Things Fall Apart... Some of my thoughts...

While reading through Things Fall Apart, you can’t help but notice the importance placed on oral culture. Throughout the book, there are many traditions passed on through generations through speaking, whether it is songs, stories, or anything else. They told stories to get across a message or a moral and also to form common ground between families. Since they lived in such close quarters, telling the same stories over and over put everyone on a common level of knowledge. Story telling was also just something to do. There is no TV or internet in an oral culture. Stories are a source of entertainment, even with a moral or past history embedded in the story. They also had traditional songs they sang during certain times. Having these traditions within a culture kept everyone close and connected. The stories were their history. Whatever was passed on was all that was known about the past.

When the white missionaries came into the village, they were someone knew, with different ideas, different stories, and different traditions. Because they didn’t have any common ground, they did not mesh well. What the missionaries brought with them was change, a new way of doing things. They measured time in terms of weeks, or based on certain days of religious importance, rather than based on seasons or market weeks. They did not speak the same language as the Ibo tribe which was a huge barrier in communication, oral communication being key in the Ibo culture. With various differences between the two groups of people, the problem that arises is a resistance to change within the Ibo tribe. You notice that those with higher societal status are very resistant to adapting to the ways of the missionaries, such as Okonkwo. It is the outcasts who first join in the ways of the white people.

When the Ibo people begin to adapt to what the missionaries believe, they are leaving behind their old traditions. No more story telling or singing of traditional Ibo songs. They have to learn a new language and take up new traditions. They are no longer a part of their native culture.

LIteracy...

So, reading through the second half of Orality and Literacy I began to think of all the ways literate cultures are at an advantage over solely oral cultures. There is a means by which to look things up, anyone with access can study things, we can build on the past instead of reinventing the wheel over and over, and the list goes on and on.

We discussed most these things in class today, and these ideas are all touched upon at some point in the book.

What I didn't really think about much, until we discussed it in class, were the disadvantages of writing things down. But there are quite of few of those as well. When speaking to someone, most of your meaning and emotion is usually implied through gestures, facial expressions, and tone of voice. So, when writing something down, how are you to personalize things so the person reading them can feel your emotion through the text. We have come up with expressions to use in writing for this exact reason, such as exclamation points to show excitement or capitalization to show anger. Overall though, I think with text, part of the personal meaning is lost in the medium.

Also, with anyone and everyone publishing books or websites or anything else with textual content, how are we to know what is True? Who can we believe? Or can we believe anyone? This is something that is kinda scary to think about. Most anyone these days can get online and post a website which looks professional and may sound professional. But without comparing what one person says to several other sources, there is no real way to prove one persons content as the real Truth. Crazy.

Yes, the pros definitely outweigh the cons in this entire situation. If the alphabet would never have been invented leaving us with still no written languages, who knows where we would be today. If we would not be able to recall back as far into history and build on things that have already happened and already been figured out, it is not unlikely to think that we would still be living in a primitive culture with no highly critical thinking taking place.

I must say, I am glad I live in a literate society with a written language.

Orality and Literacy...

When I finished reading the first half of Orality and Literacy, it made me think about different cultures.

I quickly began to compare our society with an oral culture.

Lets take a young college student, one of us, going to a completely oral society. No books. No internet. No magazines. Nothing to read. At all. What you hear is all you know. Comparing this to our lives, we can quickly see that any of us would have trouble coping. With the way our society functions today, our minds go a mile a minute. We have short attention spans. It’s hard for some of us to pay attention to one thing for longer than a few minutes. This would not go over well in an oral society. You cannot use the excuse that if you miss something in lecture, you can just look it up in your textbook. There would be no text book for you to use. Insane.

One of the characteristics listed in chapter 3 explains that oral societies are very redundant in what they say. This is because if you miss what someone says you cannot ‘look it up’. By being repetitive, they can ensure no one misses anything. Or so they hope.

But what if they do miss something?? What happens then? Stories began to change. People add in their own ideas, or just leave things out when they forget. This raises the question as to how much stories changed before they began to be written down. How much of our history do we not know? Until the first person wrote down the history of humans, stories could have changed a few times or a hundred times. No one really knows for sure. But we do know, that since the first literate culture, we have some documented history. And now, even if stories change, we can ‘look it up’ and figure out the truth.

I think many of us depend on being able to look things up and if we would have to go to an oral society, I am not sure how any of us would survive.