Orality Orature Folklore Verbal Art

In this article, I analyze the experience and consequences of grief among the Ayoreo from the Paraguayan Chaco through the study of mourning songs. As a methodological proposal, I suggest that the study of verbal art in conjunction with an ethnography of everyday domestic life can provide clues to understanding the experience of grief and its relation to expected behavior. This study shows that grief among the Ayoreo can be socially disruptive if not dealt with properly, as songs depict grieving Ayoreo as opposite to healthy people in terms of sociability and expected role fulfillment.

Folklore research in the Czech Lands was properly institutionalized on academical level in the late 1940 and early 1950 when Department of Ethnography at the Charles University and Institute for Ethnography and Folkloristics at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences have been established. However, this period was also marked by relatively strong political pressure on the field, resulting in narrowing of research themes and exclusion of theoretical and methodological perspectives alternative to dogmatic Soviet Marxism (or, rather, Marxism-Leninism). The study argues that in the study of prosaic folklore (and verbal folklore in general), the situation was remarkably different, mostly because of strong tradition of comparative research and importance of international contacts of Czech folklorists (such as Karel Jaromír Erben, Jiří Polívka, Václav Tille or Jiří Horák) since the second half of the 19th century. Since the late 1950s, Czech folklorists such as Jaromír Jech or Oldřich Sirovátka were actively participating on international folkloristic projects, sometimes as the only ones from the Eastern/Soviet Bloc (such as ISFNR Legend Commission, or ISFNR and SIEF congresses held in Czechoslovakia in 1966). The field has also been in touch with contemporary developments of theory and methodology in folkloristics, resulting of several important studies published abroad (in the West) and continuing interest of international folklorists in Czech(oslovak) research, especially one done in the 1950s and 1960s and influenced by Russian (Proppian) formalism, functional structuralism, semiotics, or historical study of folktale and legend in general. This period of international cooperation ended because of political reasons in the early 1970s, resulting in isolation and partial decline of importance of Czech folkloristics which lasted to the beginning of the new millenium.

"The oldest records indicate that the performance of poetry in Gaelic Ireland was normally accompanied by music, providing a point of continuity with past tradition while bolstering a sense of community in the present. Music would also offer, particularly for poets writing in English from the eighteenth century onwards, a perceived authenticity, a connection with an older tradition perceived as being untarnished by linguistic and cultural division.

While providing an innovative analysis of theoretical work in music and literary studies, this book examines how traditional Irish music, including the related song tradition (primarily in Irish), has influenced, and is apparent in, the work of Irish poets. While looking generally at where this influence is evident historically and in contemporary Irish poetry, this work focuses primarily on the work of six poets, three who write in English and three who write primarily in the Irish language: Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Cathal Ó Searcaigh."

It has been argued by cognitionist critics that the context-dependent communicative attributes of oral literature confer on it an inferior status relative to writing in which meaning is made clear independent of the immediate referents; that oral literature and non-literate cultures are incapable of abstract thought, as in the written tradition. It has also been argued, etymologically, that oral literature, not being written, is a preposterous concept. This essay seeks to address those positions by answering the following three questions: Is there an oral literature? What are the peculiarities of oral literature? What is the nature of the difference between orality and literacy?

In the beginning, there was oral tradition. Before civilization and colonization, the word of mouth came rst. It exists in several forms; music, poetry, folklores, and praise songs and incantations. "Oral literature maybe defined as those utterances, whether spoken, recited or sung, whose composition and performance exhibit to an appreciable degree the artistic characteristics of accurate observation, vivid imagination and ingenious expressions" Nandwa and Bukenya every culture and ethnic society carry their own unique form of belief system; that's to say, they believe in their own ethnic gods, mythology, superstitions, legends, and folktales. These beliefs are the factors

Presentation delivered at Amazonicas VII in Baños, Ecuador, which took place from 28 May till 1 June 2018. The file is in .pdf format due to issues of compatibility, and hence attached media cannot be heard.

The Napo Runa are an ethnic group that inhabits Lowland Ecuadorian Amazon along the banks of the Napo River. They speak various dialects of Amazonian Kichwa, which are mutually intelligible, but differ substantially from Highland Ecuadorian Kichwa, mostly on the basis of their lexicon and phonology. The Napo Runa have a rich tradition of verbal art (cf. e.g. Uzendoski & Calapucha-Tapuy 2014), which includes unique styles of storytelling and a wide variety of ceremonial songs performed at different occasions. The speaking styles employed by the Napo Runa in storytelling and singing can differ substantially from the everyday use of language.

