I chose the first question to answer: Explain why the notion that cultures can be distinguished as either “oral culture” or “written culture” (19) is a mistaken understanding as to how culture works, according to Chamberlin and your reading of Courtney MacNeil’s article “Orality”.
I chose this question because I had a class last semester that focused largely on orality in regard to Walter Ong and McLuhan’s definitions. After reading MacNeil’s article and Chamberlain’s book, however, my understanding of oral and written culture was challenged yet again.
It’s easy to distinguish cultures as either oral or written when basing it off of their traditions, practices, way of gaining and distributing knowledge, etc. But as MacNeil discussed, from a Western perspective, our notion of what constitutes an oral and written culture is skewed. She briefly mentions the “internet culture” and how this intermingling of oral and written word represents a dualism that challenges our westernized understanding of them as two separate cultures. She goes on to explain that one of the problems of viewing “orality as a ‘preference’ or ‘tendency’” causes one to think that “orality exists in a dialectical relationship with literacy, and that communication is a competition between eye and ear” (MacNeil). What I took from my previous class concerning oral cultures is that there is a clear differentiation between an oral community versus a written one, as Ong had discussed. His notion that there are “primary oral cultures” in which they are presumed to have no knowledge of writing was the main idea I learned while reading his research. Yet, MacNeil and Chamberlain have a different standpoint on the idea of primarily oral and written cultures. For instance, Chamberlain explains how oral cultures do in fact engage with writing:
All so-called oral cultures are rich in forms of writing, albeit non-syllabic and non-alphabetic ones: woven and beaded belts and blankets, knotted and coloured strings, carved and painted trays, poles, doors, verandah posts, canes and sticks, masks, hats and chests play a central role in the cultural and constitutional life of these communities, functioning in all the ways written texts do for European societies. And, on the other hand, the central institutions of our supposedly “written” cultures—our courts and churches and parliaments and schools—are in fact arenas of strictly defined and highly formalized oral traditions, in which certain things must be said and done in the right order by the right people on the right occasions with the right people present (Chamberlain 59)
After reading through Chamberlain’s book If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?, I came to understand the relationship between the oral word and the written word. Even if our Westernized perspective may find it difficult to see, the two are interconnected in “so-called oral cultures” and written cultures. MacNeil further discusses this interconnectedness in which “the advent of contemporary internet culture has encouraged the recognition that oral and textual need not be viewed from a hierarchical perspective” but rather conceptualize the difference between cultures “dominant art form” (MacNeil). Cultures do not all work the same, so the perception that orally dominant cultures are lesser or “barbaric,” as Chamberlain mentions, compared to a written dominant culture is a mistaken way of viewing how culture works. To expand, Chamberlain explains how we “learn to dismiss others who haven’t grown up exactly like us as incorrigible babblers and doodlers. And eventually the distinction becomes one of the ways we divide the world into Them and Us” (17). His example of Them and Us is how our culture (Western) tends to view cultures unlike our own, and as he and MacNeil discuss, this opinion creates a divide when understanding cultures and leads us to an incorrect standpoint. After reading MacNeil’s article and Chamberlain’s book, I learnt so much more in regard to the separation that is created by a mistaken understanding of the relationship between oral and written cultures and how they are both interchangeable in which they are both oral and written, not solely one versus the other.
Works Cited
Chamberlin, Edward. “If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground”. Penguin Random House Canada. 2003. Print.
MacNeil, Courtney. “Orality”. The Chicago School of Media Theory. Uchicagoedublogs. 2007, http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/orality/.
Hi Samantha, it was interesting to read your post as I answered the same question as you and had similar viewpoints and thoughts as well. I like how you say they are interchangeable and that they are interconnected because, it is true. But what I recently thought about was the power of written words versus audio files. Do you find any superiority there? We took out the impermanence of orality out with audio recordings, however it makes me wonder if listening to a human speak, rather than reading aloud written words would send a more powerful message?
Hi Sashini, that’s a great point! I tend to find that I absorb listening to information far better than reading it, for example, a novel or text assigned for a class. There’s something to be said about listening to a text, especially when there’s a lot of information to attain. I sometimes find myself reading aloud, and in my class on Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” reading the poem audibly makes it easier when attempting to interpret what is being said since you can hear the flow and rhythm. I do feel that listening to a human speak versus reading aloud written words sends a more powerful message because it is more raw and authentic, whereas reading from a script sends the message of inauthenticity and may appear to be spurious.