Sharing Oral Traditions

Over the course of the last two centuries, scholars have developed three distinct approaches to the study of oral traditions. One, the oldest, sees oral traditions as "oral literature" or "folklore" and promotes analysis on literary and humanistic elements, often focusing on comparative analysis. The second sees oral traditions as expressions of cultural values and norms. Anthropologists, especially ethnographers, analyze such traditions as functional promoters of group solidarity or structuralist explanations for the workings of society. Scholars working in both of these approaches focus little on the historical veracity of traditions and sometimes argue they contain no historically valid information. Historians, particularly of preliterate societies, on the other hand, attempt to derive from oral traditions historically valid evidence. All three approaches complement one another. Understanding the cultural and historical context of an epic enriches the appreciation of it as literature. Ethnographic analysis requires historical grounding and an understanding of the importance of performance. Historical analysis must take into account both the performative aspects of oral tradition and the cultural structuring that occurs in it.

Two issues, however, often divide students of oral traditions. One is the perceived difference between oral and literate societies. Some scholars argue that literate societies promote entirely different ways of comprehending the world than do those without or with only limited literacy. Oral traditions transmit knowledge in metaphor and ahistorical essences. Critics of this approach maintain that it minimizes the creativity and logical ability of people in preliterate societies. The second main issue dividing scholars is the historical validity of oral traditions. Many suggest they have none, that oral traditions are so attuned to the present that all information about the past is structured beyond relevance. Other scholars argue that properly understood oral traditions do transmit historically valid evidence.

The first field that developed around what is now called oral traditions was that of folklore. Folklorists sought to collect oral texts both from societies perceived as nonliterate as well as from among marginalized groups in literate societies. In the nineteenth century the field became tied with the Romantic project of recovering the "true" culture of the nations of Europe. In its less politicized form, folklore turned to the comparative method, seeking to show relationships between epics and tales found in different parts of the world. Early folklorists tended to work in Western societies, although by the middle of the twentieth century many had begun to work with non-Western oral literatures, bringing their emphasis on textual analysis to oral literatures hitherto the domain of ethnographers.

Folklore studies became the study of oral literature as the works of Milman Parry and his student Alfred Lord dramatically transformed the field in the first half of the twentieth century. Parry and Lord collected epics and songs among the Muslims of Bosnia. Their work, most famously elaborated in Lord's Singer of Tales, generally saw epics as literature composed in performance but based on a formula that used meter to string together episodes and clichés from a common fund of such tales. Each performance, then, is different, and performers do introduce innovation, often to fit a particular audience. Epics, however, retain a broad stability over long periods of time. Lord, in particular, used the Iliad and the Odyssey as models for epics, and the great questions they sought to answer concerned the actual "authorship" of such epics. Later scholars, such as Walter Ong and Werner Kelber, brought this approach to biblical studies.

Later scholars have criticized this oral literature approach for emphasizing textual analysis over context. The explicitly comparative approach minimizes the cultural and historically specific circumstances that have called forth the production of oral literature. They have charged that the importance placed on the difference between orality and literacy in the remembrance and performance of oral literature reduces it to a "formula" that denies the creativity of performers and the ways in which oral historians generate their histories.

Anthropologists, especially those engaged in ethnography, have also long used oral traditions as sources for their analyses of cultures and societies. Like folklore, anthropology originated as the study of a phenomenon outside the perceived mainstream of "Western civilization" in the nineteenth century. It began as the study of "primitive" societies. During the twentieth century, it quickly evolved into the study of culture broadly defined. As such, ethnographies have continued to draw heavily on a variety of genres of oral traditions in their efforts to portray culture.

Like folklorists, anthropologists have deemphasized the historicity of oral traditions. They have seen them functionally as means of promoting group solidarity and defining social norms. As such, they have seen them as entirely flexible, altered to suit changing circumstances. By the 1960s, the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss came to dominate such views. His argument that much of culture itself, as well as the expressions that defined and underpinned it, was structurally determined led to such important studies as Luc de Heusch's The Drunken King.

Starting in the late 1950s, the rise of new fields of historical studies led to a movement among historians to reevaluate oral sources for history. In particular, historians engaged in trying to recover a usable past for African societies, as nations on the continent began to emerge from colonialism, turned to oral traditions to recover a precolonial past often derided by colonial sources. Jan Vansina pioneered the collection of oral traditions, by which he meant mostly epics. In addition, the widespread epic tale of the founder of the kingdom of Mali, Sundiata, also attracted scholarly attention. The epic, performed by casted bards, griots in French or jeli in Mande, among many of the Mande-speaking peoples, tells of the founding of the empire in the thirteenth century and yet continues to be performed as a living oral tradition in the early twenty-first century.

Over the 1960s and 1970s, historians scoured Africa for oral traditions and produced works of incredible subtlety and incredible naïveté. While very few historians argued for the literalness of oral traditions as history, some took a more critical look at the context of the production of oral tradition than others. Ruth Finnegan, a leading folklorist, felt compelled to take historians to task for such naïveté. By the 1980s, historians had refined their approach to oral traditions. Some, such as David William Cohen, had moved close to a structuralist position. Vansina himself reworked his position on the collection of traditions, and many of his students showcased their work in The African Past Speaks, edited by Joseph Miller. Many scholars focused on the range of ways that historical information passed from generation to generation and the uses to which it was put. Since many African societies lack epic traditions, scholars have learned to use historical anecdotes, songs, stories, and life histories in innovative ways to answer questions about the past. These innovations have gone on to inform oral historical approaches in other areas and general historical debates about popular memory and history.