Oral tradition
Religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism,[7] and Jainism have used oral tradition, in parallel to writing, to transmit their canonical scriptures, rituals, hymns and mythologies.
Rather, if the whole truth is told, oral tradition stands out as the single most dominant communicative technology of our species as both a historical fact and, in many areas still, a contemporary reality.
[27] The prioritisation of the spoken word is evidenced by African societies having chosen to record history orally whilst some had developed or had access to a writing script.
[30] These African ethnic groups also utilize oral tradition to develop and train the human intellect, and the memory to retain information and sharpen imagination.
They constitute a caste and perform a range of roles, including as a historian or library, musician, poet, mediator of family and tribal disputes, spokesperson, and served in the king's court,[32] not dissimilar from the European bard.
The job of a seanchaí was to serve the head of a lineage by passing information orally from one generation to the next about Irish folklore and history, particularly in medieval times.
[49] While Cicero’s reliance on Cato’s Origines may limit the breadth of his argument,[50] he nonetheless highlights the importance of storytelling in preserving Roman history.
[51] Wiseman argues that celebratory performances served as a vital medium for transmitting Roman history and that such traditions evolved into written forms by the third century CE.
This belief stemmed from observations that highly structured language, with its rhythmic and phonetic patterns, tended to undergo fewer alterations during oral transmission.
This epic recounts the westward migration and conquests of the Banu Hilal Bedouin tribe from the 10th to 12th centuries, culminating in their rule over parts of North Africa before their eventual defeat.
[60] The historical roots of Sīrat Banī Hilāl are evident in the present-day distribution of groups claiming descent from the tribe across North Africa and parts of the Middle East.
[61] The Torah and other ancient Jewish literature, the Judeo-Christian Bible and texts of early centuries of Christianity are rooted in an oral tradition, and the term "People of the Book" is a medieval construct.
[66] A basalt stone axe found underneath volcanic ash in 1947 had already proven that humans inhabited the region before the eruption of Tower Hill.
[70] While some stories were told for amusement and leisure, most functioned as practical lessons from tribal experience applied to immediate moral, social, psychological, and environmental issues.
[82] According to one story from the Suquamish Tribe, Agate Pass was created when an earthquake expanded the channel as a result of an underwater battle between a serpent and bird.
In addition, the verse is often metrically composed with an exact number of syllables or morae—such as with Greek and Latin prosody and in Chandas found in Hindu and Buddhist texts.
[103] Banister, Dundes and other scholars (Shabbir Akhtar, Angelika Neuwirth, Islam Dayeh)[111] have also noted the large amount of "formulaic" phraseology in the Quran consistent with "oral-formulaic composition" mentioned above.
"[117] Dundes argues oral-formulaic composition is consistent with "the cultural context of Arabic oral tradition", quoting researchers who have found poetry reciters in the Najd (the region next to where the Quran was revealed) using "a common store of themes, motives, stock images, phraseology and prosodical options",[118][119] and "a discursive and loosely structured" style "with no fixed beginning or end" and "no established sequence in which the episodes must follow".
[122] The Catholic Church asserts that this mode of transmission of the faith persists through current-day bishops, who by right of apostolic succession, have continued the oral passing of what had been revealed through Christ through their preaching as teachers.
Any historian who deals with oral tradition will have to unlearn this prejudice in order to rediscover the full wonder of words: the shades of meaning they convey to those who ponder them and learn them with care so that they may transmit the wisdom they contain as the culture's most precious legacy to the next generation.
You will, with patience, get the gist of it, but the unnaturalness of the circumstance disconcerts him, your repeated request for the repetition of a phrase, the absence of the encouragement of his friends, and, above all, the hampering slowness of your pen, all combine to kill the spirit of storytelling.
[131] He would serve as mentor to the Jesuit Walter Ong (1912–2003), whose interests in cultural history, psychology and rhetoric would result in Orality and Literacy (Methuen, 1980) and the important but less-known Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness (Cornell, 1981).
[135] In advance of Ong's synthesis, John Miles Foley began a series of papers based on his own fieldwork on South Slavic oral genres, emphasizing the dynamics of performers and audiences.
The bibliography would establish a clear underlying methodology which accounted for the findings of scholars working in the separate Linguistics fields (primarily Ancient Greek, Anglo-Saxon and Serbo-Croatian).
However, numerous innovations appeared, such as the "formulaic system"[142][Note 5] with structural "substitution slots" for syntactic, morphological and narrative necessity (as well as for artistic invention).
[149] Some of these characteristic patterns of narrative details, (like "the arming sequence;"[150] "the hero on the beach";[151] "the traveler recognizes his goal")[152] would show evidence of global distribution.
[153] At the same time, the fairly rigid division between oral and literate was replaced by recognition of transitional and compartmentalized texts and societies, including models of diglossia (Brian Stock[154] Franz Bäuml,[155] and Eric Havelock).
[192][193] Shortly thereafter, Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato revolutionized how scholars looked at Homeric epic by arguing not only that it was the product of an oral tradition, but also that the oral-formulas contained therein served as a way for ancient Greeks to preserve cultural knowledge across many different generations.
", theorized the existence of the most fully developed oral poet to his time, a person who could (at his discretion) creatively and intellectually create nuanced characters in the context of the accepted, traditional story.
For example, in what Foley called a "pivotal" contribution, Larry Benson introduced the concept of "written-formulaic" to describe the status of some Anglo-Saxon poetry which, while demonstrably written, contains evidence of oral influences, including heavy reliance on formulas and themes[198] A number of individual scholars in many areas continue to have misgivings about the applicability of the theory or the aptness of the South Slavic comparison,[199] and particularly what they regard as its implications for the creativity which may legitimately be attributed to the individual artist.
