I can’t even imagine living in a completely oral culture. I mean, I like the idea of lots of storytelling, but what happens when a story isn’t told enough or isn’t interesting enough at the time and dies out? What if information that could be life changing or provide information about the past is just forgotten? Blown away with the wind? This is a problem already for people studying history. Once they go back far enough, the records of mankind become far more infrequent, with huge gaps. It leaves the question, What did we miss out on?
A culture without writing to document itself is a culture doomed to be continuously perched on the brink of death. By this, I mean that if all information is communicated orally, then the people of this culture are the only way it exists. If all the people suddenly die out, by whatever disaster chances to fall upon them, the culture is lost, because all the knowledge is oral. Of course the chances of an entire culture dying out at once are unlikely, but it is possible.
The point is that without documentation, knowledge is very easily lost. Stories can be retold, but not exactly. A perfect example is the story of a man who, upon arriving back from a fishing trip, tells his wife about his adventures, who tells her friend, who also tells a friend, etc. By the end of it, the man went from catching a two pound bass to a two ton whale. You get the idea. All stories change in the telling. Even with mnemonics and formulas, oral knowledge is very temporary, due to the capacity of the human memory, while documentation is much more permanent and likely to stand up to the test of time.
2 comments:
A fully oral culture is something that just baffles me. I know we are quite removed from that time, but while sitting in the lab yesterday I could not help but notice all the words everywhere. Little signs telling me to print or not to print, boxes on the walls, everything has writing on it.
Not only would we be missing out on the history of our culture without writing, everyday tasks would be much harder to complete. I was pretty bummed out to hear that Plato was against the written word. I figure he had more foresight than that.
What Kelly said about how easily knowledge can be lost is extremely on point. If one man was required to know all the history of America, and then pass it on to his son, who passed it on to his son, and so on, a large portion of each persons life would be spent learning ALL of that information. Once you had the history down it would probably be time to start teaching it to ones offspring, and god forbid you forget a detail. It would be lost forever.
Thank god we have books.
What about recorded oral documents? Oral literacy is jsut as important too becasue inferring context can be just as manipulative too. For instance, thier are alot of things in litery works such as the Bible, Koran, and Sheakesperian poetry that scholors today do not neccessarily know how to decipher and therefore put thier own judgment into play. This in turn distorts authenticy of the writing in the long run. Language evolves over time as well and different cultures have different writing/speaking customs that make it hard for information to be so universal as we want it to be.
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