I felt that this painting, by John Gadsby Chapman in 1840, is in general a good depiction of how society sometimes views Indigenous peoples as being uncivilized — a common interpretation in historic texts of European origin. In the painting, it can be observed that the Indigenous peoples are not watching the ceremony; one individual even standing in an aggressive position, indicating their uncivil nature as viewed by the artist. Those of European descent on the other hand are bathed in God’s light, including Pocahontas who is in the centre of the painting, indicating her transition to being civil.
The notion of “oral culture” versus “written culture” is a strange one to process. Communication in the modern age, as many of you reading this well know, involves a lot of texting and emailing – written communication. But what about phone or zoom calls? Do we not still communicate and make agreements through oral means?
Stuart Rudner talks about oral agreements in his opinion article “If it’s verbal, is it binding?”; a short but interesting read on the legality of oral agreements. In legal terms, Rudner points out that “[i]t doesn’t matter whether it is set out in a formal legal document . . . or communicated verbally” (2019) in regard to negotiating agreements between employee and employer. Despite the notion that is often put forward that Western culture is a “written culture,” as discussed in Courtney McNeil’s article, with orality being a secondary aspect, the legality of oral agreements seems to disagree with that fact. If orality did not hold any legal binding properties, then this discussion might be vastly different.
As McNeil points out in their article titled “orality” (2007), cultures that rely on oral record keeping are often seen as being less educated. This is not a new notion by any means. I would even suggest that such beliefs are tied to Medieval Europe, during which time, the culture shifted from oral record keeping to written. This opened a whole new can of worms – one of the more fascinating aspects being that people suddenly needed documents which lead to them relying on forgeries. These forgeries, however, were documents that were crafted in order to prove ownership and often were not entirely false as we might initially think when hearing the word ‘forgery’ today. (For more information on Medieval Forgeries I highly suggest taking UBCs Medieval Studies 310 with Courtney Booker if you ever get the chance.)
In order to read these new documents, one needed to be literate – meaning that education was key, which at the time of the shift, was often limited to the wealthy (i.e. nobility and the Church). Superiority then became tied to being educated and literate as it often opened doors for those that were, while closing doors to those that weren’t. I would suggest that this notion of superiority is still embedded in Western culture today despite the best efforts of historians and anthropologists.
Erin Hansen makes a very interesting point in their blog post titled “Oral Traditions” that “written documents tend to be received automatically as authorities . . . and what is written down is taken as fact” (2009) where as oral story telling, traditional to Indigenous cultures, are viewed as being easily manipulated and untruthful. However, as Justice David Vickers is quoted to have said by Hansen, “disrespect for Aboriginal people is a consistent theme in the historical documents” (2009) suggests to me that even written documents are not exactly Truth-with-a-capital-T as many like to believe.
When it comes to literature, English students are often tasked with trying to make their own interpretations and derive meaning from the texts they are presented with. In history courses, questions of biases and subjective viewpoints often arise when reading age old texts. As a student of both, I like to mix and match these questions and look at what the author of the text wants or is trying to make me believe. It is then left up to me to decide if I want to believe or continue to question.
Works Cited
Chapman, John Gadsby. Baptism of Pocahontas. 1840, Capital Rotunda.
Hansen, Erin. “Oral Traditions.” Indigenous Foundations.arts.ubc.ca, 2009. https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/oral_traditions/. Accessed Jan 26, 2021.
MacNeil, Courtney. “orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory, Winter 2007. https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/orality/. Accessed Jan 22, 2021.
Rudner, Stuart. “If it’s verbal, is it binding?” Canadian HRReporter, September 30, 2019. https://www.hrreporter.com/opinion/canadian-hr-law/if-its-verbal-is-it-binding/321022. Accessed Jan 26, 2021.
