Oral tradition or oral culture is a way of transmitting history, literature or law from one generation to the next in a civilization without a writing system. An example that combined aspects of oral literature and oral history, before eventually being set down in writing, is the Homeric epic poetry of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In a general sense, "oral tradition" refers to the transmission of cultural material by means other than written records, and was long held to be a key descriptor of folklore (a criterion no longer rigidly held by all folklorists). As an academic discipline, it refers both to a method and the objects studied by the method.

History of the study of oral tradition

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Oral tradition as a field of study had its origins in the work of the Serb scholar Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic (1787-1864), a contemporary of the Brothers Grimm. Vuk pursued similar projects of "salvage folklore" in the cognate traditions of the southern Slavic regions which would later be gathered into Yugoslavia, and with the same admixture of romantic and nationalistic interests. Somewhat later, but as part of the same scholarly moment, the turcologist Vasily Radlov (1837-1918) would study the songs of the Kara Khirgiz in what would later become the Soviet Union.

Milman Parry and Albert Lord

Shortly thereafter, Milman Parry (1902-1935), pursuing a degree in Classics at Harvard, would begin to grapple with what was then called the "Homeric Question," usually framed as "who was Homer?" and "what are the Homeric poems?" The Homeric question actually consists of a series of related inquiries, and Parry's contribution was to reconsider the foundational assumptions which framed the inquiries, a re-ordering that would have consequences for a great many literatures and disciplines.

Parry's further work under Antoine Meillet at the Sorbonne would result in his crucial insight into the "formula," which he originally defined as a certain fixed expression, used to convey an essential idea under the same metrical conditions. Furthermore, the formulas would be not the individual and idiosyncratic devices of a particular artist, but the shared inheritance of a tradition of singers, and useful not so much for enabling a verbatim repetition of what would amount to a fixed (but unwritten) text, as to make possible an improvisational composition-in-performance. The idea met with immediate resistance, because it seemed to make the fount of Western literary eloquence the slave of a system of clichés, but it accounted for such otherwise inexplicable features of the Homeric poems as gross anachronisms (revealed by advances in historical and archaeological knowledge), the presence of incompatible dialects, and the deployment of locally unsuitable epithets ("blameless Aegisthos" for the murderer of Agamemnon, or the almost comic use of "swift-footed Achilles" for the hero in conspicuously sedentary moments).

Parry was appointed to a junior professorship at Harvard, and during this time became aware of living oral traditions in the Balkan region. In two field expeditions with his young assistant Albert Bates Lord (1912-1991) he would record thousands of songs on aluminum disks. The collection would provide the basis for an empirical documentation of the dynamics of composition of metrical narrative in performance, including the patterns and types of variation at lexical and other levels which would yield a structural account of multiformity – a phenomenon which could only be accounted for in standard literary methodology (document-based, genetic stemmatology) by concepts of “corruption” and “distortion” of a pristine, original “ur-text” or hypothetical “lost Q" ("Quelle", German for "source") – a development that would reduce the prominence of the historic-geographic method in folkloristics. Unscholarly or unsympathetic accounts of oral tradition as a discipline often render this moment, quite inaccurately, as reducing the great epics to the children’s party games of “telephone” or “Chinese whispers;” in fact, these games provide amusement by showing how messages are distorted through uncontextualized transmission, while Parry’s theory showed how the tradition provided a rich, reinforcing context which optimized the noise-to-signal ratio and thus improved the quality of transmission.

Tragically, Parry was killed in a pistol-accident. His work was posthumously published by his son Adam Parry as The Making of Homeric Verse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). Lord, however, had meanwhile published The Singer of Tales (1960), and even before that, had exercised great influence on other scholars, notably Francis P. Magoun, whose application of Parry-Lord models to Anglo-Saxon traditions demonstrated the explicative and problem-solving power of the theory – a process that would be repeated by other scholars in numerous independent traditions.

Walter Ong

In a separate development, the prominent and provocative media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) would begin to focus attention on the ways in which communicative media shape the nature of the content conveyed. He would serve as mentor to the brilliant young Jesuit, Walter Ong (1912-2003), whose interests in cultural history, psychology and rhetoric would result in Orality and Literacy (Methuen, 1980) and the less-known Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness (Cornell, 1981). These two works successfully and accessibly articulated the contrasts between oral and literate cultures, and made possible an integrated theory of oral tradition which accounted for both production (the chief concern of Parry-Lord theory) and reception. The most-often studied section of Orality and Literacy concerns the “psychodynamics of orality” – a series of descriptors which, on the whole, might be used to index the relative orality or literacy of a given text or society.

The theory would undergo elaboration and development as it grew in acceptance. For example, the number of formulas documented for various traditions proliferated, and while the concept of the formula remained lexically-bound, innovations appeared, such as the “formulaic system” with structural “substitution slots” for syntactic, morphological and narrative necessity (as well as for artistic invention). Sophisticated models such as Foley’s “word-type placement rules” followed. Higher levels of formulaic composition were defined over the years, such as “ring composition,” “responsion” and the “type-scene” (also called a "theme" or "typical scene"): a basic pattern of narrative details, some of which (“the arming sequence;” “the hero on the beach;” “the traveler recognizes his goal”) would show evidence of trans-traditional distribution. Most importantly, the fairly rigid division between oral and literate was replaced by recognition of transitional and compartmentalized texts and societies, including models of diglossia (Brian Stock, Franz Bäuml, Eric Havelock). Perhaps most importantly, the terms and concepts of “orality” and “literacy” came to be replaced with he more useful and apt “traditionality” and “textuality.” Very large units would be defined (The Indo-European Return Song) and areas outside of military epic would come under investigation: women’s song, riddles and other genres.

John Miles Foley

In advance of Ong’s synthesis, John Miles Foley, studying with Robert Creed (who had in turn studied with Magoun) began a series of papers based on his own fieldwork in Yugoslavia, emphasizing the dynamics of performers and audiences. His massive bibliographical enterprise would establish both a clear underlying methodology which accounted for the findings of scholars working in the separate linguistic fields (primarily Ancient Greek, Anglo-Saxon and Serbo-Croatian) and more importantly, would stimulate conversation among these specialties, so that a network of independent but allied investigations and investigators could be established. Foley effectively consolidated oral tradition as an academic field with the issue of the first bibliography (1985) and the establishment of both the journal Oral Tradition and the founding of the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition (1986) at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Foley’s key works include The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology (1988); Immanent Art (1991); Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf and the Serbo-Croatian Return-Song (1993); The Singer of Tales in Performance (1995); Teaching Oral Traditions (1998); How to Read an Oral Poem (2002).

The methodology of oral tradition now conditions an enormous variety of studies in literature, communication and folklore, including virtually every language and ethnic group, and conspicuously in biblical studies (Werner Kelber). Present developments explore the implications of the theory for rhetoric and composition, intergroup communication, for postcolonial studies, popular culture and film studies, and many other areas. The most significant areas of theoretical development at present may be the construction of systematic hermeneutics and aesthetics specific to oral traditions.

See also

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• Folklore
• Intangible culture
• Oral law
• Oral history
• Oral Torah
• Secondary orality
• Traditional knowledge
• Patha, Shrauta

External links

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• The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition
• The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature Online

Humanities

Tradición oral | Tradition orale | Munnleg overlevering | Muntlig tradition