What can texts - both written and oral - tell us about the societies that produce them? How are texts constituted in different cultures, and how do they shape societies and individuals? How can we ...understand the people who compose them? Drawing on examples from Africa and other countries, this original study sets out to answer these questions, by exploring textuality from a variety of angles. Topics covered include the importance of genre, the ways in which oral genres transcend the here-and-now, and the complex relationship between texts and the material world. Barber considers the ways in which personhood is evoked, both in oral poetry and in written diaries and letters, discusses the audience's role in creating the meaning of texts, and shows textual creativity to be a universal human capacity expressed in myriad forms. Engaging and thought-provoking, this book will be welcomed by anyone interested in anthropology, literature and cultural studies.
This article combines two studies that dialogue with the djeliw (Masters of the Word), transmitters of ancestral knowledge in the Manden people. Based on sensitive listening and African protagonism, ...the researches penetrated the ancestral memory of these societies, which define themselves based on their own rules and values. Oral documents, meetings with the djeli Kouyaté and the works of the philosopher Hampâté Bâ bring the two researches together. The studies revealed the performative character of the oral tradition, where knowledge is an act updated, recreated, revived at the moment it is practiced. This required the translation of this living perspective of knowledge and the nature of the oral word, maintaining qualities and values typical of the djeliw tradition not to make abstract knowledge that is the very life of a community. Considering that the methodological foundation is the dialogue between people, we seek the non-hierarchy of knowledge, to establish the same horizon of conversation in the intersection of voices. The aim is to build possible translations between orality and writing, to enrich debates in the field of intercultural education.
The historical value of the oral tradition permeates literature as represented in multiple disciplines, including theology. An aspect of this tradition has proven viable in spiritual conversations ...with older adults. This paper will discuss the oral tradition’s medium of storytelling and listening to demonstrate its relevance in therapeutic conversations with older adults. Therapeutic storytelling is a distinct intervention prevalent in the African oral tradition This approach is also gaining attention in the contemporary context, blending seamlessly within the narrative approach. Using the quantitative research method of ethnography and autoethnography, I analyze specific therapeutic encounters that employ a storytelling/listening approach in spiritual conversations. The analysis reveals the relevance of storytelling in specific therapeutic encounters. Storytelling is gaining interest and reclaiming space in therapeutic settings with diverse populations, but mostly with older adults. The study also highlights the apparent similarities between the traditional approach to storytelling and the narrative approach in the contemporary therapeutic milieu.
Slaves tell tales Forsdyke, Sara
2012., 20120722, 2012, 2012-07-22
eBook
Most studies of ancient Greek politics focus on formal institutions such as the political assembly and the law courts, and overlook the role that informal social practices played in the regulation of ...the political order. Sara Forsdyke argues, by contrast, that various forms of popular culture in ancient Greece--including festival revelry, oral storytelling, and popular forms of justice--were a vital medium for political expression and played an important role in the negotiation of relations between elites and masses, as well as masters and slaves, in the Greek city-states. Although these forms of social life are only poorly attested in the sources, Forsdyke suggests that Greek literature reveals traces of popular culture that can be further illuminated by comparison with later historical periods. By looking beyond institutional contexts, moreover, Forsdyke recovers the ways that groups that were excluded from the formal political sphere--especially women and slaves--participated in the process by which society was ordered.
Forsdyke begins each chapter with an apparently marginal incident in Greek history--the worship of a dead slave by masters on Chios, the naming of Sicyon's civic divisions after lowly animals such as pigs and asses, and the riding of an adulteress on a donkey through the streets of Cyme--and shows how these episodes demonstrate the significance of informal social practices and discourses in the regulation and reproduction of the social order. The result is an original, fascinating, and enlightening new perspective on politics and popular culture in ancient Greece.
Hawaiian legends figure greatly in the image of tropical paradise that has come to represent Hawai'i in popular imagination. But what are we buying into when we read these stories as texts in ...English-language translations? Cristina Bacchilega poses this question in her examination of the way these stories have been adapted to produce a legendary Hawai'i primarily for non-Hawaiian readers or other audiences. With an understanding of tradition that foregrounds history and change, Bacchilega examines how, following the 1898 annexation of Hawai'i by the United States, the publication of Hawaiian legends in English delegitimized indigenous narratives and traditions and at the same time constructed them as representative of Hawaiian culture. Hawaiianmo'olelowere translated in popular and scholarly English-language publications to market a new cultural product: a space constructed primarily for Euro-Americans as something simultaneously exotic and primitive and beautiful and welcoming. To analyze this representation of Hawaiian traditions, place, and genre, Bacchilega focuses on translation across languages, cultures, and media; on photography, as the technology that contributed to the visual formation of a westernized image of Hawai'i; and on tourism as determining postannexation economic and ideological machinery. In a book with interdisciplinary appeal, Bacchilega demonstrates both how the myth of legendary Hawai'i emerged and how this vision can be unmade and reimagined.
