The Nature of Orality

	The Nature of Orality
Quotation	"Oral formulaic thought and expression ride deep in consciousness and the unconscious, and they do not vanish as soon as one used to them takes pen in hand." Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 26.
Overview	Before you begin with this topic, you need to read carefully the first three chapters of Ong's Orality and Literacy. We are starting our study of media with orality so that we can see the tremendous impact a shift in communication medium can have on how we create, store, retrieve, and transmit information and on cultural life as a whole. Parts of the reading may be rough going, because Ong is a well-trained Jesuit scholar, and there are many references, but the ideas raised in these first chapters are very powerful and well worth the effort of getting to them. If we are to understand chirographically based, typographically based, electronically based, and digitally based thought and documents, we have to deepen our understanding of oral based thought. That's what we are trying to do in this lesson. Goals here in this module are to Increase our understanding of the impact of medium on how knowledge is created, stored, transmitted and retrieved. Develop an understanding of orality. Recognize oral residue in contemporary communication.
Oral Culture's Use of Meter, Formulas, and Other Patterning Devices	Because sound is ephemeral, oral cultures were not able to store information in ways that are familiar to us today. Members of oral cultures had to rely on recall, on their memory, to have access to the knowledge that had been accumulated in the society. Until scholars addressed the Homeric Question (see the discussion in Ong), we did not really have an understanding of the sophisticated nature of oral forms. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey had always been held up as exemplary works. Yet, upon close examination, these poems seemed to have a lot of characteristics that literate readers found inadequate: plot, characterization, repetition, cliches. We know now that these epic poems were probably written shortly after the alphabet was invented and that they reflect many of the characteristics of oral forms. In oral cultures, memory played a very different role in knowledge storage and retrieval than it does now. Because sound is transitory and writing was not available, knowledge had to be passed along through patterned oral structures. Ong and others have identified many of those structures. One of the most common of them is meter. The rhythmic pattern of a poetic line assisted speakers and listeners in remembering the information they heard. You may want to look at the nature of meter and how it functions in oral culture as a mnemonic device.
Characteristics of Orality	In cultures that rely on the medium of print, originality is highly valued. In oral cultures, this could not be the case because what was original couldn't be remembered as well as what was familiar. In order to store knowledge that print cultures put into written texts, oral cultures had to rely on formulaic thought. Oral cultures used a variety of oral tools to store information. They placed knowledge in heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, used figures of speech–particularly similes–and repetitions both of phrases and of sounds in words. In chapter 3, Ong lists major characteristics of orally based thought with examples. These characteristics are important to understand so that we can see how the change of medium from orality to writing changed the tools by which we create, store, retrieve, and transmit information. Below you can find a brief discussion of those characteristics Ong lists. Additive Rather Than Subordinative Rather than using the subordinative patterns we are familiar with in our literate culture, oral cultures relied not on grammatical structures that are familiar to us from writing but on techniques to keep the story going. To explore this idea, try discovering oral residue by looking for additive structures in the text of the Jerusalem Bible mentioned by Ong. Aggregative Rather Than Analytic As Ong notes, this characteristic of oral cultures is closely related to the reliance on formulaic phrases that we looked at in the exercise on meter. From the perspective of learning theory today, we can see that these aggregative formulae (grey-eyed Athene; glorious Hektor) were designed to chunk information to aid recall for both the speaker and the listeners. Redundant or Copious When we read and are distracted or pause for a moment, the tangible text from which we read remains present and unchanging. We can go back, what Ong calls backlooping, to pick up an idea where we left off. Working in the medium of sound, oral people had no such access to the text when words were uttered. As a consequence, the just said had to be repeated often to ensure that both the speaker and the listener were working together. Rhetoricians call this feature of fulsomeness copia. Although we recognize it in our literate culture, it is not valued now as it was in oral cultures because it serves a function now made redundant by the existence of texts in print. When we can reread, we do not have to have things repeated as frequently. Conservative or Traditionalist In oral societies, knowledge had to be stored inside the mind rather than in texts in the library. Reducing the cognitive load on memory was essential. As a consequence, formulae and themes tend to be reshuffled instead of replaced by new information. This characteristic is not common only in oral cultures but also is visible in contemporary culture where on