2.
ORAL CULTURE: THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF ORALITY
At this point it is necessary to digress
from the particular focus of this dissertation (i.e. the Yali) to consider in
more general terms what is intended by the use of the expression “oral culture”
,
and to consider the potential of orality for transmission and retrieval of
Scripture. However, this is a byway
that will lead back to the Yali of Irian Jaya.
Oral Culture
Negatively and Positively Defined
There are two ways of defining oral culture:
the first is to describe it from the perspective and in the terms of a literate
and literary culture; that is, with reference to its lack of writing. Thus Walter Ong has defined an oral culture
as a culture before the introduction of script.1 Elsewhere, he
has written that “ primary oral cultures” are those which are “ untouched by writing in
any form”. 2 The tendency to think of oral cultures in
literary terms has also affected the way in which the corpus of oral tradition
or oral testimony of such cultures is described, namely, as “oral
literature”. For example, Foley
describes oral literature as “ literature composed without the art of
writing”.3 Ong regards this as a “strictly preposterous term”.
[This
term]. reveals our inability to represent
to our own minds a heritage of verbally organized materials except as some
variant of writing, even when they have nothing to do with writing at all.4
To him, the coupling of the term
“literature” with “oral” is as absurd as “thinking of horses as automobiles
without wheels”5 Wallace Chafe also draws attention to this
juxtaposition of two apparently contradictory terms:
The
term ‘oral literature’ seems, etymologically at least, to contain an internal
contradiction. How can something be
oral and written at the same time, if ‘literature’ implies writing?6
This etymological limitation on defining
the products of orality was also acknowledged by Wellek and Warren in Theory of Literature, where they
specifically referred to the art of “imaginative literature” in which aesthetic
and utilitarian functions coalesce:
One
of the objections to ‘literature’ is its suggestion (in its etymology from litera) of limitation to written or
printed literature; for clearly, any coherent conception must include ‘oral
literature’. In this respect the
German term Wortkunst [“ Wordcraft’]
and the Russian slovesnost
[“philology”] have the advantage over their English equivalent.7
However, the problem is not just one of
etymological connotation, but that such terms carry judgemental overtones, and
by the association of ideas, imply that orality is synonymous with
illiteracy. In this way, the stigma of
illiteracy, common in highly literate cultures, is applied to oral cultures, so
that when such cultures are described as illiterate or preliterate, there is
the inference of an inadequacy or deficiency of ‘culture’ and ‘learning’, which
can only be compensated by the teaching of literacy.8 But on the
other hand, oral cultures have their own devices by which information is not
only transmitted, but accumulated for retrieval as the occasion arises. The importance and significance of these
devices should be recognised by people involved in cross-cultural Christian
communication, but oral skills and media tend to be overlooked or undervalued
because of preoccupation with literary media.9 Hiebert in Anthropological Insights for Missionaries
has drawn attention to this tendency to denigrate oral cultures and to the need
to appreciate and use oral media:
Although
print is excellent for storing knowledge, it is not the only means. We often label those who cannot read
‘illiterate’ and thus ignorant. The
fact is, non-literate societies have a great deal of knowledge and store it in
other ways. They use stories, poems,
songs, proverbs, riddles, and other forms of oral tradition that are easily
remembered. They also enact dramas,
dances and rituals that can be seen.
This
distinction between oral and literate societies and the ways they store and
transmit information is of vital importance for missionaries. Since missionaries have generally been
literate people, they have often misunderstood oral societies and their forms
of communication. Consequently, they
have generally concluded that the most effective way to plant churches in the
mission field is to teach people how to read and write.10
Therefore it is necessary to recognise
that an oral culture is one in which both oral skills and oral media exist for
the transmission, storage and retrieval of tradition and other forms of
knowledge, and that within the parameters of such a culture, these can function
effectively for the communication of Christian knowledge. This is particularly true in evangelism. As Hiebert says, people do not have to
become literate before they can hear and understand the Gospel message.11 However, it is also necessary to determine
what skills and media exist in a given oral culture and to evaluate their
capacity and effectiveness for the communication task envisaged.
