Oral tradition and memory
Most peoples in history kept their knowledge without writing. You will learn how oral tradition works, how reliable it can be, and what tools help memory.
Presented by ClearTrust Free for classrooms, newsrooms and the curious.
Oral tradition is knowledge handed down by word of mouth and performance: stories, songs, chants, proverbs, genealogies and laws. It is easy for people raised with books to assume that anything unwritten is vague or unreliable. That is a mistake. Societies without writing developed strict methods for storing large amounts of information in human memory and passing it on accurately.
What it holds
- History: migrations, wars, treaties, the founding of villages and clans.
- Law: rights to land and water, rules of marriage, past judgments.
- Genealogy: who descends from whom, often over many generations.
- Science: the uses of plants, the habits of animals, signs of weather, the movement of stars.
- Belief: accounts of creation, the origins of customs, and how to carry out rites.
- Knowledge holder. Oral tradition means knowledge passed on by speech and performance. It starts with a holder. In West Africa a griot, or jeli, is a hereditary keeper of family histories and praise songs.
- Shaped for memory. Plain facts are hard to remember, so they are given shape. Rhythm, rhyme, melody and story act as memory aids. Māori whakapapa recites ancestors as an ordered chain of names.
- Told in public. Knowledge is tied to occasions and places. Aboriginal Australian songlines link songs to features of the land, so that walking the country prompts the next verse.
- Learners repeat. Learning is slow and personal. A learner sits with a teacher for years, listening and repeating. Parts of the knowledge are given only when the learner is judged ready.
- Community checks. Performance is public, so mistakes are noticed. Other knowledgeable people correct the teller. This shared checking is what keeps a tradition stable.
- New holder. In time the learner is recognised as someone with the right to tell. The chain has gained a link. If no learner comes forward, the knowledge can be lost in one generation.
- Recording today. Today many peoples record elders and build archives. Recording helps, but communities often set rules on who may hear what, as they always have.
Why it is more exact than it looks
Several features protect accuracy. Verse, rhythm and melody make it obvious when a line is missing or wrong. Formal training can last many years. Performances happen in front of people who know the material and will object to errors. And much knowledge is tied to places, so that the land itself becomes a kind of index.
Songlines
Aboriginal Australian peoples hold knowledge in what English speakers call songlines. A songline is a route across the country followed by an ancestral being, recorded as a long sequence of songs. Each verse belongs to a place: a waterhole, a hill, a stand of trees. To sing the song in order is to describe the route. A person who knows it can cross country they have never seen.
How far back can memory reach?
Some oral traditions appear to preserve events from thousands of years ago. Researchers have argued that Aboriginal stories from around the Australian coast, describing a time when the shoreline lay further out, record the rise in sea level after the last ice age. The Klamath people of Oregon tell of a mountain that collapsed in fire, which matches the eruption that formed Crater Lake about 7,700 years ago. Such readings are debated, but they are taken seriously.
Aids to memory
Many peoples use objects to support memory without spelling out words. In the Andes, the Inca kept records on knotted cords called khipu, or quipu. The Haudenosaunee record treaties in wampum belts woven from shell beads, which are read out by trained speakers. Lakota winter counts mark each year with one painted picture of its most memorable event.
- Stored in people and places
- Passed on by performance
- Checked by listeners who know it
- Lost if the chain of learners breaks
- Stored in documents
- Passed on by copying
- Checked against other texts
- Lost if the documents are destroyed or unread
Oral history in court
For a long time courts refused to treat oral tradition as evidence. That has changed. In 1997, in a case brought by the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en peoples of British Columbia, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that oral histories must be given proper weight in land claims. Elders' testimony is now standard evidence in native title cases in Australia as well.
Fragile and living
Oral tradition depends on an unbroken line of tellers and listeners. When children are sent away to school, when a language fades or when elders die without apprentices, a library is lost. Many communities are now recording their elders. They are also careful about access. Some knowledge is for everyone. Some belongs to a clan, to initiated people, or to women or men only.
Oral tradition is not a relic. New songs and stories are still composed, and old ones are told on radio, in films and online. Writing has been added to memory without replacing it. For many peoples, hearing a story from the right person in the right place remains the proper way to learn it.