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( Oral tradition)
Oral tradition, oral culture and oral lore is a way for a society to transmit history, literature, law and other knowledges across generations without a writing system; one set of criteria specifies material held in common by a group of people, over several generations, and thus distinct from testimony or oral history.[1] In a general sense, "oral tradition" refers to the transmission of cultural material through vocal utterance, and was long held to be a key descriptor of folklore (a criterion no longer rigidly held by all folklorists).[2] As an academic discipline, it refers both to a set of objects of study and a method by which they are studied[3] -- the method may be called variously "oral traditional theory," "the theory of Oral-Formulaic Composition" and the "Parry-Lord theory" (after two of its founders; see below) The study of oral tradition is distinct from the academic discipline of oral history,[4] which is the recording of personal memories and histories of those who experienced historical eras or events.[5] It is also distinct from the study of orality, which can be defined as thought and its verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy (especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population.[6] Oral tradition as a field of study had its origins[7] in the work of the Serb scholar Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic (1787-1864), a contemporary and friend of the Brothers Grimm. Vuk pursued similar projects of "salvage folklore" (similar to rescue archaeology) 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 (he considered all those speaking Serbo-Croat as Serbs). Somewhat later, but as part of the same scholarly enterprise of nationalist studies in folklore,[8] the turcologist Vasily Radlov (1837-1918) would study the songs of the Kara-Kirghiz in what would later become the Soviet Union; Karadzic and Radloff would provide models for the work of Parry. 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?" [9]The Homeric question actually consists of a series of related inquiries, and Parry's contribution, which drew upon and synthesized the insights of previous scholars including Marcel Jousse, Matija Murko and Arnold van Gennep, was to reconsider the foundational assumptions which framed the inquiries, a re-ordering that would have consequences for a great many literatures and disciplines.[10] Parry's work under Antoine Meillet at the Sorbonne led to his crucial insight into the "formula," which he originally defined as "a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea."[11] In Homeric verse, for example, phrases like eos rhododaktylos ("rosy fingered dawn") or oinops pontos ("winedark sea") occupy a certain metrical pattern that fits, in modular fashion, into the six-colon Greek hexameter, and aids the aioidos or bard in extempore composition. Moreover, phrases of this type would be subject to internal substitutions and adaptations, permitting flexibility in response to narrative and grammatical needs podas okus axilleus ("swift footed Achilles") is metrically equivalent to koruthaiolos ektor ("glancing-helmed Hektor"). Parry and Lord observed that the same phenomenon was apparent in the Old English alliterative line
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