Orality
Encyclopedia
Orality is thought
and verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy
(especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population. The study of orality is closely allied to the study of oral tradition
. However, it has broader implications, implicitly touching every aspect of the economics
, politics
, institutional development, and human development of oral societies. The study of orality has important implications for international development
, especially as it relates to the goal of eradicating poverty
, as well as to the process of globalization
.
In his later publications Walter J. Ong
, a key scholar in this field, distinguishes between two forms of orality: ‘primary orality’ and ‘secondary orality’. In his earlier publications Ong uses the terms 'primarily oral culture' and 'secondarily oral culture'. He works with the contrast of primary orality and secondary orality as the way to establish what one thing is by indicating what it is not: Secondary orality is not primary orality. In addition, he refers to 'oral residue' and 'residually oral cultures'. Following his example in coining the terms primary orality and secondary orality, we can refer to residual orality.
, Albert B. Lord, and Eric A. Havelock
. Marshall McLuhan
was among the first to fully appreciate the significance of the Ong's earlier work about print culture and the written and printed word as a technology
. In his work The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan quotes and discusses different works by Ong in the 1950s regarding print culture on pages 104, 129, 146, 159-60, 162-63, 168, 174-76. But using his own examples to amplify Ong's thought, McLuhan shows how each stage in the development of this technology throughout the history of communication
– from the invention of speech (primary orality), to pictograms, to the phonetic alphabet
, to typography
, to the electronic communications of today – restructures human consciousness, profoundly changing not only the frontiers of human possibility, but even the frontiers it is possible for humans to imagine.
or print
.”
All sound
is inherently powerful. If a hunter kills a lion he can see it, touch it, feel it and smell it. But if he hears a lion he must act, fast, because the sound of the lion signals its presence and its power. Speech is a form of sound that shares this common power. Like other sounds, it comes from within a living organism. A text can be ignored; it is just writing on paper. But to ignore speech can be unwise; our basic instincts compel us to pay attention.
Writing is powerful in a different way: it permits people to generate ideas, store them, and retrieve them as needed across time in a highly efficient and accurate way. The absence of this technology in oral societies limits the development of complex ideas and the institution
s that depend on them. Instead, sustained thought in oral settings depends on interpersonal communication, and storing complex ideas over a long period of time requires packaging them in highly memorable ways, generally by using mnemonic
tools.
In his studies of the Homeric Question
, Milman Parry
was able to show that the poetic metre found in the Iliad
and the Odyssey
had been ‘packaged’ by oral Greek
society to meet its information management needs. These insights first opened the door to a wider appreciation of the sophistication of oral tradition
s, and their various methods of managing information. Later, ancient and medieval mnemonic tools were extensively documented by Frances Yates
in her book The Art of Memory
.
‘Residual orality’ refers to thought and its verbal expression in cultures that have been exposed to writing and print, but have not fully ‘interiorized’ (in McLuhan’s term) the use of these technologies in their daily lives. As a culture interiorizes the technologies of literacy, the ‘oral residue’ diminishes.
But the availability of a technology of literacy to a society is not enough to ensure its widespread diffusion and use. For example Eric Havelock observed in A Preface to Plato that after the ancient Greeks invented writing they adopted a scribal
culture that lasted for generations. Few people, other than the scribes, considered it necessary to learn to read or write. In other societies, such as ancient Egypt
or medieval Europe, literacy has been a domain confined to political and religious elites.
Many cultures have experienced an equilibrium state in which writing and mass illiteracy have co-existed for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Oral residue rarely disappears quickly and never vanishes completely. Speech is inherently an oral event, based on human relationships, unlike texts. Oral societies can mount strong resistance to literate technologies, as vividly shown in the arguments of Socrates
against writing in Plato
’s Phaedrus. Writing, Socrates argues, is inhuman. It attempts to turn living thoughts dwelling in the human mind into mere objects in the physical world. By causing people to rely on what is written rather than what they are able to think, it weakens the powers of the mind and of memory. True knowledge can only emerge from a relationship between active human minds. And unlike a person, a text can’t respond to a question; it will just keep saying the same thing over and over again, no matter how often it is refuted.
The Canadian communications scholar, Harold Innis
argued that a balance between the spoken word and writing contributed to the cultural and intellectual vitality of ancient Greece in Plato's time. Plato conveyed his ideas by writing down the conversations of Socrates thus "preserving the power of the spoken word on the written page." Aristotle
, Innis wrote, regarded Plato's style as "halfway between poetry and prose." Plato was able to arrive at new philosophical positions "through the use of dialogues, allegories and illustrations."
