Orality can be defined as
thoughtThought and thinking are mental forms and processes, respectively . Thinking allows beings to model the world and to deal with it according to their objectives, plans, ends and desires. Words referring to similar concepts and processes include cognition, sentience, consciousness, idea, and...
and its verbal expression in societies where the technologies of
literacyLiteracy is a concept claimed and defined by a range of different theoretical fields. In everyday terms, "literacy" is typically described as the ability to read and write...
(especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population. The study of orality is closely allied to the study of
oral traditionOral tradition, oral culture and oral lore are messages or testimony transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...
. However, it has broader implications, implicitly touching every aspect of the
economicsEconomics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
,
politicsPolitics is a process by which groups of people make decisions. The term is generally applied to behavior within civil governments, but politics has been observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic and religious institutions...
, institutional development, and human development of oral societies. The study of orality has important implications for
international developmentInternational development or global development is a concept that lacks a universally accepted definition, but it is most used in a holistic and multi-disciplinary context of human development – the development of greater quality of life for humans,...
, especially as it relates to the goal of eradicating
povertyPoverty is the condition of lacking basic human needs such as nutrition, clean water, health care, clothing, and shelter because of the inability to afford them. This is also referred to as absolute poverty or destitution...
, as well as to the process of
globalizationGlobalization describes an ongoing process by which regional economies, societies, and cultures have become integrated through a globe-spanning network of communication and exchange....
.
Walter J. OngFather Walter Jackson Ong, Ph.D. , was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian and philosopher.-Biography:...
, a key scholar in this field, distinguishes between two forms of orality: ‘primary orality’ and ‘residual orality’.
Impact of literacy on culture
Ong draws on pioneering work by
Milman ParryMilman Parry was a scholar of epic poetry and the founder of the discipline of oral tradition.He studied at the University of California, Berkeley and at the Sorbonne . A student of the linguist Antoine Meillet at the Sorbonne, Parry revolutionized Homeric studies...
and
Marshall McLuhanHerbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar — a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist. McLuhan's work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory.McLuhan is known for the...
, among the first to fully appreciate the significance of the
wordA word is the smallest free form in a language, in contrast to a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning. A word may consist of only one morpheme , but a single morpheme may not be able to exist as a free form A word is the smallest free form (an item that may be uttered in isolation with...
as a
technologyTechnology is a broad concept that deals with human as well as other animal species' usage and knowledge of tools and crafts, and how it affects a species' ability to control and adapt to its environment...
. McLuhan, in his work
The Gutenberg Galaxy shows how each stage in the development of this technology throughout the
history of communicationThe history of communication dates back to the earliest signs of life. Communication can range from very subtle processes of exchange, to full conversations and mass communication. Human communication was revolutionized with speech about 200,000 years ago. Symbols were developed about 30,000 years...
– from the invention of speech (primary orality), to pictograms, to the
phonetic alphabetPhonetic alphabet can mean:* phonetic transcription system: a system for transcribing the precise sounds of human speech into writing.** International Phonetic Alphabet : the most widespread such system...
, to
typographyTypography is the art and technique of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs. Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques...
, to the electronic communications of today – restructures human consciousness, profoundly changing not only the frontiers of human possibility, but even the frontiers it is possible for humans to imagine.
Primary orality
‘Primary orality’ refers to thought and its verbal expression within cultures “totally untouched by any knowledge of
writingWriting is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and the recording of language via a non-textual medium such as magnetic tape audio.In Eurasia writing began as a...
or
printPrinting is a process for reproducing text and image, typically with ink on paper using a printing press. It is often carried out as a large-scale industrial process, and is an essential part of publishing and transaction printing.-History:...
.”
All
soundSound is a travelling wave which is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations.- Perception of sound...
is inherently powerful. If a hunter kills a lion he can see it, touch it, feel it and smell it. But if he hears a lion he must act, fast. Speech is a form of sound that shares this common power. Like other sounds, it comes from within a living organism. A text can be ignored; it is just writing on paper. But to ignore speech can be unwise; our basic instincts compel us to pay attention.
