{"id":25,"date":"2020-01-17T23:42:17","date_gmt":"2020-01-18T06:42:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/samantharenfro\/?p=25"},"modified":"2020-01-17T23:44:20","modified_gmt":"2020-01-18T06:44:20","slug":"assignment-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/samantharenfro\/2020\/01\/17\/assignment-13\/","title":{"rendered":"Assignment 1:3"},"content":{"rendered":"

I chose the first question to answer: E<\/span>xplain why the notion that cultures can be distinguished as either \u201coral culture\u201d or \u201cwritten culture\u201d (19) is a mistaken understanding as to how culture works, according to Chamberlin and your reading of Courtney MacNeil\u2019s article \u201cOrality\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I chose this question because I had a class last semester that focused largely on orality in regard to Walter Ong and McLuhan\u2019s definitions. After reading MacNeil\u2019s article and Chamberlain\u2019s book, however, my understanding of oral and written culture was challenged yet again.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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 \u201cinternet culture\u201d 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 \u201corality as a \u2018preference\u2019 or \u2018tendency<\/span>\u2019\u201d <\/span>causes one to think that \u201corality exists in a dialectical relationship with literacy, and that communication is a competition between eye and ear\u201d (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 \u201cprimary oral cultures\u201d 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:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201cwritten\u201d cultures\u2014our courts and churches and parliaments and schools\u2014are 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)<\/span><\/p>\n

After reading through Chamberlain\u2019s book <\/span>If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?<\/span><\/i>, 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 \u201cso-called oral cultures\u201d and written cultures. MacNeil further discusses this interconnectedness in which \u201cthe advent of contemporary <\/span>internet<\/span><\/a> culture has encouraged the recognition that oral and textual need not be viewed from a hierarchical perspective\u201d but rather conceptualize the difference between cultures\u00a0 \u201cdominant art form\u201d (MacNeil). Cultures do not all work the same, so the perception that orally dominant cultures are lesser or \u201cbarbaric,\u201d as Chamberlain mentions, compared to a written dominant culture is a mistaken way of viewing how culture works. To expand, Chamberlain explains how we \u201clearn to dismiss others who haven\u2019t 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\u201d (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\u2019s article and Chamberlain\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/span><\/p>\n

Chamberlin, Edward.<\/span> \u201cIf This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground\u201d. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i>Penguin Random House Canada<\/span><\/i>.<\/span> 2003. Print.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

MacNeil, Courtney. \u201cOrality\u201d. <\/span>The Chicago School of Media Theory<\/span><\/i>. Uchicagoedublogs. 2007, <\/span>http:\/\/lucian.uchicago.edu\/blogs\/mediatheory\/keywords\/orality\/.<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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I chose the first question to answer: Explain why the notion that cultures can be distinguished as either \u201coral culture\u201d or \u201cwritten culture\u201d (19) is a mistaken understanding as to how culture works, according to Chamberlin and your reading of Courtney MacNeil\u2019s article \u201cOrality\u201d.\u00a0 I chose this question because I had a class last semester […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":69725,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/samantharenfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/samantharenfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/samantharenfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/samantharenfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/69725"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/samantharenfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/samantharenfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/samantharenfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions\/28"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/samantharenfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/samantharenfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/samantharenfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}