Abstract: Did ordinary people in early modern England have any coherent sense of the past? Andy Wood’s pioneering new book charts how popular memory generated a kind of usable past that legitimated claims to rights, space and resources. He explores the genesis of customary law in the medieval period; the politics of popular memory; local identities and traditions; gender and custom; literacy, orality and memory; landscape, space and memory; and the legacy of this cultural world for later generations. Drawing from a wealth of sources ranging from legal proceedings and parochial writings to proverbs and estate papers , he shows how custom formed a body of ideas built up generation after generation from localized patterns of cooperation and conflict. This is a unique account of the intimate connection between landscape, place and identity and of how the poorer and middling sort felt about the world around them. The first major study of popular memory in the early modern period Broad-ranging, interdisciplinary approach will appeal to historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and historical geographers Written by a leading social historian

Abstract: Science is using methodologies to study behaviour. These methodologies are socially constructed, culture specific, and deeply affected by North American and Western language. African cultures feature empathic processes fueled by compassion and the desire for co-existence. It operates on communal, often primary oral, cultures and uses mostly oral tradition in its presentations. Oral traditions process knowledge and verbalize data specifically. This case of long term research in which Information and Communications Technology is introduced in a highly oral and rural culture shows that using constructs available in primary oral culture can create outcomes that are a useful function within oral tradition circumstances. Analysis of methodologies used during the eleven-year case study suggest that outcomes benefit from interactions that are aligned within oral-culture formats. The case study follows 'the flow of science' - analysing, interpreting, clarifying, constructing - primarily in the oral tradition. Outcomes appear fruitful in oral traditions. This long term and unique approach opens the door to new ways of understanding in rural Africa, and recognition that literacy and orality exist side by side.

Abstract: Contents: Preface: Technology and Social Change. Part I: Introduction. R. Langlois, An Introduction to Jack Goody's Historical Anthropology. Part II: Historical Anthropology: Kinship, Inheritance, and the State. K. Hart, Agrarian Civilization and Modern World Society. P. Ebrey, Succession to High Office: The Chinese Case. C. Hann, Between East and West: Greek Catholic Icons and Cultural Boundaries. E. Hobsbawm, Culture and Gender in European Bourgeois Society 1870-1914. M. Bloch, D. Sperber, Kinship and Evolved Psychological Dispositions: The Mother's Brother Controversy Reconsidered. G.E.R. Llyod, The Use and Abuse of Classification. J-C. Schmitt, Images in Flowers. Part III: Orality, Literacy, and Written Culture. G. Hawthorn, Orality in Politics. S. Hawkins, Writing and Kinship in Northern Ghana: From Cowry Payments to Paper Documents. C. Bazerman, The Writing of Social Organization and the Literate Situating of Cognition: Extending Goody's Social Implications of Writing. E.N. Goody, Dynamics of the Emergence of Sociocultural Institutional Practices. R. Finnegan, Not by Worlds Alone: Reclothing the "Oral". D.R. Olson, The Documentary Tradition in Mind and Society. M. Cole, J. Cole, Rethinking the Goody Myth. Bibliography of Jack Goody's Work.

Abstract: This study attempts a poetic analysis of the Igue festival song text. Igue festival is one of the major cultural markers among the Edos, a strategic ethnic group in Nigeria. It is an annual event that ushers in a new year for every Edospeaking person. It is characteristic of the famous “head washing” and the significant display of ‘Ewere leaves”. These are two important cultural practices are central to the royalty and overall development of the Edo kingdom. The study indicates that beyond the historical and cultural implications of the songs is an intricate and predominant interplay of poetry and other aesthetic resources. The songs were analysed based on the critical approach of literary stylistics. This approach was used to examine the literary forms and functions of the selected text within the framework of oral literatures. Finally, it is discovered that the songs have creative potentials and artistic qualities which justify their appreciation as essentially literary masterpiece. Key words: Poetry; Igue; Edo; Orality,; Festival; Songs

Abstract: How to read literature as law, or what Old French judicial scenes tell us about customary law, depends upon theoretical assumptions about literacy. Early studies of orality demonstrated its complexity, while privileging literacy and connections to analytical thinking. Increasing literacy in the twelfth century seemed to confirm the chronological progress from oral, customary law that tolerated feud and ordeals to supposedly more objective methods of proof. The evolutionary view of many medieval textual studies accepts custom as either no law at all, or as inflexible and incapable of self-reflection. Now legal historians draw on anthropologists for models of dispute resolution through collective, oral and written negotiations. We find warrants in critical legal studies and pragmatist strategies for reading the texts, not as faithful renditions of specific legal practices, but as creations of ethical situations that individuals and communities live in vicariously as part of decision-making and dispute resolution.

