Showing papers in "Oral Tradition in 2010"

Torah on the Heart: Literary Jewish Textuality Within Its Ancient Near Eastern Context

Abstract: This essay examines evidence for the interplay of memory recall and written technology in ancient Israel and surrounding cultures.1 The focus is on recovering the processes by which ancient Israelite authors wrote and revised long-duration texts of the sort found in the Hebrew Bible. Thus, this essay does not address the process by which display, administrative, or other types of texts were written, however important those genres were. Instead, the primary emphasis is on what we can learn from other cultures, epigraphy, manuscripts, and references within the Hebrew Bible itself about the context in which such texts transmitted over long periods of time were composed and revised, texts that might be broadly described as literary-theological in emphasis (such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Ptah-Hotep, Homer, the Bible--with "theology" used in its very broadest sense).

Rethinking the Orality-Literacy Paradigm in Musicology

Abstract: literacy-orality problematic, which has been debated from Plato to Postman, has focused on how the visuality of the literary medium affects the aurality of the oral medium. Recent research by John Miles Foley has addressed the particular advantages in using the most modern technology of the Internet to simulate and explore the oldest technology of orality, thereby calling into question our continued reliance on textually based media in orality research when electronic media provide a more effective vehicle for scholarly investigations into oral forms. 1 But how does this discussion relate specifically to the act of music-making? Is there an interface between a musical orality and a musical literacy? Musicologists have treated the question of the musical dimension of orality in such works as Yoshiko Tokumaru and Osamu Yamaguti’s The Oral and the Literate in Music (1986), Stephen Erdely’s research on the musical dimension of Bosnian epics (1995), Bruno Nettl’s collection of cross cultural research on the topic of improvisation (1998), Karl Reichl’s compilation of music research in a wide-ranging number of oral epic traditions (2000), and Paul Austerlitz’s work on the “consciousness” of jazz (2005), but less attention has been given to the link between the visual technology of notation and its effect on the oral-aural processing of music. 2 Scholars of medieval music have been at the forefront in addressing the connection between oral performance and the emergence of notation. Leo Treitler’s work during the latter half of the twentieth century that considered the visual-aural link in medieval music was groundbreaking, culminating in the recent collection of seventeen of his foundational essays on medieval chant (Treitler 2003). Seminal works by Susan Boynton (2003), Kenneth Levy (1998), Peter Jeffery (1992), and other medievalists have also contributed considerably to the discussion of orality and literacy in the music of the Middle Ages. In addition, Anna Maria Busse Berger’s recent book, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (2005), highlights the change in performance practice and composition with changes in medieval notation practices (250-51). Busse Berger asks why musicologists have been slow to address the role of memory and notation in music, and then follows with a thorough and thought-provoking analysis of the interaction

Biblical Performance Criticism: Performance as Research

Abstract: Traditionally, scholars have studied the writings of the New Testament by reading them silently and in private. For centuries, we scholars have been treating these scriptures as "writings"--written to be studied and interpreted as manuscripts, written to be broken up into episodes and verses for scholarly analysis. We have been dealing with them as if they originated as part of a print culture. But this is not at all how the early Christians of the first century experienced the writings in the context of the oral cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world. It is the thesis of this paper that the contents of the writings that comprise the New Testament were originally composed and experienced orally. As such, the New Testament writings ought to be treated as remnants of oral events. That is, we need to study the writings of the New Testament as (trans)scripts of performances in an oral culture.

Oral and Written Aspects of the Emergence of the Gospel of Mark as Scripture

Abstract: How the Gospels, particularly the Gospel of Mark, came to be included in the Scriptures of established Christianity offers a striking example. On the earlier Christian theological assumption that Christianity as the religion of the Gospel made a dramatic break with Judaism as the religion of the Law, one of the principal questions was how the Christian church came to include the Jewish Scriptures in its Bible. We now see much more clearly the continuity of what became Christianity with Israel. The Gospels, especially Matthew and Mark, portray Jesus as engaged in a renewal of Israel. The Gospel of Matthew is now generally seen as addressed to communities of Israel, not "Gentiles" (Saldarini 1994). And while Mark was formerly taken as addressed to a "Gentile" community in Rome, it is increasingly taken as addressed to communities in Syria that understand themselves as the renewal of Israel (Horsley 2001).

