Rethinking oral tradition

I have been thinking for a while about the concept of oral tradition and the way that this ties in with folk music and with cultural identity. With my last post also talking about tradition and culture, now seemed like a good time to try to sum up the musings I have made so far.

Wikipedia tells us that, "Oral tradition, oral culture and oral lore is cultural material and traditions transmitted orally from one generation to another." It also says that sociologists have a tendency to, "emphasize a requirement that the material is held in common by a group of people, over several generations" but I find this somewhat lacking, and perhaps limiting for modern culture.

Oral tradition refers to song, story and knowledge that is passed on without the use of written forms (for example, music that is learned by ear instead of by reading music notation). Before most people could read or write (and before music notation had been devised) oral tradition was the only way that information could be transmitted. In some cultures, it was a specialised role of certain people to memorise and perform the information (e.g. bards).

The questions in my mind were these:

1. In today's "information age", where not only written, but digital sound, images and video can be transmitted at ease, is there any meaningful definition for oral tradition, and if so, what is it?
2. How can one tell whether or not a particular song, story or piece of information has become part of the oral tradition of a culture, and is it possible for that to happen nowadays?

Oral tradition is clearly a part of the theory of memes, and was once the primary mode of transmission of memes both within a community and between communities.

Of course, "meme" is a common term in bloggery, and can be used to refer to little quizzes and games that get passed around the internet, as well as popular tweets or images that are frequently reposted around blogs and services like tumblr and twitter. But I think that it is fair to say that retweeting someone is not the same as participating in oral tradition in any way. A tweet, or a blog image, or a youtube video, is reproduced without any involvement of the person, and there is no oral transmission involved at all.

Some things do exist that originated in the information age and that at least occasionally result in oral transmission: these are urban legends. Some of these, at least, do seem to cross generations, as well as being told primarily in an oral way - campfire horror stories are another such thing (and it seems as though often those overlap quite a lot in terms of thematic content with urban legends). But, given that these often move into recorded media and back again (for instance, the movie franchise of "Urban Legend" recorded and developed a horror story based on urban legends coming true; undoubtedly some people who saw the movie learned at least one legend they hadn't heard before) how much can we say of such stories can be attributed to oral tradition, and how much to written or recorded media? Does the distinction matter?

Setting aside what might be called "traditional" ideas about oral tradition (such as the sociologists' emphasis), what criteria can we identify that might help us pinpoint a useful way of looking at oral tradition?

Taking the biological analogy by which Richard Dawkins developed the theory of memes, it might be suggested that, just as a successful organism is one that produces grandchildren, so a successful meme is one that produces a third generation - that is, it is one that not only is heard, but then is repeated to a third party independently.

That term, "generation", also appears in the definition of oral tradition cited above, although there not talking about an information reproduction generation, but of a biological reproduction generation. However, it seems tricky for me to understand what distinguishes sociologically one generation from the next. I think about the defining moments of my lifetime, as I see them, and a lot of them are meaningless to people just ten years younger than me. Some of them would be fairly peripheral to people just five years younger than me. Likewise, someone five or ten years older than me would probably have quite clear childhood memories of something like the 1984 Miners' Strike, which to me is a peripheral memory from personal experience and only known from others' later testimony. When one is growing up, a person just a year or two older can seem to be in a completely different social class.

So, I want to say that oral tradition should use information reproduction as the basis, although temporal sustainability should also be a factor.

So my first criterion for oral tradition is simply that a song, story or piece of information should tend to be re-transmitted by the hearer, just like any other meme: it has to have produced at least one further transmission.

How long should the timeframe be? A good test of sustainability is that re-transmission tends to happen if the information is still felt to be relevant and therefore worthy of passing on. When technological changes were relatively slow, information that was relevant in one century might still be relevant in the next, for many reasons, so several biological generations might be needed to see if something will persist in oral tradition. Nowadays, it seems as though technological advances come every 5 years or so, and the social playing field seems to shift accordingly. The life of an oral tradition meme might therefore be measured in much shorter terms, and in terms of generational elements might be tested over a decade or two instead of a century or two.

This song was written for the first Gulf War. It seems that it remains as relevant now, some 20 years later (see some of the images in the video for evidence of that!). Youtube has performances by other artists, although I saw no evidence for it producing a third generation:



There is a hint of another criterion that I feel must be included, in my earlier remark about retweeting and reblogging stuff. I noted then that these did not seem like "oral tradition" in any worthwhile sense, because there is no involvement of the person in it - there is no oral transmission involved.

It seems to me to be an inherent part of oral tradition that it has some personal involvement with the information to be transmitted, that it should require that a person taking part in oral tradition should also have learnt the information and internalised it to some extent. It is not sufficient that zie should have liked it enough to copy-paste it into a new tweet or blog post. Zie should have made it a part of hirself. When we are talking about song or story, that invariably means learning it to the point of being able to present one's own performance of the story or song.

