field research in oral literature

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Contemporary oral literature fieldwork : a researcher's guide

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• Cover; Title page; Copyright page; Dedication; Contents; List of Pictires; List of Maps; List of Figures; List of Tables; Foreword; Acknowledgements;
• 1. Introduction; Orality and Literacy; Oral Literature as Verbal Art; Oral Literature and Tradition; Oral Literature as History; Functionality of Oral Literature; Growth of Oral Literature Scholarship in Kenya; The False Step; Anyumbaism in Kenyan Oral Literature Tradition;
• 2. Research in Oral Literature; Qualitative and Quantitative Research Methods; Demystifing Fieldwork; Multidisciplinary in Oral Literature; Fieldwork Defined.
• Responsibilities of a FieldworkerOral Literature and Globalization; Importance of Fieldwork; Critical Ethnography; Exploratory Fieldwork; Intensive Fieldwork; Supervised Fieldwork; Independent Fieldwork; Home-based Fieldwork; Outward-bound Fieldwork;
• 3. Theory and Oral Literature; Theory and Scholarship; Theory in Oral Literature; Traditional Theories of Oral Literature; Modern Theories of Oral Literature;
• 4. Methodology in Oral Literature; Methodology and Oral Literature Research; Observation Method; Structured and Unstructured Interview Methods; Fieldwork Design; Fieldwork Preparatory Phase.
• Fieldwork PhasePost-Fieldwork Phase; Qualities of a Consumate Fieldworker; Fieldwork Participants; Lead Researcher's Check-list; Field Research Assistants; Field Local Assistant; Research Driver; Fieldwork Accountant; Fieldwork and Wellness; Literature Review and Sampling; Rapport Building; Fieldwork Documentation; Interview Method; Transcription and Translation; Performance Settings; Importance of Methodology;
• 5. Documentation, Preservation and Access; Performance and Memory; Archiving Oral Texts; Disconnect between Researchers and Archivists; University of Nairobi and Archiving of Oral Text.
• Archivists and NeutralityDigital Technology and Archiving; Ong and Secondary Orality; Importance of Digitalization; Challenges of Digitalization;
• 6. Data Analysis; Oral Literature Criticism; Transcription and Translation; Data Analysis; Coding in Oral Literature; Textualization in Verbal Art; Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software; Report Outline;
• 7. Fieldwork Ethics, Challenges and Strategies; Ethics and Oral Literature; Ethics and Reciprocity; Omondi Tawo the Bard; Ethics and Accountability; Ethics and Informed Consent; Managing Expectations; Non-Compensation School.
• Self-CompensationFieldwork in Conflict Zone; Ethical Dilemmas; Ethics and Creative Deception; Release Form A; Release Form B; Other Fieldwork Challenges; Bibliography; Index; Back cover.

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methods of collecting oral literature material from the field

Related Papers

Manual for Safeguarding Oral Traditions and Expressions, commissioned in 2007 by the Intangible Cultural Heritage of UNESCO. Not published. Defines oral traditions; communities, practitioners, tradition bearers, authorities, NGOs; language, inventory; safeguarding; promoting development goals; role of communities in managing cultural heritage.

mbarek elfarhaoui

Valentin Vydrin

On different methods of retriving linguistic information in a fieldwork.

Sergey Abashin

Journal of Ethnobiology

Jeanine Pfeiffer

Contending that a significant portion of current ethnobiological research continues to overlook cultural variation in traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and practice, this paper explores the potential impacts of gender-imbalanced research on data collection, hypothesis testing, and the formulation and application of ethnobiological inventories and theories. A multidisciplinary review of over 220 studies addresses commonly held stereotypes underlying gender-imbalanced field research and demonstrates the need for more inclusive, finely-tuned studies which disaggregate indigenous knowledge and practice by gender. The paper outlines factors underlying gender-based spatial and temporal variation in ecosystem exposure and traditional ecological knowledge in rural societies worldwide, and discusses how these factors contribute to gender differences in wild food harvesting, biodiversity and agrobiodiversity maintenance, natural resource management, and the transmission and conservation of sacred and secular customs. The review concludes with suggestions for designing and implementing more inclusive research.