Writing is powerful in a different way: it permits people to generate ideas, store them, and retrieve them as needed across time in a highly efficient and accurate way. The absence of this technology in oral societies limits the development of complex ideas and the
institutionInstitutions are structures and mechanisms of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of individuals within a given human collectivity. Institutions are identified with a social purpose and permanence, transcending individual human lives and intentions, and with the making and...
s that depend on them. Instead, sustained thought in oral settings depends on interpersonal communication, and storing complex ideas over a long period of time requires packaging them in highly memorable ways, generally by using
mnemonicA mnemonic device is a mind memory and/or learning aid. Commonly, mnemonics are verbal—such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember something—but may be visual, kinesthetic or auditory. Mnemonics rely on associations between easy-to-remember constructs which can be...
tools.
In his studies of the
Homeric QuestionThe Homeric Question concerns the doubts and consequent debate over the identity of Homer, the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey, and their historicity...
,
Milman ParryMilman Parry was a scholar of epic poetry and the founder of the discipline of oral tradition.He studied at the University of California, Berkeley and at the Sorbonne . A student of the linguist Antoine Meillet at the Sorbonne, Parry revolutionized Homeric studies...
was able to show that the poetic
metreThe metre or meter is the basic unit of length in the International System of Units . Historically, the metre was defined by the French Academy of Sciences as the length between two marks on a platinum-iridium bar, which was designed to represent one ten-millionth of the distance from the Equator...
found in the
IliadThe Iliad is an epic poem recounting significant events during a portion of the final year of the Trojan War — the Greek siege of the city of Ilion — hence the title...
and the
OdysseyThe Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work traditionally ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon. Indeed it is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of...
had been ‘packaged’ by oral
GreekGreece , officially the Hellenic Republic , is a country in southeastern Europe, situated on the southern end of the Balkan Peninsula....
society to meet its information management needs. These insights first opened the door to a wider appreciation of the sophistication of
oral traditionOral tradition, oral culture and oral lore are messages or testimony transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...
s, and their various methods of managing information. Later, ancient and medieval mnemonic tools were extensively documented by
Frances YatesDame Frances Amelia Yates DBE was a noted British historian. She taught at the Warburg Institute of the University of London for many years....
in her book
The Art of MemoryThe Art of Memory is a 1966 non-fiction book by British historian Frances A. Yates. The book follows the history of mnemonic systems from the classical period of Simonides of Ceos in Ancient Greece to the Renaissance era of Giordano Bruno, ending with Gottfried Leibniz and the early emergence of...
.
Residual orality
‘Residual orality’ refers to thought and its verbal expression in cultures that have been exposed to writing and print, but have not fully ‘interiorized’ (in McLuhan’s term) the use of these technologies in their daily lives. As a culture interiorizes the technologies of literacy, the ‘oral residue’ diminishes.
But the availability of a technology of literacy to a society is not enough to ensure its widespread diffusion and use. For example Eric Havelock observed in
A Preface to Plato that after the ancient Greeks invented writing they adopted a
scribalA scribe is a person who writes books or documents by hand as a profession. The profession, previously found in all literate cultures in some form, lost most of its importance and status with the advent of printing...
culture that lasted for generations. Few people, other than the scribes, considered it necessary to learn to read or write. In other societies, such as
ancient EgyptAncient Egypt was an ancient civilization of eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. The civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh, and...
or medieval Europe, literacy has been a domain confined to political and religious elites.
Many cultures have experienced an equilibrium state in which writing and mass illiteracy have co-existed for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Oral residue rarely disappears quickly and never vanishes completely. Speech is inherently an oral event, based on human relationships, unlike texts. Oral societies can mount strong resistance to literate technologies, as vividly shown in the arguments of
Socrates Socrates was a Classical Greek philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known only through the classical accounts of his students...
against writing in
PlatoPlato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world...
’s Phaedrus. Writing, Socrates argues, is inhuman. It attempts to turn living thoughts dwelling in the human mind into mere objects in the physical world. By causing people to rely on what is written rather than what they are able to think, it weakens the powers of the mind and of memory. True knowledge can only emerge from a relationship between active human minds. And unlike a person, a text can’t respond to a question; it will just keep saying the same thing over and over again, no matter how often it is refuted.
The Canadian communications scholar,
Harold InnisHarold Adams Innis was a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on media, communication theory and Canadian economic history. The affiliated Innis College at the University of Toronto is named for him...
argued that a balance between the spoken word and writing contributed to the cultural and intellectual vitality of ancient Greece in Plato's time. Plato conveyed his ideas by writing down the conversations of Socrates thus "preserving the power of the spoken word on the written page."
