In 1982, a Jesuit academic, Walter J. Ong, published ‘Orality and Literacy : The Technologizing of the Word’. In it he describes his researches with, and in, societies that do not have writing (‘oral’ societies) i.e. they have no way of recording their speech, apart from remembering and repeating it.
It is difficult for people from cultures that have writing, to imagine life without it. We rely so heavily on writing for the conduct of everyday life and the institutions of our society. How would you store information without writing? Imagine trying to consult a TV guide that consisted of one long audio recording of someone reading out the programs and their broadcast times!
In oral cultures without writing, everything that is known has to be remembered and recited from one generation to the next. It sounds impossible, but one of the effects of learning to read and write is a reduction in one's capacity to remember and repeat verbal utterances. People in oral societies have much better memories in this way. Also, they use various techniques such as mnemonics, formulaic expressions and rhythmic sounds to aid recall.1*
Ong goes into great detail describing how the people conceive of language and how their thought processes differ from those of people living in societies with writing.
The principal effect of writing is to remove the conceptualisation of spoken words from their natural habitat of sound and 3-D space, to a visual-spatial realm, defined by the 2-D surface of a piece of paper. Words cease to be actions (expressions of man's power over matter), and become objects without immediate reference. (See ‘Organic Language’ for more detailed discussion.)
He lists some of the other psychodynamics of orality as2*:
(i) Additive rather than subordinate
People in oral cultures tend to append their thoughts together in a pragmatic manner, invoking the oral context rather than by arranging components according to relationships of causality, temporalness, or priority.
A familiar instance of additive oral style is the creation narrative in Genesis 1:1-5, which is indeed a text, but one preserving recognizable oral patterning. The Douay version (1610), produced in a culture with a still massive oral residue, keeps close, in many ways, to the additive Hebrew original:
In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters. And God said: Be light made. And light was made. And God saw the light that it was good; and he divided the light from the darkness. And he called the light Day, and the darkness Night; and there was evening and morning one day.
Adjusted to sensibilities shaped more by writing and print, the New American Bible (1970) translates:
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, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light. God saw how good the light was. God then separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness he called ‘night’. Thus evening came, and morning followed – the first day.
Instead of nine introductory ‘ands’ we have two, each submerged in a compound sentence. The Douay renders the Hebrew we or wa (‘and’) simply as ‘and’. The New American renders it ‘and’, ‘when’, ‘then’, ‘thus’, or ‘while’ to provide a flow of narration with the analytic, reasoned subordination that characterizes writing. Note that the modern translation arranges the events on a time scale, which precludes any consideration of a realm beyond time.
(ii) Aggregative rather than analytic
Oral cultures use formulaic oral expressions to make expressions more meaningful and memorable. Oral folk prefer, especially in formal discourse, not the 'soldier', but the 'brave soldier'; not the 'princess', but the 'beautiful princess'; not the 'oak', but the 'sturdy oak'. Oral expression thus carries a load of epithets and other formulary baggage which high literacy rejects as cumbersom.
If you lose concentration whilst reading, you can just go back to the previous page or paragraph — the train of ideas is preserved on the page. An oral utterance however, vanishes as soon as it is uttered — you can't revisit what was said. Thus, oral cultures repeat information, so that it becomes ingrained in memory. Ideas progress more slowly, because much of what has already been dealt with is repeated every time a new idea is introduced.
Sparsely linear or analytic thought and speech is an artificial creation, structured and enabled by the technology of writing. This imposes some kind of strain on the psyche in preventing expression from falling into its more natural patterns.
(iv) Conservative or traditionalist
Since, in a primary oral culture, conceptualized knowledge, that is not repeated aloud, soon vanishes, oral societies must invest great energy in saying over and over again what has been learned arduously over the ages. This need establishes a highly traditionalist or conservative set of mind that inhibits intellectual experimentation. Knowledge is hard to come by and precious, and society regards highly, those wise old men and women who specialize in conserving it. By storing knowledge outside the mind, writing, and even more, print, downgrade the figures of the wise old man and the wise old woman, repeaters of the past, in favor of younger discoverers of something new.
Writing is of course conservative in its own ways. But by taking conservative functions on itself, the text frees the mind of conservative tasks, (of its memory work), and thus enables the mind to turn itself to new speculation.
(v) Close to the human lifeworld
In the absence of elaborate analytic categories that depend on writing to structure knowledge at a distance from lived experience, oral cultures must conceptualize and verbalize all their knowledge with more or less close reference to the human lifeworld. Anything alien must be assimilated to the immediate world, familiar to human beings.
Many, if not all, oral or residually oral cultures strike literates as extraordinarily agonistic in their verbal performance and indeed in their lifestyle. Writing fosters abstractions that disengage knowledge from the arena where human beings struggle with one another. It separates the knower from the known. By keeping knowledge embedded in the human lifeworld, orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle. Proverbs and riddles are not used simply to store knowledge but to engage others in verbal and intellectual combat: utterance of one proverb or riddle challenges hearers to top it with a more apposite or a contradictory one.
(vii) Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced
For an oral culture, learning or knowing means achieving close, empathetic, communal identification with the known — ‘getting with it’. Writing separates the knower from the known and thus sets up conditions for ‘objectivity’, in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing.
Oral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance. Print cultures have invented dictionaries in which the various meanings of a word as it occurs in datable texts can be recorded in formal definitions. Words thus are known to have layers of meaning, many of them quite irrelevant to ordinary present meanings. Dictionaries advertise semantic discrepancies.
Oral cultures of course have no dictionaries and few semantic disagreements. The meaning of each word is controlled by ‘direct semantic ratification’, that is, by the real-life situations in which the word is used here and now. The oral mind is uninterested in definitions. Words acquire their meanings only from their actual habitat, which is not just other words but includes gestures, vocal inflections, facial expression, and the entire human, existential setting in which the real, spoken word always occurs. Word meanings come continuously out of the present.
(ix) Situational rather than abstract
Oral cultures tend to use concepts in situational, operational frames of reference that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the living human lifeworld.
NOTE: A pdf download of 'Orality and Literacy' is available at monoskop.org.
The characteristics of orally based thought are discussed at newlearningonline.com.
Footnotes
1. Ong, Walter J. 1982, Orality and Literacy, Methuen, London, pp. 34-35.
‘Protracted orally based thought, even when not in formal verse, tends to be highly rhythmic, for rhythm aids recall, even physiologically. ... Formulas help implement rhythmic discourse and also act as mnemonic aids in their own right, as set expressions circulating through the mouths and ears of all. ... ‘Divide and conquer.’ ‘To err is human, to forgive divine.’ ... ‘The clinging vine.’ ‘The sturdy oak.’ ... Fixed, often rhythmically balanced, expressions of this sort and of other sorts can be found occasionally in print ... but in oral cultures they are not occasional. They are incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Thought in any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them.’ Back
2. Ong, Walter J. 1982, Orality and Literacy, Methuen, London, pp. 37-49. Back