Orality: Transmission,
Storage and Retrieval
One of the basic characteristics of oral
communication is that it is based on the interaction of a speaker and his
audience. It is a social activity, in
which the personality and skill of the speaker (or singer) is complemented by
the participation of the listener(s), whether that be passive (that is, through
shared experience in the event and in common understanding of the semantic
field of meaning of the words and paralanguage),12 or active (that is, by vocal or other response).13 The transmission may take place in a formal
setting such as the passing on of esoteric knowledge in a transition rite, or
it may take place informally, such as when a teller of tales or singer of songs
enthralls a village with a performance from his repertoire. Simultaneous to transmission, storage is
taking place through a process of listening, repetition and memorization. Through the practice of the same skills,
the speaker or singer is retrieving what he has already stored. Orality, therefore, is a complex
combination of these component skills, by which information is passed on and
learned in such a way as to be possible of recall. Ong writes:
[People
in oral cultures] learn a great deal and possess and practice [sic] great
wisdom, but they do not ‘study’. They
learn by apprenticeship. by listening,
by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and
recombining them, by assimilating other formulatory materials, by participation
in a kind of corporate retrospection — not by study in the strict
sense.14
However, some writers on oral tradition
and orality emphasize that it must be understood that this is not rote
learning,15 but the
employment of mnemonic devices to fix the essential content in the memory and
aid in recall and transmission. There
is considerable “variability” according to Lord, if one understands by that
term “that there is not the urge to use exactly the same words one used the
last time that one expressed a given idea”.16
In other words, in oral cultures,
while verbal memorization skills are reputedly refined, verbatim memorization
is limited, and apart from short expressions, “ no clear-cut instances of
absolute verbatim memory of any lengthy passages” are known to exist. Verbatim
memory, in fact, is something that belongs within a literate culture, where “ the
illusion is widespread that if one has the exact words someone has uttered, one
has by that very fact his exact meaning”.17
But this is not true, because it is
possible to record the words, and yet through loss of verbal, paralingual and
situational context, fail to retain the meaning; and it is possible to learn
words by rote and recite them verbatim, without understanding their import. Verbatim memory can only function where
there is a written or otherwise recorded text, to which the memorizer can
return as often as is necessary to test and perfect verbatim mastery. Moreover, its value must be questionable
unless it is possible for a third party to test its accuracy against the
original text and the validity of its employment against the original context.18 Memory, then, is not the same as a written or some other kind
of record, which is not a remembrance, but an aide memoire. But memory
seems to be the crucial factor in the ability of members of oral cultures to
retain and retrieve oral tradition or testimony. According to Vansina, however, “there exists no proof that there
is any inborn difference in cerebral faculties between the various races of
man”.19 We must, therefore, conclude that people of
oral cultures have no innate physiological ability of memory, but that as Ong
states:
[They]
nourish among some of their members, and even to a degree among virtually all
of them, memory skills which are beyond those cultivated in present-day
technological cultures.20
According to Ong, the key factor in
memory skill is the ability to “think memorable thoughts” by the employment of
mnemonic devices:
In
a primary oral culture, 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 thought must come into being in heavily rhythmic, balanced
patterns, in repetitions or antitheses, in alliterations and assonances, in
epithetic and other formulatory expressions, in standard thematic
settings. in proverbs which are
constantly heard by everyone so that they come to mind readily and which
themselves are patterned for retention and ready recall, or in other mnemonic
form. Serious thought is intertwined
with memory systems. Mnemonic needs
determine even syntax.21
These features identified by Ong as
mnemonic devices are also identified by other writers on orality. Rhythm and pattern are developed through
the employment of various connotative and emotive sounds and sound structures,
sometimes assisted by paralinguistic symbols such as touch, smell, artifact,
ritual and body movement.22 For example, Ong cites the Beatitudes as “ obviously
