Oral Tradition and Folkloristics

Abstract

For a folklorist it is difficult to think about oral tradition other than through the perspectives provided by our discipline. It is oral communication that links people into those small groups who create and re-create folklore, while reading is a solitary activity. Walter Ong has shown how literacy has penetrated our oral discourses, but it is also possible to see elements of orality in written texts (1982). A folklore performance that has been transformed into an archival unit still remains a manifestation of oral tradition. The main problem in reading these texts lies in our ability to discern them as a part of the tradition, which remains invisible. Oral tradition always implies going beyond the borders of individual creation and single performances; it means relying upon the words that have already been spoken and on a dialogical relationship, as noted by Mikhail Bakhtin (1986). Our object of research is not the text as a singular unit but its relationships with the rich phenomena beyond its written form, such as the generic, situational, cultural, and performative contexts. If we are able to perceive and study these contexts, we can also comprehend the textual meanings that are not explicit at first glance. Text is a gateway into these realms, ruled by tradition. There are certain key concepts in folkloristics that mark it as a distinctive, autonomous scholarly discourse, such as “tradition,” “group,” “variant,” “type,” and so on. I find it better not to fossilize them in international folkloristics as technical terms but to reconsider them time and again, that is, to maintain the discussion rather than establish normative definitions. One of the last great projects of the late Lauri Honko was to reinterpret the concept of “variant,” which led to shifts in theory, to “organic variation” as opposed to “phenomenological variation,” to mental text and textualization, to the corpuses of thick materials that are created through “collecting of the repertoires of one or several informants in one community” (2000:15-16). Such endeavors to revitalize traditional concepts are essential for world folkloristics.