Orally Based Thought and
Expression
Guðlaug Hilmarsdóttir
The people
Walter J. Ong
A. R. Luria
Jack Goody
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Joel Sherzer
Additive Thought and Expression
• The creation narrative in Genesis 1:1-5
– ‘and’  ‘and’, ‘when’, ‘then’, ‘thus’,
‘while’.
– Strikes the present-day sensibility as remote,
archaic, and even quaint.
• Speaking ability highly valued and a
source of personal prestige among the
Cuna.
Aggregative Thought and
Expression
• Reliance on formulas to implement memory.
• Epithets
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The soldier vs. The brave soldier
The princess vs. The beautiful princess
The oak vs. The sturdy oak
The Glorious Revolution of October 26
Wise Nestor, clever Odysseus
The glorious Fourth of July
• Lévi Strauss: “The savage mind
totalizes” (p.245)
Redundant or Copious Thought and
Expression
• Retrieval of a text possible.
• There is nothing to backloop into
outside the mind in an oral discourse.
• Redundancy
– More natural to thought and speech than
sparse linearity.
– Favoured by the physical conditions of
oral expression before a large audience.
– African drum talk.
• Repetition favoured over hesitation.
Conservative or Traditionalist
Thought and Expression
[...] oral societies must invest great energy in saying
over and over again what has been learned ardously
over the ages.
(Ong, P.41)
• The text frees the mind of conservative tasks.
• Narrative originality.
• Goody’s Investigation of the mathematical
operations of the LoDagaa of Northern
Ghana.
Close to the Human Lifeworld
• Knowledge conceptualized and
verbalized with close reference to the
human lifeworld.
• Neutral list of names did not exist.
• The Iliad’s famous catalogue of ships.
• Little knowledge of statistics or facts
divorced from human or quasi-human
activity.
• Nothing corresponding to how-to-do-it
lists exists.
Agonistically Toned Thought and
Expression
• Agonistic verbal performances.
– Performers try to top the others with a more
apposite or a contradictory proverb or
riddle.
– The Iliad, Beowulf, throughout medeival
European romance, The Mwindo Epic,
countless other African stories, the Bible.
• Descriptions of physical violence
• The fulsome expression of praise
Empathetic and Participatory
Thought and Expression
• To feel oneself
identified in each
work.
• The hero of the oral
performance
assimilates into the
oral world (The
Mwindo Epic).
Homeostatic Thought and
Expression
• Live in the present.
• The condition of words.
• The Lokeles’ African talking drums.
• Rhymes and games transmitted orally
from one generation of small children
to the next.
• Genealogies of politicians.
Situational Thought and Expression
• Perception
– Subjects often designated colors with categorical names, with
occasional refinements.
Male collectivefarm activists
Ichkari women
– The ichkari women gave “richer and more diversified color names”.
– Teachers’ school students named geometrical figures by
categorical names (circle & “something like a circle”).
– Subjects in other groups presented quite different results (plate,
sieve, bucket, watch).
• Generalization and Abstraction
– Illiterate peasants group objects in practical situations and reject
the use of a general term for similar objects. No illiterate subject
could seperate tools from materials. They reject the need for
explanation or refuse to attempt explaining simple objects.
– A barely literate subject could solve the task of categorization
(p.69).
– A Literate person immediately classifies objects in categorical terms.
Another literate defined a concept (sun
) by citing essential
attributes
Situational Thought and Expression
• Deduction and Inference
– Illiterates could not draw deductions from given syllogisms, or
had trouble in understanding them.
– An almost illiterate person could not draw conclusion from a
given syllogism.
• Reasoning and Problem Solving
– Subject from remote villages, uninfluenced by school
instruction, were incapable of solving even the most simple
problems.
– A sligtly literate subject used guesswork to answer a
mathematical question.
• Imagination
– A third of the illiterate subjects refused to pose questions.
• Self-Analysis and Self-Awareness
– Illiterate peasants from remote villages found it much easier to
characterize other people in their village than to characterize
themselves.