scholarly journals Altering the Default Setting: Re-envisaging the Early Transmission of the Jesus Tradition

2003 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES D. G. DUNN
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Word Of Mouth ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Present Form ◽  
Oral Performance ◽  
Synoptic Problem ◽  
Oral Cultures ◽  
Classic Solution ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
Default Setting

The literary mindset (‘default setting’) of modern Western culture prevents those trained in that culture from recognizing that oral cultures operate differently. The classic solution to the Synoptic problem, and the chief alternatives, have envisaged the relationships between the Gospel traditions in almost exclusively literary terms. But the earliest phase of transmission of the Jesus tradition was without doubt predominantly by word of mouth. And recent studies of oral cultures provide several characteristic features of oral tradition. Much of the Synoptic tradition, even in its present form, reflects in particular the combination of stability and flexibility so characteristic of the performances of oral tradition. Re-envisaging the early transmission of the Jesus tradition therefore requires us to recognize that the literary paradigm (including a clearly delineated Q document) is too restrictive in the range of possible explanations it offers for the diverse/divergent character of Synoptic parallels. Variation in detail may simply attest the character of oral performance rather than constituting evidence of literary redaction.

MYTHOLOGIZING YORUBA ORATURE: LOBOTO MIZING SWIVELLED PULSES OF LAUGHTER IN NIYI OSUNDARE’S WAITING LAUGHTERS AND REMI RAJI’S A HARVEST OF LAUGHTERS

Imbizo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-42
Author(s):  
Niyi Akingbe
Keyword(s):  
Seasonal Variations ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Oral Poetry ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Oral Performance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Momentary Happiness ◽  
Political Turmoil

Every literary work emerges from the particular alternatives of its time. This is ostensibly reflected in the attempted innovative renderings of these alternatives in the poetry of contemporary Nigerian poets of Yoruba extraction. Discernible in the poetry of Niyi Osundare and Remi Raji is the shaping and ordering of the linguistic appurtenances of the Yoruba orature, which themselves are sublimely rooted in the proverbial, chants, anecdotes, songs and praises derived from the Yoruba oral poetry of Ijala, Orin Agbe, Ese Ifa, Rara, folklore as well as from other elements of oral performance. This engagement with the Yoruba oral tradition significantly permeates the poetics of Niyi Osundare’s Waiting laughters and Remi Raji’s A Harvest of Laughters. In these anthologies, both Osundare and Raji traverse the cliffs and valleys of the contemporary Nigerian milieu to distil the social changes rendered in the Yoruba proverbial, as well as its chants and verbal formulae, all of which mutate from momentary happiness into an enduring anomie grounded in seasonal variations in agricultural production, ruinous political turmoil, suspense and a harvest of unresolved, mysterious deaths. The article is primarily concerned with how the African oral tradition has been harnessed by Osundare and Raji to construct an avalanche of damning, peculiarly Nigerian, socio-political upheavals (which are essentially delineated by the signification of laughter/s) and display these in relation to the country’s variegated ecology.

Commentary: Music Learning and Teaching in Infancy and Early Childhood

2012 ◽  
pp. 226-228
Author(s):  
Margaret S. Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Music Learning ◽  
Early Music ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Musical Cultures ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Infancy And Early Childhood

This article, which presents an overview by exploring the characteristic features of a range of musical beginnings and the possibilities for learning that are evidenced, demonstrates that much of young children's early music-making is improvised in the moment as a means to communicate with others and self. Such communications, from responses and exchanges in “motherese” or “parentese” to young children's independent invented song-making, may be regarded as the first “oral tradition.” Oral traditions draw on the power of repetition and the human urge to generate and create. Their musical outputs feature elaboration and ideational fluency as well as the acknowledgment of the musical cultures from which the tradition arises.

The Oral-Written Textuality of Stichographic Poetry in the Dead Sea Scrolls

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shem Miller
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Dead Sea Scrolls ◽  
Dead Sea ◽  
Oral Performance ◽  
Spoken Text ◽  
Specific Performance ◽  
Performance Events ◽  
Social Uses

Textuality in antiquity differs significantly from that of modern Western culture in which the text exists as a fixed, idealized abstraction. In antiquity reading was speaking, and stichography is a visual representation of this interface between speech and writing. Stichography’s spatialization displays scribes’ perception of the spoken text including the concomitants of oral performance. Stichography also reflects scribes’ attentiveness to the readership’s experience with the performed or inscribed text. Scribes interacted with compositions as authors, adapting them according to the exigencies of specific performance events. As a result, the transmission of a specific written layout can supersede parallelismus membrorum; nevertheless, parallelism is a constitutive device in the majority of stichographic texts. The demarcation of sense units elicits two symbiotic social uses, both of which are also implied by the content of the canon. Stichographic texts provide a formatted reference point that is styled to facilitate oral performance and pedagogy.

