Oral tradition : contending historical and contemporary relevance

Abstract

Being the collection of all unwritten information, ideas, stories, and past accounts that have been verbally passed down from one generation to the next, oral tradition has played a pivotal role in sustaining and reproducing the cultre of pre-literate and semi-literate societies, and continues to do so, albeit differently, in highly literate industrial societies. To accomplish this, the process of verbally transmitting past ideas needs to be capable of adapting to new social circumstances and an emerging range of influences. This is why oral tradition reveal as much about the present, and the societies in which they are retold and performed, as they do about the past.