It’s Friday night.  You are out with your friends and glance at your watch only to notice you are already twenty minutes past curfew.  An images pops into your mind of both your parents sitting in front of the door waiting to greet you.  Seeing as how you are late, this is the last thing you want to occur.  You are afraid.  You do not want a face-to-face confrontation.  You know what this type of communication will entail – emotion, anger, punishment, involvement – you directly living the consequences of your experience.  You would prefer then to leave you a note explaining your grounding period, its terms, and the new rules you are ordered to follow – never having to speak a word about the incident.  In communicating this way, you save yourself the emotion and feeling that an oral communication would bring – the tangible document, the note from your parents, separates you from the situation.  You can read it on your own time and interpret it according to your own thoughts.  In this situation, you prefer communicating using literate culture versus oral culture.  Why? 

            In Hobart and Schiffman’s “Orality and the Problem of Memory,” oral and literate cultures are examined, bringing to light important differences.  They explain why people prefer dealing in one culture versus another – or why people choose a culture based upon the situation they are dealing with.  Hobart and Schiffman explain the evolution of the process which allows a face-to-face experience to be converted into a document, a piece of information, changing the entire meaning of the experience, as seen in everyday human situations such as the girl’s desire to avoid parental confrontation.

            To truly understand this complex essay, the first step is to simplify the foundation and build from the ground up.  The essence of the essay is the division between a literate culture and an oral culture.  One is written down, one is spoken.  One you read, one you listen to.  One “permits communication over space and time,” one is “constrained by the here-and-now, communicating face-to-face” (13).  Hobart and Schiffman portray the importance of this concept at the outset of their essay, introducing to us these worlds as they translate the oral culture of a bard reciting the Iliad into the literate culture in which we now read and analyze.  In order to facilitate one’s understanding of this essay, it is essential to think about the bard reciting a “song that enraptures the listeners” versus reading the “Iliad’s 15,693 lines of dactylic hexameter” or a mother and daughter clashing over curfew rules versus the daughter reading a note stating her curfew punishment (12).  Remembering these basic foundations is key in following Hobart and Schiffman as they explore oral and literate cultures, providing the reader with new perspectives and visions into our familiar paper and pen world and a world that came before whose “sophisticated compositional practices” exemplify an art that is long lost (28). 

            A dividing line between oral and literate worlds can be established through an identification of the “separation between the knower from the known” (21).  This separation began “with the earliest form of writing” when images and experiences that served as the basis for oral culture were “taken out of the flow of speech” and given written form (28-29).  When an abstraction from thought is given form, “a critical distance between the mind and the object of thought” is created (21).  Rather than listeners, we become readers and analyzers.  We can perform these tacks at our leisure; hence, “we can afford the luxury of inattention” (13).  We can skim documents, pick and choose the chapters we read, underline, highlight, and mark what we deem important or significant.  With the introduction of the printed form to thought, we can realize a “thinking self” independent of the oral experience (21).

            The tradition of oral culture, however, blurs the separating line between the knower and the known, in essence harmonizing them as one.  The oral mode of abstraction is deemed ‘unreflective’ meaning that it “does not foster a critical distinction between the knower and the known” (28).  Rather than readers, the oral culture deals with audiences whose members “identify uncritically” with the action that has become fixed in their minds (20).  Those listening to the bard recite the Iliad become Agamemnon: “they experience the heat of battle, feeling the ghastly, mortal blows to the head, neck, chest and thighs, seeing with the blood-drained vision of the dying, and reveling in the glory of the victors” (12).  Likewise, the young girl could see the anger of her parents, feel their disappointment, and become embarrassed and guilt-stricken.  Oral culture requires a face-to-face mode of communication that facilitates the sharing of experiences and living each experience imaginatively, hence, these “encounters preclude the separation of the knower form the known” (22).  With the so-called evolution of the literate world filled with writing and text, we have converted a culture of experience and living into a set of ideas and information.  We have converted a dynamic culture, one that is created in real-time, into a static culture, one that produces information to be retrieved.

            It is not until the knower and the known are separated that “the real divide” can be acknowledged which “separates an oral world where information does not exist from a literate world where it does” (22).  It is difficult for us as a product of literate culture to imagine a society that could exist without producing information.  We see information as a by-product of existence, using writing as a conduit through which we transfer information into a metaphorical container.  The task of putting thoughts and words onto paper, writing, weds information to literate culture because it “gives stability to the mental objects abstracted form the flow of experience, such that one can access them readily and repeatedly” (30).  We unite our literate community using static information – papers, books, texts – what can be referred to collectively as print culture.  Oral culture builds its foundation upon experience and the act of living; “commemoration that binds the community together as a living entity rather than passively storing information about it” (15). 

            Commemoration differs from recalling information in that it “continually reinterprets the past in light of an ever-changing present” (27).  The concept of past as we know it in our literate culture does not exist in the oral world – nothing but the “now” is significant.  To establish a past, information and history must exist, both components being void in oral cultures; things spoken just a moment ago no longer exist.  Oral culture finds no use “for preserved communication to store knowledge of everyday practices” as these practices are preserved, not in a container, but through the activity of people living in the oral culture itself (23).  With the introduction of such a definite difference between the two cultures, one is able to analyze and interpret their meanings in light of new realities. Oral culture has proven its right to battle literate culture in terms of intelligence and complexity.  How we live and “remember” has been greatly altered since literacy “first changed a form of preserved communication that was primarily commemorative into one that was primarily informational” (30). 

            One cannot help but ponder, what new culture will be born next?  It all began with the basic experience of life and the concept of commemoration, which gave birth to writing that, in turn, created information which has thrusted us into a print culture.  Information has propelled our culture into a whole new realm, beyond basic human functioning.  Print culture quickly moved us into a digital culture.  Are we slowly being stripped of the basic human actions that have evolved throughout different cultures as Hobart and Schiffman have portrayed?  Could we live in a culture void of face-to-face confrontation, commemoration, information, memory, and experience – the livelihood of both oral and literate cultures?  An immediate response would be no, but how does one judge when ‘evolution’ stops?  Have we really evolved if all our experiences become virtual ones, f what we call memory is replaced by a programmed digitized computer chip, if face-to-face contact is eliminated?  Think f how prevalent this culture has already become the next time you check out of the grocery store with a scanner rather than a person, have a virtual class over the Internet, or turn to your computer to sit down and chat with a friend.  Where has human contact gone?  The concept of culture will become increasingly complex as we move towards the future.  Hobart and Schiffman have uncovered the complex nature and depth that fueled oral cultures of the past and the literate culture that followed out of natural human development.  It will be our job to explain the next cultural pass-over in terms of both oral and literate cultures – as they will inevitably give rise to a new way of thinking and living.

Back to Home Page