Discuss the relationship between literacy, orality and sacred texts with particular reference to South Asian society.

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25.05.04                                                                                                             Jenny Söderlind

Discuss the relationship between literacy, orality and sacred texts with particular reference to South Asian society.

        Traditionally, the relationship between literacy and orality has been regarded in what have are arguably quite simplistic and ethnocentric terms. Lack of literacy was viewed as signifying a lack of a literary tradition and an inability to think in abstract, objective terms. Oral traditions were generally given little attention, and even when they were, they were at times subjected to sweeping generalisations. It is not until relatively recently that alternative approaches have been put forward and the perspective towards orality has changed. This new view rejects the dichotomy between ‘literate’ and ‘oral’ societies and their supposed distinctive modes of thought, challenges the idea of literacy as a neutral and purely technological entity, and attempts to explore literate and oral expression as part of their own social context. I will begin by exploring the ‘simplistic’ view of literacy and orality, before presenting the arguments against such a perspective, illustrating the usefulness of a more nuanced, culturally specific approach with reference to the epics and sacred texts of India.  

        One view explicitly or implicitly shared by many social scientists is that literacy is a neutral technology which can be detached from specific social contexts. Street (1984) delineates the arguments for this perspective, referring to it as the ‘autonomous’ model of literacy. Those who regard literacy in this way consider it a more useful distinction to make than the older divisions of societies into primitive/modern or logical/pre-logical. While the older versions of this ‘great divide’ theory were based on now rejected notions of race and biological determinism, this new incarnation is based on technology, the ‘technology of the intellect’ as Goody (1968, cited in Street) phrases it. While Levy-Bruhl’s (1926) version of the great divide theory proposed differences in cognitive capacity between members of different cultures, those appealing to literacy are merely pointing to differences in cognitive development. Thus they are not racist, they are not proposing that certain peoples are innately intellectually superior. Instead they are arguing for intellectual superiority based on the technology of writing.

        In conjunction with this there has been a tendency to draw a sharp distinction between oral and literate societies. As two sides of the great divide, literate and non-literate societies are regarded as fundamentally different. Finnegan (1973) cites the Director-General of UNESCO who distinguishes between literate societies as those ‘who master nature, share out the world’s riches among themselves and set out for the stars’ and non-literate peoples as those who ‘remain fettered in their inescapable poverty and the darkness of ignorance’. The argument is that non-literate societies must cross this great divide, that only the establishment of mass literacy will enable the ‘liberation and advancement of man’. A much-cited figure by Anderson (1966, cited in Street 1984) is that a society requires a 40% literacy rate before it can begin its economical development. Thus a simple trajectory of literacy development is assumed, that moving from pre-literacy to literacy is associated with progress, civilisation and individual liberties.

        The main reason for this association of literacy with social and individual development is that spoken language is argued to be significantly different from written language. Hildyard and Olson (1978, cited in Street 1984), propose that education, specifically literacy, causes the development of intellectual competence that would otherwise not be utilised. Language, and through it thought, are argued to change under the impact of written text. Writing enables the separation of different functions of language rather than conflating them as one does when speaking. More specifically, writing distances the communicator from the recipient, removing the necessity for interpersonal elements of the information. This it is argued, enable the logical functions, the pure truth of the statements, to take precedence. In contrast, oral speech is said to be dominated by the social. Hildyard and Olson, among others, propose that this ability to extract information from its social context leads to cognitive changes. They support their claim with several comparative studies, including a test conducted on bush-schooled, unschooled, and urban-schooled children in Senegal by Greenfield (1972). She found that, when presented with a range of objects and asked to sort these, the unschooled children were less likely to generalise or present contrasting points of view. She took this as evidence that speakers of an oral language rely more on context for communication and on imitation for learning. She argued further that context-dependent speech is tied up with context-dependent thought, which is the opposite of abstract thought. Other studies include Bernstein’s (1971) studies of working-class children in Britain, who, he concluded, showed signs of ‘verbal deprivation’. When presented with a picture of an event, they would refer to it as if the event were actually occurring, stating ‘a man is walking’ rather than phrasing their description as ‘in the picture there is a man walking…’, as the middle-class children did.  

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        Thus literacy is deemed to be necessary for abstract thought, and Goody (1968, cited in Street) argues particularly strongly that this leads to the development of logic, the distinction of myth from history, the emergence of scientific thought and the growth of democratic political processes. He argues that in oral societies, the cultural repertoire is held only in the memory and is subject to constant change, and ‘whatever parts of it have ceased to be of contemporary relevance are likely to be eliminated by the process of forgetting’. He views classical Greece as exemplary; highlighting the fact that ‘it was ...

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