Jennie L Harvey

This dissertation investigates the current status and attitudes toward traditional knowledge of ethnoveterinary medicines in a Maasai community in rural Tanzania, and the relationships between ethnoveterinary knowledge and formal education. It concludes that ethnoveterinary medicine still plays an important role in primary livestock health care in the village of Eluwai, and that formal schooling appears to have a negative impact on young people's ethnoveterinary knowledge. It also finds that a culturally sensitive education can have a positive impact on young peoples' attitudes toward traditional knowledge and practises such as ethnoveterinary medicine, suggesting that intercultural education may be a valuable tool in biocultural conservation. Furthermore, this study highlights the importance of practical and contextual experience for learning about ethnoveterinary medicine.

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to compile, analyze, and annotate a diverse collection of Brazilian children‘s songs and games for use in the American general music classroom. The data gathering process consisted of 47 days of fieldwork in several locations in Northeast, Southeast, and Central Brazil and ongoing conversations with informants. Research employed participant observation, structured and semi-structured interviews, and content analysis. The raw data consisted of audio and video and field notes. The following criteria for song selection were developed: 1) accessibility for the young voice, 2) accessibility of Portuguese for the English speaker, 3) aesthetic reasons (beauty, novelty, etc.) 4) diversity, 5) and the representation of Brazilian children‘s songs. From these criteria, the collection was limited to 30 songs. These were notated in standard notation and mastercopy format, translated, and pronunciation helps (IPA and phonetic) were included. The results of this study yield information about history/context, music elements, extramusical elements, specific to individual songs and the songs as a collection. The historical and contextual background of the songs reveal subjects ranging from history, land, animals, cuisine, and social issues, to economy, work, relationships, religious, and military life. In many cases, the songs reflect the demographics and social classes of Brazil. The genres consist of: cirandas, playground rhymes and songs, action songs, singing games, nonsense songs, children‘s songs, holiday songs, courting songs, role playing songs, and love songs. Texas Tech University, Bradley Layne Green, December 2010 vii The musical and textual features of the songs are: anacruses, outlines of the tonic triad, melodic sequences, repeated note group fragments at the ends of phrases and motives, and descending pentachords at the final cadence. The text often contains animal sounds, repeated syllables and vowel sounds, and parlendas (tongue twisters). The time signatures are and , with only one song in. The rhythmic content ranges in complexity from quarter notes to sixteenth-eighth-sixteenth notes and dotted sixteenths. Approximately two-thirds of the songs contain anacruses and two-thirds (20 of 30) of the songs contain semitones. The smallest range is a minor third, and the largest range is an octave. With the exception of one song in the Aeolian mode, the tonality of the songs is either major or intervallic centered with a major feel. Formally, the songs are divided into two or four sections. Songs in this collection can be used at many levels of teaching and learning because of the variety between simple and complex musical material. Trustworthiness is sought by using triangulation in the form of multiple data sources, member checks, and the involvement of peers and dissertation committee members in reviewing material for authenticity and reliability; an extended period of fieldwork and communication with informants, and self reflection. Recommendations and implications for further research are included.

CHLOE WOOLLEY

This thesis examines the revival and subsequent development of traditional music in the Isle of Man from the 1970s until the present day. Together with dance and the Gaelic language, the revival of Manx traditional music has contributed to the reevaluation of a Manx identity based upon traditional values and symbolism. Drawing on individual interviews, a comprehensive survey and primary source material, this thesis investigates the motivations, influences and ideology behind the revival. Issues of nationalism, individual and communal identities, Celticism, authenticity and the formation of cultural boundaries are all addressed in an analysis of the revivalist ideology, which has consequently dictated the standard repertoire and musical style of today. The structure of the study is based upon a theoretical model of musical revivalism designed by Tamara E. Livingston (1999:69): 1. an individual or small group of “core revivalists” 2. revival informants and/or original sources (e.g. historical sound recordings) 3. a revivalist ideology and discourse 4. a group of followers which form the basis of a revivalist community 5. revivalist activities (organizations, festivals, competitions) 6. non-profit and/or commercial enterprises catering to the revivalist market. Livingston’s model has been employed to ascertain whether the Manx music movement corresponds with the modern conception of the term ‘revival’ and therefore with the typical characteristics as documented in other cases. This thesis aims to render new concepts that can be added to contemporary theory on musical revivalism.

