In defense of oral tradition

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Within a tradition, there may be ways to experiment and introduce new elements, but continuance and an unbroken connection between past, present, and future are still very much central to any such tradition.

The bolded part is to me the key difference. Once one verifies that a written account is not a later forgery, one can be certain it hasn't been changed in the decades or centuries after it was written, and one can be certain the person's writing wasn't influenced by anything that would happen later.
 

RichardGarfinkle

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That is a fallacy, though. (To be clear again, I am not saying it is infallible.) Oral tradition is not the same as oral testimony. It is not the same as expressing one's perspective. Oral tradition relies on ritual and rhetoric methods to ensure the integrity of what is passed on. Within a tradition, there may be ways to experiment and introduce new elements, but continuance and an unbroken connection between past, present, and future are still very much central to any such tradition.

Kuwi, it might help to elaborate on the methods used. Most people these days are unfamiliar with the particular techniques of preserving and presenting oral tradition.

I'm also personally interested as I'm only familiar with the Art of Memory as practiced in Medieval Europe and not any other cultures methods.
 

kuwisdelu

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The bolded part is to me the key difference. Once one verifies that a written account is not a later forgery, one can be certain it hasn't been changed in the decades or centuries after it was written, and one can be certain the person's writing wasn't influenced by anything that would happen later.

That's fair. Another way of saying that is that oral traditions tend to keep history alive, while in written accounts history is relegated to the past. That can be both an advantage and a disadvantage, though.

An advantage is that keeping a living history through oral tradition tends to preserve context better. Because it is kept alive through people rather than paper and ink, it often provides a greater opportunity to ask questions about it and have them answered. It's harder to have a conversation with a dusty tome.

Kuwi, it might help to elaborate on the methods used. Most people these days are unfamiliar with the particular techniques of preserving and presenting oral tradition.

Lisa mentioned a few of them, such as the ritualized practices of only telling some stories at particular times of the year or at certain places or to certain people. In Zuni, tales must be told during the winter, while true stories can be told all year round.

There is also the acknowledgement of other versions, and often this can come with an implicit understanding of how the versions relate to one another. For example, many versions of our creation story exist, but they all draw upon certain versions that are considered to be the "official" versions. In addition to humans, different kachinas tell different versions of it, and the "most official" version is the one told by Kiaklo, who is the keeper of our history. While other versions may introduce variation, this version never changes, except maybe to include recent history. (An interesting cultural note is that we don't call it a "creation" story or differentiate it from the rest of history. Any history or "true" story can be considered to be a part of the same story, as a continuance from the beginning of time. There is no significant difference between the past of a thousand years ago and the past of yesterday. Both are equally connected to each other and to the present day and the future.)

Many oral traditions call upon poetic devices. Or rather, many of what we now consider poetic techniques can trace their origins to oral tradition. These greatly depend on the language, so it's hard to generalize. European examples can be found, for example, in Homer and Beowulf. You see the use of rhythm and meter: Homer being written in dactylic hexameter, for example.

In other traditions (depending on the language) it may be more difficult to characterize meter, but it's not uncommon for oral tradition to come in the form of song or forms that are chanted. Even when it is simply spoken, there is usually a rhythm, and everything from timing of pauses and volume become significant.

Other techniques include repetitions (saying the same thing multiple times for emphasis) and motifs of re-phrasing, such as use of synecdoche and metonymy. Repetition and re-phrasing key ideas multiple times or in multiple ways is a very common technique.

There are often ritualized beginnings and openings and transitions between sections. Homeric tradition begins with invocation of the gods or muses, for example. Likewise, Zuni stories begin and end with set phrases, which also indicate the kind of story (tale or history, etc.), and variations on these set phrases can also say something about the story. For example, one might tell a true story in the style of a tale, or a tale in the style of a true story, and this would be evident in the way it is told.

Similar to many traditions of poetry (or rather, poetry inherits these attributes), there is often an extensive lexicon of set phrases and words that represent meaning. There are metaphors and imagery that are understood to represent specific things or actions. This can be found everywhere from (relatively) modern poetry to Biblical stories to ancient oral traditions around the world, where meaning is preserved through elaborate ritual shorthand, and knowledge of the ritual language is often necessary to fully understand what is being said.
 
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milkweed

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Kuwi, it might help to elaborate on the methods used. Most people these days are unfamiliar with the particular techniques of preserving and presenting oral tradition.

I'm also personally interested as I'm only familiar with the Art of Memory as practiced in Medieval Europe and not any other cultures methods.

I mentioned a couple in the form of story sticks, some NA groups used a series of shells and stones and other objects as mechanisms that trigger the story memory. I think it's in south america where they have a series of cords with knots upon the cords that relate to each story.

Or did you have something else in mind?
 

RichardGarfinkle

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I mentioned a couple in the form of story sticks, some NA groups used a series of shells and stones and other objects as mechanisms that trigger the story memory. I think it's in south america where they have a series of cords with knots upon the cords that relate to each story.

Or did you have something else in mind?

Nothing specific, but it can be hard for people in reading-centric cultures like ours to understand how much is possible with memory and oral story-telling and related arts. I figured it would make the discussion clearer if some of the techniques were elaborated.

The abstract discussion of such techniques goes only so far to comminicate how this is done.
 

kuwisdelu

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Here are a few more in-depth examples specific to Zuni oral tradition, taken from Zuni Ritual Poetry by Ruth Bunzel.

