This is a follow-on to my previous post on the topic.
Don't you think that the stone age Greeks had a rich, oral tradition, too? How about the stone age Germans? Stone age India must have had some great storytellers, as well. What's so special about having a rich, oral tradition, anyway?
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Looking over "history of writing" at wikipedia, two things pop out at me. Both commerce and the need to control empires were strong evolutionary pressures on the development of writing systems and later alphabets. Both commerce and empire building are sternly looked down on (if not rabidly opposed), so why wouldn't people of a certain stripe get warm fuzzies about "rich oral traditions?" Toss in a little bit of worship of the "noble savage," and the desire to chastise Western Culture for subjugating and/or destroying people with "rich oral traditions" and it becomes a very special condition indeed.
jlbussey, one can't look too carefully into the realities of those noble savages. It turns out they weren't so enlightened after all.
As for commerce and empire building, there's another thing you don't want to examine too closely. The English settlers at Jamestown found themselves right in the middle of a volatile relationship between neighboring Indian tribes. At first it worked out for them and then it didn't. The disagreements between the Indian tribes were based on greed and empire building.
There are some genuine advantages to being an oral/aural culture. The major one is that it develops the memory. We still have records of early Greek and Roman writers bitching about how people who can read are lazy about remembering things, and don't bother to learn all the memory tricks. There are advantages to composing poetry in your head, which is why Irish and Scottish poets kept it up so long despite being Total Learning Nerds and writing their heads off. And yes, you can learn and tell stories either strictly by heart or by making sure to include every single plot point -- which was something else that Irish poets were very concerned about doing, and which the peasant storytellers continued. (When it came to the famous masterpiece type stories, anyway.)
Of course, in other ways writing stomps all over the competition. Which was probably part of why the Irish poets seem to have started converting very very early when Christianity took hold, and why they wrote book after book after book in all the languages they knew. So did most oral cultures in Europe, once they saw the use in it and/or converted to Christianity.
In our society, there's a surprising amount of oral 'literature' around the edges. But we're not used to all the cool stuff about it, so possibly social scientists tend to get a little too impressed when they encounter another society that runs on it.
banshee, thanks so much for the thoughtful comment. I hadn't considered the memory angle.
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