Episode 40 | Oral Traditions and Memory

From The Knowledge Architects: Building Wisdom in the Information Age · 18:16

Show by ElysFlow

AI-generated audio: the two voices and their conversation in this episode are created by AI. The hosts are not real people.How we make it: our team chooses each topic and edits the audio. The research and these notes are drafted with AI and read by us before publishing.Why AI? It lets us bring peer-reviewed science to you for free, in English and German. Sources are below.Episode SummaryIn 1935 an illiterate singer named Avdo Međedović dictated an epic poem of 12,311 lines, about as long as Homer's Odyssey. His source was a printed version of 2,160 lines that a friend had read aloud to him five or six times. For most of human history, knowledge had no shelf. Writing is about 5,000 years old, our species roughly 300,000, and about 3,000 of the world's languages are probably still unwritten today. So how do people store, check and pass on large bodies of knowledge without writing anything down? In this episode we answer the question Episode 39 left open, and test five popular claims about oral tradition against the evidence.The answer is not that people in oral cultures had better memories. Nothing shows that. They had better memory systems. Rhythm, rhyme and meaning narrow down each next word until there is almost no choice left. Singers compose in performance instead of reciting a fixed text. Listeners who know the material correct the performer, and genealogies tend to drop what no longer matters. We follow these systems from the Muses, daughters of Memory, and the Greek reciters who knew all of Homer, to the Aboriginal songlines that carry law and knowledge across Country, to the Vedic chanting that has kept the wording of the Rigveda essentially fixed for some 3,000 years, and to a canoe that found Tahiti without instruments. Along the way we check the famous numbers: no songline has been dated to 40,000 years, but fireplaces that match a GunaiKurnai ritual are 11,000 and 12,000 years old. And we reread Plato's warning in the Phaedrus. The king in Socrates' story did not say that writing would destroy memory. He said that people would stop practising it, and that writing would give them reminders instead of memory, and the appearance of knowing instead of knowing.Key Topics CoveredThe scale of the question: writing's 5,000 years against roughly 300,000 years of our species, and the thousands of languages still unwritten todayWhat counts as oral tradition in Jan Vansina's definition, and why "oral" does not mean "before writing"David Rubin's multiple constraints: meaning, imagery and sound together leave almost no choice for the next word, and a rhyme plus a meaning retrieved the target word 97% of the time"Eenie, meenie, miney, mo," "The Wreck of the Old 97," and students who "corrected" a ballad back to a line they had never heardMilman Parry, Albert Lord and the South Slavic epic singers: composing in performance, and what "word for word" means to a singerVerbatim or generative? Ian Hunter's 50 word criterion and Jack Goody's recordings of the BagreThe exceptions: checks by other people, interlocking patterns and very strict forms; and melody, which helps only when it repeatsStructural amnesia: Tiv genealogies, the founder of Gonja whose seven sons became five, and Vansina's objectionVansina's floating gap, and Walter Ong's "think memorable thoughts"Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, and Homer by heart: Niceratus, the rhapsodes and the relay at the Panathenaic festivalSimonides before Cicero: the Parian Marble, Callimachus and PlinyThe oldest surviving Greek memory manual: vivid images but, in what survives, no places, which first appear in AristotleSpensithios of Crete, appointed around 500 BCE to "write" and to "remember" for his citySonglines in Aboriginal terms: Tjukurpa as map and law, and the Seven Sisters songlines across three desertsLynne Kelly's thesis: songlines as memory systems laid out on Country, monuments such as Stonehenge as memory spaces, and how reviewers received itThe 40,000 year claim: why the age of a culture is not the age of a songline, and the current debate on when people reached AustraliaThe one published classroom test of an Aboriginal memory method: 76 medical students and 20 butterfly namesHow long can a story last? Cloggs Cave, stories of a drowning coast, Budj Bim, Crater Lake, and a folktale that may go back to the Bronze AgeThe sceptics: David Henige, Peter Hiscock, and stories that may explain a landscape rather than remember an eventVedic recitation as error correction, and what it does not preserveMau Piailug's 1976 voyage on the Hōkūleʻa, and etak, the Micronesian navigators' fiction that the islands moveRed giant stars that brighten and fade in two South Australian traditions, firehawk raptors reported to spread fire, and 1,625 Hanunóo plant typesMemory objects: the Luba lukasa and the Andean khipuPlato's Phaedrus: Theuth, Thamus and an elixir "not of memory, but of reminding"Writing that cannot answer back, what Plato concedes to writing, and why he puts…

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