There are regular stereotyped phrases for all things commonly alluded to in prayer. The sun always "comes out standing to his sacred place," "night priests draw their dark curtain," the corn plants "stretch out their hands to all directions calling for rain," the meal painting on an altar is always "our house of massed clouds," prayer sticks are "clothed in our grandfather, turkey's, robe of cloud." Events are always described in terms of these stereotypes, which are often highly imaginative and poetic.[2] These fixed metaphors are the outstanding feature of Zuñi poetic style. There are not very many of them; they are used over and over again, the same imagery appearing repeatedly in one prayer. A prayer recorded by Cushing more than 50 years ago contains all of the same stereotypes and no turns of expression different from those in use to-day. A comparison of Cushing's texts[3] with mine shows a rigidity of style in oral tradition.

This is specifically referring to prayer, but the same techniques form the basis of non-sacred oral tradition. I would note that most stories are characterized by plain language rather than the colorful language in this example. This is meaningful, however. Colorful metaphors are limited to key set phrases that reappear throughout all stories and prayers and tales.

The sentence structure is that of continued narrative in the hands of a particularly able story-teller. Zuñi is a language that is very sensitive to skillful handling. Oratory is a recognized art, and prayer is one of the occasions on which oratory is used. The best prayers run to long periods-the longer the better, since clarity of expression is not necessary, nor particularly desirable.

Zuñi, like Latin, is a highly inflected language and can handle effectively involved sentences that can not be managed intelligibly in English. These features, which are difficult enough of translation in prose, are emphasized in the poetry. The long period is a characteristic feature. The typical Zuñi word order is subject, object, verb; the verb always holding the final position. The usual method of expressing temporal or causal subordination is by means of participial or gerundive clauses, fully inflected, preceding the principal proposition. These participial clauses are impossible in English. In the translation it has been necessary, therefore, to break up the original sentences. Thereby an important and effective stylistic feature is unavoidably lost. But the reader should think of the Zuñi sentences rolling on like the periods of a Ciceronian oration to their final close.

Linguistics and grammatical structure is a key rhetoric device that can be exploited for power, emphasis, and ensure the memorability and continued integrity of a story. Again, repetition and re-phrasing of actions in multiple ways is a common technique.

It has been impossible, of course, to render the original rhythm. One characteristic feature, however, has been retained, namely, its irregularity, the unsymmetrical alternation of long and short lines. Cushing, in his commendable desire to render Zuñi verse into vivid and intelligible English verse, committed the inexcusable blunder of reducing the Zuñi line to regular short-line rhymed English stanzas. If one were to choose a familiar English verse form it should be the line of Milton or, better still, the free verse of the King James version of the psalms. I have tried to retain the sense in the original of the fluidity and variety of the verse form. In reading the translations one must be mindful of Zuñi methods of declamation. The short lines are declaimed slowly and with marked emphasis, the long lines are spoken rapidly, unaccented syllables are slurred or elided, and the word accents pile up on each other. The two types of line are like the booming of the surf and the rushing of the brook.

Zuñi poetry has no feminine endings.[5] The heavy accent with noticeable lengthening on the final syllable can not be transferred to English. The translation therefore suffers greatly from loss of sonority and vigor. In the original every line is like the declaration of a creed--an effect which no translation can adequately render. It is interesting to note that although the natural cadence of Zuñi is trochaic, the poetic rhythm is predominantly iambic. The principal word accent in Zuñi is invariably on the first syllable, with a secondary accent, in words of four or more syllables, on the penult. The final syllable is always unaccented, yet the important poetic stress is always on the final syllable of the line, which gives the verse a curious syncopated quality, very difficult of reproduction. The final syllable is usually distinguished by prolongation and a high falling tone.

Again, rhythm and meter are a strong part of oral tradition. This can be found in Western examples such as Homer and Beowulf, and can still be found in oral traditions around the world that have not been written down. Like structure, the use of rhythm and meter can be used for emphasis and meaning and to aid in recalling the story.

Ethnopoetics is a field that attempts to capture some of these techniques of oral tradition in written form.

An example can be found here, in transcribing the telling of a traditional Zuni tale.

And here is an example of a Zuni prayer, many of which can take an hour or more to recite from memory.
 
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Google "Oral formulaic composition," with the caveat that oral formulas work/exist in prose tales too.

Key names:
Milman Parry -- analyzed Homer in the Greek and discovered metrical formulaic metaphors/conceits i.e. "rosy-fingered dawn"
Albert Lord -- analyzed traditional Serbian oral epics s.v. Singer of Tales
Francis P. Macgoun -- Old English poetic formulae, i.e. litotes and kennings
John Miles -- a folklorist and student of Lord -- see http://oraltradition.org

There are traditional tale-tellers, Seanchaí, in Ireland who tell stories in Gaelic; these include songs/poetic pieces in the tales and rely on highly elaborate "runs" that use formulas to describe action.

Oral formulae are a pre-built library of phrases, metaphors, conceits. The serve to fill in the meter, to make memorization easier, and to aid in on the spot creation.
 

Dave.C.Robinson

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I'm not saying it trumps other kinds of evidence. I'm saying written evidence does not trump it.

Basically, I'm arguing for equality between the literary and oral traditions.

The historical record versus the scientific record is a completely different matter.

(Written history and oral history are both history; neither are scientific.)

I see your point about the importance of oral history, but I think written history is given more weight in many cases because it can be verified in a way that was impossible with oral history until relatively recently.

As an example, consider both an oral and a written history of a given event, both initially composed at the same time (let's say 200 years ago).

If we have the original written document from that date, we can know that it hasn't changed. It may or may not be accurate, it may be biased, but we know it is fixed.

When it comes to an oral tradition, regardless of its accuracy, we cannot perform the same cross-check. Without a time machine, there is no way of verifying that the words heard today are identical to those heard 200 years ago.

Its constancy can't be verified in the same way, so we can't prove it hasn't changed. That's not to say it has, but simply that it's impossible to prove it hasn't in the same way that you can prove a document from the era has remained unchanged.