Ruth Finnegan

Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts : A Guide to Research Practices

1. Introduction: scope and terminology 2. Theoretical Perspectives 3. Some Prior Issues and Practicalities 4. Collecting, Recording and Creating Texts: preliminaries and mechanics 5. Observing and Analysing Performance 6. Production, Functions and Ideas 7. Genres and Boundaries 8. Analysing and Comparing Texts: style, structure and content 9. Texts in Process: translation, transcription and presentation 10. Ethics.

Oral cultures past and present : rappin' and Homer

Part 1 The oral worlds a stage: the good talker thinking on your feet can I get a witness?. Part 2 Caught in the web of words: praising boasting abusing drawing together the web. Part 3 The tapestry of words: spinning the threads the web that binds. Part 4 Stepping back: repairing the seams coming to a close.

Communication and technology

Abstract The subject of ‘transformations of the word’ now leads beyond the traditional studies of orality and literacy to the new electronic forms which have now become part of the comparative study of communication. Walter Ong in his influential Orality and Literacy speaks of the patterned evolution over the ages through ‘the sequels of literacy, print, and the electronic processing of verbalization’ (1982, p.178. Methuen, London), and the planning document for the conference on ‘Transformations of the Word’ refers to ‘the evolving technologies of writing, printing, and the electronic media’. So I will start with some account of the relevance of these recent electronic forms: both their development and the way we study them. I will then go on to consider some of their wider implications for the analysis of transformations of the word and of human communication more generally.

Participating in the Knowledge Society

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Introduction: Looking Beyond the Walls

In its consideration of the remarkable extent and variety of non-university researchers, this book takes a broader view of ‘knowledge’ and ‘research’ than in many current discussions about today’s knowledge society, ‘learning age’, or organisation of research. It goes beyond the commonly held image of ‘knowledge’ as something produced and owned by the full-time experts to take a look at those engaged in active knowledge building outside the university walls.

How oral is oral literature

The study of oral literature is among the many areas to which Wilfred Whiteley made an important contribution. He was one of the founder editors of the extensive ‘Oxford Library of African Literature’, and played an essential part in both the development of the study of African oral literature and the maintenance of scholarly standards through generous encouragement and informed advice to colleagues and students working in this area. His primary interest was in Africa but, with his background in Classical studies and his continuing co-operatioii with American folklorists, he also took a wide comparative approach to oral literature. It is appropriate therefore to devote this paper, in a volume in his memory, to some comments on one aspect of oral literature viewed in a comparative context.

Limba Stories and Storytelling

The Limba are rice farmers of northern Sierra Leone. This detailed study of their stories, collected and translated by Ruth Finnegan, emphasizes the importance of actual delivery in these orally transmitted tales, the part played by the story-teller, and the changing forms arising from the originality of individual narrators.

Oral and Literate Culture

Oral and literate expression refers to verbalized formulations communicated through speech and writing, respectively. Despite their apparent clarity, ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ are actually complex and multiform concepts, both in their varying cultural manifestations and in the theoretical controversies surrounding their significance and interpretation. The ideas of ‘orality’ and ‘literacy’ have played crucial and value-laden roles in successive theoretical interpretations of the nature of society, culture, individual cognition, and historical change, across a wide range of humanistic and social science disciplines. Specially fraught debates relate to their (now-queried) role in the grand evolutionist narratives, to the social and/or cognitive ‘consequences’ of oral and literate communication, to the arguably ethnocentric background for many generalized assessments, intertwined with the Western experience of expansion and empire, and to their relation to current IT developments. Recent work has stressed ethnographic, historically specific, situational and socially-contexted approaches to oral and literate practices and performance pays more attention to multiplicity and to power (and other) differentiations, and explores their multidimensional role in subtle and creative expression.

Oral Tradition: Weasel Words or Transdisciplinary Door to Multiplexity?

“Oral tradition”—not a concept I’m really comfortable with, actually. It’s partly its sneaky connotations: “oral” as symbol of the primitive, the other, the marginal at the edge of the triumphant western dream; “tradition”/ “traditional” too: opposed to modern/western/literate/individual/creative, implicitly highlighting transmission and the “old,” downplaying creativity, multiple agency, politics, inventiveness. Nowadays we query those onceobvious ethnocentric universalizing assumptions, of course, and instead explore the overlap and interpenetration of oral and written (their intermingling with other media too—music, dance, material displays, electronic options) and look not to essentialized divisions between “old” and “new” but to historical changes and multiplicities (to changing genres, to new media interacting with established themes, to contemporary forms not just “traditional” ones)—but the older connotations still keep sneaking through. “Oral tradition” isn’t very transparent as an analytical concept anyhow: “oral” with its ambiguity between “voiced” and (the potentially much wider) “non-written”; “tradition” as—what exactly? what’s ruled out? In the areas I’ve worked in (around issues to do with performance, oral/performed literature, narrative, popular culture—in Africa and comparatively) the term “oral tradition” hasn’t proved particularly illuminating as such and isn’t nowadays very widely used. It has pragmatic uses, though. As in this journal, it has served to gather together questions of textuality, orality, voice, text, performance, verbal art in a way too often ignored elsewhere. It fills—and challenges—gaps left in the canons of many established academic disciplines. And its cross-cultural framework and synoptic wide-ranging vision, unfettered by discipline-imposed shibboleths, can take us constructively across language, text, literary analysis, genre, media studies, popular culture, performance, information technology, and

The Kinship Ascription of Primitive Societies: Actuality or Myth?

a long way. Morgan in the nineteenth century put forward the still much cited notion that primitive societies were characterised by having kinship rather than politicsl and the same idea has reappeared in various guises ever since. Usually there is also the implication that primitive communities are characterised by an emphasis on ascription rather than achievement, and by lack of individualism and opportunities for choice. The present article examines this group of assumptions. Since this close association between kinship and lack of individualism on the one hand and &dquo;primitive&dquo; societies on the other may seem surprising or outdated to some it may be worth opening with some typical statements reflecting this assumption. The idea was of course a common place among nineteenthcentury evolutionists many of whom were as much concerned with a priori contrasts between &dquo;primitive&dquo; and &dquo;civilised&dquo; as with a dispassionate appraisal of the facts. However these earlier writings need not detain us even though in practice some later assertions amount to little more than restatements of such earlier speculations. The relevant statements for discussion here are those of