Asian Origins of Cinderella: The Zhuang Storyteller of Guangxi

Abstract: Focusing on Duan Chengshi's c. 850 CE text, this paper starts with the hypothesis that Yexian's story reflects the time and place of the informant, Li Shiyuan, cited by Duan. I concentrate on Li Shiyuan's possible identity as a member of the Zhuang ethnic group in Nanning, Guangxi Province, now within the People's Republic of China near the Vietnamese border. Victor Mair's 2005 translation and footnotes stimulated my interest in Guangxi, and Katherine Kaup, who studies contemporary Zhuang politics, enabled me to interview Zhuang folklore scholars in Nanning. With some observations in Guangxi Province, but more importantly analysis of literary texts and previous scholarship, I place the Yexian story in the context of Zhuang beliefs, creativity, and history.

The Interplay Between Written and Spoken Word in the Second Testament as Background to the Emergence of Written Gospels

Abstract: Christianity is a faith rooted in the written and the spoken word. However, the precise relationship between the written and the spoken word in the period of Christian origins has been a matter of much debate. Past studies have viewed the written and the spoken word as belonging to differentiated social worlds and modes of thought (e.g., Ong 1982; Kelber 1983). In recent years a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between written and spoken words and worlds has begun to emerge (e.g., Byrskog 2002; Jaffee 2001; Kirk 2008). Following this trend, I attempt, in this essay, to draw a kind of “contour map” of the textual world of the Second Testament with respect to written and spoken words, tracing where and how references to written and spoken words occur and the interplay between them. To assist in charting this territory, I employ as a compass references to the uses of written and spoken word found in Greek and Roman sources. My focus, then, is on primary sources rather than studies of these sources in secondary literature. While I include the broad range of texts in the Second Testament, the cornerstone of my study is Luke-Acts. The goal of this exercise is to gain insight into the different ways written and spoken words were perceived, encountered, and experienced in early Christian communities, and to explore what insight this may offer into the emergence of written gospels. This is self-consciously only an initial exploration of the territory, intended to lay the groundwork for a larger and more comprehensive project.

The History of the Closure of Biblical Texts

Abstract: Mindful of the power of media in the ancient and medieval past, in modernity and in current biblical scholarship, this paper attempts an overview of the history of the biblical texts from their oral and papyrological beginnings all the way to their triumphant apotheosis in print culture. In macrohistorical perspectives, a trajectory is observable that runs from scribal multiformity, verbal polyvalency, and oral, memorial sensibilities toward an increasing chirographic control over the material surface of biblical texts, culminating in the autosemantic print authority of the Bible.

"Writing" and "Reference" in Ifá Divination Chants

Abstract: In July 1897, Bishop C. Phillips, a leading member of the Yoruba-speaking clergy of the Anglican Church in Nigeria, praised Rev. E. M. Lijadu’s commentaries on Ifa divination stories as a bold first step towards understanding the basis of the disappointing result of evangelization in the Yoruba missionary field. Thinking of conversion work in warfare terms, Bishop Phillips believed Lijadu’s collection and commentary to be a brilliant reconnaissance (Lijadu 1898:4):