mnemonically structured thought” probably recited with rhythmic rocking of the body, as is typical
in “ verbomotor” cultures.23
Each of the acoustic and structural
devices which Ong lists (in the quotation above) contribute towards creating
rhythm, which “aids recall, even physiologically”,24 but each in their own right act as mnemonic
aids. Repetition which is part of the
rhythmic pattern, can be created within the “text” by use of assonance and
alliteration; synonym and synonymous parallelism; and recurrent phraseology
(formulae) and themes. The formulae
and themes are themselves rhythmic and patterned compounds of smaller, or
shorter, sonic devices. They are
groups of words — stereotype phrases — which convey an idea and which are
regularly employed under the same or similar circumstances;25 and themes are groups of ideas in which the focus is
on things and events rather than words.26
Because of their efficiency as
mnemonic devices, formulaic expressions occur with high frequency in oral
cultures, and to some degree fulfil the same function as writing in literate
societies. Ong points out:
In
an oral culture, to think through something in non-formulaic, non-patterned,
non-mnemonic terms, even if it were possible, would be a waste of time, for such
thought once worked through, could never be recovered, with any effectiveness,
as it could be with the aid of writing.27
The business of facilitating retention
and recall of “texts”28
through the creation and employment of such mnemonic devices, is the goal of
orality, and takes precedence over observance of the normal rules of
grammar. Consequently, in some forms
of oral tradition, and especially in poems and songs, modified phonoogical,
morphological and syntactical forms occur.
Lord calls this “the ‘grammar’ of the poetry, a grammar superimposed, as
it were, on the grammar of the language concerned”. But this “special grammar within the grammar of the language” is
not contrived by the composer, nor is it “memorized” any more than children memorize
a language. It occurs and is used
naturally and unconsciously through the constraints imposed by the necessity of
mnemonic forms.29
An additional mnemonic device not
specifically mentioned by Ong in his otherwise fairly comprehensive list
(above) is music, whether vocal or instrumental. He does acknowledge the control exercised by music over
variation of the text: “Music may act as a constraint to fix a verbatim oral
narrative”,30 but as far
as that goes, laws of scansion, rhyme, tone, morphology and syntax are inbuilt
textual controls. Music — the melody and rhythm of voice or
instrument — intensifies the
inherent rhythm and patterning of the text, and a few bars or even notes of
music may be all that is needed to aid recall of the text itself. “In all traditions that are sung,” wrote
Vansina, “mnemonic aid is found in the melody and rhythm of the song. Throughout Africa drum rhythms are used as
mnemonic aids”.31
Thus it is clear that in oral cultures, a
number or series of skills has been developed to intensify the human capacity
to memorize information and traditions in such a way that the whole cycle of
transmission, retention and retrieval is facilitated. These skills form an integrated system built upon the fact that
memory can be stimulated by various kinds of rhythm — whether the rhythm of acoustic patterning of speech, and melody,
or the rhythm of the repetitive or antithetic juxtaposition of ideas, or the
rhythm of formulaic and thematic structuring of the text. All these are somehow sensed
physiologically and are employed intuitively as part of the subconsciously
learned culture. In order to achieve
this rhythm, the normal rules of grammar yield to the operation of a different
law of syntax, which, in turn, enhances the mnemonic potential of the
whole.
Oral Tradition: A
Typology
Jan Vansina in Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology has attempted to
draw up a typology of oral traditions, and claimed that (at time of writing) no
one else had previously done so.32
By using the criteria of purpose,
significance, form, and manner of transmission he identified five categories
which he subdivided into various types as follows:
i. Formulae
Vansina’s definition of formulae is
identical to that given above (“stereotype phrases used in various special
circumstances”), but whereas other writers tend to apply this term to a device
within a narrative, poem or song, Vansina used the term to denote formulae
which can stand alone, such as a magic formula to drive away rain. Such formulae, he said, can only be
effective if used correctly, and this results in their transmission with a
“very great accuracy”. Threat of
sanctions controls the use and transmission of formulae, if only because of the
risk that faulty pronouncement might result in failure to achieve their
purpose.
