Communication in Orality and the Advent of Writing

The greatest division of this kind was between those who could read and those who could not, a division that applied not only to cultures, literate and nonliterate, but to individuals within societies, literate and illiterate. For the first five thousand years of the history of writing until the end of the nineteenth century, writing was (with a few, marginal exceptions) acquired only by a minority of the population. In many ways, the literate minority made most of the running intellectually. They were responsible for the written religion, for the schools, the administration, the written works of literature, drama, music, and poetry, producing and communicating many of the dominant ideas. The rest of the population were, of course, affected by these developments, for example, by way of the "Bible of the Poor," through images; their intellectual apparatus was also influenced by techniques such as "oral arithmetic," which it took writing to invent. And they had their own, often vigorous, "popular" culture that was in turn affected by the narratives produced by the literates and in turn impinged upon the latter's achievements. But as far as most literate activities were concerned, they played very much a subordinate role. Only with the gradual extension of education, based on learning to read and write, was this situation largely changed.

It has been claimed by some recent writers, unwilling to accept the absence of writing in, for example, Africa, that any visual signs, even memory traces, represent writing. Such a position is held by certain well-meaning persons who wish to play down intellectual differences of the kind that are embodied in Levy-Bruhl's notion of a "primitive mentality" that failed to perceive contradiction, were prelogical, and resorted to mystical participation. Such notions need to be set aside, as was done by the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard in the work on Azande witchcraft where he tried to demonstrate that their ideas about witchcraft were in fact "logical." One specific case he took was the Azande explanation for why a man was killed by a brick falling off a wall as he passed underneath; the Azande would not accept the notion of an accident, insisting that some person or force had mystically caused the brick to drop at that particular time.

Certainly his position could not be considered "prelogical" in Levy-Bruhl's terms. On the other hand, that logic had in turn to be differentiated from the "logic" of Greek philosophers and others, which depended critically on developments in the written sphere, in the formality that characterizes the treatment and composition of written statements such as the syllogism. While embryonic forms may exist in oral discourse, the syllogism itself, a is to b and so on, must be considered as a product of writing that in this way extends and elaborates the range of "technologies of the intellect" available to humans. Equally one can posit that many notions of mathematics, anything except simple multiplication and division, are, unlike addition and subtraction, dependent upon the written mode. So the advent of writing does not simply allow the communication of ideas but strongly influences the nature of the ideas to be communicated.