Two Faces of the Qur'ān: Qur'ān and Muṣḥaf

Abstract: Every prophet is given a sign that testifies to his rank as a messenger. Moses, who was sent to the Egyptians, had to convince addressees with magic. To eclipse them he had to perform a miracle, changing a rod into a snake and changing the snake back into the rod. Jesus made his appearance in an age when the most prestigious discipline was medicine; he therefore had to work a medical miracle: resurrecting the dead. Coming still later, Muḥammad was sent to a people who would no longer be won by physical miracles, but—being particularly committed to rhetoric, balāgha—demanded a more sublime prophetic sign. Muḥammad, therefore, had to present a linguistic and stylistic miracle to convince them. He presented a scripture, the Qur’ān.1 This review of the prophetic missions, often evoked since the time of its first transmitter, the eighthand ninth-century polymath al-Jāḥiẓ, seems to hit an important point in the perception of the kind of scripture the Qur’ān constitutes. Although one might object to the classification of the two great messengers preceding Muḥammad as professionals in magic and medicine, the classification of Muḥammad and the Qur’ān as closely related to linguistics and rhetoric is certainly pertinent. His communication of the message is in fact the central part of his mission, unlike Moses and Jesus whose significance relies on both deeds and words. Not only by virtue of Muḥammad’s addressing a linguistically demanding audience should the Qur’ān be acknowledged as particularly closely related to balāgha, but also for another reason about which the authors of the above-quoted classification were arguably less conscious. I am referring to the peculiar iunctim of speech and meta-speech in the Qur’ān. Unframed by any narrative scenario, the entire Qur’ān is speech as such. Qur’ānic speech, moreover, is not limited to the oral communication of a message to listeners, but is often a metadiscourse, a speech about speech, a comment on the Qur’ānic message itself or on the speech of others. The Qur’ān—so one might summarize the classifications of prophets related above—was sent down not in an age where amazement could be aroused by extraordinary deeds, but where a speaker successfully confronted and vanquished another, eclipsing the argument of the other in what in Islamic theology would later term i‘jāz, meaning to “render the other rhetorically impotent.” That age was neither an age of magic, nor of science, but an age of exegesis. The Qur’ān accordingly Oral Tradition, 25/1 (2010): 141-156

Like cords around my heart : Sacred harp memorial lessons and the transmission of tradition

Abstract: My Christian friends, in bonds of love, Whose hearts in sweetest union join, Your friendship’s like a drawing band, Yet we must take the parting hand. Your company’s sweet, your union dear, Your words delightful to my ear; Yet when I see that we must part You draw like cords around my heart. (“Parting Hand,” 62) 1 After spending all day Saturday and most of Sunday morning engaged in full-voiced, energetic singing, the two hundred fifty people gathered for the 2009 Midwest Sacred Harp Convention grew quiet for the memorial lesson. The three members of the memorial committee stepped to the center of the hollow square of singers, carrying two lists of names: the deceased list, representing Sacred Harp singers, friends, and family members who had died in the past year; and the list of “the sick and shut-in,” people too infirm to attend the convention. The singing room, an elaborately painted performance hall on the University of Chicago campus, had been ringing with sound all weekend; now even its bright Progressive Era murals seemed momentarily subdued. Bob Meek, a singer from Kentucky, spoke on behalf of the deceased: I’d like to tell you a story, and it’s about Chicago. Many years ago, when I had hair—and it wasn’t the Midwest Convention; it was at the Anniversary Singing in January. I came up [from the South], and it was at the Irish-American hall, the heritage hall, and I was singing somewhere in the back row. And I looked up and saw—literally saw—a feathered angel sitting right across over the treble section looking down. Now, before you think I’m nuts: the Polish-American Christmas pageant was next door [laughter] in its full regalia with feathered angels, so one of the guys came

Improvised Song in Schools: Breaking Away from the Perception of Traditional Song as Infantile by Introducing a Traditional Adult Practice

Abstract: Within the repertoire of songs coming from the oral tradition of Catalonia there is an interesting corpus of melodies that have been used--and continue to be used--for the improvisation of verses. As is well known, this type of oral communication is not exclusive to Catalonia but forms part of a broad tradition deeply rooted in Mediterranean culture (Scarnecchia 1998) and in the Ibero-American world (Trapero, Santana, et al. 2000). And it is also allied to the rap music that originated in the United States that has had such enormous commercial success (Munar 2005).

From Jāhiliyyah to Badī c iyyah: Orality, Literacy, and the Transformations of Rhetoric in Arabic Poetry

Abstract: This essay1 offers a speculative exploration of the transformations in the form and function of rhetorical styles and devices at three distinctive points of Arabic literary history. It takes as its starting point the mnemonic imperative governing the use of rhetoric in pre- and early Islamic oral poetry and proposes that in the later literary periods rhetorical devices, now free of their mnemonic obligation, took on further communicative or expressive functions. It then turns to the effect of literacy on the "retooling" of the no longer mnemonically bound rhetorical devices to serve as what I term the "linguistic correlative" of Islamic hegemony as witnessed in the High cAbbasid caliphal panegyrics of the rhetorically complex badic style. Finally, it attempts to interpret what seems to modern sensibilities the rhetorical excess of the post-classical genre of badiciyyah (a poem to the Prophet Muhammad in which each line must exhibit a particular rhetorical device) as a memorial structure typical of the medieval manuscript (as opposed to modern print) tradition.