AristotleAristotle was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology.Together with Plato and Socrates , Aristotle is one of...
, Innis wrote, regarded Plato's style as "halfway between poetry and prose." Plato was able to arrive at new philosophical positions "through the use of dialogues, allegories and illustrations."
Furthermore, as McLuhan emphasizes, modernization attentuates some oral capabilities. For example, in medieval Europe silent reading was virtually unknown. This tilted the readers' attention towards the poetic and other auditory aspects of the text. Educated modern adults may also occasionally long for something like "the capacious medieval memory, which, untrammelled by the associations of print, could learn a strange language with ease and by the methods of a child, and could retain in memory and reproduce lengthy epic and elaborate lyric poems."
Both McLuhan and Ong also document the re-emergence, in the electronic age, of a kind of ‘
secondary oralityWalter J. Ong presented the dichotomy between oral and literate cultures in his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, published in 1982. In this book, he coined the phrase ‘secondary orality’, describing it as “essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based...
’ that displaces written words with audio/visual technologies like
radioRadio is the transmission of signals by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
, TV and telephones. Unlike primary oral modes of communication, these technologies depend on print for their existence. Mass internet collaborations like Wikipedia rely primarily on writing, but re-introduce relationships and responsiveness into the text.
Importance of the concept
It has been a habit of literate cultures to view oral cultures simply in terms of their lack of the technologies of writing. This habit, argues Ong, is dangerously misled. Oral cultures are living cultures in their own right. A 1971 study found that of 3,000 extant languages, only 78 had a written
literatureLiterature is the art of written works. Literally translated, the word means "acquaintance with letters" , and therefore the academic study of literature is known as Letters...
. While literacy extends human possibilities in both thought and action, all literate technologies ultimately depend on the ability of humans to learn oral languages.
Understanding between nations may depend to some degree on understanding oral culture. Ong argues that “many of the contrasts often made between ‘western’ and other views seem reducible to contrasts between deeply interiorized literacy and more or less residually oral states of consciousness.”
Illiteracy is both an important cause, and an important effect, of chronic global
povertyPoverty is the condition of lacking basic human needs such as nutrition, clean water, health care, clothing, and shelter because of the inability to afford them. This is also referred to as absolute poverty or destitution...
. Improvements in livelihoods and access to services in rural communities depends on their ability to manage local organizations, or hold external ones accountable. The processes of development can also be undermined by educated agents of development whose ‘deeply interiorized literacy’ informs their decisions. In recent years this has begun to change, with methods of engagement with oral communities that have emphasized
participationParticipation, in addition to its dictionary definition, has specific meanings in certain areas.*Participation , the process of involving young people in projects, policy reviews or ideas to encourage decision-making and empowerment, ownership of opinion and influence in youth services and issues...
, voice, and other development methods like
participatory rural appraisalParticipatory rural appraisal is an approach used by non-governmental organizations and other agencies involved in international development...
,
participatory action researchAction research or participatory action research has emerged in recent years as a significant methodology for intervention, development and change within communities and groups...
and
Farmer Field SchoolThe Farmer Field School is a group-based learning process that has been used by a number of governments, NGOs and international agencies to promote Integrated Pest Management...
s.
Theory of the characteristics of oral culture
Drawing on hundreds of studies from
anthropologyAnthropology is the study of human beings, everywhere and throughout time....
,
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
and the study of
oral traditionOral tradition, oral culture and oral lore are messages or testimony transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...
, Ong summarizes ten key aspects of the ‘
psychodynamicsPsychodynamics is the systematized study and theory of the psychological forces that underlie human behavior, emphasizing the interplay between unconscious and conscious motivation.The original concept of "psychodynamics" was developed by Sigmund Freud...
of orality’. While these are subject to continuing debate, his list remains an important milestone. Ong draws his examples from both primary oral societies, and societies with a very high ‘oral residue’.
1. Formulaic Styling
To retain complex ideas requires that they be packaged memorably for easy recall.
| 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 thoughts must come into being in heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or antithesis, in alliterations or assonances, in epithetic and other formulary expressions… Serious thought is intertwined with memory systems. |
Jousse identifies a close linkage between
rhythmRhythm is the variation of the length and accentuation of a series of sounds or other events.-Rhythm in linguistics:...
and breathing patterns, gestures and the bilateral symmetry of the human body in several ancient verse traditions. This synergy between the body and the construction of oral thought further fuels memory.
