Culture Shock

I’ve read Things Fall Apart previously, but I was reading it from a related, but different perspective. So, going over events and themes found in the text using the filter of things discussed in class and written in Orality and Literacy resulted in a slightly different interpretation of the effects of technology and literacy on oral cultures.

While reading this as part of a class concerned with globalization, I came away with an impression of how wider cultural shifts arose from interaction and exchange with more technologically advanced and non-native cultures. As noted above, this is related to this class, but this time I tried to look at the aspects of and interplay between oral and literate languages/cultures.

I came away seeing many parallels between how the two systems worked, but I’ll try to focus a bit more on the differences in an effort to highlight the differences and/or impact that written language seemed to have.

Before reviewing the text, one of my first inclinations was to consider the dissemination of information between various groups. However, that seems the same if we take more advanced modes of transportation out of the picture. For example,  if something happens in village A in an oral culture, someone has to go to another tribe to spread the story and then that person either goes to the next village or lets someone from village B spread the info to village C and so. However, even with written information this sequential process still has to take place, but in theory the consistency of the message between points A and Z remains intact where there may be embellishment or whatnot.

While there isn’t an inherit “speed” in communicating information in literate societies, there is an improved fidelity from one step to another in the literate culture. It could be argued that this enhanced fidelity creates greater efficiency in explaining things or carrying out orders. If we look at page 89 of Things Fall Apart, we see how the literate culture (English) are able to wield power from afar through the presumed use of written accounts/orders (I realize how making an assumption in this case could be problematic, but it’s not an unreasonable assumption or one made completely outside the context of the story) by punishing (hanging) Umuofians who committed some transgression against the church. On the other hand, we see that the native Mbantans, who relied on oral communication, did not view messages that were passed from village to village with any seriousness. In fact, they viewed them as “fairy tales” because there was no immediate example to refer to nor did there appear to be any confirmation of the danger presented by the new government from elders or oracles in the tribe.

By building upon this idea of verisimilitude in written documents and its absence in “common” oral accounts, it may be possible to see a level of democratization (of authority and information) in the English culture. Granted, messages still had to come from a center of power, but the ability to communicate this authority via written document allows for the rapid designation of delegates to carry out and/or share information in the name of the king, church, etc. The natives featured in Things Fall Apart did not have this system because authority in the tribe could only be developed through a life of hard work and demonstrating success and wisdom, a process which obviously takes many years, if not generations. This means that not just anyone was able to communicate something and expect others to trust it; as a result we see how the English were able to take advantage of the Umuofians’ relative centralization of information and employ a greater level of decentralization to completely upset, destabilize, and disorganize the long held and carefully cultivated systems in an oral culture.

Matter of Time

I kind of feel like I am repeating myself in this blog post, but this feels like it is going to be more about the discrepancy/discrepancies between an oral and literate world. Not surprising considering that this is the intent of Ong’s argument, but it does make my posts feel redundant. However, in an effort to appear slightly more diverse, I’ll try to focus on Ong’s discussion of oral (memory) records vs. written.

Throughout the last half of the text, chapter 4 onward, Ong repeatedly touched on the isolation and intellectual disengagement from texts. He does not posit that texts are less intellectually stimulating or worse for intellectual discovery/discourse, but the reader is necessarily disengaged and cannot enter into discourse with the author.  This distance from the author is most obviously due to gaps in time or space. It is possible to read a text and agree, disagree, or “argue” with an author, but in literate cultures this moves into the realm of the abstract and has to reason things within one’s own mind or with one’s peers who are familiar with the same text. Literates are no longer presented with an opportunity to immediately interact with the primary author or orator and hash out new conclusions on the spot. Again, this isn’t a wholly negative situation because the advance of literacy allowed for the proliferation of additional documents which may support, refute, or otherwise build upon or contribute to a conversation that would not have otherwise been available.

Beyond changing the way literate cultures become involved and engage with new information, Ong also addresses how oral records had and in some cases still have more veracity than written.

Ong writes, “Witnesses were prima facie more credible than texts because they could be challenged and made to defend their statements” (95). This applies to the situation noted previously in which one can’t confront the person he disagrees with. We also see this hold over in our modern legal system where an individual’s spoken statement in court carries more weight than one that may be written.

 In the same section of the text, Ong also addresses how literacy ultimately shaped the conception of time in our own and other literate cultures. In oral cultures only the most scholarly or those individuals entrenched in a church were concerned with the specific year and/or where they fit in the wider timeline. However as record keeping evolved and engagement with these “distant” texts evolved most everyone became aware of a uniform time system and where they fit on that timeline. One could also argue that this led to the widespread ability or desire to abstract one’s future rather than living day to day. With the spread of technology and literacy things became a little more amorphous, but also finite. Ideas built upon previous ideas are increasingly ethereal, but things may be codified, organized, and otherwise delineated to give a sense of finality or what not.

Ong goes on to cover a ton of other topics in these final chapters (including something as simple, but important as how we scan things with our eyes), but I found the above points to be quite interesting and illustrative of how profound the spread of literacy has been in human society.

Writing, Orality, and Thought

These first three chapters were indeed dense. Not in a bad way, but after finishing chapter 3 I am left feeling that I need to “rest” like a bard and incorporate all these ideas into an existing framework. There is a lot of information and many topics to discuss, but I kept coming back to the overarching idea about how tremendously writing has effected not only the culture of literate societies, but thought processes in general.
As noted in class and in Orality and Literacy the presence of written words in is a relative aberration considering that thousands of languages exist, but only a couple hundred of those spoken languages have written counterparts. It is amazing out fundamentally the introduction of written words (technology) have irrevocably changed things (after all, we can’t unsee what we’ve already seen) and led those cultures with written language down a completely different conceptual path. In written cultures, there is obviously permanence to things once they have been committed to paper, stone, hard drive, etc, but the fact that technology has delivered this level permanence is relatively new and seems somewhat stifling in comparison.
Granted, one has the ability to refer to past works exactly as they were originally devised, there is the ability to store and build upon complex ideas that may have been lost in the oral record, and it could be argued that there is more “truth” or objectivity in written texts, but this greatly impacts an individual’s ability to filter information. Why filter things if we don’t need to remember them, because we can keep them all and review them as we please? However, this seems to take away a degree of dynamism from the language and thought. All the chaff is kept and written languages begin to hold on to irrelevant definitions, words, and concepts.
As noted above, writing provides a common framework so someone in the present can comprehend something from the past, but the static nature of texts makes this a questionable assessment. I write this because verbiage and context can change dramatically over time, but the original text remains the same without an orator/narrator to recontextualize that information and make it more accessible/understandable for their time and community. Depending on where and when a line was written and recorded, its meaning can vary greatly. In an oral society, there is someone to mediate this message and communicate the original intent even if the words differ.
 I’m not saying that oral cultures are better or worse, I happen to think that having an available written archive is incredibly advantageous, but purely oral languages have and had a much more fluid system that does not chain people to the concepts of the past like written languages seem to do. While there may be less truth and more subjectivity in the information shared in the society, orality allows for completely different thought processes and additional abilities to filter information that have traditionally been lost in written cultures, but are becoming increasingly important as technology and literacy evolve today and in the future.