Orality

Abstract: John Hartley: Before Ongism: "To become what we want to be, we have to decide what we were" Orality & Literacy: The Technologization Of The Word Introduction Part 1: The orality of language 1. The literate mind and the oral past 2. Did you say 'oral literature'? Part 2: The modern discovery of primary oral cultures 1. Early awareness of oral tradition 2. The Homeric question 3. Milman Parry's discovery 4. Consequent and related work Part 3: Some psychodynamics of orality 1. Sounded word as power and action 2. You know what you can recall: mnemonics and formulas 3. Further characteristics of orally based thought and expression 4. Additive rather than subordinative 5. Aggregative rather than analytic 6. Redundant or 'copious' 7. Conservative or traditionalist 8. Close to the human lifeworld 9. Agonistically toned 10. Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced 11. Homeostatic 12. Situational rather than abstract 13. Oral memorization 14. Verbomotor lifestyle 15. The noetic role of heroic 'heavy' figures and of the bizarre 16. The interiority of sound 17. Orality, community and the sacral 18. Words are not signs Part 4: Writing restructures consciousness 1. The new world of autonomous discourse 2. Plato, writing and computers 3. Writing is a technology 4. What is 'writing' or 'script'? 5. Many scripts but only one alphabet 6. The onset of literacy 7. From memory to written records 8. Some dynamics of textuality 9. Distance, precision, grapholects and magnavocabularies 10. Interactions: rhetoric and the places 11. Interactions: learned languages 12. Tenaciousness of orality Part 5: Print, space and closure 1. Hearing-dominance yields to sight-dominance 2. Space and meaning 3. Indexes 4. Books, contents and labels 5. Meaningful surface 6. Typographic space 7. More diffuse effects 8. Print and closure: intertextuality 9. Post-typography: electronics Part 6: Oral memory, the story line and characterization 1. The primacy of the story line 2. Narrative and oral cultures 3. Oral memory and the story line 4. Closure of plot: travelogue to detective story 5. The 'round' character, writing and print Part 7: Some theorems 1. Literary history 2. New Criticism and Formalism 3. Structuralism 4. Textualists and deconstructionists 5. Speech-act and reader-response theory 6. Social sciences, philosophy, biblical studies 7. Orality, writing and being human 8. 'Media' versus human communication 9. The inward turn: consciousness and the text John Hartley: After Ongism: The Evolution of Networked Intelligence

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction Section 1: Literacy, Politics and Social Change Introduction 1 Putting Literacies on the Political Agenda 2 Literacy and Social Change: The Significance of Social Context in the Development of Literacy Programmes Section 2: The Ethnography of Literacy Introduction 3. The Uses of Literacy and Anthropology in Iran 4. Orality and Literacy as Ideological Constructions: Some Problems in Cross-cultural Studies Section 3. Literacy in Education Introduction 5. The Schooling of Literacy 6. The Implications of the New Literacy Studies for Pedagogy Section 4: Towards a Critical Framework Introduction 7. A critical Look at Walter Ong and the `Great Divide' 8. Literacy Practices and Literacy Myths Index

Abstract: Auto/Ehnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. DEBORAH E. REED-DANAHAY, ed. Oxford: Berg, 1997; 277 pp. Since the 1980s a community of anthropologists, both in the United States and in Europe, have placed written texts at the forefront of anthropological analysis. Think, for example, of Text, play and story (Bruner, ed. 1983), Literary anthropology (Poyatos, ed. 1988), Literature and anthropology (Dennis and Aycock, eds. 1989), Domains et chateaux (Aug* 1989), Jane Austen and the fiction of culture (Pandler and Segal 1990), Anthropological poetics (Brady, ed. 1991), Anthropology and literature (Benson, ed., 1993), Creativity/anthropology (Lavie et al. 1993), The ethnography of reading (Boyarin, ed. 1993), Ecritures ordinaires (Fabre, ed. 1993), The prose and the passion (Rapport 1994), Exploring the written (Archetti, ed. 1994), and Culture/contexture (Daniel and Pecks, eds. 1996). The book edited by Reed-Danahay joins this significant trend of literary anthropology. This development has in most cases occurred spontaneously, as the by-product of genre mixing and the influence of cultural studies, without a dominant theoretical body and without the consolidation of a legitimate speciality, like psychological or medical anthropology. This fact reflects perhaps the complexity of this intellectual enterprise that I will now explore. The practice of anthropology in the contexts of "little traditions" implied an emphasis on the study of oral practices: speaking, singing, and orating. Therefore, the "anthropological written texts" originate, in principle, from oral transmissions - and, of course, behavioural observation. Orality was thus transformed by the writing of the anthropologist. However, in contexts of "great traditions," social discourses were and are also embedded in, or expressed through, writing. Anthropologists working in complex societies with ample literary traditions are confronted with a variety of texts. These different texts have been produced nationally, even locally, in the community studied, or elsewhere, by the informants themselves or by "others" in general: writers journalists, scientists, politicians, bureaucrats or teachers. Confronted with this dense jungle of texts, research strategies can vary: the emphasis on the consumption of texts concentrates the analysis on the impact of reading, while the emphasis on the production of texts permits a discussion on the implications of writing in the shaping of cultural forms. Any cultural theory thus needs to reflect on the multiplicity of writings because identities, or the interface between the self and the social, are also created and recreated through writing. So how heterogeneous literary works affect the anthropological understanding of a given sociocultural setting is a relevant question to pose. In her introduction Reed-Danahay defines the main objectives of the volume. All the chapters of the book result from research carried out in contemporary literary societies and can be seen as an attempt to problematize and, in a way, to transcend the distinction between autobiography and ethnography. Three crucial genres of writing intersect in the different chapters: (1) "native anthropology," where the subjects of enquiry become the authors of studies of their own group; (2) "ethnic autobiography," characterized by personal narratives written by members of ethnic groups; and (3) "autobiographical ethnography," in which anthropologists transform given personal experiences, in the context of field work or in the realm of the lived, into ethnographic writing. The articles explore various interconnections, mixtures of genres and voices, in order better to shape the complexity between ethnography and autobiography. Some of the case studies are indeed innovative. The chapters in Part One deal with contexts of state repression and the possibilities of resistance in life stories and autoethnography. Kay B. Warren discusses the prose of Victor Montejo, a Jacaltec Maya from Guatemala, who fled the rural violence of 1982 and became an anthropologist and writer in exile. …