2. Additive rather than subordinative
Oral cultures avoid complex ‘subordinative’ clauses. Ong cites an example from the Douay-Rheims version of Genesis (1609-10), noting that this basic additive pattern (in
italics) has been identified in many oral contexts around the world:
| In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was on the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters. And God said … |
Demonstrating how oral modes of communication tend to evolve into literate ones, Ong additionally cites the
New American BibleThe New American Bible is a Catholic Bible translation first published in .It was specifically translated into English by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine under the liturgical principles and reforms of the Second Vatican Council ....
(1970), which offers a translation that is grammatically far more complex:
| In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters. Then God said … |
3. Aggregative rather than analytic
Oral expression brings words together in pithy phrases that are the product of generations of evolution: the ‘sturdy oak tree’, the ‘beautiful princess’ or ‘clever Odysseus’. This does not apply specifically to
poetryPoetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
or
songA song is a metrical composition intended or adapted for singing, especially one in rhymed stanzas; a lyric; a ballad....
; rather the words are brought together out of habit during general communication. ‘Analyzing’ or breaking apart such expressions adds complexity to communications, and questions received wisdom.
Ong cites an American example, noting that in some parts of the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
with heavy oral residue, it is still considered normal or even obligatory to use the adjective ‘glorious’ when referring to the ‘
fourth of JulyIn the United States, Independence Day, commonly known as the Fourth of July, is a federal holiday commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, declaring independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain...
’.
4. Redundant or ‘copious’
Speech that repeats earlier thoughts or thought-pictures, or shines a different light on them somehow, helps to keep both the speaker and the listener focused on the topic, and makes it easier for all to recall the key points later. "Oral cultures encourage fluency, fulsomeness, volubility. Rhetoricians were to call this
copiaCopia: Foundations of the Abundant Style is a rhetorical guide written by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus in 1512. It is Erasmus' systematic instruction on how to embellish, amplify, and give variety to speech and writing....
".
5. Conservative or traditionalist
Because oral societies have no effective access to writing and print technologies, they must invest considerable energy in basic
information managementInformation management is the collection and management of information from one or more sources and the distribution of that information to one or more audiences. This sometimes involves those who have a stake in, or a right to that information...
. Storage of information, being primarily dependent on individual or collective recall, must be handled with particular thrift. It is possible to approximately measure oral residue “from the amount of memorization the culture’s educational procedures require.”
This creates incentives to avoid exploring new ideas and particularly to avoid the burden of having to store them. It does not prevent oral societies from demonstrating dynamism and change, but there is a premium on ensuring that changes cleave to traditional formulas, and “are presented as fitting the traditions of the ancestors.”
6. Close to the human lifeworld
Oral cultures take a practical approach to information storage. To qualify for storage, information must usually concern matters of immediate practical concern or familiarity to most members of the society.
Long after the invention of writing, and often long after the invention of print, basic information on how to perform a society’s most important trades was left unwritten, passed from one generation to the next as it always had been: through
apprenticeshipApprenticeship is a system of training a new generation of practitioners of a skill. Apprentices or protégés build their careers from apprenticeships...
, observation and practice.
By contrast, only literary cultures have launched phenomenological analyses, abstract classifications, ordered lists and tables, etc.. Nothing analogous exists in oral societies.
7. Agonistically toned
‘Agonistic’ means ‘combative’, but Ong actually advances a deeper thesis with this point. Writing and to an even greater extent print, he argues, disengage humans from direct, interpersonal struggle.
Products of “the highly polarized, agonistic, oral world of good and evil, virtue and vice, villains and heroes” the great works of
oral literatureOral literature corresponds in the sphere of the spoken word to literature as literature operates in the domain of the written word. It thus forms a generally more fundamental component of culture, but operates in many ways as one might expect literature to do...
from
HomerHomer is a legendary ancient Greek epic poet, traditionally said to be the author of the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey...
to
BeowulfBeowulf is an Old English heroic epic poem of unknown authorship, dating as recorded in the Nowell Codex manuscript from between the 8th and the early 11th century, set in Denmark and Sweden...
