Oral History and Oral Culture

Abstract

Oral culture is culture based on the spoken rather than the written word; oral history is a record of the past based on spoken accounts. The enabling insights leading to wide‐ranging and spectacularly fruitful new developments in the study of oral cultures originated, paradoxically enough, in classics, that most venerable of humanities disciplines. The American Milman Parry centered his collecting in the 1930s on Serbo‐Croatian guslari, but his influential “oral formulaic theory,” presented in papers published in French in the 1920s, was developed first of all to describe the compositional methods deployed in the creation of Homeric epics (1987[1971]). For Parry, the key to the art of these epics lay in neither memorization nor improvisation, though it featured elements of both; what was crucial was the performance, each iteration unique in its enactment for a particular audience and situation, of a traditional repertoire of lines and parts of lines, scenes, and tales.