Quotes About Oral culture

There is no real agreement among scholars as to whether Homer and Hesiod were contemporaries or whether Homer came a hundred or so years later or earlier. How could there be, given that both poets recited and sang in an oral culture.

Though alien to modern thinking, we need to reckon with the possibility that written forms are not necessarily significantly more enduring or reliable. In other words, it may be wrong to presume that Jesus' words suddenly became more permanent when recorded in written form, as if our textual culture is better at preserving truth than their oral culture.

The role of listeners has never been fully appreciated. However, it is well known that most people don't listen. They use the time when someone else is speaking to think of what they're going to say next. True Listeners have always been revered among oral cultures, and prized for their rarity value; bards and poets are ten a cow, but a good Listener is hard to find, or at least hard to find twice.

It was the encounter between the printed page and the oral culture, of which he was one embodiment, that led Menocchio to formulate -first for himsel, later for himself, later for his fellow villagers, and finally for the judges- the "opinions ... (that) came out of his head.

Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself. So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV—which is sort of an oral tradition.

It seems clear from the wider gospel tradition that Jesus considered love to have hermeneutical precedence in the interpretation of the Torah and to be the lodestar for his own activity,12 and, as T. W. Manson observes, in the oral culture of the day, "the only way of publishing great thoughts was to go on repeating them in talk and sermons."13

But intellectually, our ancestors' oral culture was in many ways a shallower one than our own.