Orality and Anthropology

Orality, a term used in anthropology to interpret the performances of “verbal art,” was not a term created or defined by anthropologists for their particular use. It is a very old concept, formulated as the opposite of “literacy,” and has a long history in the humanities. It is encrusted with many beliefs and ideas that apply mostly to verbal art in Western societies with alphabetic writing systems. Thus, the tools used by anthropologists were created for one purpose, while anthropologists in the field must try to use them for another. A brief examination of the term's history will [Page 1776]clarify why “orality” as currently understood is a problematic notion.

Orality was framed as the opposite of literacy, not by modern authors but by Roman scholars active during the first century B.C.E. The virtues and characteristics of written texts had been molded earlier by Alexandrian scholars between the third and first centuries B.C.E. Scholars and researchers hired by the Greek pharaoh Ptolemy I to fill his libraries were confronted with a high volume of scrolls. In order to cope, the scholars were forced to become critics (lit.:“choosers”)and to select, to emend, and to create exemplary texts fit to belong to the “first class,” or “classics.” Discussions always revolved around the Homeric texts; many scholars of the time wrote learned commentaries, now mostly lost. Textual fixity (i.e., unchangeability) turned into the norm, not the exception. Cicero (1st century B.C.E.), the famous Roman orator, argued that the Homeric poems were a collection put together by the Athenian statesman Peisistratus during the fifth century B.C.E. The 1st century C.E. Jewish author, Josephus, living in Rome, pointed out in his Against Apion (a famous Homer scholar) that the Homeric texts (the Iliad and Odyssey)probably were recorded quite recently: “[Homer's]date…. is later than the Trojan war; and they say that even he did not leave his poems in writing. The scattered songs were at first transmitted by memory, and not united until later; the numerous inconsistencies of the work are attributable to this circumstance.” Josephus contrasted the famous epics with the Hebrew texts, whose origins were known to be very old (2,000 years, he claims), transmitted in writing from father to son. Josephus's goal was to discredit the high esteem in which all things Greek were held by the Romans. He did not achieve this goal, but his (and Cicero's) claim that the Homeric poems were a collection of fragments put together during the fifth century B.C.E. became part of common knowledge. There are numerous references to Homer in earlier Greek authors, but none state as clearly as Josephus that the poems must have been orally transmitted (although many modern scholars read this into these texts).

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the invasions of the Barbarians, and above all, the conquest of Christianity over paganism, the Homeric poems fell out of use in the West. The epics were copied and preserved in the East, in Byzantium. The Renaissance brought them back, but few people knew Greek, so their difference in style and content did not immediately strike readers. But during the late 17th century all that changed:scholars began to comment that the Homeric poems were very unlike the Latin ones with which they had grown up, and the “oral origins” of the poems once again came to the fore. The18th-century Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns in France (which spread to all European intellectual centers) was provoked by some authors defending Homer and his style, whereas others believed him to be outmoded. A few generations later, the Romantic reaction allowed the poems back into polite society, but under a different banner: now, they were considered to be similar to the primitive poetry of the natural peoples whose lives and ways were just being discovered in the Americas, except, of course, that the Greek poems were more complex and lengthy. The final connection between “primitive and oral,” and “civilized and literate” had been made.

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