Furthermore, as McLuhan emphasizes, modernization attenuates some oral capabilities. For example, in medieval Europe silent reading was largely unknown. This tilted the readers' attention towards the poetic and other auditory aspects of the text. Educated modern adults may also occasionally long for something like "the capacious medieval memory, which, untrammeled by the associations of print, could learn a strange language with ease and by the methods of a child, and could retain in memory and reproduce lengthy epic and elaborate lyric poems."
Both McLuhan and Ong also document the apparent re-emergence, in the electronic age, of a kind of ‘secondary orality
’ that displaces written words with audio/visual technologies like radio
, TV and telephones. Unlike primary oral modes of communication, these technologies depend on print for their existence. Mass internet collaborations like Wikipedia rely primarily on writing, but re-introduce relationships and responsiveness into the text.
. While literacy extends human possibilities in both thought and action, all literate technologies ultimately depend on the ability of humans to learn oral languages and then translate sound into symbolic imagery.
Understanding between nations may depend to some degree on understanding oral culture. Ong argues that “many of the contrasts often made between ‘western’ and other views seem reducible to contrasts between deeply interiorized literacy and more or less residually oral states of consciousness.”
In a benchmark study on rural poverty the World Bank estimated that about 1.2 billion people earn less than US $1 a day (adjusted for Purchasing power parity), and that about 70% of them live in rural areas. “More than half a century of persistent efforts … has not altered the stubborn reality of rural poverty, and the gap between rich and poor is widening. The likelihood of achieving the Millennium Development Goals without a focus on improving the livelihoods and service accessibility of rural dwellers is low.”[1] Since most of these individuals cannot read or write, they do not use the internet, and are less likely than their neighbours to dial out on their mobile phones or initiate mobile banking transactions. An important implication of Ong's argument is that, in explaining their response to technology, residually oral culture is as important a factor as capabilities.
Illiteracy is both an important cause, and an important effect, of chronic global poverty
. Improvements in livelihoods and access to services in rural communities depends on their ability to manage local organizations, or hold external ones accountable. The processes of development can also be undermined by educated agents of development whose ‘deeply interiorized literacy’ informs their decisions. In recent years this has begun to change, with methods of engagement with oral communities that have emphasized participation, voice, and other development methods like participatory rural appraisal
, participatory action research
and Farmer Field School
s.
, linguistics
and the study of oral tradition
, Ong summarizes ten key aspects of the ‘psychodynamics
of orality’. While these are subject to continuing debate, his list remains an important milestone. Ong draws his examples from both primary oral societies, and societies with a very high ‘oral residue’.
Anthropologist Marcel Jousse identifies a close linkage between rhythm
and breathing patterns, gestures and the bilateral symmetry of the human body in several ancient verse traditions. This synergy between the body and the construction of oral thought further fuels memory.
Demonstrating how oral modes of communication tend to evolve into literate ones, Ong additionally cites the New American Bible
(1970), which offers a translation that is grammatically far more complex:
or song
; rather the words are brought together out of habit during general communication. ‘Analyzing’ or breaking apart such expressions adds complexity to communications, and questions received wisdom.
Ong cites an American example, noting that in some parts of the United States
with heavy oral residue, it is still considered normal or even obligatory to use the adjective ‘glorious’ when referring to the ‘fourth of July
’.
".
. Storage of information, being primarily dependent on individual or collective recall, must be handled with particular thrift. It is possible to approximately measure oral residue “from the amount of memorization the culture’s educational procedures require.”
This creates incentives to avoid exploring new ideas and particularly to avoid the burden of having to store them. It does not prevent oral societies from demonstrating dynamism and change, but there is a premium on ensuring that changes cleave to traditional formulas, and “are presented as fitting the traditions of the ancestors.”
Long after the invention of writing, and often long after the invention of print, basic information on how to perform a society’s most important trades was left unwritten, passed from one generation to the next as it always had been: through apprenticeship
, observation and practice.
By contrast, only literary cultures have launched phenomenological analyses, abstract classifications, ordered lists and tables, etc.. Nothing analogous exists in oral societies.
‘Agonistic’ means ‘combative’, but Ong actually advances a deeper thesis with this point. Writing and to an even greater extent print, he argues, disengage humans from direct, interpersonal struggle.
Products of “the highly polarized, agonistic, oral world of good and evil, virtue and vice, villains and heroes,” the great works of oral literature
from Homer
to Beowulf
, from the Mwindo epic
to the Old Testament
, are extremely violent by modern standards. They are also punctuated by frequent and intense intellectual combat and tongue-lashings on the one hand, and effusive praise (perhaps reaching its height among African praise singers) on the other.
