Oral Tradition最新文献

{"title":"Text and Memory in the “Oral” Transmission of a Crime and Execution Ballad: “The Suffolk Tragedy” in England and Australia","authors":"T. Pettitt","doi":"10.1353/ORT.2013.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ORT.2013.0006","url":null,"abstract":"The murder of Maria Marten by her lover, William Corder, in May 1827 became the object of intense public interest and frenzied media attention immediately upon the discovery of the body eleven months later in the subsequently notorious “red barn” where he had buried her. While popular interest persisted much longer—and indeed continues—the case itself culminated with Corder’s trial and execution by public hanging in August 1828 and prompted the publication of no fewer than nine different broadside ballads—sensational journalistic accounts in the form of songs printed on a single sheet and sold cheaply at stalls or by itinerant balladmongers.1 Two of these songs offer significant insights into the nature of oral tradition; having been printed, sold, sung, remembered, and passed on by word of mouth for many decades, they have subsequently been recorded from country singers, starting with the first great wave of folksong collection in the decades immediately prior to the First World War and continuing on into the 1990s. This situation does not represent the “pure” oral tradition sometimes encountered in the field, as the songs were composed in writing and initially diffused in print, and some of the singers were undoubtedly literate, but this interlacing of literate and oral transmission has been the norm in English folk tradition throughout its recorded history. Juxtaposing the words of the songs as recorded from singing with the texts of the originals as published permits us to determine exactly what the processes of memorization, performance from memory, and voice-toear transmission can do over time to verbal narrative material originally in the form of texts. Of those two songs, “The Murder of Maria Marten” (Roud 215), with issues from at least six London printers, several more from the provinces, and yet others without imprint, was by far the more successful. Its preeminent market penetration is confirmed by the score or more recordings of the song, about half with texts, from folk tradition. In 1979 the versions of this Oral Tradition, 28/1 (2013): 5-34","PeriodicalId":30001,"journal":{"name":"Oral Tradition","volume":"28 1","pages":"-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66491853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In and Out of Culture: Okot p’Bitek’s Work and Social Repair in Post-Conflict Acoliland","authors":"Lara Rosenoff Gauvin","doi":"10.1353/ORT.2013.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ORT.2013.0008","url":null,"abstract":"In 2008, on my fifth visit to Northern Uganda, I was staying with Nyero’s family in Padibe Internally Displaced Person’s (IDP) camp, in what is now Lamwo district. At that time, the cease-fire of the previous year and a half had changed things considerably. People all over Acoliland 1 (Northern Uganda) had begun to return to their villages after a decade of forced displacement into squalid camps, where inhumane conditions killed—according to one study—in excess of about 1,000 individuals per week (UMH 2005). Like much of the 90% of the population who had been forcibly displaced, Nyero’s family was planning to return to their “traditional” village at the end of the year. Finally, land was being cleared, seed sown, water wells checked, gardens planted, grass cut, and huts built. � At the same time, however, Acoli men, women, children, youths, families, and villages struggled to deal with the past two decades of war between President Museveni’s Government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group. Forced displacement, confinement, poverty, and social torture (Dolan 2009) by the Government of Uganda, together with brutal abductions and terrorization by the LRA, squeezed the population between the two sides.","PeriodicalId":30001,"journal":{"name":"Oral Tradition","volume":"28 1","pages":"-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66491870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cultural Circles and Epic Transmission: The Dai People in China","authors":"Qu Yongxian","doi":"10.1353/ORT.2013.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ORT.2013.0002","url":null,"abstract":"The Dai1 ethnic group in China and the Thai people in Southeast Asia2 can all be broadly divided into two cultural groups: a Buddhist cultural circle and another circle centered around indigenous religion. Within the Buddhist circle, the Dai people practice Theravada Buddhism, celebrating the Songkran3 Festival and using a writing system created by their ancestors long ago with the result that poems were often recorded as written texts or books very early in their history. Within the indigenous circle, the Dai communities in China are generally referred to as “Hua-Yao Dai” (“Colorful-Waistband Dai,” in connection with their vivid clothing), and they adhere to folk belief or animism. These communities have little or no literacy education; consequently, their poetry has been handed down orally from generation to generation. Interestingly, in both of these Dai cultural circles, the poetry employs a key technique that can be termed “waist-feet rhyme” wherein the last syllable of one line rhymes with an internal syllable in the succeeding line. This feature—which is discussed in detail below—is embedded in both the oral and written traditions and is an important enabling device within the poetry of the Dai people. Oral Tradition, 28/1 (2013): 103-124","PeriodicalId":30001,"journal":{"name":"Oral Tradition","volume":"28 1","pages":"-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66492235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editor's Column","authors":"J. Zemke","doi":"10.1353/ort.2012.