He identified four types of formulae:
Titles, which describe the status or office of an individual; slogans, which
describe the character of a group; didactic formulae in the form of proverbs,
riddles, saying and epigrams; and ritual formulae which are used in magical or
religious rites. The texts of ritual
formulae are often executed and learnt with particular care because of the fear
either of “supernatural sanctions” or the risk of reduced efficacy when not
recited correctly.
ii. Poetry
Under this category, Vansina included
“all traditions in fixed form, the form and content of which are considered to
be of artistic merit in the society in which they are transmitted. While formulae also tend to be composed in
fixed form, they differ from poetry in that they have a purely instrumental or
utilitarian function in the performance of some ritual act whereas poetry must
fulfil aesthetic demands, both in form and content. Moreover, while some formulae tend to be used by specialists
alone and thus are esoteric, poetry by its artistic nature becomes a tradition
to be transmitted, and “ formal expression of the content plays as
great a role as the actual content itself”.
Vansina subdivided poetry into four
types: First, historical poetry, which may be used for propaganda purposes and
therefore its contents will have been edited; or, historic poetry of a popular
nature, which may become a folk-song.
Secondly, panegyric poetry in which stereotype phrases, metaphors,
synonyms and homophones33
are employed to extol the virtues of the person praised. Thirdly, religious poetry, often in the
stereotype forms of prayer, hymns and dogmatic texts. As such, religious poetry is similar to ritual formulae and may
be limited to esoteric use by a specialist class, but on the other hand is also
more likely to be transmitted accurately.
Fourthly, personal poetry, which expresses an individual’s attitude to,
and experience of, life. By nature it
is open to wide variation and distortion.
iii. Lists
Lists, place names and genealogies are
generally transmitted with care because of their political or social
significance. However, Vansina also
observed that “genealogies are sources in which distortions are very prone to
occur, because they form the ideological framework with reference to which all
political and social relationships are sustained and explained”.34
iv. Tales
In this category, Vansina placed all text
which is in free or narrative form, with the sub-categories of historical,
didactic, artistic and personal function.
In addition, he classified these according to type: History may be
general, local or family history. Of
didactic narratives, he said:
[They]
attempt to explain the world, the culture and the society. When such explanations are given in terms
of religious causes, the tale in question is a myth. Myths are often recited during a rite which recalls the myth
itself. Most myths concern events
which are not thought of as having happened in the past, but in a time which is
sacred and which exists beyond or side by side with profane time.35
Vansina listed aetiological myths as a
separate type, with four sub-types (local legends, tales about natural
phenomena, popular etymologies and tales about cultural traits), and
distinguished these from the former because they do not incorporate religious
factors. Tales of artistic merit and
those which are composed simply to please and entertain the listeners, and
personal tales recount personal experiences within the family or
neighbourhood.
v. Commentaries
In this category, Vansina included
recitations of legal precedents, explanatory commentaries associated with
recitations of histories, and occasional comments which reiterate facts in
response to casual enquiries.
Vansina’s categorization is a useful one
to which I will return when I come to describe Yali orality, and in particular,
the various types of oral tradition still remembered or employed by Yali
today.
Orality: Limitations
and Potentialities
Despite the obvious skills employed in an
oral culture to transmit, store and retrieve tradition and other oral texts,
from a literary perspective, orality has inherent limitations. The question might be asked, particularly by
those concerned to communicate the Christian message in the context of an oral
culture: How serious are the limitations of orality to the communication of
what has largely become a literary tradition?
The illiteracy or non-literacy of an oral culture is an obvious obstacle
to the communication of a message, which through centuries of conditioning, has
come to be viewed as capable of effective and permanent communication only in
literary form. This sort of viewpoint
is reflected by Frank C. Laubach in Thirty
Years with the Silent Billion:
Teaching
illiterates is a means of extending the gospel, moreover, because every
Christian needs to read his Bible.