Ong cites a study of community decision-making from 12th Century England
. Writing already had a long history in England, and it would have been possible to use texts to establish for example, the age of majority of the heir to an estate. But people were skeptical about texts, noting not only the cost of generating and managing them, but the problems involved in preventing tampering or frauds.
As a result, they retained the traditional solution: gathering together “mature wise seniors of many years, having good testimony”, and publicly discussing the age of the heir with them, until agreement was reached. This hallmark principle of orality, that truth emerges best from communal process, resonates today in the jury
system.
9. Homeostatic
Oral societies conserve their limited capacity to store information, and retain the relevance of their information to the interest of their present members, by shedding memories that have lost their past significance.
While many examples exist, the classic example was reported by Goody
and Watt (1968). Written records prepared by the British in Ghana
in the early 1900s show that Ndewura Jakpa, the seventeenth century founder of the state of Gonja
, had seven sons, each of whom ruled a territorial division within the state. Six decades later two of the divisions had disappeared for various reasons. The myths of the Gonja had been revised to recount that Jakpa had five sons, and that five divisions were created. Since they had no practical, present purpose, the other two sons and divisions had evaporated.
, a psychologist who did extensive fieldwork comparing oral and literate subjects in remote areas of Uzbekistan
and Kirghizia in 1931-2 documented the highly situational nature of oral thinking.
Thought
"Thought" generally refers to any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual's subjective consciousness. It can refer either to the act of thinking or the resulting ideas or arrangements of ideas. Similar concepts include cognition, sentience, consciousness, and imagination...
and verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy
Literacy
Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material.Literacy represents the lifelong, intellectual process of gaining meaning from print...
(especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population. The study of orality is closely allied to the study of oral tradition
Oral tradition
Oral tradition and oral lore is cultural material and traditions transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...
. However, it has broader implications, implicitly touching every aspect of the economics
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
, politics
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
, institutional development, and human development of oral societies. The study of orality has important implications for international development
International development
International development or global development is a concept that lacks a universally accepted definition, but it is most used in a holistic and multi-disciplinary context of human development — the development of greater quality of life for humans...
, especially as it relates to the goal of eradicating poverty
Poverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...
, as well as to the process of globalization
Globalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
.
In his later publications Walter J. Ong
Walter J. Ong
Father Walter Jackson Ong, Ph.D. , was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian and philosopher. His major interest was in exploring how the transition from orality to literacy influenced culture and changed human consciousness...
, a key scholar in this field, distinguishes between two forms of orality: ‘primary orality’ and ‘secondary orality’. In his earlier publications Ong uses the terms 'primarily oral culture' and 'secondarily oral culture'. He works with the contrast of primary orality and secondary orality as the way to establish what one thing is by indicating what it is not: Secondary orality is not primary orality. In addition, he refers to 'oral residue' and 'residually oral cultures'. Following his example in coining the terms primary orality and secondary orality, we can refer to residual orality.
Impact of literacy on culture
In his 1982 book mentioned above (2nd ed. 2002), Ong sums up his own work over the previous three decades as well as the work of numerous other scholars. With regard to oral tradition and primary orality he draws on pioneering work by Milman ParryMilman Parry
Milman Parry was a scholar of epic poetry and the founder of the discipline of oral tradition.-Biography:He was born in 1902 and studied at the University of California, Berkeley and at the Sorbonne . A student of the linguist Antoine Meillet at the Sorbonne, Parry revolutionized Homeric studies...
, Albert B. Lord, and Eric A. Havelock
Eric A. Havelock
Eric Alfred Havelock was a British classicist who spent most of his life in Canada and the United States. He was a professor at the University of Toronto and was active in the Canadian socialist movement during the 1930s. In the 1960s and 1970s, he served as chair of the classics departments at...
. Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist...
was among the first to fully appreciate the significance of the Ong's earlier work about print culture and the written and printed word as a technology
Technology
Technology is the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, and procedures. The word technology comes ;...
. In his work The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan quotes and discusses different works by Ong in the 1950s regarding print culture on pages 104, 129, 146, 159-60, 162-63, 168, 174-76. But using his own examples to amplify Ong's thought, McLuhan shows how each stage in the development of this technology throughout the history of communication
History of communication
The history of communication dates back to prehistory, with significant changes in communication technologies evolving in tandem with shifts in political and economic systems, and by extension, systems of power. Communication can range from very subtle processes of exchange, to full conversations...