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ort.2012.0001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":30001,"journal":{"name":"Oral Tradition","volume":"27 1","pages":"-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66491513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Oral/Aural Culture in Late Modern Society?: Traditional Singing as Professionalized Genre and Oral-Derived Expression","authors":"Ing-Marie Åkesson","doi":"10.1353/ORT.2012.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ORT.2012.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses some expressions and elements of orality and aurality in late modern society, and the roles, functions, and limitations of these expressions. Traditional song of different cultural origin has been the subject of much analysis and scholarship within the areas of orality studies, ballad studies, and several other related fields. However, songs and singing are in many cases analyzed chiefly as verbal art and verbal performance, while less attention is given to the closely interwoven texture of words, music, rhythm, and timbre, or to the balance between verbal and music-related sides of orality. I think more frequent discussions between scholars within the disciplines of folkloristics, literature, linguistics, and ethnomusicology might be fruitful. Initiatives of this kind are continuously taken in conferences and publications, and a couple of interesting texts on musical aspects have recently been published in Oral Tradition itself. 1 My own discipline is ethnomusicology, and my topic is traditional singing (or vocal folk music) in a Northern European and especially Swedish/Scandinavian context, viewed as a contemporary cultural—verbal and musical—expression, and partly as an established sub-genre within the genre or field that is today labeled “folk music” or “folk and world music.” There are reasons to ask, in the early twenty-first century, what the consequences are for oral-derived singing and music-making in an era of accelerating professionalization, institutionalization, and formalization. Which elements and expressions of orality function in a cultural environment characterized by fast changes, access to innumerable cultural items, and music as a mediatized, processed, and often digitized phenomenon? And what are the consequences for affinity-centered and long-term qualities of oral tradition, such as learning songs across the kitchen table and performing and developing one’s repertory during a lifetime? This essay is based on my studies of the Swedish/Scandinavian contemporary folk music scene with some references to earlier periods of time and other European/Western music cultures. It is my belief that, despite these geographic and cultural limitations, several of my","PeriodicalId":30001,"journal":{"name":"Oral Tradition","volume":"27 1","pages":"-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66491670","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Masonic Song in Scotland: Folk Tunes and Community","authors":"Katherine Campbell","doi":"10.1353/ORT.2012.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ORT.2012.0007","url":null,"abstract":"The Masonic song tradition of Scotland gives an opportunity to explore the vital role of oral tradition, particularly as carried by communal performance. Issues surrounding folk tunes and community will be explored in turn in this article, first by looking at the songs of Freemasonry against the backdrop of folksong culture and then by viewing the songs as central to the Masonic community and also more broadly to the community at large. This study builds on the general theoretical points made by Anne Dhu McLucas in the American context in her book, The Musical Ear: Oral Tradition in the USA. McLucas highlights the many musical contexts in which oral tradition plays a vital role, with the proposition that these contexts do \"not depend on the use of musical notation to make their power felt\" (2010:1). Of course, this does not mean that musical notation is not present, and McLucas recognizes that while \"the oral/aural is present everywhere,\" it \"mixes freely with the written\" (4).","PeriodicalId":30001,"journal":{"name":"Oral Tradition","volume":"27 1","pages":"-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66491679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Instrument Teaching in the Context of Oral Tradition: A Field Study from Bolu, Turkey","authors":"N. Kalyoncu, Cemal Özata","doi":"10.1353/ORT.2012.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ORT.2012.0016","url":null,"abstract":"In almost all industrial and post-industrial societies of the modern age as well as in a majority of developing countries, musical-cultural accumulation is documented via writing, musical notation, and similar audio-visual tools to achieve transmission with minimum information loss. As a consequence of the formation of written culture and widespread use of musical notation, musical works could then be registered on permanent documents to enable transmission not only to the immediately following generations but also to many generations over future centuries. The use of writing and the consequential transmission of music via writing, however, are comparatively new yet noteworthy developments in the long history of humankind. The earliest traces of using symbols or writing in music can be seen in the musical cultures of “ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, and Greece” (Michels 2001:159). 