Oral and Written Communication and Transmission of Knowledge in Ancient Judaism and Christianity

Abstract: This paper examines the contexts of oral communication and the use of written messages in Josephus’ writings, the New Testament, and rabbinic literature, and discusses the possible reasons for using orality or writing in the respective Jewish and Christian contexts in antiquity. It is argued that an individual’s social power depended on his position within the communication network and his ability to control and manipulate the dissemination of knowledge among his co-religionists. Mobility was an important means of creating these networks and the most mobile rabbis would have been the most well-connected.

Interperformative Relationships in Ingrian Oral Poetry

Abstract: The aim of this article is twofold: to introduce the Ingrian poetic singing culture, which is often referred to when discussing Kalevala-metric poetry, and to discuss aspects of performance and intertextuality. The central point here is to highlight that the meanings of a song are created on the various levels of performance; not only is the text itself worth studying, but likewise the other performance features, such as musical structures, singing conventions, and performance situations warrant analysis. After referring to the most central theoretical thoughts and concepts, I will introduce the geographical area and then proceed to a general portrait of Ingrian Kalevalametric poetry with its typical contexts and conventions of use. As case studies, I will first discuss the interperformative relationships and situational stylistics of West Ingrian swinging songs3 and lullabies, and then focus on the various uses of one poetic theme, The Sad Widow. With this general introduction of Ingrian oral poetry and the treatment of some particular cases, I hope to draw a picture of some aspects of situational variation and referentiality in performance.

Orality, Literacy, Popular Culture: An Eighteenth-Century Case Study

Abstract: distinctive and groundbreaking in many respects, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) is typical of eighteenth-century lexicons in its definition of “oral” as “delivered by mouth; not written” and “orally” as “by mouth; without writing.” Nathan Bailey, who compiled his Dictionarium Britannicum in 1730 and John Ash, whose New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1775, draw the same attention to the physical production of sound by the body, and to the opposition of the oral to the literate arts: “delivered by the mouth or voice,” they assert, “not committed to writing.” The clarity and confidence of these definitions suggests that there was, from the early part of the eighteenth century, an awareness of a conceptual difference between spoken and written language. 1 Indeed, Nicholas Hudson (1996) has argued that extended and conscious differentiation of this kind arises for the first time in this period, as the work of the numerous lexicographers, grammarians, and conjectural historians who began to investigate the origins of languages, alphabetic script, and the development of modern civilizations drew new attention to the oral dimension of language. Prior to this, although it was acknowledged that the oral and literate differed as modes of transmission, accounts of linguistic structure and development were constructed primarily with reference to written modes. On the basis of this understanding, a series of narratives that seek to chart the contours of eighteenth-century attitudes towards these two communicative modes has been commonly accepted. The first posits that the work of enlightenment historians and antiquarians situates the relationship between oral and literate practices within a strongly progressivist account of the development of modern civilized society from primitive and barbarous origins. A series of related oppositions structures this account, cementing a connection between the character of a given culture and its primary mode of communication: orality and literacy, savagery and politeness, passion and reason, ignorance and knowledge, superstition and skepticism. The second narrative adds the coda that for a significant number of eighteenth-century thinkers, Jean Jacques Rousseau being the prime example, this trajectory was not one of progress but of decline, entailing the loss of an ideal state of natural genius, unfettered humanity, and pure

Response from an Africanist Scholar

Abstract: Coming from a background of comparative work on orality and literacy but a non-specialist on the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, I was struck by how the conference themes paralleled developments in oral literary studies in Africa. These included the move away from generalized assertion to more focused insights into multiple historical and culturally specific diversities; a more nuanced, culturally aware, and critical approach to the concept of “the oral”; the fading influence of speculative teleological models; the historically specific epistemologies of oral and written as part of the subject matter; and the concepts of multi-literacies and multi-oralities.