Wherever a church contains many illiterates, it feels weak and unhappy
until it has taught them to read. It
finds that illiterates just emerging from non-Christian habits need constant
personal attention to keep them from sinking back into the old life. They could gain new power to overcome if
they could read the gospels, and hymns, and Sunday School journals, and
prayerbooks.36
Support for such a viewpoint may be
adduced from the knowledge that oral cultures have no verbatim memory and no
mnemonic device which functions as a permanent record, in the way that writing
or print do. Moreover, in oral
transmission, according to Vansina, original form is lost and content becomes
“fluctuating and blurred”.37 Since it is not possible in an oral culture to record the words of
a text verbatim, then it is assumed that literacy must first (or, early) be taught. But this assumption is based on the premise
that the authentic meaning of an original message can only be accurately
preserved when the words per se are
recorded.
In a literary culture, because of our
“chirographic-typographic squint”38 we tend to think of words
as a record, and that if we have captured the exact words in writing, we have
also recorded the meaning of a message or utterance. As already observed, this is a fallacy, and verbatim records themselves
have a different and limited function.
Therefore, it can be noted that orality and literacy have different
functions and therefore different values.
One recent writer brings out this antithesis:
It
is generally acknowledged that written and oral communication involve very
different kinds of strategies: what works orally does not work in print, and
vice versa. We know the reasons for
this discrepancy, at least in part: oral communication works through the
assumption of immediacy, or spontaneity; writing on the other hand, is planned,
organized and non-spontaneous.
Overlaid
on this distinction is a problem of judgement. For the past three thousand years, more or less, literacy has
been in competition with non-literacy (or rather, perhaps, orality) for minds
and souls: many commentators are not so much interested in the different
values, the different advantages, of each medium, as in perceiving the two as
locked in deadly combat.39
The Christian communicator with his
literary mind-set, therefore, needs to be aware of his prejudiced perception of
orality. Instead of viewing written
forms of communication as basic, or more valid than oral, he must appreciate
the potentiality of orality as an alternative means of communication, of
different, not lesser, quality.
There is, however, another dimension of
limitation in orality which needs to be considered. It has to do with cognitive and noetic processes possible within
an oral culture on the one hand, and the increasing exposure of oral cultures
to literary culture on the other. Ong,
one of the leading proponents of orality, writes:
Oral
cultures indeed produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high
artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has
taken possession of the psyche. Nevertheless,
without writing, human consciousness
cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and
powerful creations. In this sense, orality needs to produce and is destined to
produce writing. Literacy… is
absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of
history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art,
and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself. There is hardly an oral culture or a
predominantly oral culture left in the world today that is not somehow aware of
the vast complex of powers forever inaccessible without literacy.40
On the basis that writing is a derivative
of speech, Ong brings out the almost inevitable tendency of orality towards literacy. Nevertheless, this has not occurred in many
cultures in the course of history. Ong
says, “that of the many thousands of languages — possibly tens of thousands —
spoken in the course of human history”, a relative few has been “ committed
to writing to a degree sufficient to produce literature”.41 Before writing can be created, there must be
a need for it, or at least the motivation to pursue fresh dimensions of thought
that are not possible without writing.
That need or motivation seems to be linked in some measure to
association with other cultures, and with literate cultures in particular. This is implicit in Ong’s statement that
literacy is necessary for certain kinds of development, for existing oral
cultures have functioned in a self-sufficient manner, unaware of the existence,
let alone the need for such, until coming into contact with literary cultures
through colonial expansion, missionary outreach etc. Moreover, the assumption that oral societies are incapable of
logical, linear cognitive processes, and that literacy is necessary to enable
complex and scientific thought, is questionable. Lakoff says that there is no empirical evidence for that
opinion.42
The limitation of orality, in the realm
of cognitive development, therefore, is, if not questionable, at least relative
to the proximity to, or degree of contact with, literary cultures.