, from the
Mwindo epicThe Mwindo Epic is an oral tale from the Democratic Republic of the Congo told by the Nyanga people. The origins and creation of the Mwindo epic are mostly unknown since the story is only passed down through Oral tradition...
to the
Old TestamentIn Christianity, the Old Testament is the collection of books that form the first of the two-part Christian Biblical canon. These works correspond to the Hebrew Bible , with some variations and additions. In the Eastern Orthodox Church the comparable texts are known as the Septuagint, from the...
, are extremely violent by modern standards. They are also punctuated by frequent and intense intellectual combat and tongue-lashings on the one hand, and effusive praise (perhaps reaching its height among African praise singers) on the other.
8. Empathetic and participatory
In an oral culture the most reliable and trusted technique for learning is to share a “close, empathetic, communal association” with others who know.
Ong cites a study of community decision-making from 12th Century
EnglandEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. Writing already had a long history in England, and it would have been possible to use texts to establish for example, the age of majority of the heir to an estate. But people were skeptical about texts, noting not only the cost of generating and managing them, but the problems involved in preventing tampering or frauds.
As a result, they retained the traditional solution: gathering together “mature wise seniors of many years, having good testimony”, and publicly discussing the age of the heir with them, until agreement was reached. This hallmark principle of orality, that truth emerges best from communal process, resonates today in the
juryA jury is a sworn body of people convened to render an impartial verdict officially submitted to them by a court, or to set a penalty or judgment...
system.
9. Homeostatic
Oral societies conserve their limited capacity to store information, and retain the relevance of their information to the interest of their present members, by shedding memories that have lost their past significance.
While many examples exist, the classic example was reported by
GoodySir John Rankine Goody is a British social anthropologist. He has been a prominent teacher at Cambridge University, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1976, and he is an associate of the US National Academy of Sciences...
and Watt (1968). Written records prepared by the British in
GhanaThe Republic of Ghana is a country in West Africa which borders Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south...
in the early 1900s show that Ndewura Jakpa, the seventeenth century founder of the state of
GonjaGonja is a kingdom in northern Ghana; the word can also refer to the people of this kingdom. With the fall of the Songhai Empire , the Mande Ngbanya clan moved south, crossing the Black Volta and founding a city at Yagbum...
, had seven sons, each of whom ruled a territorial division within the state. Six decades later two of the divisions had disappeared for various reasons. The myths of the Gonja had been revised to recount that Jakpa had five sons, and that five divisions were created. Since they had no practical, present purpose, the other two sons and divisions had evaporated.
10. Situational rather than abstract
In oral cultures, concepts are used in a way that minimizes abstraction, focusing to the greatest extent possible on objects and situations directly known by the speaker. A study by
A.R. LuriaAlexander Romanovich Luria was a famous Soviet neuropsychologist and developmental psychologist. He was one of the founders of cultural-historical psychology and psychological activity theory.- Biography :...
, a psychologist who did extensive fieldwork comparing oral and literate subjects in remote areas of
UzbekistanUzbekistan, officially the Republic of Uzbekistan , is a doubly landlocked country in Central Asia, formerly part of the Soviet Union...
and Kirghizia in 1931-2 documented the highly situational nature of oral thinking.
- Oral subjects always used real objects they were familiar with to refer to geometric shapes; for example a plate or the moon might be used to refer to a circle.
- Asked to select three similar words from the following list “hammer, saw, log, hatchet”, oral subjects would reject the literate solution (removing the log to produce a list of 3 tools), pointing out that without the log there wasn’t much use for the tools.
- Oral subjects took a practical, not an abstract, approach to syllogisms. Luria asked them this question. In the far north, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zembla is in the far north and there is always snow there. What colour are the bears? Typical response: “I don’t know. I’ve seen a black bear. I’ve never seen any others. … Every locality has its own animals.”
- Oral subjects proved unwilling to analyze themselves. When asked “what sort of person are you?” one responded: “What can I say about my own heart? How can I talk about my character? Ask others; they can tell you about me. I myself can’t say anything.”
See also
- Cultural traditions
Oral tradition, oral culture and oral lore are messages or testimony transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...