In this talk, we explore the stylistic differences between everyday use of language and ritual speech and the issues they raise for translation, in particular for machine-mediated translation. The point of departure for our discussion are Napo Runa wedding songs. They are traditionally performed by a virsaru - singer and drummer who improvises the song, and is accompanied by a violinist (for more details on the symbolism of Napo Runa weddings, see Uzendoski 2005: ch. 3). The wedding songs have a characteristic rhythm, in which each verse consists of 3 units of 4 syllables and a final 3-syllable unit. In this genre, both the word order and the pragmatically-motivated morphological marking are conditioned by the rhythm. A preliminary study based on a 13h corpus of Kichwa discourse has shown that the enclitic =ga, associated with topicality/presupposed information (cf. Grzech 2016a), occurs on verbal hosts (particularly on 1SG) much more frequently in wedding songs than in other genres. Moreover, in wedding songs =ga is much more prone to occur several times within the same clause than it is in any other genre, and it also co-occurs with epistemic authority enclitics =mi/=ma, in a combination judged as ungrammatical in any other context. The emphatic enclitic =ri also patterns differently in wedding songs. It is more frequent there than in  everyday discourse, and these songs are the only genre in which it was attested on adverbial hosts  (cf. Grzech 2016: ch.3).

This talk focuses on the issues that the unusual word order and clitic distribution in wedding songs causes for their translation into Spanish. We focus in particular on machine translation, relating our experience of creating a parallel corpus of Amazonian Kichwa and Spanish with the use of SDL Trados Studio software. The software detects strings of words which have previously been translated and automatically offers their translation into the target language - in this case, Spanish. Weddings songs are a good source material for machine translation, as they offer a lot of repetitions and frequent collocations. On the other hand, the more liberal use of discourse enclitics in this genre, as well as a specific rhythm, poses a challenge to the researchers overseeing the translation process. The use of enclitics has implication for the information structure within the text, so decisions need to be made as to how - and whether - these alterations are to be reflected in translation. The same applies to the rhythm, as the researcher needs to decide whether it is more important to reflect the stylistic features of this specific genre, or whether to focus chiefly on reflecting its meaning. We discuss and justify the choices we’ve made in both these respects.

The central focus of this article is the hikajat Sawitto (hS), a 12-page typed text in the Latin script and Malay language constructed in the 1930s from mainly oral Bugis sources. The hS provides an important insight into how the past was transmitted in South Sulawesi and the relationship between orality and writing. Discussion of the hS is framed within this broader context and begins with an overview of Bugis and Makasar historical prose works, focusing mainly on the few longer written compositions dating from the 17th, to the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and the factors that influenced their creation. Central to the article is the argument that these written works are not representative of Bugis and Makasar historical sources and that orality played the primary role in transmitting the past. The article further demonstrates how the hS was constructed from independent sources and what these sources can reveal about the history of Sawitto. An annotated translation of the hS is presented within the article and the original appended.

This paper explores parallelism as a phenomenon not restricted to language and poetic expression but rather something that may be manifested through any type of signs.

The first half of the paper concentrates on the relationship of parallelism to different orders of representation - i.e. verbalization, signs communicated verbally such as images and motifs, and higher order signs e.g. communicated through images and motifs as signs. This part considers both parallelism at these different orders of representation and also interactions and relations between them.

The second half of the paper outlines an approach to parallelism across different media (channels, modes) of performance as a mode of expression. This is complementary to the discussion of parallelism at different orders of representation and considers the rhythm of the performance mode as coordinating meters of verbal, musical etc. aspects of expression.

Examples are taken from mythological epic and ritual performance. A model is also presented for considering that the 'reality orientation' (Siikala 1978) associated with certain rituals as not only subjective to a performance specialist such as a shaman, but also interfaced with the 'performance arena' (Foley 1995) of a particular traditional practice.  According to this model, the activation of the performance arena is connected to a change in reality orientation, inciting participants / audiences to attend to the unseen world engaged through performance over empirical realities of immediate experience (even if each participant's subjective engages with the performance arena may vary).

