Sharing Oral Traditions

In a narrow sense, the rise of mass literacy and its spread (although still incomplete) across the globe has transformed the role of oral traditions in society. Just as happened in ancient Greece around 800 B.C.E., so it has happened repeatedly that when an epic is reduced to writing, it ceases to change. Written versions, with their stability, become orthodox, canonical versions. Yet, to see the gradual decline in importance of oral epics as the end of oral tradition takes much too narrow a view of the importance of the field. In some places, epics retain important functions and continue to be performed. The descendants of the royal griots of Mali who perform the full epic of Sundiata in a ritual reroofing of his shrine every seven years remain adamant that only they know the full version and that the transcriptions made over the years by many writers and scholars are pale glosses on the fullness of the epic.

More to the point, oral traditions in many parts of the world, including many communities in Western, wealthy, and industrialized nations, remain vibrant ways of expressing group solidarity. Oral traditions in the form of stories and songs continue to circulate widely in many communities as alternative takes on the world and its workings. They often express counterhegemonic tendencies and sometimes focus on communalism. They exist in situations where literate and especially formal discourse is dominated by state power.

Oral traditions have served to place humanity in the universe and to explain the workings of the world to humanity. The narrative mode of explanation embodied in the epic is a big part of what makes us human. But also the other genres of oral literature—the song, the riddle, the praise poem, the proverb, the genealogy—help delineate social relationships that define human society. Oral tradition remains the most immediate, the most "natural" way for humans to bring past and present together.