Oral Tales

They use special languages and performance arenas while employing flexible patterns and structures that aid composition, retention, and reperformance. In addition, they assume an active role for the audience and fulfill a clear and important function for the societies that maintain them. Perhaps counterintuitively, oral traditions also embody an expressive power that derives from their ability to vary within these limitations as they respond to different performance settings and circumstances.

These core aspects of oral tradition are by no means limited to peoples of the past. Rather, they abound in contemporary cultures. In Australia some of the Aboriginal peoples navigate their territory through series of short songs popularly known as songlines.

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In addressing a network of both mythical and tangible landmarks, the songlines together constitute a catalogue of local route systems—in essence, a map delineating the geographical, spiritual, social, and historical contour , of their environment. Native American peoples such as the Zuni recount tales that portray approved as opposed to objectionable social behaviour or that explain the origins of natural phenomena.

History, religion, and ritual merge in major, multimedia oral events e. Brazilian cordel ballad s—the small printed folios of stories, often strung up on a string for sale and sung by their sellers—whose roots go back to European sources, demonstrate rich combinations of tradition and innovation in oral performance; they show how a rule-governed process generates linked variants. In northern Albania , moreover, oral tradition was the repository of the secular law code for more than years before the law was committed to paper in the 20th century.

Thriving oral genres in the Pacific Islands include protest songs, spirit narratives, love songs, clan traditions, laments, and dance-dramas. The Basque poets of southern France and northern Spain use their improvisational contest poetry, called bertsolaritza , not merely to entertain but to discuss cultural, linguistic, and political problems.

Local performances number in the thousands, and every four years selection of a national champion is made before an audience of thousands and is broadcast on live television to many more. Women in a host of South Asian cultures employ oral traditions to explore the ambiguities of gender, ideology , and identity within their complex communities. Meanwhile, the long stories of Manas and Jangar, performed by nonliterate bard s in versions reaching more than , lines, traverse multiple languages and cultures across north-central Asia.

In the United States , folk preachers use oral tradition to extrapolate stories based on biblical accounts; hip-hop and rap artists improvise socially coded poetry along familiar rhythmic and rhyming patterns; and in so-called slam poetry competitions, contestants are awarded points equally for their poems and for their oral performance of them.

Oral tradition represents a vital and multifunctional means of verbal communication that supports diverse activities in diverse cultures. Both the Internet and oral tradition operate via navigation through webs of options; both depend upon multiple, distributed authorship; both work through rule-governed processes rather than fossilized texts; and both ultimately derive their strength from their ability to change and adapt. For additional information on forms and functions of oral tradition, see folk literature.

For accounts of specific regional traditions, see Native American literature , African literature , Basque literature , Kazakh literature , Australian literature , New Zealand literature , and Oceanic literature. We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind.

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Please note that our editors may make some formatting changes or correct spelling or grammatical errors, and may also contact you if any clarifications are needed. Learn More in these related Britannica articles: Literacy , capacity to communicate using inscribed, printed, or electronic signs or symbols for representing language. Literacy is customarily contrasted with orality oral tradition , which encompasses a broad set of strategies for communicating through oral and aural media. In real world situations, however, literate and oral modes of communication coexist and….

Literature , a body of written works. The name has traditionally been applied to those imaginative works of poetry and prose distinguished by the intentions of their authors and the perceived aesthetic excellence of their execution.

• The lasting power of oral traditions.
• The primacy of oral tradition;
• Discovery and rediscovery.

Literature may be classified according to a variety of systems, including language, national origin, historical…. Yugoslavia , former federated country that was situated in the west-central part of the Balkan Peninsula.

CSOT Projects

Full interview and video excerpts are featured on the International Society for Studies in Oral Tradition website. The home page of the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition website features news stories, articles, and announcements of events that are of interest to individuals involved in the comparative field of oral tradition studies. What appears on this page at any given moment is a selection of items that are either time-dependent or of continuing importance of one kind or another.

After their currency has expired, we will archive older items in the archive section of the website, so that they can serve as reference material on a permanent basis. Among the Lyngngam and Nongtrai communities of the Khasi Hills, special funerary rituals associated with spirit propitiation, corpse reanimation, and endo-mortuary anthropophagy exist, and narratives about these practices have a special social function.

Oral tradition (literature) - New World Encyclopedia

What comes out strongly, is the divisive function of folklore, as opposed to the romantic, unifying discourse of folklore studies as stressed in Western scholarship. In his Singer of Tales Albert B. It is argued that the concept of composition in performance acquires a range of different meanings in the Uzbek and other Turkic oral traditions — in traditions that in some areas have continued to flourish into the present century.

The central mission of ISSOT is to use electronic media to connect people with a truly international group of colleagues who have similar interests. Oral Tradition and the Internet.

ORAL TRADITION

The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition now offers an online, searchable, free-of-charge bibliography that contains every book, article, film, or other item ever referenced in the journal Oral Tradition from its founding in onward, more than 15, entries in all. This multimedia, hyperlinked eEdition of an oral performance provides an experience beyond the reach of a freestanding book or page.

To a degree you can actually join the audience. How to Read an Oral Poem starts from square one.