Truths yet Unborn? Oral Tradition as a Casualty of Culture Contact

1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Henige
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Culture Contact ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Cultural Assimilation ◽  
Historical Materials ◽  
Oral Cultures ◽  
Extraneous Data

This essay treats the effects of acculturation on oral historical materials. Rather than addressing it as a matter of ‘contamination’, that is, as a question of extraneous data entering and distorting ‘pristine’ traditions, it is considered here to be a facet of the larger question of cultural assimilation – a case of the old and familiar constantly confronting and responding to the new and strange. Seen in this way, oral data continuously adopt and adapt whatever new, relevant and interesting materials come their way in not very different – though decidedly less visible – ways from those that written data have always done. This argument is illustrated by examples from various times and places, largely situations where missionaries, newly literate members, or colonial officials, perceptibly influenced the historical views of societies on their way to becoming literate.In fact this phenomenon seems widespread enough to justify advancing a model that can be tested against specific cases. For our purposes, this model begins with the first meeting of oral and literate cultures, although we can fairly assume that an infinity of similar but unrecorded meetings of oral cultures also resulted in change. After this initial impetus, the constraints of colonial rule, the exigencies of independence, and the aims of modern academic oral historiography each contributed in some measure to this process of ongoing change. As a result, historians, whether primarily interested in the reliability of oral data, or in the process and effects of changes in them, must look to a wider range of sources than has been customary.

scholarly journals The Expansion of Protestantism and Culture Change among Gedeo

2021 ◽  
Vol 04 (06) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eshettu Tesfaye Retta ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Culture Change ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Oral Performance ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
The People ◽  
Mass Conversion ◽  
Other World

This paper was primarly concerned with the expansion of Protestantism and culture change among the Gedeo people. It attempted to document the coming of branches of Christianity and their methods of expansion and the conversion of the people. Special emphasis is given to examine the impacts of expansion of Protestantism on the Gedeo traditional culture. The researcher employed qualitative paradigm; primary data were collected by formal and informal interview, document analysis, the use of oral tradition and secondary sources such as reports, journals and electronics media. Finally, the collected sources will be cross-checked and analyzed by using content narrating and descriptive method. Based on the study findings and analysis, it is deduced that, in the study area, before the introduction of Christianity, most of the people practiced indigenous belief known as Maganno, literally meant the “Sky God”. Mainly, the research reveals that Christianity arrived among the Gedeo before a century ago, following the conquest of the area by Emperor Menilek’s force. Protestantism expanded in the area by convincing method of donations and often by pulling factors that attract the people from traditional religion to Protestantism. The then general contextual background: political oppression, low economic status, lack of infrastructures, the event of epidemic and other world historical incidents have contributed to the peoples’ active conversion to Protestantism. The mass conversion of the people resulted in creating new spiritual orientations, which brought hollistic change, including the missing of indigenous cultural practices. Accordingly, the Gedeo indigenous culture was changed in many aspects: social customs, material cultures, oral literature and verbal arts or oral performance.

The Synoptic Problem: Where to from here?

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-87
Author(s):  
Christopher John Monaghan
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
First Century ◽  
Synoptic Problem ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The study of the Synoptic Problem continues with a wide range of hypotheses proposed to explain the relationship of Mark, Matthew and Luke to the early Jesus tradition, and to each other. This article reviews recent developments in synoptic studies highlighting the recognition of the ongoing role of the oral tradition, the ways in which scribal compositional practices in the first century have been used to test the major hypotheses, and the methodological constraints that accompany research in this area.

The First Oral Folk Tale Ever?

