A Meme-Based Approach to Oral Traditional Theory

Abstract

The most complex, beautiful, and longstanding tradition in world is great and continuous four-billion-year-old web of life, what Richard Dawkins calls the river out of Eden (1995). Thirty years ago he showed that existence and interplay of replicators, entities that are able to copy themselves, are sufficient to explain, in broad terms, workings of evolutionary biology. Dawkins, whose focus was biological gene, also noted that there is another replicator on earth besides gene--the (1976:203-15). A meme is simplest unit of cultural replication; it is whatever is transmitted when one person imitates, consciously or unconsciously, another (208).1 In this essay I will show how an understanding of interactions of memes can do for culture what identification of selfish genes (Dawkins 1976), extended phenotypes (Dawkins 1982), and cooperative genes (Ridley 2001) did for biology. Meme theory can explain workings of several well-known and much discussed aspects of oral traditions: traditional referentiality, anaphora, and use of repeated metrical patterns. All three phenomena, different as they are, can be understood as arising from operations of same underlying processes of repetition and pattern-recognition explained by meme-theory.2