- Ethnopoetics
Ethnopoetics is a poetic movement and subfield in linguistics, and anthropology. It was coined as a term by Jerome Rothenberg in collaboration with George Quasha in 1968, when Quasha asked Rothenberg to create a term using 'ethnos' and 'poetics' on the model of 'ethnomusicology' for inclusion in...
- History of communication
The history of communication dates back to the earliest signs of life. Communication can range from very subtle processes of exchange, to full conversations and mass communication. Human communication was revolutionized with speech about 200,000 years ago. Symbols were developed about 30,000 years...
- History of writing
The history of writing follows the art of expressing thought by letters or other marks. In the history of how systems of representation of language through graphic means have evolved in different human civilizations, more complete writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of...
- Intangible culture
Intangible culture is the opposite of culture which is tangible or touchable such as a castle, a statue, or a painting. Intangible culture includes song, music, drama, skills, crafts, and the other parts of culture that can be recorded but cannot be touched and interacted with, without a vehicle...
- Linguistic anthropology
Linguistic anthropology is that branch of anthropology that brings linguistic methods to bear on anthropological problems, linking the analysis of semiotic and particularly linguistic forms and processes to the interpretation of sociocultural processes....
- Mnemonics
- Oracy
The term oracy was coined by Andrew Wilkinson, a British researcher and educator, in the 1960s. This word is formed by analogy from literacy and numeracy...
- Oral contract
An oral contract is a contract that terms of which have been agreed by spoken communication, in contrast to a written contract, where the contract is a written document...
- Oral history
Oral history can be defined as the recording, preservation and interpretation of historical information, based on the personal experiences and opinions of the speaker....
- Oral interpretation
Oral Interpretation is a dramatic art, also commonly called "interpretive reading" and "dramatic reading", though these terms are more conservative and restrictive...
- Oral law
An oral law is a code of conduct in use in a given culture, religion or community application, by which a body of rules of human behaviour is transmitted by oral tradition and effectively respected, or the single rule that is orally transmitted....
- Oral literature
Oral literature corresponds in the sphere of the spoken word to literature as literature operates in the domain of the written word. It thus forms a generally more fundamental component of culture, but operates in many ways as one might expect literature to do...
- Oral poetry
Oral poetry can be defined in various ways. A strict definition would include only poetry that is composed and transmitted without any aid of writing. However, the complex relationships between written and spoken literature in some societies can make this definition hard to maintain, and oral...
- Oratory
Oratory is a type of public speaking.Oratory may also refer to:* Oratory , a power metal band* Oratory , a place of worship* a religious order such as** Oratory of Saint Philip Neri ** Oratory of Jesus...
- Performance poetry
Performance poetry is poetry that is specifically composed for or during performance before an audience. During the 1980s, the term came into popular usage to describe poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution.-History:...
- Storytelling
Storytelling is the conveying of events in words, images, and sounds often by improvisation or embellishment. Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture and in every land as a means of entertainment, education, preservation of culture and in order to instill moral values...
Further reading
- Goody, Jack
Sir John Rankine Goody is a British social anthropologist. He has been a prominent teacher at Cambridge University, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1976, and he is an associate of the US National Academy of Sciences...
. The Interface Between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
- Havelock, Eric A.
Eric Alfred Havelock was a British classicist who spent most of his life in Canada and the United States. He was a professor at the University of Toronto and was active in the academic milieu of the Canadian socialist movement during the 1930s. In the 1960s and 1970s, he served as chair of the...
The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.
- Innis, Harold A.
Harold Adams Innis was a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on media, communication theory and Canadian economic history. The affiliated Innis College at the University of Toronto is named for him...
The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951.
- Martin, Henri-Jean.
Henri-Jean Martin was a leading authority on the history of the book in Europe, and an expert on the history of writing and printing...
The History and Power of Writing. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN 0-226-50835-8
- McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
- Misztal, Barbara. Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press, 2003.
- Ong, Walter J.
Father Walter Jackson Ong, Ph.D. , was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian and philosopher.-Biography:...
The Presence of the Word. London & New York: Routledge, Francis & Taylor Group, 2002.
- Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory
The Art of Memory is a 1966 non-fiction book by British historian Frances A. Yates. The book follows the history of mnemonic systems from the classical period of Simonides of Ceos in Ancient Greece to the Renaissance era of Giordano Bruno, ending with Gottfried Leibniz and the early emergence of...
. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.