Fabula ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 316-334
Author(s):  
Ole Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
First Record ◽  
Oral Performance ◽  
Folk Tale ◽  
Folk Tradition

AbstractMs. Uppsala E.8 contains an incomplete version of the wonder tale ATU 510B, Donkey-Skin, taken down from oral performance in 1612. Though briefly mentioned in reference works it is largely ignored and has not been translated before. Other than being the first known version of the tale and of the motif Three Magical Dresses known from the Cinderella cycle it is probably the first record anywhere of a folktale taken down from an oral source, as demonstrated by its form. It also appears to be the only folktale manifestation of the motif Three Animal Opponents, known prominently from Dante’s Commedia. Complete versions of the tale come from Scandinavian nineteenth-century folk tradition in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Some of these have the incest motif (The Unnatural Father) common to ATU 510 B, while others, including the 1612 fragment, do not: these tell of a farmer or similar who wants to give his daughter to a man she does not want, not of a widowed king pretending a marriage with his own child. In both cases the heroine escapes from home, assisted by a magical Animal Helper. An early fourteenth-century version as a non-magical novella is found in the Florentine collection Il Pecorone; there is also a loose connection to Straparola’s novella Tebaldo – the latter with, the former without the incest motif. Furthermore, the existence of the tale is one of several obstacles to Ruth B. Bottigheimer’s controversial theory that wonder tales were a sixteenth-century urban creation in print rather than a European oral tradition.

scholarly journals Spoken word corpus and dictionary definition for an African language

2020 ◽  
Vol Special Issue on Collecting,... (Digital humanities in...) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wanjiku Nganga ◽  
Ikechukwu Achebe
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
African Language ◽  
Oral Culture ◽  
Standard Practice ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Language Technology ◽  
Technology Tools ◽  
Oral Cultures

The preservation of languages is critical to maintaining and strengthening the cultures and identities of communities, and this is especially true for under-resourced languages with a predominantly oral culture. Most African languages have a relatively short literary past, and as such the task of dictionary making cannot rely on textual corpora as has been the standard practice in lexicography. This paper emphasizes the significance of the spoken word and the oral tradition as repositories of vocabulary, and argues that spoken word corpora greatly outweigh the value of printed texts for lexicography. We describe a methodology for creating a digital dialectal dictionary for the Igbo language from such a spoken word corpus. We also highlight the language technology tools and resources that have been created to support the transcription of thousands of hours of Igbo speech and the subsequent compilation of these transcriptions into an XML-encoded textual corpus of Igbo dialects. The methodology described in this paper can serve as a blueprint that can be adopted for other under-resourced languages that have predominantly oral cultures.

scholarly journals ‘WE ARE A STORY-TELLING PEOPLE’: AN EXPLORATION OF THE ORIGIN TALES IN THE ORAL NARRATIVES OF THE NAGAS AND THE KHASIS OF INDIA’S NORTH EAST

2020 ◽  
pp. 141-149
Author(s):  
Payel Dutta Chowdhury
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Oral Narratives ◽  
Distinguishing Characteristic ◽  
Easy Task ◽  
North East ◽  
The Social ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
Written Word ◽  
Roman Script

In the absence of a written literature and language for ages, the oral tradition was one of the distinguishing characteristic features of the various tribes of Nagaland and Meghalaya. In the case of the Khasis of Meghalaya, “…their alphabet is of very recent history, no older than when Thomas Jones, the Welsh Presbyterian missionary, introduced the Roman script in 1842, to form the essentials of the Khasi written word.” (Nongkynrih vii) For the Nagas, even the oral dialects spoken by the different indigenous tribes are different and hence, it was not an easy task to keep the oral tradition alive amidst so much of diversity. The origin tales that find mention in the oral narratives of both the Nagas and the Khasis play an important role in the comprehension of the unique culture and tradition of both the tribes. This paper is an attempt to explore the tales related to the origin of the Nagas and the Khasis, to explore their rich oral tradition, how these tales mirror the cultural identity of these tribes which have undergone several changes in today’s time and most importantly, to read in between the lines of the tales to explore their significance vis-à-vis the social and cultural make-up.

BODY SOUNDS

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 664-664
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Disease Process ◽  
The Body ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
Private World ◽  
The Mind

The effects of the stethoscope on physicians were analogous to the effects of printing on Western culture. Print and the reproducible book had created a new private world for man. He could isolate himself with the book and ponder its messages. As the sociologist David Riesman comments: "As long as the spoken or sung word monopolized the symbolic environment, it is particularly impressive; but once books enter that environment it can never be quite the same again—books are, so to speak, the gunpowder of the mind. Books bring with them detachment and a critical attitude that is not possible in an oral tradition." Similarly, auscultation helped to create the objective physician, who could move away from involvement with the patient's experiences and sensations, to a more detached relation, less with the patient but more with the sounds from within the body. Undistracted by the motives and beliefs of the patient, the auscultator could make a diagnosis from sounds that he alone heard emanating from body organs, sounds that he believed to be objective, bias-free representations of the disease process.

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