– from the invention of speech (primary orality), to pictograms, to the phonetic alphabet
Phonetic alphabet
Phonetic alphabet can mean:* phonetic transcription system: a system for transcribing the precise sounds of human speech into writing.** International Phonetic Alphabet : the most widespread such system...
, to typography
Typography
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
, to the electronic communications of today – restructures human consciousness, profoundly changing not only the frontiers of human possibility, but even the frontiers it is possible for humans to imagine.
Primary orality
‘Primary orality’ refers to thought and its verbal expression within cultures “totally untouched by any knowledge of writingWriting
Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio.Writing most likely...
or print
Printing
Printing is a process for reproducing text and image, typically with ink on paper using a printing press. It is often carried out as a large-scale industrial process, and is an essential part of publishing and transaction printing....
.”
All sound
Sound
Sound is a mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations.-Propagation of...
is inherently powerful. If a hunter kills a lion he can see it, touch it, feel it and smell it. But if he hears a lion he must act, fast, because the sound of the lion signals its presence and its power. Speech is a form of sound that shares this common power. Like other sounds, it comes from within a living organism. A text can be ignored; it is just writing on paper. But to ignore speech can be unwise; our basic instincts compel us to pay attention.
Writing is powerful in a different way: it permits people to generate ideas, store them, and retrieve them as needed across time in a highly efficient and accurate way. The absence of this technology in oral societies limits the development of complex ideas and the institution
Institution
An institution is any structure or mechanism of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of individuals within a given human community...
s that depend on them. Instead, sustained thought in oral settings depends on interpersonal communication, and storing complex ideas over a long period of time requires packaging them in highly memorable ways, generally by using mnemonic
Mnemonic
A mnemonic , or mnemonic device, is any learning technique that aids memory. To improve long term memory, mnemonic systems are used to make memorization easier. Commonly encountered mnemonics are often verbal, such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember something,...
tools.
In his studies of the Homeric Question
Homeric Question
The Homeric Question concerns the doubts and consequent debate over the identity of Homer, the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey, and historicity, especially of the Iliad...
, Milman Parry
Milman Parry
Milman Parry was a scholar of epic poetry and the founder of the discipline of oral tradition.-Biography:He was born in 1902 and studied at the University of California, Berkeley and at the Sorbonne . A student of the linguist Antoine Meillet at the Sorbonne, Parry revolutionized Homeric studies...
was able to show that the poetic metre found in the Iliad
Iliad
The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...
and the Odyssey
Odyssey
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of Western literature...
had been ‘packaged’ by oral Greek
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
society to meet its information management needs. These insights first opened the door to a wider appreciation of the sophistication of oral tradition
Oral tradition
Oral tradition and oral lore is cultural material and traditions transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...
s, and their various methods of managing information. Later, ancient and medieval mnemonic tools were extensively documented by Frances Yates
Frances Yates
Dame Frances Amelia Yates DBE was a British historian. She taught at the Warburg Institute of the University of London for many years.She wrote extensively on the occult or Neoplatonic philosophies of the Renaissance...
in her book The Art of Memory
The Art of Memory
The Art of Memory is a 1966 non-fiction book by British historian Frances A. Yates. The book follows the history of mnemonic systems from the classical period of Simonides of Ceos in Ancient Greece to the Renaissance era of Giordano Bruno, ending with Gottfried Leibniz and the early emergence of...
.
Residual orality
But the availability of a technology of literacy to a society is not enough to ensure its widespread diffusion and use. For example Eric Havelock observed in A Preface to Plato that after the ancient Greeks invented writing they adopted a scribal
Scribe
A scribe is a person who writes books or documents by hand as a profession and helps the city keep track of its records. The profession, previously found in all literate cultures in some form, lost most of its importance and status with the advent of printing...
culture that lasted for generations. Few people, other than the scribes, considered it necessary to learn to read or write. In other societies, such as ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
or medieval Europe, literacy has been a domain confined to political and religious elites.
Many cultures have experienced an equilibrium state in which writing and mass illiteracy have co-existed for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Oral residue rarely disappears quickly and never vanishes completely. Speech is inherently an oral event, based on human relationships, unlike texts. Oral societies can mount strong resistance to literate technologies, as vividly shown in the arguments of Socrates
Socrates
Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...
against writing in Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
’s Phaedrus. Writing, Socrates argues, is inhuman. It attempts to turn living thoughts dwelling in the human mind into mere objects in the physical world. By causing people to rely on what is written rather than what they are able to think, it weakens the powers of the mind and of memory. True knowledge can only emerge from a relationship between active human minds. And unlike a person, a text can’t respond to a question; it will just keep saying the same thing over and over again, no matter how often it is refuted.
