Hi all~! I have been thinking about my final paper and roaming the web a bit collecting useful links and materials. Now that I have a good chunk of stuff that I think might be interesting for the group I’ll post some of it. I am interested in transitions from oral to literate culture and how that transition affects culture, so most of my links are going to have some connection to that field, and I also tried to choose things that were appropriate to the topics in each module. Have a look~!^^

http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/?pg=53

This is a link to a short article titled “Oral traditions and expressions including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage.” The article points out some ways in which language is a direct carrier of culture that may not be obvious to everyone. It also makes some interesting points about how language and its functional spaces need to be maintained in order to preserve culture. It points out some things that I hadn’t thought much about prior to reading.

Oral Culture: a useful concept relevant to information … – CiteSeer

This is an interesting presentation of some ideas regarding literacy, information-technology, and the responsibilities of the literate mainstream to anyone non-literate. I can’t recall ever reading anything about responsibilities of the literate society to anyone orally based, so this caught my attention.

The Complexity of Oral Tradition – Oral Tradition Journal

This article goes some distance in defining oral tradition and gives a synopsis of some major writing that has been done in that field. It is a useful introduction to the field, and it offers a lot of names and titles that can be pursued for further study.

http://www.yorku.ca/aviseu/eng_assessmclu_content.html

This article presents a very interesting argument that written, mechanical representation systems moved culture away from oral traditions, but that more recent digital representation systems are taking us back to a more orally based culture. It is not directly applied to indigenous situations, but the ideas are relevant. There is some interesting talk of the balance of senses that is promoted by oral traditions, and I feel some connection between this balance and some of the other balances that I have read that indigenous cultures revere.

http://oralhistoryeducation.com/

This links a video that talks about using oral history projects in classrooms. I think the accounts that the participants give are quite interesting, and I am going to try to find a way to work this into my own ELA classes.

http://jsse.revues.org/index792.html

This article presents a lot of very pertinent and interesting ideas about how orality and literacy are actually not successive stages, but are rather necessarily intertwined and coexisting modes. The author refers to several authors, including Thomas King and Harry Robinson, whose work is a part of this discourse.

http://www.albany.edu/faculty/rpy95/webtext/critique.htm

This page offers another criticism of the orality vs. literacy binary. It is short, and it makes some worth while points. It offers a lot of names and titles that could be pursued for more in-depth study.