2 Nonetheless, “music writing with a notation system” (Rosing 1997:79) and its written transmission is a practice that gained popularity amidst European culture, though it was not so widespread among other global musical cultures. Western notation started with letters and neumes, but it then became more systematized when the ninth-century Dasia Notation gained prominence through the spread of the printing press and then underwent several evolutionary steps up through the sixteenth century. It reached its peak use in the twentieth century, when it was then renewed and reused by New Music composers or abandoned completely by other composers. Still, this traditional European notation system bears remarkable responsibility for the transmission of music culture from one generation to the next.","PeriodicalId":30001,"journal":{"name":"Oral Tradition","volume":"56 1","pages":"-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/ORT.2012.0016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66491492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Challenges in Comparative Oral Epic","authors":"J. Foley, Chao Gejin","doi":"10.1353/ORT.2012.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ORT.2012.0018","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we propose to examine some fundamental issues in comparative oral epic. Our investigation will proceed across four epic traditions widely separated in space and time. Two of them, the Mongolian and South Slavic epic, are or were recently still living and therefore observable by fieldworkers. The other two, the ancient Greek and Old English epic traditions, are preserved only in manuscript form. Although no comparative treatment can ever claim to be exhaustive or universal, we feel that these four witnesses represent considerable diversity and collectively offer a chance to forge a suitably nuanced model for oral epic. We welcome responses from scholars in other fields, especially Africanists, as we all search for ways to understand the international phenomenon of oral epic.2","PeriodicalId":30001,"journal":{"name":"Oral Tradition","volume":"27 1","pages":"-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66491554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Copy Debts”?: —Towards a Cultural Model for Researchers’ Accountability in an Age of Web Democracy","authors":"Jan Jansen","doi":"10.1353/ORT.2012.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ORT.2012.0015","url":null,"abstract":"The highly standardized oral narrative about Sunjata, nowadays known as the Sunjata Epic, has been governing society since—at least—the fourteenth century when Arab travel writer Ibn Battuta on a trip along the Niger River reported a Sunjata tradition. This epic tells about the foundation of society—called “Mali” or “Mande”—and expresses values that go beyond the borders of countries: it explains the relationships among clans. It also prescribes how, based on patronymics and clan-related praise songs, every person should behave in public. The epic is also now much esteemed as Mali and Guinea’s medieval history and as a national and supranational charter, maintaining prominence both in the mass media and in educational programs (cf. Bulman 2004; Adejunmobi 2011). The name “Mali” itself, which in 1960 became the official designation for the territory, is definitely the most striking example of this heightened status of the Sunjata Epic. 2 Several villages in Mali and Guinea have families living there that have much prestige because of their knowledge of the Sunjata Epic. In Mali, the Diabate family from Kela are among the most authoritative interpreters of the Sunjata Epic (cf. Austen 1999; Jansen 2001). I use the case presented in this article—about a Sunjata Epic recording in Kela and the discussions of ownership that the recording raised—to argue that researchers whose work deals with such an intangible heritage may have to reposition themselves. They must work from a radically different perspective than the one behind the usual discourse, which is based on concepts of permission/ approval, individual author rights, and informed consent. A new attitude, based on the idea of “copy debts,” may meet the local deep concerns and unexpected claims that underlie a","PeriodicalId":30001,"journal":{"name":"Oral Tradition","volume":"27 1","pages":"-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66491481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sensing “Place”: Performance, Oral Tradition, and Improvization in the Hidden Temples of Mountain Altai","authors":"Carole Pegg, E. Yamaeva","doi":"10.1353/ORT.2012.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ORT.2012.0012","url":null,"abstract":"The snow-capped Altai Mountain range runs from southern Siberia in the Russian Federation, southwards through West Mongolia, eastern Kazakhstan, and the Xinjiang autonomous region of Northwest China, before finally coming to rest in Southwest Mongolia. This essay is based on fieldwork undertaken in 2010 in that part of the Altai Mountains that in 1990 became the Republic of Altai, a unit of the Russian Federation.1 The Altaians, known previously as Kalmyks and Oirots, engage in a complex of spiritual beliefs and practices known locally as Ak Jang (“White Way”)2 and in academic literature as Burkhanism. Whether this movement was messianic, nationalist, or spiritual and whether it was a continuation of indigenous beliefs and practices or a syncretic mixture of local beliefs (Altai Jang), Buddhism, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, and Orthodox Christianity have been argued Oral Tradition, 27/2 (2012): 291-318","PeriodicalId":30001,"journal":{"name":"Oral Tradition","volume":"27 1","pages":"-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66491840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}