The Canadian communications scholar, Harold Innis
Harold Innis
Harold Adams Innis was a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on media, communication theory and Canadian economic history. The affiliated Innis College at the University of Toronto is named for him...
argued that a balance between the spoken word and writing contributed to the cultural and intellectual vitality of ancient Greece in Plato's time. Plato conveyed his ideas by writing down the conversations of Socrates thus "preserving the power of the spoken word on the written page." Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
, Innis wrote, regarded Plato's style as "halfway between poetry and prose." Plato was able to arrive at new philosophical positions "through the use of dialogues, allegories and illustrations."
Furthermore, as McLuhan emphasizes, modernization attenuates some oral capabilities. For example, in medieval Europe silent reading was largely unknown. This tilted the readers' attention towards the poetic and other auditory aspects of the text. Educated modern adults may also occasionally long for something like "the capacious medieval memory, which, untrammeled by the associations of print, could learn a strange language with ease and by the methods of a child, and could retain in memory and reproduce lengthy epic and elaborate lyric poems."
Both McLuhan and Ong also document the apparent re-emergence, in the electronic age, of a kind of ‘secondary orality
Secondary orality
In his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, published in 1982 , Walter J. Ong works with the contrast between oral and literate cultures. In this book, he used the phrase ‘secondary orality’, describing it as “essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based...
’ that displaces written words with audio/visual technologies like radio
Radio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
, TV and telephones. Unlike primary oral modes of communication, these technologies depend on print for their existence. Mass internet collaborations like Wikipedia rely primarily on writing, but re-introduce relationships and responsiveness into the text.
Importance of the concept
It has been a habit of literate cultures to view oral cultures simply in terms of their lack of the technologies of writing. This habit, argues Ong, is dangerously misled. Oral cultures are living cultures in their own right. A 1971 study found that of 3,000 extant languages, only 78 had a written literatureLiterature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
. While literacy extends human possibilities in both thought and action, all literate technologies ultimately depend on the ability of humans to learn oral languages and then translate sound into symbolic imagery.
Understanding between nations may depend to some degree on understanding oral culture. Ong argues that “many of the contrasts often made between ‘western’ and other views seem reducible to contrasts between deeply interiorized literacy and more or less residually oral states of consciousness.”
In a benchmark study on rural poverty the World Bank estimated that about 1.2 billion people earn less than US $1 a day (adjusted for Purchasing power parity), and that about 70% of them live in rural areas. “More than half a century of persistent efforts … has not altered the stubborn reality of rural poverty, and the gap between rich and poor is widening. The likelihood of achieving the Millennium Development Goals without a focus on improving the livelihoods and service accessibility of rural dwellers is low.”[1] Since most of these individuals cannot read or write, they do not use the internet, and are less likely than their neighbours to dial out on their mobile phones or initiate mobile banking transactions. An important implication of Ong's argument is that, in explaining their response to technology, residually oral culture is as important a factor as capabilities.
Illiteracy is both an important cause, and an important effect, of chronic global poverty
Poverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...
. Improvements in livelihoods and access to services in rural communities depends on their ability to manage local organizations, or hold external ones accountable. The processes of development can also be undermined by educated agents of development whose ‘deeply interiorized literacy’ informs their decisions. In recent years this has begun to change, with methods of engagement with oral communities that have emphasized participation, voice, and other development methods like participatory rural appraisal
Participatory rural appraisal
Participatory rural appraisal is an approach used by non-governmental organizations and other agencies involved in international development...
, participatory action research
Participatory action research
Participatory action research – or action research – is a recognized form of experimental research that focuses on the effects of the researcher's direct actions of practice within a participatory community with the goal of improving the performance quality of the community or an area of...
and Farmer Field School
Farmer Field School
The Farmer Field School is a group-based learning process that has been used by a number of governments, NGOs and international agencies to promote Integrated Pest Management...
s.
Theory of the characteristics of oral culture
Drawing on hundreds of studies from anthropologyAnthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
, linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
and the study of oral tradition
Oral tradition
Oral tradition and oral lore is cultural material and traditions transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...
, Ong summarizes ten key aspects of the ‘psychodynamics
Psychodynamics
Psychodynamics is the theory and systematic study of the psychological forces that underlie human behavior, especially the dynamic relations between conscious motivation and unconscious motivation...
of orality’. While these are subject to continuing debate, his list remains an important milestone. Ong draws his examples from both primary oral societies, and societies with a very high ‘oral residue’.