So, I want to put as my third criterion for oral tradition, that the means of producing a third generation should be by a new, personalised, performance of the original material. For instance, if someone heard my version of Talis Kimberley's "Ladybird Year" and was moved to learn the song themselves, then that would mean the song had produced a third generation.

I have always felt that it would be the proudest moment of my life if someone sang one of my songs to me, when I knew that they had never heard my original version. That would mean that someone else had liked it enough to learn it, and then sing it to this person who was now singing it back to me, because that person liked the someone's version enough to want to learn my song.

So, the criteria I want to use are as follows:

1. An oral tradition element must be able to produce memetic grandchildren
2. It must be able to do so even after social changes seem to have altered the scene since its original transmission
3. Transmission must be personalised, and effectively retain an oral element from the transmitter

In the modern age, as you may already have spotted from my referencing a youtube video of mine as a possible step in an oral tradition lineage, I feel that an oral performance can be in the form of performing into a recording device. While my recording will persist, and could (of course) be looked up by any later generation in that lineage, the idea in my mind is that such recordings now represent just another way of transmitting an oral performance from one person to another. As long as a person heard and learned the song not from the original source, but from the second generation source, then their new performance represents a third generation. Songs reach wider audiences through these technological means, yes, but equally the means of reproduction (i.e. the human mind and its attraction to and use for the song) remains the same, and the personal involvement in the tradition remains the same.

What if someone hears my version of Ladybird Year, and then decides they want to learn it based on my performance, but before learning it decides to look up the original? Arguably, the songs memetic information has already produced the grandchild based on my performance, and the new performer's research does not change the fact that hir mind is the third generation of the meme. But for oral tradition, the new performer is now going to produce a performance that is a descendant of the original performance, and not necessarily of mine. My inclination is to say that either interpretation is valid, depending on what angle seems important to you.

Some might object that oral tradition elements do not have author credits, but these days it is possible to find out who wrote what song, and go straight to the original source. But to that, I would say that all songs must originally have had an author. The songs, stories and so on will change and evolve over time, perhaps, but someone originally came up with it. That we now know who originally wrote something does not mean that the song loses its oral tradition status - suppose I found some scrap of ancient parchment that identified the original author of some song attributed to "trad." Would we then feel that that song, which survived generation after generation of oral transmission, would then not be part of oral tradition? The key element of oral tradition is not whether or not some written record exists somewhere (otherwise, the Victorian era collectors would have put an end to oral tradition way back then!) but rather how the ideas are communicated and transmitted from one mind to the next. Is it by some written record, or is it by a live, oral, performance (whether face-to-face or via youtube or some other digitally recorded means)?

With these thoughts, I seem to have answered both questions that I posed at the start: both, "How can you tell if something has entered the oral tradition?" and, "What meaningful definition can be found for oral tradition in the information age?"

Here is an example of a recorded media that nevertheless has entered the oral tradition, by my definition:

I first heard (the chorus to) the Queen song "Bicycle Race" when I was 5 or 6, in the school playground. "I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike/ I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride it where I like!" was a perfect theme to capture the minds of young people - it was a meme well-adapted to that environment. I heard it from my peers at that age. The song was written and released before I was born. I don't know where my peers heard the song, but either way, I must have represented at least the third generation from the original recording and I reproduced the meme (that is, I sang those words many times myself). Therefore, by my definition, the song had at that point become part of the oral tradition. It had also, self-evidently, crossed generations (although it's hard to see what social changes could render the bicycle bits irrelevant, as far as my generation were concerned the verses such as "I don't want to be a candidate/ for Vietnam or Watergate" referenced things that were deep in the past already).

Clearly, I am at odds with traditional views of oral tradition. This is because I feel that those views are conservative, and they also seem to me to stand as a way to other indigenous culture and to divorce modern populations from their roots and traditions. By making "oral tradition" something that could only happen in the past, it makes it harder for people now to feel involved in the tradition or to add to the recognised history of their people - to feel as though it is living now, and something that belongs to them as much as it did to their forebears. I think that stuff that is created now can be seen to enter oral tradition, and moreover, can be seen by its creators to enter oral tradition. Oral tradition is a way for a people now to lay claim to their heritage outside of the commodified cultural structures of global capital, and that necessarily means allowing people to shape and own their heritage by adding to it as well as preserving it. (That's why this post is tagged as "radicalised democrat", btw.)

I say that things like youtube actually aid in the development of new oral tradition, and that people who resist it in the name of "copyright protection" are fighting a losing battle against human nature and human will for social engagement with one another. The parodies and posts of such material are ways for people to reclaim cultural relevance for themselves.