Abstract: 1. Introduction Valerie Smith 2. From orality to literacy: oral memory in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon Joyce Irene Middleton 3. Call and response: voice community and dialogic structures in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon Marilyn Sanders Mobley 4. Knowing their names: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon Marianne Hirsch 5. The postmodernist rag: political identity and the vernacular in Song of Solomon Wahneema Lubiano.

Abstract: After some preliminary considerations concerning orality and writing in India and the date of the Buddha, this article re-examines the questions of where and when a version of the Pali Canon was first set to writing and what were the contents of that collection. It then goes on to examine the origin and evolution of the Māgadha language we now call Pali, seeing it as derived from a written language which was in wide use over the major part of India during the last centuries B.C. rather than directly from spoken dialects.

Abstract: Flore ncia E. Mallo n (ed .), Decolonizing Native Histories: Collaboration, Knowledge, and Language in the Americas. Durham, North Carolina, and London: Duke University Press. 2012. 262 pp. ISBN 978-0-8223- 5152-8.The latest publication in the series 'Narrating Native Histories', this interdisciplinary collection of essays from disparate communities in the Americas is skilfully edited by Florencia Mallon into three unifying themes which epitomize Native struggle. Framed by Mallon's inspiring and challenging introduction and pithy conclusion, each thematic section is contextualized by her conceptually rich and tightly woven editorials, priming the reader for key recurring themes. Together, the collection and commentaries challenge the research community to scrutinize the bases of its ethical, methodological, conceptual and epistemological frameworks. The objective is not merely the decolonization of scholarship - task enough - but the reorientation of scholarship towards the project of decolonization.Opening the collection in Part One - 'Land, Sovereignty and Self-determination', are essays on 'Hawaiian Nationhood' and 'Self-determination and International Law' by J. Kehaulani Kauanui, and 'Issues of Land and Sovereignty: The Uneasy Relationship between Chile and Rapa Nui' by Riet Delsing. Both are remarkable for the patience and precision with which they disentangle complex colonial histories. A recurring theme is the sleights of hand, falsehoods and doublespeak - otherwise known as 'the law' - which has characterized historic and modern-day struggle. These intricate accounts, keeping abreast of continual change, are perhaps testimony to how both observation and scholarship are enhanced by strong affective engagement with decolonization.In Part Two, 'Indigenous Writing and Experiences with Collaboration', such engagement again surfaces in three highly informative essays. In 'Quechua Knowledge, Orality and Writings: The Newspaper Conosur Nawpagman', Fernando Garces V. narrates his experience of producing a Quechua-language newspaper in Bolivia. He problematizes the methodological, linguistic and political implications of inscribing orality, and at the same time explores in an accessible way how native knowledge comes to be valued. This important theme is developed in the discursive essay 'Collaboration and Historical Writing: Challenges for the Indigenous - Academic Dialogue'. Joanne Rappaport and Abelardo Pacho Ramos jointly reflect on production of a history of intercultural and bilingual education in Cauca, Colombia. The questions they pose concerning Native and non-Native collaboration in research and theorizing, translating theory and of community control and autonomy are answered through a unique blend of collaborative text and turntaking monologues. …

Abstract: Although the English and Scottish ballads have an established place as a major folklore genre, they have remained stubbornly resistant to definition and much that has been written both about their history and about their essential characteristics has been ambiguous, confusing, and in some instances misleading. This lecture casts an eye over some of the paradoxes thrown up by the genre, taking as a starting point Child's criteria of great age, initial wholeness, traditionality, and mutability, and considering the question of orality and print. It invokes modern textual theory to shed some light on the protean nature of the genre, and a historical perspective to question whether the findings of the late Victorian and Edwardian folk song collectors really can be projected back in time.