1. Formulaic Styling
To retain complex ideas requires that they be packaged memorably for easy recall.| To solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence. Your thoughts must come into being in heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or antithesis, in alliterations or assonances, in epithetic and other formulary expressions… Serious thought is intertwined with memory systems. |
Anthropologist Marcel Jousse identifies a close linkage between rhythm
Rhythm
Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...
and breathing patterns, gestures and the bilateral symmetry of the human body in several ancient verse traditions. This synergy between the body and the construction of oral thought further fuels memory.
2. Additive rather than subordinative
Oral cultures avoid complex ‘subordinative’ clauses. Ong cites an example from the Douay-Rheims version of Genesis (1609–10), noting that this basic additive pattern (in italics) has been identified in many oral contexts around the world:| In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was on the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters. And God said … |
Demonstrating how oral modes of communication tend to evolve into literate ones, Ong additionally cites the New American Bible
New American Bible
The New American Bible is a Catholic Bible translation first published in 1970. It had its beginnings in the Confraternity Bible, which began to be translated from the original languages in 1948....
(1970), which offers a translation that is grammatically far more complex:
| In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters. Then God said … |
3. Aggregative rather than analytic
Oral expression brings words together in pithy phrases that are the product of generations of evolution: the ‘sturdy oak tree’, the ‘beautiful princess’ or ‘clever Odysseus’. This does not apply specifically to poetryPoetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
or song
Song
In music, a song is a composition for voice or voices, performed by singing.A song may be accompanied by musical instruments, or it may be unaccompanied, as in the case of a cappella songs...
; rather the words are brought together out of habit during general communication. ‘Analyzing’ or breaking apart such expressions adds complexity to communications, and questions received wisdom.
Ong cites an American example, noting that in some parts of the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
with heavy oral residue, it is still considered normal or even obligatory to use the adjective ‘glorious’ when referring to the ‘fourth of July
Independence Day (United States)
Independence Day, commonly known as the Fourth of July, is a federal holiday in the United States commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, declaring independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain...
’.
4. Redundant or ‘copious’
Speech that repeats earlier thoughts or thought-pictures, or shines a different light on them somehow, helps to keep both the speaker and the listener focused on the topic, and makes it easier for all to recall the key points later. "Oral cultures encourage fluency, fulsomeness, volubility. Rhetoricians were to call this copiaCopia: Foundations of the Abundant Style
Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style is a rhetorical guide written by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus in 1512. It is Erasmus' systematic instruction on how to embellish, amplify, and give variety to speech and writing...
".
5. Conservative or traditionalist
Because oral societies have no effective access to writing and print technologies, they must invest considerable energy in basic information managementInformation management
Information management is the collection and management of information from one or more sources and the distribution of that information to one or more audiences. This sometimes involves those who have a stake in, or a right to that information...
. Storage of information, being primarily dependent on individual or collective recall, must be handled with particular thrift. It is possible to approximately measure oral residue “from the amount of memorization the culture’s educational procedures require.”
This creates incentives to avoid exploring new ideas and particularly to avoid the burden of having to store them. It does not prevent oral societies from demonstrating dynamism and change, but there is a premium on ensuring that changes cleave to traditional formulas, and “are presented as fitting the traditions of the ancestors.”
6. Close to the human lifeworld
Oral cultures take a practical approach to information storage. To qualify for storage, information must usually concern matters of immediate practical concern or familiarity to most members of the society.Long after the invention of writing, and often long after the invention of print, basic information on how to perform a society’s most important trades was left unwritten, passed from one generation to the next as it always had been: through apprenticeship
Apprenticeship
Apprenticeship is a system of training a new generation of practitioners of a skill. Apprentices or protégés build their careers from apprenticeships...
, observation and practice.
By contrast, only literary cultures have launched phenomenological analyses, abstract classifications, ordered lists and tables, etc.. Nothing analogous exists in oral societies.
7. Agonistically toned
Products of “the highly polarized, agonistic, oral world of good and evil, virtue and vice, villains and heroes,” the great works of oral literature
Oral literature
Oral literature corresponds in the sphere of the spoken word to literature as literature operates in the domain of the written word. It thus forms a generally more fundamental component of culture, but operates in many ways as one might expect literature to do...
from Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
to Beowulf
Beowulf
Beowulf , but modern scholars agree in naming it after the hero whose life is its subject." of an Old English heroic epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines, set in Scandinavia, commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature.It survives in a single...
, from the Mwindo epic
Mwindo epic
The Mwindo Epic is an oral tale from the Democratic Republic of the Congo told by the Nyanga people. The origins and creation of the Mwindo epic are mostly unknown since the story is only passed down through Oral tradition...
to the Old Testament
Old Testament
The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...