Hi Cayla,
So interesting to read your thoughts. It got me thinking about education – I’m a new teacher, so I am always thinking about education. In my teacher training there was a strong focus on offering students multiple ways to show their learning. This means creating assessment opportunities that are not solely exams and essays, as is so often the case in schools. Coming from a background in drama and music, performance based assessments were completely familiar to me in that context. However, I began to see how many other subject areas still do not really make room for any assessment other than written. Teaching English this year, I have been working on including opportunities for students to show their learning verbally and I have found it challenging because the traditions of assessment that are in place are very strong. I had not really considered this focus on written assessment to be such a colonial structure! You said in your post that, “this notion of superiority is still embedded in Western culture today” and I think you are absolutely right. Non-written forms of communication – speaking, discussing, storytelling, acting, singing, moving, dancing – are not seen as proper or formal or legitimate enough to be used for assessment purposes in many fields.
*I will say that of course I don’t mean that all teachers use only written assessments! So many teachers are creating and engaging in completely incredible, progressive, thoughtful, and creative ways of assessing student learning. This is more so a beef with the traditions of the public school system in Canada. *
What part do you think the education system plays in this notion or oral cultures and written cultures?
~Hi Laura,
My experience of educational evaluations, from high school to today, showed a lot more willingness to accept new forms of education including short performances, videos, podcasts. Granted I have not always taken these opportunities because I find I am much better at expressing my thoughts via a written form, I have had the pleasure of seeing my fellow students’ own work in these oral forms.
I think a major aspect of the Education system is the fact that it stems from an age where we did not have technology, and after high school many students were expected to enter the workforce right away. Thus, ways of evaluation have seemed almost stuck in a written culture (I’m thinking of tests, or term papers for example). Not to say that these are not competent forms of evaluation, I just believe in this information age that these forms need to evolve to accommodate the amount of information we have access to on a daily basis through the internet.
In reading through your illuminating post I was particularly drawn to your opening paragraph where you raise the issue of communication in our technological age. What an interesting rabbit hole it is to consider the implications of the rise of social media in how we communicate to one other! Particular during this of pandemic-induced isolation – and as you write, are our online communications oral or written? Or perhaps a hybrid?
I think it’s something new entirely. Much of our lives are now wholely online. In a sense textese has become a language of its own, and much scholarly examination of it can be found in the literatures of linguistics and media studies. But online communication is also visual as well as oral, and media literacy is far from universal. This is an online culture that is neither entirely oral or written. It straddles a liminality between all forms of communication that came before it. It is uncategorizable by any traditional standards.
So what becomes of “truth” in this internet era? Posing such a question can lead us to examining such phenomenons as that of “Internet health”, wherein individuals, without ever seeing a docotor, perform self-diagnoses, and claim for themselves the societal sick role, through online explorations of their symptoms and conditions. Without an “oral agreement”, or perhaps even a “written agreement,” between patient and health provider, what is the “truth” of the e-patient’s diagnosis?
All this to say that forms of online communication are complex and multimodal. Chamberlin writes of how “stories and songs give us a way to believe, and ceremonies sustain our faith” (2). What of online stories, then, and online ceremonies? What becomes of community and storytelling with the Internet’s democratizing effect on how we communicate?
A link to Professor Judy Segal’s work on Internet health: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0741088309342362
Hi Cayla,
I thought it was interesting what you had to say about the legality of written versus oral contracts within the context of Western Culture which places great emphasis on “written culture”. I think instances like this emphasize Chamberlin’s point that we can’t think in terms of “this” or “that” because both forms are so intrinsically intertwined.
I also think that there’s definitely a lot to be explored in what you said at the end of your post regarding in how you challenge what is presented to you through text, whether it’s History or literature. It echoes what Chamberlin discusses regarding the presumption that if it is written it then becomes more concrete or more truthful to most people. There’s a really great essay called “The Ethics of Memoir: Ethos in Uptake.” by Katherine Mack, and Jonathan Alexander in which they talk about the “ethically engaging” as readers with texts that are often assumed to be taken as truth and fact. Within the context of this course and specifically Chamberlin’s work, I wonder what your thoughts are on how we can carry over this type of engagement to oral narratives. How can we engage in the same way that we do with written narratives that grows and challenges our understanding of the world around us?
Hi Cayla,
Thank you for such an insightful post! Having taken a shot at answering this question myself for my blog post, I had not thought about it in regards to Medieval Europe. You bring up a very good point in that, with the switch from oral record keeping to written, really only the educated and literate were able to benefit from this switch, or as you put it: “ …as it often opened doors for those that were, while closing doors to those that weren’t.” You offer a very interesting way of thinking about this, and I agree that it is very apparent in Western culture today. Thank you for sharing!
