) (Because words are written to be read, and it takes too much time to understand the meaning of the text if we must connect the tags to the actual objects signified.)

7 Saussure vs. Ong And I am not alone, Saussure takes the view that writing simply represents spoken language in visible form. For Saussure, there is no significant difference between spoken language and written language, they are all signifiers.

8 Why did oral folk bother to remember? Responsibilities, obligations. Curiosity. Survival. Needs for literature? And most importantly, they had to, if they did not remember thousands of words, they would not be able to communicate!

9 Store Experience By remembering, it will be possible to deposit experience. There will be no need to kill someone to find out what happens when some person loses his head. People will not make same mistakes over and over again. For us, we do not need to do all the research as Ong did, we only need to read this book. Hence knowledge comes into being. Knowledge means “Familiarity, awareness, or understanding gained through experience or study.”

10 So we may say Without remembering, there will be no knowledge.

11 Oral Mnemonics Proverbs. Using another interlocutor to help remember things. Yet these means are not good enough to remember things complicated enough such as history, or cultural elements.

12 So, how? There is only one way – think memorable thoughts.

13 The ultimate, best oral mnemonics Put the things needed to be remembered into a meaningful context. The longer the context is, the more interesting it needs to be. Conbined with other mnemonics – proverds, clichés, interlocutors, etc. It gradually became verbal art. Narrative.

14 Narrative Narrative is everywhere a major genre of verbal art, occurring all the way from primary oral cultures into high literacy and electronic information processing. In a sense narrative is paramount among all verbal art forms because of the way it underlies so many other art forms, often even the most abstract.

15 Narrative is meaningful Narrative is in certain ways more widely functional in primary oral cultures than in others. First, in a primary oral culture, as Havelock pointed out, knowledge cannot be managed in elaborate, more or less scientifically abstract categories. …because of their size and complexity of scenes and actions, narratives of this sort are often the roomiest repositories of an oral culture’s lore.

16 Narrative is interesting Second, narrative is particularly important in primary oral cultures because it can bond a great deal of lore in relatively substantial, lengthy forms that are reasonably durable – which in an oral culture means forms subject to repetition.

17 Narrative is about repetition Most importantly, narrative is so wonderfully a means of remembering, because it is so meaningful and so interesting, therefore people want to hear it over and over again. Thus remembering becomes a pleasurable job.

18 Last but not least Narrative is so fascinating so it later on became an art. We may say that narrative gave birth to literature. Literate narrative makers: Stephen King, J. K. Rowling.