John Miles Foley offers an innovative and straightforward approach
to the structural analysis of oral and oral-derived traditional
texts. Professor Foley argues that to give the vast and complex
body ...of oral "literature" its due, we must first come to terms with
the endemic heterogeneity of traditional oral epics, with their
individual histories, genres, and documents, as well as both the
synchronic and diachronic aspects of their poetics. Until now, the
emphasis in studies of oral traditional works has been placed on
addressing the correspondences among traditions-shared structures
of "formula," "theme," and "story-pattern." Traditional Oral
Epic explores the incongruencies among traditions and focuses
on the qualities specific to certain oral and oral-derived works.
It is certain to inspire further research in this field.
This study focused on the literary genres of Cebuano to find out its socio-cultural impact and awareness in the Cebu community. As such research, this is revealed in the socio-cultural histories of ...literary works, which serve as an imagination of creativity in genres like stories, poems, folklore, and other oral traditions. This study aimed to identify the level of awareness and acceptance of the respondents to Cebuano writers’ works and oral traditions; strengthen the effects of the past and present literary works; and signify the cultural impact and preservation on the youth's perspectives and the evidence of the forms of Cebuano socio-cultural literary dimensions. The study used a quantitative- research method in which the sources of data were collected from the northern and southern parts of Cebu province; and the researcher-made questionnaire results were tabulated, tallied, and interpreted using the Likert scale. The results revealed that most of the younger respondents were not very well aware of some of the literary works. Only the elderly respondents stated that these literary works had been practiced since time immemorial and that folk life is influenced by the mental, cultural, and interaction modes of Cebuanos. They were more into crafting poems and short stories. Thus, respondents agreed to preserve the literary works of famous Cebuano writers. The findings of the study revealed the respondents’ influence on the socio-cultural impact of the literary works on the literary skills of the Cebuanos, and reflected the interconnection and linkage of the works of art to Cebuano culture. Based on the findings, recommendations to encourage students to compile varied genres, exhibit literary works, and establish a mini-library of Cebuano writers and poets and their literary works were recommended.
Si l’histoire des rapports entre écriture et oralité met en perspective des agencements permanents, la Modernité occidentale a donné une place prépondérante à la littératie. Dans la France hexagonale ...des XIX
è
et XX
è
siècles, la tradition orale et les langues régionales ont alors connu une dépréciation au profit de la langue nationale écrite. En même temps que des pratiques oratoires telles que la rhétorique et la poésie orale étaient exclues de l’enseignement, les écrits en langue minoritaire, particulièrement s’ils étaient à visée littéraire, étaient assignés à la littératie vernaculaire et la culture populaire. Le retour contemporain de l’oralité, particulièrement visible dans l’émergence du slam, se heurte donc au statut prépondérant donné à l’écrit et à la langue hégémonique. Dans les sociétés coloniales françaises, le système scripturaire a également été conçu comme un instrument de civilisation, mais réservé à une élite favorable au système colonial. La scolarisation a donc été basée sur la francisation, restreignant ainsi l’éducation des subalternes à une littératie rudimentaire. Ce processus de minorisation a eu des conséquences sociolinguistiques importantes dans les territoires français d’Outre-mer, qui conjuguent diglossie et colonialité. A l’Île de La Réunion, où le créole est la langue première de la majorité de la population, le rapport à l’écrit et à la langue dominante a ainsi longtemps participé d’une exclusion des textes créolophones de la littérarité. Il faudra attendre la fin du XX
è
siècle pour que soit remise en cause une littératie monolingue et que la tradition orale créole retrouve sa propre historicité linguistique et culturelle.
Orality and coloniality through the prism of the Reunionese literary diglossy.
By developing an overview of the permanent historical arrangements that define the relation between writing and orality, we seek to demonstrate that Western Modernity assigned to literacy a predominant status. In France, during the XIX
th
and the XX
th
centuries, oral tradition and regional languages have been depreciated in favor of the written national language. As oratory practices like rhetoric and oral poetry were excluded from schooling, literary writings in minorized languages were assigned to vernacular literacy and folklor. The contemporary come-back of orality, particularly noticeable in the emergence of slam poetry, meets with the predominant status given to written and hegemonic language. In the French colonial societies, the scriptural system was also conceived as an instrument of civilization, but reserved for an elite favorable to the colonial system. Learning was therefore based on francization, thus restricting the education of subalterns to rudimentary literacy. This minorization had important sociolinguistic consequences on French Overseas Territories, that combine diglossy and coloniality. On Reunion Island, whereas Creole is the first language of the majority of the population, the relationship with the written word and the dominant language thus participated for a long time in the exclusion of Creole-speaking texts from literarity. It is only at the end of the XX
th
century that monolingual literacy has been questioned and that Creole oral tradition recovered its own linguistic and cultural historicity.
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