Anáil an Bhéil Bheo brings together a stimulating range of interdisciplinary essays considering the connections between orality and modern Irish culture. From literature to song, folklore to the visual arts, contributors examine not only the connections between oral and textual traditions in Ireland, but also the theoretical concept of “orality” itself and the corresponding significance of oral texts in Irish society. Featuring work by emerging scholars in the fields of history, literature, folklore, music, women’s studies, film and theatre studies and disciplines contributing to Irish Studies, this multifaceted volume also includes contributions from scholars long engaged with issues of orality such as Gearóid Ó Crualaoich and Henry Glassie.

Parallelism may indeed be fundamental to poetic discourse, but the very degree to which it appears fundamental makes the concept as a whole challenging to pin down.  This is an introduction to the pre-print of working papers for the seminar-workshop Parallelism in Verbal Art and Performance (26-27 May 2014, Helsinki, Finland).  After introducing the event, it prefaces the working papers of this event with a review of some of the topics and themes that are found across them, as well as some of the significant questions concerning parallelism that connect and relate the different papers to one another.  This preliminary survey and discussion has two primary intentions as a prelude and introduction to Parallelism in Verbal Art and Performance.  The first is to survey some of the basic ground that is covered or addressed in individual papers and discussions as a preliminary frame in which the papers can be approached and deliberated.  The second is to stimulate thinking about parallelism and ways to relate perspectives from the different approaches offered by different materials and produced by focus on parallelism of different types.

How can expository preaching, rooted in a textual analysis of Scripture, be effectively utilized in oral cultures? In Expository Preaching in Africa, Ezekiel A. Ajibade engages this challenge directly, offering practical techniques for integrating African oral elements – such as myths, proverbs, folklore, dance, drama, poetry, and storytelling – into preaching that is both biblical and African. Alongside numerous examples and tools, Ajibade provides a rich overview of the nature of orality, the history and development of African preaching, and the reason biblical exposition must be central to gospel proclamation. He reminds us that it is the word of God, incarnated among us, that has the power to transform lives and revitalize nations. Contextualized expository preaching is not, therefore, one technique to be utilized among many; it is, rather, the heart of biblical teaching and the future of the African church. 

While contributing significantly to studies in contextualization and homiletics, this book is immediately applicable to practitioners, especially African preachers and those working in oral contexts.

Get the book here: https://langhamliterature.org/expository-preaching-in-africa
or here: https://www.amazon.com/Expository-Preaching-Africa-Effective-Proclamation-ebook/dp/B097H2WYZY

En este trabajo se analizan las fórmulas de apertura de un corpus de textos pertenecientes a la narrativa de tradición oral maya tojolabal, con una doble finalidad, describir sus elementos y la obligatoriedad de los mismos y analizar su función tanto literaria como pragmática. Este trabajo contribuye a probar que la narrativa tojolabal de tradición oral es un arte verbal que los propios narradores distinguen de la oralidad cotidiana mediante estas estructuras que enmarcan el comienzo y el fin de cada relato. También veremos cómo las fórmulas de apertura son estructuras convencionales con elementos comunes con cierto margen de variación compartidas por una comunidad cultural.

This paper analyzes the opening formulas of a set of Maya Tojolabal oral traditional folktales. It argues that oral traditional indigenous folktales constitute a verbal art that the narrators themselves distinguish from daily orality by framing the beginning and end of each story with these devices. The paper aims at both de- scribing these elements and their obligatory character, and analyzing their literary as well as pragmatic function. Also, it shows how opening formulas have common elements with a certain margin of variation. All this confirms the idea that the oral narrative tradition is a conventionalized verbal art, with certain aesthetic rules and variable elements that are common to a cultural community.

The study presents dynamic process of mythization and heroization of  Czech urban phantom of the Second World War usually called „Pérák“ (the Spring Man) connected with his gradual transition from communicative memory transferred by transgenerational transmission of oral tradition (in form of rumours, contemporary legends and memorates) to cultural memory consisting of symbolically interpreted artifacts of objectified culture (popular literature, comics, theatre, movies). This transition, influenced by various cultural processes which have taken place since 1946, could be characterized by increase of moral, ethical and ideological motivations of activities of this fictional character, including his gradual influence of mediasphere and public sphere since 2010.