The Tuzu Gesar Epic: Performance and Singers

Abstract: Different minority groups have different versions of the Gesar epic. Their respective forms differ from the Tibetan version in content, structure, characters, events, and actual performances. This kind of variety is common in Asian oral epic traditions. The Tu people are a unique minority who reside in northwest China with a total population of 200,000. The Gesar epic of this group is found mainly in Tu communities in Gansu and Qinghai provinces. The Tuzu Gesar is performed as a combination of verse and prose. It also shows some differences from the Anduo dialects of Tibetan. As a result of phonetic changes, the Tuzu Gesar has its own structure and follows strict procedures and performance rules. Many native scholars and experts have studied this tradition.

Guarding Oral Transmission: Within and Between Cultures

Abstract: Like their rabbinic Jewish predecessors and contemporaries, early Muslims distinguished between teachings made known through revelation and those articulated by human tradents. Efforts were made throughout the seventh century—and, in some locations, well into the ninth— to insure that the epistemological distinctness of these two culturally authoritative corpora would be reflected and affirmed in discrete modes of transmission. Thus, while the revealed Qur’an was transmitted in written compilations from the time of Uthman, the third caliph (d. 656), the inscription of ḥadīth, reports of the sayings and activities of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, was vehemently opposed—even after writing had become commonplace. The zeal with which Muslim scholars guarded oral transmission, and the ingenious strategies they deployed in order to preserve this practice, attracted the attention of several contemporary researchers, and prompted one of them, Michael Cook, to search for the origins of this cultural

The Constitution of the Koran as a Codified Work: Paradigm for Codifying Hadīth and the Islamic Sciences?

Abstract: The Koran 1 was already a book during the life of the Prophet—although only as an objective or an idea, not in reality. 2 It wasn’t until 20-25 years after the death of the Prophet that it became an actual book. The codification process progressed from occasional notes to deliberate collections to an edited and published book. Hadīth (the tradition, singular), that is, the transmitted reports (traditions or hadīths, plural) 3 on the words and deeds of the prophet Muhammad, were originally to have been taught and passed on purely orally and not in writing. Some hadīth scholars (also called traditionists) nonetheless occasionally made notes from the beginning; later (from about 680 CE on) they compiled collections, and, as of the middle of the eighth century, systematic collections subdivided into chapters according to content-relevant criteria. 4 After about another 100 years, hadīth was in existence in (more or less) codified works, the most important of which, the canonical collections of al-Bukhārī (d. 870) and Muslim ibn al-Hajjāj (d. 875), almost equal the Koran in importance for the religion of Islam. Based on observations that the codification process of both Koran and hadīth exhibits considerable similarities and that the codification of many Arabic-Islamic sciences proceeds analogously to that of hadīth, the following will examine whether the codification of the holy book of Islam was paradigmatic for the codification process of hadīth and the other ArabicIslamic sciences. “Paradigm” here is understood not as a “mystical” prefiguration, but as a pattern of development that repeats itself two or more times because the same or similar

Oral Tradition in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Introduction

Abstract: The present issue of Oral Tradition stands as a tribute to a conference initiated and convened by Werner Kelber and Paula Sanders on the topic of Oral-Scribal Dimensions of Scripture, Piety, and Practice in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Rice Conference was the seventh in a series of Orality-Literacy Conferences that was inaugurated in 2001 in South Africa and over the years convened in Africa, Europe, and the United States. The series has focused on issues such as colonialism, the world of the Spirits, memory, diversity, ritual, and tradition--always from the perspectives of orality-literacy dynamics. Information about this and the other Orality-Literacy Conferences is available at http://voicestexts.rice.edu, a website dedicated to new theories about the verbal arts.ter.

A Bibliography of Publications by Albert Bates Lord

Abstract: Note: [at time of printing] All items listed here can be found in Ellis Library at the University of Missouri, Columbia, either in Special Collections (Ellis 401) or in open stacks (see the affixed call numbers below). Many journals are available online to University of Missouri faculty, staff, and students, and of course through other institutions as well. A full collection of article-length items is maintained in hard copy and on CD in Special Collections.