Abstract: In ‘The Storyteller’ (1936), his meditation upon the death of orality, Walter Benjamin writes: We have witnessed the evolution of the ‘short story’, which has removed itself from oral tradition and no longer permits that slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers which constitutes the most appropriate picture of the way in which the perfect narrative is revealed through the layers of a variety of retellings. (92) For Benjamin, the short story exemplifies the cultural tendency for abbreviation, a symptom of the economic, bureaucratic and technological organization of society that ‘quite gradually’ has ‘removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing’ (86). Benjamin’s melancholic diagnosis, ‘Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell’ (93), seeks to recover those trace elements of the oral tradition that he finds, especially, in the work of Nikolai Leskov but also J.P. Hebel, Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Allan Poe. Benjamin is unclear as to exactly when the oral tradition began to disappear — although its demise seems to coincide with the development of print culture — and he tends to mythologize the figure of the storyteller as an epic bard for whom ‘counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom’ (86).

Abstract: This chapter examines one effect of the philter of love and law, namely, the different historiographies of the legal literature of thirteenth-century France and England, and proposes that closer comparison is an antidote. An examination of the purpose and form of thirteenth-century customary texts, and putting them in an extranational context, shows that the authors understood the writing of customary legal texts in a similar manner on both sides of the Channel. In the chapter the author makes a contribution towards this point by touching on some themes that have traditionally described as features which differentiated French and English legal literature, and discusses some similarities. Issues of writing and orality have also been a common marker of difference between French and English customary texts. French and English traditions of customary literature clearly had some important differences. Keywords:customary literature; England; France; orality; writing

Abstract: This paper reports on an innovative approach to oral language development in one British Columbia elementary school, in the context of a larger-scale research project aimed at building cultural inclusive classrooms through the development of imaginative teaching practices. A number of approximately three-week units were designed to lead students through a series of increasingly challenging oral language activities; each unit was developed on the basis of a traditional oral narrative of the Sto:lō, the aboriginal people of the region. In the tradition of design-based research, key features of the units are discussed in connection with pedagogical challenges encountered by the teachers using them. This approach to integrating oral language in the language arts curriculum was effective at promoting engagement by at least some marginalised students, but limited by cultural and political factors that were not addressed in the original research design. Conclusions are drawn for future research on imaginative or...

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction: When They Write What We Read Unsettling Subjects: Critical Perspectives on Selves in Writing and Writing Selves (Re)Writing Histories: The Emergence and Development of Indigenous Australian Life-Writing 'The Pencil and the Mouth': Anthropology, Orality, Literacy, and Modernity 'A Tape-Recorder and an Editor': The Politics and Practices of Cross-Cultural Collaborative Text-Making Crowded House: Gularabulu: Stories of the West Kimberley Troubling Relations: Nyibayarri: Kimberley Tracker, Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs, and The Sun Dancin' Fighting With Our Tongues, Fighting For Our Tongues: Warlpiri karnta karnta-kurlangu yimi/Warlpiri Women's Voices: Our Lives, Our History and Auntie Rita Conclusion: Reading the Word, Reading the World: Re-Reading Orality, Literacy, and Modernity Works Cited Index

Abstract: For societies in which traditions are conveyed more through speech than through writing, oral literature is often an important medium for the transmission of ideas, knowledge, and history. The term "oral literature," while contested, can be broadly read to include ritual texts, curative chants, epic poems, folk tales, creation stories, songs, myths, spells, legends, proverbs, riddles, tongue twisters, recitations, and historical narratives. This list is by no means exhaustive or intended to be definitive, but it serves rather to underscore the range of performative styles that can be accommodated within the category of oral literature (and, by association, within folklore and oral tradition). In many cases, oral and performative traditions are not translated when a community shifts to using a more dominant language, and oral literature in general remains one of the most poorly studied and least recognized forms of human creative expression.

