The Preservation of Oral Tradition (original) (raw)
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Oral tradition and communication
Bodhi an Interdisciplinary Journal, 2009
Oral tradition has become a domain of great interest to scholars of different disciplines of knowledge such as literature, psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. It has a huge scope for the discipline of communication too. This article presents an appraisal of oral tradition as a means of communication from one generation to another. While doing so, it deals with following issues: Can history be narrated based on oral traditions just as it is done with 'written documents'? Are the oral traditions only the sources of historiography or do they have other implications too? It also discusses whether oral traditions can be taken as valid historical sources, and, if not, whether there are means for testing its reliability. The oral tradition Vansina (1965) has defined oral traditions as "documents of the present" also inheriting "a message from the past." For Turner (1986), it is one of branchs of literary studies which reaches back far enough in time to invite a consideration of that crucial period in human prehistory when biological evolution overlapped with cultural evolution (p. 68). The oral traditions encompass all verbal testimonies that are reported statements concerning the past (M. Bauer and E. Bernheim, qtd. in Vansina, 1965). According to Henige (1988), oral tradition, as a genre, should have been transmitted over several generations and to some extent be the common property of a group of people (p. 232). As Rosenberg observes, it "is the transmission of cultural items from one member to another, or others. Those items are heard, stored in memory, and, when appropriate, recalled at the moment of subsequent transmission" (1987, p. 80).
Koers - Bulletin for Christian Scholarship, 1992
In this study the im portance o f research concerning orality a nd oral traditions fo r a variety o f pressing current issues related to social history, cultural studies, education and science o f religion is stressed. It is necessary to take into account the fu ll range o f language use as it is spoken and listened to, read and written, to improve our descriptions and analyses o f ways o f communicating and consequently to uncover the inter-relatedness o f language and culture.
A Study on Oral Tradition as a Communication Tool
How many mothers can sing a lullaby? How many Fathers do tell bedtime stories to their wards today? The ability of man to speak and communicate distinguishes him from other beings. Human activity to communicate through speech and his intelligence, the cognitive ability to be aware of his surroundings and visualize them in his mind are the two pivotal factors in human society's progression. In it, Oral Tradition is an aspect of human society's evolution. Oral tradition has become a domain of great interest to scholars of different disciplines of knowledge today. It has a huge scope for the discipline of communication too. In the absence of script, it is a complex process of passing on information of a people's culture, custom and behaviour from one generation to the next by word of mouth through stories. This article presents an appraisal of oral tradition as a means of communication. It also discusses whether oral traditions can be taken as valid historical sources.
An archaeological reconstruction of the history and aspects of the culture of the Tiv of Central Nigeria has benefitted enormously from the systematic use of models generated from oral traditions and ethnography. Suffice it to say that oral traditions are up to now a very important means of storing and disseminating information in all its ramifications among the Tiv. Similarly, there is a great degree of continuity in the material culture of the people through time and space. This makes ethnography an indispensable area of knowledge for culture-historical reconstructions in Tivland. The ancestors of the present-day Tiv of Benue State of Nigeria entered the region from the northwestern part of Cameroon at least five hundred years ago according to the limited dates at our disposal. Our representative approach to the collection, sifting and interpretation of oral traditional and ethnographic data was aimed at reducing the minuses of these areas of anthropological scholarship to the barest minimum.
Recording One’s Own Oral Culture: A Case Study of Locals’ Notebooks
Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review, 2022
Interest towards communities characterized by oral tradition has taken the form of ethnological and/or anthropological field research on this topic over the past two centuries. With the invention of the tape recorder, the difficulty of recording field information was reduced as it enabled real-time recording of testimonies provided by informants; the process became even more accessible once digital information storage became available. In parallel with the efforts of the researcher—outsider—to document realities considered relevant for the culture of traditional societies, some of the insiders became aware of the need to write down such information, which they recognized to be defining for their own social group. This article thus focuses on a particular practice in writing down ethnographic information, namely the existence of notebooks in which oral texts of different types and with different functions are recorded. To build the argument, I draw on the example of such notebooks he...
Truths yet Unborn? Oral Tradition as a Casualty of Culture Contact
The Journal of African History, 1982
This essay treats the effects of acculturation on oral historical materials. Rather than addressing it as a matter of ‘contamination’, that is, as a question of extraneous data entering and distorting ‘pristine’ traditions, it is considered here to be a facet of the larger question of cultural assimilation – a case of the old and familiar constantly confronting and responding to the new and strange. Seen in this way, oral data continuously adopt and adapt whatever new, relevant and interesting materials come their way in not very different – though decidedly less visible – ways from those that written data have always done. This argument is illustrated by examples from various times and places, largely situations where missionaries, newly literate members, or colonial officials, perceptibly influenced the historical views of societies on their way to becoming literate.In fact this phenomenon seems widespread enough to justify advancing a model that can be tested against specific cas...
ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE POST-EUCLIDEAN STATE OR FROM TEXTUAL TO ORAL ANTHROPOLOGY
The actual crisis of anthropology is examined in relation to its wide public success. Anthropology has prospered and the anthropologists have proliferated becoming more specific. But the theoretical debate has come to a halt over the last decades. The article suggests that both the methodology and the form of expression of the ethnographic report have developed and then become crystallized around actual protocols. A critique of the dichotomy Subject/Object, namely the key discussion about the notion of Otherness, is here reexamined as the testimony for an immanent “non-protocolar” character of anthropology. This critique together with the end of anthropology as tekhne, i.e. as protocolar activity, will allow anthropology to go on enhancing many other social and non social sciences. The article discusses the re-definition of anthropology in the context of Daseinanalysis and, therefore the changing relation between man and power, that is between the social actor and the post-Euclidean State in the era of the tekhne.