Becoming immersed in oral cultures was a massive wake-up call for me! Taught to privilege the written over the spoken word, as most literate people are, it took me years of living in the Pacific Islands, travelling regularly to their remoter parts, to appreciate that people who could neither read nor write could retain huge amounts of information in their heads – and explain it effortlessly. We undervalue orality because we are literate, but that is an irrational prejudice. And as I have discovered from encounters with oral traditions throughout Australia and the Pacific, India, and northwest Europe, not only are oral traditions extensive but may be thousands of years old.
I wrote...
The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World
For almost all the time that modern humans (like us) have roamed the earth’s surface, we have communicated our knowledge about our surroundings without the aid of the written word. Sometimes today we forget this. We assume our pre-literate ancestors must have survived by luck, given they were unable to read or write.
The Edge of Memory addresses this mistaken belief, showing that our ancestors systematically encoded their observations into oral traditions and passed them on from one generation to the next so effectively that some remain understandable today even after thousands and thousands of years have passed. By dismissing such memories as ‘myth and legend’, we not merely diminish our ancestors’ legacy but also hinder our ability to cope with an uncertain future.
I had been immersed in oral cultures for more than two decades when I read this book by Lynne Kelly and it was like a curtain being lifted for me. Suddenly I found affirmation that oral traditions indeed had meaning and purpose but – more than this – that they were supplemented in this by art, by dance and performance, by poetry and music. Lynne’s clever and readable book has had a lasting impact on me and the research questions I endeavor to answer. Everyone interested in human pasts should read it.
In this book, Lynne Kelly explores the role of formal knowledge systems in small-scale oral cultures in both historic and archaeological contexts. In the first part, she examines knowledge systems within historically recorded oral cultures, showing how the link between power and the control of knowledge is established. Analyzing the material mnemonic devices used by documented oral cultures, she demonstrates how early societies maintained a vast corpus of pragmatic information concerning animal behavior, plant properties, navigation, astronomy, genealogies, laws and trade agreements, among other matters. In the second part Kelly turns to the archaeological record of three sites, Chaco Canyon,…
When I first read this book, not only was I struck by its central theme that ‘myths’ have meaning but also by the fact that it is our problem that we cannot today recognize myths for what they once were. All oral traditions evolve through time, sometimes over thousands of years and across hundreds of generations of retelling, but if their core is sufficiently memorable, then it can remain recognizable. It is up to us to unpack the stories we hear today, to learn how they changed through time, and try to see whether there is an empirical core in their hearts. This book is a must for anyone interested in learning more about the meaning of ‘myth’ rather than romanticizing it.
Why were Prometheus and Loki envisioned as chained to rocks? What was the Golden Calf? Why are mirrors believed to carry bad luck? How could anyone think that mortals like Perseus, Beowulf, and St. George actually fought dragons, since dragons don't exist? Strange though they sound, however, these "myths" did not begin as fiction. This absorbing book shows that myths originally transmitted real information about real events and observations, preserving the information sometimes for millennia within nonliterate societies. Geologists' interpretations of how a volcanic cataclysm long ago created Oregon's Crater Lake, for example, is echoed point for point in the…
The second edition of this book is the one I read, more than thirty years ago, and it taught me a respect for oral traditions that I had not then fully rationalized. Literate people often disparage those who can neither read nor write, suggesting they could not possibly have any useful knowledge to contribute to a literate world. This is what I have termed ‘the arrogance of literacy’ and is something Vansina, following decades of familiarity with African oral traditions, shows to be baseless. Orally communicated knowledge was key to survival and to understanding one’s place in the world. This is a pioneering study that should never be forgotten.
Jan Vansina's 1961 book, Oral Tradition, was hailed internationally as a pioneering work in the field of ethno-history. Originally published in French, it was translated into English, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and Hungarian. Reviewers were unanimous in their praise of Vansina's success in subjecting oral traditions to intense functional analysis.
Now, Vansina-with the benefit of two decades of additional thought and research-has revised his original work substantially, completely rewriting some sections and adding much new material. The result is an essentially new work, indispensable to all students and scholars of history, anthropology, folklore, and ethno-history who are concerned with the transmission…
First published in 1940, Hawaiian Mythology is an astonishingly comprehensive compilation of native Hawaiian stories and beliefs that, had it not been for the systematic – even dogged – efforts of people like Martha Beckwith may have never survived to today. This is a book to dip into, especially if you find yourself in Polynesia. The stories are factual, often unembellished, which allows you a glimpse into the soul of Pacific peoples. This book also explores the connections between (remote) Hawaii and other island groups in the western Pacific whence its people came, bearing oral memories that seeded the geography of Hawaii and directed the nature of its human occupation, probably hundreds of years before Europeans even knew the Pacific Ocean existed.
Ku and Hina―man and woman―were the great ancestral gods of heaven and earth for the ancient Hawaiians. They were life's fruitfulness and all the generations of mankind, both those who are to come and those already born.
The Hawaiian gods were like great chiefs from far lands who visited among the people, entering their daily lives sometimes as humans or animals, sometimes taking residence in a stone or wooden idol. As years passed, the families of gods grew and included the trickster Maui, who snared the sun, and fiery Pele of the volcano.
Ancient Hawaiians lived by the animistic philosophy…
This unique book is based on the written records from the early 1300s – more than 700 years ago – of the Cathar heretics living in the village of Montaillou in southern France. Determined to stamp out hereticism, the Inquisition in the person of the Bishop of Pamiers spent considerable time in Montaillou, writing down a huge amount of incidental information about the way people really lived at the time in such places, what their worldviews entailed, how they behaved and why. Le Roy Ladurie peppers his analysis of this community with masses of direct quotes from its residents. I once imagined ancient history could never authentically come to life but this book proved me wrong.
"Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has had a success which few historians experience and which is usually reserved for the winner of the Prix Goncourt...Montaillou, which is the reconstruction of the social life of a medieval village, has been acclaimed by the experts as a masterpiece of ethnographic history and by the public as a sensational revelation of the thoughts, feelings, and activities of the ordinary people of the past."―Times Literary Supplement.
With a new introduction by author Le Roy Ladurie, this special edition offers a fascinating history of a fourteenth-century village, Montaillou, in the mountainous region of southern France, almost…
Reading was a childhood passion of mine. My mother was a librarian and got me interested in reading early in life. When John F. Kennedy was running for president and after his assassination, I became intensely interested in politics. In addition to reading history and political biographies, I consumed newspapers and television news. It is this background that I have drawn upon over the decades that has added value to my research.
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
Long before Trump, each of these phenomena grew in importance. The John Birch Society and McCarthyism became powerful forces; Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first “personal president” to rise above the party; and the development of what Harry Truman called “the big lie,” where outrageous falsehoods came to be believed. Trump…
Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism
It didn't begin with Donald Trump. The unraveling of the Grand Old Party has been decades in the making. Since the time of FDR, the Republican Party has been home to conspiracy thinking, including a belief that lost elections were rigged. And when Republicans later won the White House, the party elevated their presidents to heroic status-a predisposition that eventually posed a threat to democracy. Building on his esteemed 2016 book, What Happened to the Republican Party?, John Kenneth White proposes to explain why this happened-not just the election of Trump but the authoritarian shift in the party as a…
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