Abstract: For most of human history, the essential nature of creativity was understood to be cumulative and collective. This notion has been largely forgotten by modern policies that regulate creativity and speech. As hard as it may be to believe, the most valuable components of our immortal culture were created under a fully open regime with regard to access to pre-existing expressions and reuse. From the Platonic mimesis to Shakespeare’s “borrowed feathers,” the largest part of our culture has been produced under a paradigm in which imitation — even plagiarism — and social authorship formed constitutive elements of the creative moment. Pre-modern creativity spread from a continuous line of re-use and juxtaposition of pre-existing expressive content, transitioning from orality to textuality and then melding the two traditions. The cumulative and collaborative character of the oral formulaic tradition dominated the development of epic literature. The literary pillars of Western culture, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were fully forged in the furnace of that tradition. Later, under the aegis of Macrobius’ art of rewriting and the Latin principles of imitatio, medieval epics grew out of similar dynamics of sharing and recombination of formulas and traditional patterns. Continuations, free re-use, and the re-modeling of iconic figures and characters, such as King Arthur and Roland, made chansons de geste and romance literature powerful vehicles in propelling cross-country circulation of culture.The parallelism between past and present highlights the incapacity of the present copyright system to recreate the cumulative and collaborative creative process that proved so fruitful in the past. In particular, the constant development and recursive use of iconic characters, which served as an engine for creativity in epic literature, is but a fading memory. This is because our policies for creativity are engineered in a fashion that stymies the re-use of information and knowledge, rather than facilitating it. Under the current regime, intellectual works are supposedly created as perfect, self-sustaining artifacts from the moment of their creation. Any modifications, derivations, and cumulative additions must secure preventive approval and must be paid off, as if they were nuisances to society.Rereading the history of aesthetics is particularly inspiring at the dawn of the networked age. The dynamics of sharing of pre-modern creativity parallel the features of digital networked creativity. As in the oral-formulaic tradition, digital creativity reconnects its exponential generative capacity to the ubiquity of participatory contributions. Additionally, the formula — the single unit to be used and reused, worked and re-worked — is the building block of the remix culture as well as the oral formulaic tradition. Today, in an era of networked mass collaboration, ubiquitous online fan communities, user-based creativity, digital memes, and remix culture, the enclosure of knowledge brought about by an ever-expanding copyright paradigm is felt with renewed intensity. Therefore, I suggest that the communal, cumulative, social and collaborative nature of creativity and authorship should be rediscovered and should drive our policies. In order to plead my case, I have asked for the support of the most unexpected witnesses.

Abstract: Michele Grossman, Entangled Subjects: Indigenous / Australian Cross-Cultures of Talk, Text and Modernity (Rodopi, 2013)Michele Grossman's Entangled Subjects : Indigenous / Australian Cross-Cultures of Talk, Text and Modernity explores, as the very title of the book suggests, issues of 'talk' and 'text' in the area of contemporary collaborative Indigenous Australian writing. This work represents a continuation of Grossman's scholarly work on cross-cultural research and Indigenous Australian writing and representation, highlighting important debates and issues surrounding this complex and important field of inquiry. Grossman untangles her topic eloquently using compelling argumentation and generous referencing. Positioning her research in the context of her own cultural history, location and privileges, as well as her previous academic work, Grossman exposes and intervenes in current debates surrounding 'orality' and 'literacy' and their problematic rendering as dichotomies.In her 'Introduction', Grossman discusses the complexity and the socio-historical and political underpinnings of 'orality' and 'literacy' figured as 'vexed' terms. She discusses the identification of literacy with the rise and development of Western modernity as a way of demarcating the 'civilized' and the 'primitive'. Engaging with contemporary discourses on literacy, Grossman criticises certain social anthropologists whose work contributed to associating 'orality' with premodern and primitive forms of cognition which are in turn 'transformed' by acquisition of literacy.Chapter One, entitled 'Unsettling Subjects: Critical Perspectives on Selves in Writing and Writing Selves', continues the discussion on the written word in a cross-cultural setting. Grossman sees Indigenous Australian cultures of the written word as both constituted by and resistant to paradigms of Western-based knowledge and representation. As a direct consequence of colonialism and imperialism, Aborigines are amongst the most researched and the most heavily textualised peoples in the world, with Western scientists writing about them without even visiting the continent, as a part of, in Grossman's own words, the 'bid for advancing and refining the central, globalizing narratives of modernity'. Within this context, the introduction of literacy carries a particular historical burden of imperial domination, dispossession, repression and disenfranchising Aboriginal ways of viewing and being in the world. Nonetheless, Grossman argues that writing and literacy are not primarily or merely 'tainted fruits of the imperial tree' for Indigenous peoples, either in Australia or elsewhere. Challenging attitudes that the process of decolonisation necessarily involves a complete repudiation of the coloniser's language, Grossman draws from numerous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander intellectuals and writers who use this language for various emancipatory, revolutionary and cultural projects and aims, highlighting the ways in which the Indigenous peoples have interacted with and made their own systems of writing and literacy-based forms of knowledge. …