Hi Cayla,
I really liked what you said about the legal implications of the oral v. written culture dichotomy. My work has made the decision to make most of its group decisions over Zoom, as in-person meetings have been a necessity in the past, and shifting to text-only communication would not be efficient, practical, or reflect the nuance necessary for fair and open communication with staff. The importance of oral communication, and oral agreements is certainly expected in the world, even when it is most difficult to achieve.
Even our judicial system appears to expect oral agreements and statements to not just be binding, but a backbone to the system at large; while a court room requires evidence to be documented in physical and written form, the outcome of a case can be swayed one way or another by the verbal argument of a lawyer, the orders of a judge, and the inner dialogues of a jury, despite what the evidence suggests on its own. More to the latter, the jury’s dialogue is in such high esteem that that they can overrule the process of law just by the statements they come to together.
But even at the same time, witness testimony is considered a weak form of evidence in law. It seems strange that the stories that the lawyer tells to convince an audience is considered more convincing than the story from a person who was physically present in the events leading to the court case.
Fascinated about what you mean by ‘forgeries’? Are forgeries not forgeries anymore? Were these objects of value?
What you said about even written documents being “not exactly Truth-with-a-capital-T as many like to believe,” has got me thinking about the fragility of such documents, and what they mean for Power, Truth, and Objectivity. I completely agree that written documents are not inherently true as seems to be believed by history. Far short of written documents being outright forgeries (whatever that even means anymore), written documents only capture what the person scribing them was trying to convey. They do not reflect the truth, but a frozen moment, or a thought, or an argument.
In the colonial tradition, we often have it ingrained in us that documented history is unchanging, and for the large part sorted out, even when we receive evidence to the contrary. Like, just because we have a collection of written documents, that sort of sets in stone what really happened. But written documents are always subjective, and they are always filled with the biases of the person writing them. We see these in the land of meme- and clickbait-culture, where attention-worthiness is considered equivalent to verification. In the age where politicians are able to share complete verified falsehoods to the world at large, and the media does nothing to fact-check in the moment, our biases fill the way that we understand the world, each other, and the history that we trust. Those biases influence our understanding of the past, and the way that we deal with those biases also influence our understanding of the past. Do these biases find their way in your own experience of Medieval Studies? As there is such a large part of that history that is now only remembered by the literate and wealthy side, can we know much about what oral stories people may have told us back in 15th Century England? How can we get around this, when the side supporting written, static documentation is also the side colonizing and erasing oral works?
Hi Cayla! You raise a lot of very intriguing ideas in this post regarding oral and written cultures. It really does seem like the Internet is enabling a new kind of communication to emerge–a kind of hybrid creation that incorporates aspects of both oral and written communication with new dissemination techniques. After reading your post, I found myself dwelling on this idea of “forgery,” and why some mediums are seen as inherently more truthful (or deceptive) than others.
While we might not be able to so easily classify today’s Canada as primarily written or oral in culture, there is definitely a hierarchy between these modes of communication, in my opinion. There is a legitimacy–and as you point out, a prestige–that is automatically granted to written texts that simply is not extended to oral endeavors. The former are *more* truthful, somehow, even though (obviously) both mediums carry the potential to be used in either honest or deceitful ways. I would say, generally, that the “European” conception of the written word is that it allows for orderliness, stability, and truth-telling; on the other hand, orality stands for fluidity, uncertainty, and falsehood. I don’t think it would be out of the ballpark to say that this characterization did not emerge spontaneously, but rather as the result of sustained and systemic suppression and denigration of Indigenous cultures and ways of life.
It is interesting, then, to question how the Internet relates to ideas of truth and forgery. Do you see the Internet as being a more honest/trustworthy place, or the opposite? And, do you see a connection between opinions about the Internet (like, “you should never trust anybody on the Internet” versus “people are more honest on the Internet,” for instance) and these long-standing conversations about oral and written communication?
Also, thanks for sharing that “enlightening” painting–super relevant to this discussion!