Socrates on Orality vs. Literacy
 

And he famously preferred orality...

From Phaedrus:

"this discovery of yours [script] will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you will give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth: they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing: they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

This is interesting. I am reading Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale and he spends some time at the beginning analogizing between written history and DNA tranmission, while shunting oral histories by comparison due to thier inaccuracy. I found his point easy to accept, but I thought he had given very short shrift to the value and possible accuracy of oral histories. Socrates apparenly agreed as to the value of learning and transmitting knowledge orally.

I read in the facinating New Yorker article I've referenced about oral histories that these bards they've found in India and the Balkans, who can carry around in their heads and recite the entire text of Bible-length and longer works, lose their powers of memorization if they become literate.

Very interesting. Well, that would help explain how Homer's works survived so long in oral form in spite of their great length.

As you know, I have some familiarity with Maori culture. When the European missionaries first arrived and began trying to convert the Maori, they found that certain persons in tribes were assigned the task of memorizing and when called upon reciting the tribe's oral history These histories included many generations of "begats" and tales of heroic voyages, etc., which tales and genealogies were of epic length. As European influence and control waxed, these persons disappeared.

Did anyone ever write the Maoris' tales and genealogies down??

Yes. There are several different versions. Some are deemed more authentic than others based primarily on how early they were recorded, wioth thosewirtten later being less likely to be accurate (this is a gross oversimplfication, but you get the idea). All Maori 'iwi' can trace their lineage back to one of the original canoe landings, which tracing is through the oral histories. For many years european historians beleived these histories were fanciful tales, but with furhter investigation they have come to conclude that they can be related to actual events and in fact may be quite accurate, basing this on textual analysis as well as traditonal archeology and even DNA samples.

In fact, scholars didn't realize the Iliad and the Odyssey were originally orally transmitted until early in the Twentieth Century when a scholar named Milman Parry studied the bards in the Balkans and identified certain linguistic devices they used that are also present in Homer's works and he realized were charactaristic of oral traditions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milman_Parry

The Wikipeda article is little more than a stub but Bernard Knox's introduction to Fagles' translation of the Iliad contains a facinating discussion of Parry and his work. The bards in India have enriched our understandings of oral traditions.

I'm not surprised there's a core of truth. The same has been shown to be true in the same way for Homer's works. For example, adventurers and archeologists have found Minoan civilizations (the Minoans preceded the Greeks as the dominant culture in the Aegean Sea) destroyed by siege warfare around the general time they believe the events of the Iliad took place, including a huge settlement on Asia Minor some believe is the basis for Troy.

Do you have a title for these Maori works?

I'll track some down for you.