Abstract: Applied to literary texts, the notion of performance is often reserved for forms of oral presentation. This article argues that such a characterization is anachronistic if projected onto Dutch literary texts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It proposes that performance manifests itself not in orality and the physical presence of a performer but in the interaction of a text with a specific place, moment, and audience. This is illustrated through several types of performance in the Testament Rhetoricael (1562), an important collection of lyrical texts by the Flemish poet and rhetorician Eduard De Dene.

Abstract: Teaching discipleship in a theological seminary, one is challenged by the diverse world that students serve. According to a 2004 study conducted for the United Nations by Princeton University (Office of Population Research), approximately 80% of the world's population operated as primarily oral communicators (3.74 billion). Only 2% of the world's population (123 million) was highly literate (e.g., students, staff, and professors at a theological seminary). Anthropologists and missionaries are addressing orality's impact on the teaching–learning process; surprisingly, educators are not. How do professional religious educators prepare students to engage oral cultures in their hometowns and around the world? This article describes the ongoing, transformational process of both a professor and her Western, highly literate classroom. Through the lens of orality, each now affirms and practices new ways of seeing, learning, and teaching.

Abstract: This article examines the presence of discursive and symbolic patterns from Hispanic oral tradition in one of the most significant narratives of the Mexican Revolution, Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho (1931). With a view to offering a subjective, community and regionalist picture of the fights between villistas and carrancistas in the north of Mexico, the author decided to reproduce stories passed on to her by relatives and neighbours, thus creating a deeply polyphonic and testimonial tale. Hence, orality gives shape to a text where the dialogue with literary forms of the Mexican folklore is highly discernible. Particularly relevant is the dialogue maintained by Cartucho with such an outstanding expression of the ballad tradition as the corrido , which is incorporated into the prose through direct quotation, as well as through the reproduction of its typical language and poetics.

Abstract: F scholars of “folk” or “traditional” music, an understanding of the processes by which material is disseminated has been a central and definitive concern since the earliest identifications of the genre. Attempts to discover or list universal features shared by musics thus categorized have now largely given way to a widespread recognition that the terms’ meanings are multiple and context specific.1 Despite this recognition, however, the concept of oral transmission is one of few characteristics still regularly cited as a common (although, of course, not universal) feature of folk and traditional musics. Whether as an exclusive means to a music’s transmission (as implied by Oxford English Dictionary’s definition: “Folk music . . . is transmitted orally from generation to generation”; Hanks 1998:713) or to a music’s evolution (as in the International Folk Music Council’s Sao Paulo resolution: “the product of a musical tradition that has evolved through the process of oral transmission”; IFMC 1955:23), orality (or aurality, in the case of instrumental traditions) has in some cases played a significant role in musicians’ conceptualization of their music and culture. This is likely to be particularly significant where that music culture is identified in necessary contradistinction to a dominant performance culture that is based on notation literacy. The importance of an unwritten transmissive mode in distinguishing folk musics from art music in Euro-American society is a strong case in point. In this article, I shall examine the case of instrumental folk music sessions in North East England as an example of a music culture where the ongoing development of a musical tradition has involved

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Abstract: Recent work on political liberalism attempts to find ways to bring divergent cultural practices under a single rubric. This article examines one of the limits of the cultural commensurability of modern liberal legality. It argues that Western forms of evidentiary proof are not amenable to oral history testimony given by indigenous litigants. Current anthropological research on oral history and indigenous culture shows that oral history is not simply a “record” or “chronology” of events, but is a particular cultural practice that draws its members into the fold – and this is an event of its own. Western forms of evidence, however, traditionally treat testimony as “reporting” or as “creating a record” of a prior set of events in time. This article suggests that the distance between these two conceptions of “events” and “record” is significant enough to warrant rethinking the place of traditional trial practices in the treatment of oral history. It also suggests that the Western form of legality is grounded ...