television, for example, characters, formulae, and themes tend to be reused. Close to the Human Lifeworld Cultures that rely on writing, print, or other media can move beyond the familiar world in which life is lived. For oral cultures, facts and information are more likely to be connected to human activities. Agonistically Toned Whereas cultures for which the dominant medium is print frequently deal with a high level of abstraction, oral cultures tend to be tied more to the materiality of the lifeworld as noted above. One consequence of this connection to the lifeworld is a tendency to, as Ong says, "situate knowledge in the context of struggle" (44). The rhetorical patterns in oral communication tend toward a kind of verbal combat that probably worked to keep both speaker and listener engaged. Although distancing is generally connected with print media, as we will see shortly, it may not be surprising to find that electronic communication via email, for example, which resembles speech in many ways also is noted for its tendency to foster or at least permit flaming, which very much echoes the agonistic tone we find in oral cultures. Empathetic and Participatory Rather Than Objectively Distanced In cultures in which print is dominant, there is a separation between the knower and what is known that we consider objectivity. In oral cultures, Ong contends, this separation is not present and in its place is a sense of community or communal identification. Homeostatic One thing that print does is to allow a culture to keep track of the history of words and its own history in a very specific way. Dictionaries, particularly the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), provide users with the definitions of words and their etymology. If you're not familiar with the print version of the OED, then take a moment to look at the online version. Note that it claims to be "the definitive record of the English language," something that could not have existed in an oral culture. Thus, for example, the OED organizes information so that if you were interested in the expressions "hold your horses" or "put that in the icebox," phrases that no longer reflect daily experience, you could learn about the original referential meanings. In oral cultures, terms that are no longer useful in their present meanings were sloughed off. Cultures primarily reliant on oral media tend to maintain an equilibrium or homeostasis by adding new information gradually while shedding that no longer practically necessary. Situational Rather Than Abstract The last characteristic that Ong deals with in chapter 3 is related to many of the ones we have already examined. Knowledge in oral cultures, according to Ong, is situational in nature. His examination of the work of A. R. Luria with oral cultures in parts of the former Soviet Union illustrates the nature of situational thinking. Now that you have had a chance to examine the characteristics of "texts" produced by cultures that rely on oral media, you may want to see if you can detect the mnemonic devices and patterning structures in texts with heavy oral residue.
Conclusion	As you can see from this examination of orality, the dominant medium of a culture has a profound effect on how knowledge is created, stored, retrieved, and transmitted. There are remnants of orality to be found in many places. Think about ways in which we still make use of rhythmic patterns to help us remember toasts, poems, or sayings. If you know any limericks, for example, you can understand how rhyme and meter help you to remember what comes next, and if you've ever memorized a toast, you probably can note how these tools help us remember information. A friend of mine loves Irish blessings and curses, and each time I hear one of them spoken aloud, I think about the tools that exist in spoken language that can be employed to help us remember the content of messages. See if you can apply any of the information about meter or Ong's other characteristics of oral language to these examples that I remember from having heard them said aloud. An Irish Curse May those who love us love us. And those that don't love us, May God turn their hearts. And if God doesn't turn their hearts, May God turn their ankles, So we'll know them by their limping. An Irish Blessing Always remember to forget The things that made you sad. But never forget to remember The things that made you glad. Always remember to forget The friends that proved untrue. But never forget to remember Those that have stuck by you. Always remember to forget The troubles that passed away. But never forget to remember The blessings that come each day.
Resources	The following resources can provide you with a bit more information about some of the various topics we considered in this module. If you find other resources of interest, please share them with me and others in the class. You can read more about A. R. Luria's work described in Chapter 3 of Ong's book by looking at the following: Luria, A. R. (1961). The role of speech in the regulation of normal and abnormal behavior. New York: Liveright Luria, A. R. (1976). Cognitive development: Its cultural and social foundations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Luria, A. R. (1979). The making of mind: A personal account of Soviet psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Luria, A. R. (1979). Higher cortical functions in man. New York: Basic Books Luria, A. R. & Tsvetkova, L . S. (1990). The neuropsychological analysis of problem solving. Orlando, FL: Paul M. Deutsch Press Luria, A. R. & Vygotsky, L. S. (1992). Ape, primitive man, and child: Essays in the history of behavior.