The Deterministic Implications of Orality and Literacy
The Deterministic Implications of Orality and Literacy
Without ever having read it, I’ve always hated the title of the book, “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”. I prefer, “Men are from Earth, Women are from Earth”. All of us know people whose appearance, personality, or perceived tastes lend themselves more to stereotypes of the opposite gender. Basically, there are exceptions to every rule, not just opposites, but a range of permutations. The same is true with literacy and orality. Just as there are men who love flowers and women who love cars, there are countless examples in literate cultures of holistic thinking and examples of abstraction and deduction in oral cultures.
By dividing cultures into oral and literate (with a few certain grey areas like, literate but for less than 300 years) Walter Ong leads to the unwanted and probably unintended conclusion that oral cultures are analogous to children, while literate ones are grown up. Before we dismantle the notion that orality and literacy have a primary role in determining what a culture is like, we must take a look at Ong’s writing to understand the kind of dichotomy presented by those who prescribe to this distinction. Ong ironically uses great powers of literary persuasion to show us that he has nothing against these oral cultures, who are, to him, in certain ways superior to literate ones, but the implications of Orality and Literacy reek of a certain superiority complex for literate cultures.
Ong bases the difference between orality and literacy on the fact that “sound exists only when it is going out of existence” (Ong, 1982, p. 32) while the written word is more permanent. From there, he postulates certain ways in which oral cultures must remember things in the absence of writing. “In a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thoughts, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence” (p. 34). These mnemonic patterns include “heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or antitheses, in alliterations and assonances, in epithetic and other formulary expressions, in standard thematic settings…” (p.34). While Ong admits that “fully literate persons can only with great difficulty imagine what a primary oral culture is like” (p. 31), he claims to know what techniques such persons would use to remember things.
Furthermore, if we accept these mnemonic patterns, Biakolo points out that the consequences impose certain conclusions on oral cultures. “This mode of cofidication (sic) and structuration of knowledge can only lead to a certain type of discourse — a traditionalist and conservative one that demands continuity and stasis and eschews experimentation” (Biakolo, 1999, p. 45). “In contrast to this regimen, writing cultures are innovative and inventive” (p. 45).
So, even though Ong seems to have a great admiration for oral cultures — he refers to speaking as ‘natural’ and writing as ‘artificial’ (Chandler, 1995) — he echoes early anthropologists like Levi-Strauss as seeing oral cultures as somehow in an earlier stage of development than literate cultures. “To the Jesuit Father Ong, writing surely represents the Fall of Man from Edenic existence” (Chandler, 1995, Phonocentrism, para. 14). Biakolo cites Jacques Derrida as contending that “this is ethnocentrism masquerading as anti-enthnocentrism” (Biakolo, 1999, p. 50).
Hochbruck adds “the essentially romantic concept of an ideological supremacy of the natural and immediate spoken word over the written is countered by a Euroamerican philosophical crosscurrent running from the Classics through the Age of Reason into the here and now: ‘Verba volant, scripta manent,’ peoples without a written history do not have a history at all, to be illiterate still spells (so to speak) failure” (Hochbruck, 1996, p. 139).
References:
Biakolo, E. A. (1999). On the Theoretical Foundations of Orality and Literacy. Research in African Literatures. Vol 30, No. 2, pp. 42-65. Retrieved from: http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v030/30.2biakolo.html
Chandler, D. (1995). Biases of the Ear and Eye ‘Great Divide’ Theories, Phonocentrism, Graphocentrism & Logocentrism. Retrieved from http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/litoral/
Hochbruck, W. (1996). “I Have Spoken”: Fictional “Orality” in Indigenous Fiction. College Literature. Vol. 23, No. 2 (Jun., 1996), pp. 132-142. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25112253
Ong, W. J., & Ebrary Academic Complete (Canada) Subscription Collection. (1991;1988;1982;). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York;London;: Routledge. Retrieved from: http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ubc/detail.action?docID=10017717
Randy,
While I did not catch Ong’s bias towards literate cultures as you describe in your post, I did find Ong’s example of oral cultures lacking “how-to” manuals as an interesting one. While the how-to manual may have its benefits, is it truly the defining feature of a society? Use the example of setting a simple snare to catch a rabbit or other small game. In oral cultures, the information was passed from adult to child as they reached the age of hunting and trapping. The adult would explain how the trap worked and then allow the child to practice and set snares. The youth could ask questions, experiment and receive feedback on their traps. This exercise is, as Ong describes, practical and “close to the human lifeworld” (p. 42). In literate cultures, this information could be found stored in a survival booklet, on a hunting enthusiast poster, or perhaps a Boy Scouts manual. Is the literate society able to set better traps because the knowledge has been stored in text? I would vote “No”. Weekend warriors and camping enthusiasts may feel prepared to rough it if they need to, but without demonstration, explanation and repetition, I know with whom I would rather be stuck in the middle of nowhere with.
As an aside, I believe that the emerging technoliterate culture is slightly more prepared than the literate one, as in addition to the survival manual, we can now access demonstrations and examples of how to create snares on Youtube. Why are there videos of setting traps on Youtube? Because people will watch them. Why will people watch them? Because some knowledge is better shared orally than in a text.
Yes, great points, Michael. I hadn’t really thought about the Internet swinging us back to orality, but it has in some ways. Today as I shucked an oyster, I couldn’t recall how I learned this skill, though it was recent, then I realized I’d learned it from Youtube. I don’t know if the instruction would have been as effective on paper.