, are extremely violent by modern standards. They are also punctuated by frequent and intense intellectual combat and tongue-lashings on the one hand, and effusive praise (perhaps reaching its height among African praise singers) on the other.
8. Empathetic and participatory
In an oral culture the most reliable and trusted technique for learning is to share a “close, empathetic, communal association” with others who know.Ong cites a study of community decision-making from 12th Century England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. Writing already had a long history in England, and it would have been possible to use texts to establish for example, the age of majority of the heir to an estate. But people were skeptical about texts, noting not only the cost of generating and managing them, but the problems involved in preventing tampering or frauds.
As a result, they retained the traditional solution: gathering together “mature wise seniors of many years, having good testimony”, and publicly discussing the age of the heir with them, until agreement was reached. This hallmark principle of orality, that truth emerges best from communal process, resonates today in the jury
Jury
A jury is a sworn body of people convened to render an impartial verdict officially submitted to them by a court, or to set a penalty or judgment. Modern juries tend to be found in courts to ascertain the guilt, or lack thereof, in a crime. In Anglophone jurisdictions, the verdict may be guilty,...
system.
9. HomeostaticHomeostasisHomeostasis is the property of a system that regulates its internal environment and tends to maintain a stable, constant condition of properties like temperature or pH...
Oral societies conserve their limited capacity to store information, and retain the relevance of their information to the interest of their present members, by shedding memories that have lost their past significance.While many examples exist, the classic example was reported by Goody
Jack Goody
Sir John Rankine Goody is a British social anthropologist. He has been a prominent teacher at Cambridge University, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1976, and he is an associate of the US National Academy of Sciences...
and Watt (1968). Written records prepared by the British in Ghana
Ghana
Ghana , officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country located in West Africa. It is bordered by Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south...
in the early 1900s show that Ndewura Jakpa, the seventeenth century founder of the state of Gonja
Gonja
This page discusses the Ghanaian kingdom of Gonja; for uses for the word Ganja, see Ganja Gonja was a kingdom in northern Ghana; the word can also refer to the people of this kingdom. The Gonja are a Guan people who have been influenced by both Akan people and Mande people. With the fall of the...
, had seven sons, each of whom ruled a territorial division within the state. Six decades later two of the divisions had disappeared for various reasons. The myths of the Gonja had been revised to recount that Jakpa had five sons, and that five divisions were created. Since they had no practical, present purpose, the other two sons and divisions had evaporated.
10. Situational rather than abstract
In oral cultures, concepts are used in a way that minimizes abstraction, focusing to the greatest extent possible on objects and situations directly known by the speaker. A study by A.R. LuriaAlexander Luria
Alexander Romanovich Luria was a famous Soviet neuropsychologist and developmental psychologist. He was one of the founders of neuropsychology and the jointly led the Vygotsky Circle.- Biography :...
, a psychologist who did extensive fieldwork comparing oral and literate subjects in remote areas of Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan , officially the Republic of Uzbekistan is a doubly landlocked country in Central Asia and one of the six independent Turkic states. It shares borders with Kazakhstan to the west and to the north, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the east, and Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to the south....
and Kirghizia in 1931-2 documented the highly situational nature of oral thinking.
- Oral subjects always used real objects they were familiar with to refer to geometric shapes; for example a plate or the moon might be used to refer to a circle.
- Asked to select three similar words from the following list “hammer, saw, log, hatchet”, oral subjects would reject the literate solution (removing the log to produce a list of 3 tools), pointing out that without the log there wasn’t much use for the tools.
- Oral subjects took a practical, not an abstract, approach to syllogisms. Luria asked them this question. In the far north, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the far north and there is always snow there. What colour are the bears? Typical response: “I don’t know. I’ve seen a black bear. I’ve never seen any others. … Every locality has its own animals.”
- Oral subjects proved unwilling to analyze themselves. When asked “what sort of person are you?” one responded: “What can I say about my own heart? How can I talk about my character? Ask others; they can tell you about me. I myself can’t say anything.”
See also
- Art of memoryArt of memoryThe Art of Memory or Ars Memorativa is a general term used to designate a loosely associated group of mnemonic principles and techniques used to organize memory impressions, improve recall, and assist in the combination and 'invention' of ideas. It is sometimes referred to as mnemotechnics...
- Cultural traditionsOral traditionOral tradition and oral lore is cultural material and traditions transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...
