Sharing Oral Traditions

The introduction above sketches an expansive definition of oral tradition, using the term to refer to any form of knowledge transmitted in a regular way between generations verbally. This definition, while broad, does distinguish between oral tradition and oral history. Researchers (who need not be professional historians or scholars) elicit oral history by interviewing informants. Oral history is information about the past that is spoken only in the context of personal memory. Generally, it includes life histories and personal recollections. It can include information told to an informant by others, such as parents. In the context of collecting oral histories, though, the research may also collect oral traditions.

While the expansive definition also allows for the existence of oral tradition in societies with literacy, oral traditions are usually associated with "preliterate" societies. In such societies, information can be passed on only through oral means. All known societies have oral texts that validate a moral order. Many have texts that depict the proper relationships between groups within a community and often with those outside a community. To the extent that social divisions exist, component groups often have their own form of traditions. In particular, women quite often have a distinctive body of oral texts circulated only among themselves. In addition to traditions that bind a community together, some types of traditions celebrate hierarchy and power. In particular, praise songs—panegyrics—not only signify power and prestige during the honoree's lifetime but often become eulogies remembered long afterward. Finally, great narratives, epics, and sagas served to tell the story of heroes and founders, of creators and minions.

Even when literacy emerged and spread, knowledge often continued to be transmitted and developed orally. Only elites often had extensive literacy in large parts of the world for long periods of time. While they might codify the epics into scripture and history, oral traditions often remained alive as folk wisdom and oral literature. Sometimes, oral traditions served as ideological justifications for counterhegemonic movements among subject classes or communities. Often, a complex interplay developed between oral and literate traditions. Even after the rise and spread of mass literacy, oral tradition has continued to play an important role in helping create popular, folk, and subaltern identities; however, the interaction between oral and literate in those cases often becomes more intimate and immediate.

The broad definition of oral tradition used here does not deny that there are sharp differences between situations where the only means of transmission of information is through oral communication and those where oral transmission serves as a refuge for a group in some way marked different from the rest of society. This definition, though, sees the differences more in terms of genre and function, than in terms of oral and literate societies or oral and literate people.