Thursday, December 27, 2007

An Oral Society

A great article in the New Yorker (Dec 24/31) about reading/writing/oral transmission. According to this article, a society which doesn't rely on writing thinks completely differently...
It’s difficult to prove that oral and literate people think differently; orality, Havelock observed, doesn’t “fossilize” except through its nemesis, writing. But some supporting evidence came to hand in 1974, when Aleksandr R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted in the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a “graphic-functional” way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said “dark blue” or “light yellow,” but illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.” Literates saw optical illusions; illiterates sometimes didn’t. Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to them than any conceptual category. One peasant, informed that someone had grouped the three tools together, discarding the log, replied, “Whoever told you that must have been crazy,” and another suggested, “Probably he’s got a lot of firewood.” One frustrated experimenter showed a picture of three adults and a child and declared, “Now, clearly the child doesn’t belong in this group,” only to have a peasant answer:

Oh, but the boy must stay with the others! All three of them are working, you see, and if they have to keep running out to fetch things, they’ll never get the job done, but the boy can do the running for them.

Illiterates also resisted giving definitions of words and refused to make logical inferences about hypothetical situations. Asked by Luria’s staff about polar bears, a peasant grew testy: “What the cock knows how to do, he does. What I know, I say, and nothing beyond that!” The illiterates did not talk about themselves except in terms of their tangible possessions. “What can I say about my own heart?” one asked.

...
Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

4 Comments:

Blogger Shoshana said...

That is fascinating. I'm having trouble figuring out exactly how to describe the difference, but it seems that literacy enables an abstract conceptualization that is difficult for those who are illiterate and dependent on oral descriptions and their visual experiences to grasp. Way cool.

December 27, 2007 10:18 AM  
Blogger e-kvetcher said...

which is why I am suspicious of historians theorizing about ancient, mostly illiterate cultures. Their thought processes were so different from ours that I don't know how well we can understand them.

December 27, 2007 11:23 AM  
Blogger -suitepotato- said...

Fascinating reading. Since most of those responsible for the oral law should have been literate even when the oral law was unwritten, it makes one wonder how oral tradition was kept and conceived versus what was written. Do literate people still treat completely oral information differently than they treat the written?

December 27, 2007 12:37 PM  
Blogger e-kvetcher said...

>Fascinating reading. Since most of those responsible for the oral law should have been literate even when the oral law was unwritten

Suitepotato, Joshua b. Gamala established mandatory literacy in 64 CE. The tannaim lived from 1 to 200 CE and the Mishna was written down around 200 CE. So I agree with you that it is likely the Tannaim were literate, but the period when the sages were literate and the Oral Law was not written down is fairly brief. It would be interesting to find out how literate were the rabbis that lived in the periods of time prior to the tannaim and who were responsible for transmitting the Oral Torah to them.

December 27, 2007 1:19 PM  

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