This paper investigates the phenomenon of stand-up comedians performing in more than one language, which poses the question of whether and how they translate their material. Past research on stand-up comedy underlines its conversational nature, sometimes at the expense of recognising its content. Empirical evidence collected from interviews with bilingual stand-up comedians, on the other hand, suggests that they perform a form of oral self-translation, which implies a tertium comparationis, the transfer of content. The notion of mental text, borrowed from ethnography, is then productively used to define this content. As is then suggested, two types of memory, namely declarative and procedural, are involved in the memorisation of this mental text. The declarative part accounts for what is repeatable across performances and is the part involved in conscious translation; its minimal content is identified in the punch lines. The procedural part accounts for variation, improvisation and interaction. A model of the oral-self translation process of stand-up is then proposed. I conclude that re-focusing on the (mental) text of stand-up comedy can offer a better understanding of its translation, which in turn can contribute to a better understanding of humour in a multilingual and multicultural context in future research.

Link to a 26-minute documentary film entitled The War of the Princes of Rain ("La guerra de los príncipes de la lluvia", in Spanish) researched, directed and co-produced by Bernardo Pérez-Soler:

https://vimeo.com/119632830
(Please request password by writing an e-mail to bperezsoler@gmail.com)

The old Macehual Maya experts in the art of recalling events long gone-by from the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico, still evoke vividly and in great detail the final stages of the so-called “Caste War” of Yucatan, even though they did not witness them or ever read anything about them—actually, they never learned how to read.

The vividness of this evocation has to do with the fact that the remembrance of the Caste War is thoroughly intertwined with both Maya religion and agriculture, and, more generally, with how the people who still speak the Yucatec Maya language spend their everyday lives.

This film is about the old stories on the war three of these men recount, and about the main activities those who share (or, in one case, oppose) their beliefs engage in.

Albeit in its present form it is a fully completed short-film, I have recorded enough material to enlarge it into a feature-length film. I, however, did not get enough funding to edit and post-produce such longer version.

Handout for the conference presentation  of the same title, containing examples illustrating the points made in the powerpoint.

The presentation was delivered at the Amazonicas VII conference in Baños, Ecuador, which took place from 28 May to 1 June 2018

Neal Norrick presents the interface of tradition and individual agency in proverb performance as a paradox, a rhetorical recusation in which the proverb initiator fades into the background of societal opinion while gaining the upper hand (1994). I will argue that we don’t need to leave ourselves in the place of paradox, but can attain clarification of how proverbs operate by applying the concept of deictic projection to explore how proverbs operate in the space between quote and story.

Neal Norrick presents the interface of tradition and individual agency in proverb performance as a paradox, a rhetorical recusation in which the proverb initiator fades into the background of societal opinion while gaining the upper hand (1994). I will argue that we don’t need to leave ourselves in the place of paradox, but can attain clarification of how proverbs operate by applying the concept of deictic projection to explore how proverbs operate in the space between quote and story.

[Introduction to the collection Anáil an Bhéil Bheo: Orality and Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009)] While the connections between oral and textual traditions in Ireland have been the focus of much scholarly work in the past, less consideration has been paid to the theoretical concept of “orality” and the corresponding significance of oral texts in modern Irish culture and society.  The present collection of essays seeks to explore the relationships between such interrelated islands, and to highlight the connections between orality and textuality that, at different times and for different reasons, have not been recognised, foregrounded or integrated into our general understanding of how these forms of cultural discourse have operated in an Irish context. This volume is the result of a rich interdisciplinary collaboration, which began with the hosting of a conference dealing with the ways in which modern Irish culture has navigated its way through the “surrounding sea of orality”. One of the central aims of the conference was to address and sensitively navigate the critical faultlines that permeate and shape our understanding of Irish literate and oral cultures. An additional concern was to foster an interdisciplinary critique of Irish oral and textual cultures that would draw on many disciplines to disrupt and complicate the too easy and dichotomising alignment of orality with the Irish language, the traditional and rurality, and print literacy with the English language, modernity and urbanity. While much disciplinary-based work is vital to Irish Studies scholarship, an interdisciplinary approach that rigorously interrogates and integrates such disciplinary strands can highlight previously occluded connections, offer new insights, and on occasion can evolve new interpretive strategies that further our understanding of the key issues under investigation.