- EthnopoeticsEthnopoeticsEthnopoetics is a poetic movement and subfield in linguistics, and anthropology. It was coined as a term by Jerome Rothenberg in collaboration with George Quasha in 1968, when Quasha asked Rothenberg to create a term using 'ethnos' and 'poetics' on the model of 'ethnomusicology' for inclusion in...
- History of communicationHistory of communicationThe history of communication dates back to prehistory, with significant changes in communication technologies evolving in tandem with shifts in political and economic systems, and by extension, systems of power. Communication can range from very subtle processes of exchange, to full conversations...
- History of writingHistory of writingThe history of writing records the development of expressing language by letters or other marks. In the history of how systems of representation of language through graphic means have evolved in different human civilizations, more complete writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of...
- Intangible culture
- Linguistic anthropologyLinguistic anthropologyLinguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages, and has grown over the past 100 years to encompass almost any aspect of language structure and...
- MnemonicMnemonicA mnemonic , or mnemonic device, is any learning technique that aids memory. To improve long term memory, mnemonic systems are used to make memorization easier. Commonly encountered mnemonics are often verbal, such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember something,...
s - OracyOracyThe term oracy was coined by Andrew Wilkinson, a British researcher and educator, in the 1960s. This word is formed by analogy from literacy and numeracy. The purpose is to draw attention to the neglect of oral skills in education...
- Oral contractOral contractAn oral contract is a contract the terms of which have been agreed by spoken communication, in contrast to a written contract, where the contract is a written document...
- Oral historyOral historyOral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews...
- Oral interpretationOral InterpretationOral Interpretation is a dramatic art, also commonly called "interpretive reading" and "dramatic reading", though these terms are more conservative and restrictive...
- Oral lawOral lawAn oral law is a code of conduct in use in a given culture, religion or community application, by which a body of rules of human behaviour is transmitted by oral tradition and effectively respected, or the single rule that is orally transmitted....
- Oral literatureOral literatureOral literature corresponds in the sphere of the spoken word to literature as literature operates in the domain of the written word. It thus forms a generally more fundamental component of culture, but operates in many ways as one might expect literature to do...
- Oral poetryOral poetryOral poetry can be defined in various ways. A strict definition would include only poetry that is composed and transmitted without any aid of writing. However, the complex relationships between written and spoken literature in some societies can make this definition hard to maintain, and oral...
- OratoryOratoryOratory is a type of public speaking.Oratory may also refer to:* Oratory , a power metal band* Oratory , a place of worship* a religious order such as** Oratory of Saint Philip Neri ** Oratory of Jesus...
- Performance poetryPerformance poetryPerformance poetry is poetry that is specifically composed for or during a performance before an audience. During the 1980s, the term came into popular usage to describe poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution.-History:...
- StorytellingStorytellingStorytelling is the conveying of events in words, images and sounds, often by improvisation or embellishment. Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation and in order to instill moral values...
- World Oral Literature ProjectWorld Oral Literature ProjectThe ' is 'an urgent global initiative to document and disseminate endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record'. Directed by Dr Mark Turin and co-located at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, at the University of Cambridge and Yale University, the project was...
- Orality Virtual Project's
Further reading
- Goody, JackJack GoodySir John Rankine Goody is a British social anthropologist. He has been a prominent teacher at Cambridge University, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1976, and he is an associate of the US National Academy of Sciences...
. The Interface Between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. - Havelock, Eric A.Eric A. HavelockEric Alfred Havelock was a British classicist who spent most of his life in Canada and the United States. He was a professor at the University of Toronto and was active in the Canadian socialist movement during the 1930s. In the 1960s and 1970s, he served as chair of the classics departments at...
The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. - Innis, Harold A.Harold InnisHarold Adams Innis was a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on media, communication theory and Canadian economic history. The affiliated Innis College at the University of Toronto is named for him...
The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951. - Martin, Henri-Jean.Henri-Jean MartinHenri-Jean Martin was a leading authority on the history of the book in Europe, and an expert on the history of writing and printing...
The History and Power of Writing. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN 0-226-50835-8 - McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
- Misztal, Barbara. Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press, 2003.
- Ong, Walter J.Walter J. OngFather Walter Jackson Ong, Ph.D. , was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian and philosopher. His major interest was in exploring how the transition from orality to literacy influenced culture and changed human consciousness...
The Presence of the Word. Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1967. - Yates, Frances A. The Art of MemoryThe Art of MemoryThe Art of Memory is a 1966 non-fiction book by British historian Frances A. Yates. The book follows the history of mnemonic systems from the classical period of Simonides of Ceos in Ancient Greece to the Renaissance era of Giordano Bruno, ending with Gottfried Leibniz and the early emergence of...
. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.