If literate peoples overvalue literary
skills, it is also true that they tend to undervalue, or even fail to
appreciate the value of orality. When
Christian communicators do this by heavy dependence on literacy, they do
themselves, the receptor culture, and the Christian message a disservice. Oral cultures have effective means of
communication which can be employed, and in some cases may need to be employed,
apart from literacy. Oral societies
are usually face-to-face societies where the immediacy and warmth of speech,
and the social and participatory characteristics of oral communications are both
understood and esteemed. Oral media of
communication, moreover, are receptor oriented. They involve interaction between speaker and audience, and part
of their function is their capability of transmitting for retention. Even the perception of what words are in an
oral culture is significant. According
to Ong, members of such cultures “consider words to have great power. Sound cannot be sounding without the use of
power”, and, therefore, oral utterance is itself “dynamic”.43 Moreover,
speech is perceived to emanate from the very heart and being of a person,
expressed by the vital breath of life itself..
In short, orality is a culturally appropriate and effective method of
communication within an oral culture.
Herbert V. Klem in the introduction to Oral Communication of Scripture writes:
Approaching
oral communicators with indigenous media reduces resistance to literacy and
Christianity in several ways. The use
of indigenous media allows the people to approach the material with existing
skills. An indigenous definition of
learning allows those who expect to memorize what they learn to feel
fulfilled. This allows them to become
teachers of the material relatively early in their experience with the new
material. It allows for continuation
of indigenous patterns of leadership and existing patterns of leadership are
not disrupted by a demand for new communicative skill among Christian leaders.44
From this, it is evident that the
ramifications of the potentialities of orality go far beyond the business of
transmission of the Christian message per
se into areas of contextualization and indigenization of Christianity
within the culture. Christian
missionaries and evangelists need to give serious consideration to orality for
more reasons than merely as a means of communication.
Endnotes for chapter 2:
1. Ong (1967:22).
2. Ong (1982:9).
3. Foley (1986:3).
4. Ong (1982:11).
5. Ibid p.12.
6. Chafe in Tannen p.49.
7. Wellek and Warren (1949:11).
8. See e.g. Lakoff in Tannen p.259.
9. See e.g. Goody in Tannen p.201; cf Lakoff in Tannen p.239-240.
10. Hiebert (1985:32). In section 4, I will return specifically to this issue vis-a-vis the communication and function of Scripture in an oral culture.
11. Ibid p.135-136.
12. On paralanguage see Hiebert (1985:145ff), and cf. C. Kraft (1979:147ff).
13. See Lord (1960L25); Ong (1982:42 and 45); and Meyer in NOTES ON LITERACY No.51 (1986) pp.2-4.
14. Ong (1982:9).
15. E.g. Lord (1960:5); Ong (1967:31-32).
16. Lord in Foley pp.19-20.
17. Ong (1967:32).
18. See Ong (1982:57-63).
19. Vansina (1973:40).
20. Ong (1967:23).
21. Ong (1982:34).
22. Hiebert (1985:143).
23. Ong (1967:30). The term “ verbomotor” was coined by Marcel Jousse to describe “cultures in which, by contrast with high-technology cultures, courses of action and attitudes towards issues depend significantly more on effective use of words, and thus on human interaction and significantly less on non-verbal, often largely visual input from the ‘objective’ world of things.” See Ong (1982:68); cf Ong (1967:148).
24. Ong (1982:34).
25. Cf Lord (1960:4 and 30); and Vansina pp. 143-144.
26. Lord (1960:4 and 69); Ong (1967:57) where he cites Frances Yates, The Art of Memory.
27. Ong (1982:35).
28. While “text” like “literature” by usage has literary connotations, I follow Ong who writes: “‘Text’, from a root meaning ‘to weave’, is, in absolute terms, more compatible etymologically with oral utterance than is ‘literature’, which refers to letters etymologically.” Ong (1982:13).
29. Lord (1960:35-65), cf Vansina p.54.
30. Ong (1982:63).
31. Vansina p.39.
32. Ibid p.142.
33. Cf Vansina pp.69-72.
34. Ibid p.53.
35. Ibid p.157.
36. Laubach (1961:16).
37. Vansina p.5.
38. Ong (1967:22).
39. Lakoff in Tannen (1982:239).
40. Ong (1982:14-15).
41. Ong (1982:7).
42. Lakoff in Tannen p.258.
43. Ong (1982:32).
44 Klem (1982:xxiii).