Open Access Publishing Group

Mau Forest, the home of the majority of the Ogiek people is located in the Rift Valley Province and straddles Kericho, Nakuru, Narok and Bomet districts .Traditionally, the Ogiek as hunter-gatherers have distinctive histories of interaction with the natural environment. Over the years, the Ogiek have inhabited in the Mau Forest with little impact on the environment. The paper focuses on the influence of hunting apprenticeship as Indigenous Form of Education for sustainable conservation of Wild life in Mau Forest of Kenya. The study was informed by the General Systems Theory and the Cultural Ecology Theory. The argument of the general systems theory is that the intricate relationship of the parts cannot be treated in isolation from the whole. In this case, an analysis of the Ogiek superstructure affirmed that the society’s institutions must be contextualized in their totality. Arguably, an understanding of the Ogiek in general is related to how the community interacts with nature. On the other hand, the cultural ecologists argue that there exist a clear link between the society’s culture, mode of subsistence and the natural environment. An ethno-historical approach was employed in the design, instrumentation, data collection, analysis and interpretation. To achieve systematic collection of data, purposive sampling techniques were used. Forty-five (45) members of the Ogiek community, mainly key cultural consultants were interviewed for the study. Cultural consultants provided the most complete and representative information about particular aspects of Ogiek life because of their experience and training. The main instruments for data collection were observation and interview schedules. In addition to oral interviews, this study used a variety of documentary sources. The information obtained from the various sources was checked for validity and reliability using triangulation as well as external and internal criticism approaches to data analysis. The paper reveals that hunting apprenticeship as indigenous education as practised by the Pre-colonial Ogiek society facilitated sustainable conservation of wild life in Mau Forest of Kenya. In essence, it was arguably revealed that the Ogiek hunting practice and broader socio-cultural contexts as well as human-animal relations incorporated a number of conventions and practices that helped to support and sustain wild life populations.

Anja Nylund Hagen

Dissertation: This study is among the first to be explicitly concerned with music-streaming services from a qualitative user perspective. It sheds light on how music in general, and streaming technology in particular, is perceived, made sense of, experienced and practiced in the context of the individual streaming user’s everyday life. Its research perspective is inspired by sociological phenomenology, starting with Alfred Schutz’s action-oriented approach to understanding intersubjective meaningful experience. This perspective informs both the methodological model and the theoretical framework of the study, which is otherwise interdisciplinary and eclectic. The research was conducted in Norway, which currently boasts a globally pioneering streaming market. The study relies on a mixed-methods design using twelve heavy music-streaming users (ranging from seventeen to sixty years old) as informants. I began by devoting two months to sampling users’ self-reported practices and experiences with music-streaming services, combined with online observation and logging of all streamed tracks during this period. I followed up with individual in-depth interviews that were conducted while looking at the personal streaming-service interfaces together with the informants. This design is original to the dissertation and intended to make immediate experience sampling convenient for the informant. It is therefore also relevant for grasping everyday experiences of a taken-for-granted nature that arise in the context of mobile media and the ubiquitous Internet. I develop my arguments through a discussion that draws on theoretical frameworks that fundamentally revolve around notions of human action, which is also a focus of my analyses (via user practices and experiences). The principal study finding involves the extent of the role that music has assumed in daily life as a result of streaming services. Streaming-related musical meaning is found to be intensely self-referential and personal, and streaming presents itself as a malleable lifeworld resource. I also argue that music-streaming services afford involvements in diverse modes of experience and practice that are realised through the role and impact of these services in everyday life, as demonstrated by the micro-dynamics that follow upon the act of streaming among individuals, the technology, the music and the context. The dissertation’s overall structure is divided in two: (1) the covering paper that will survey the research project as a whole, and (2) four articles written over the three-year course of the project.

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Oral Literature in the Digital Age

Introduction

Texte intégral, collecting, protecting and connecting oral literature.

1 This volume is an essential guide and handbook for ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists, librarians, and all who connect with indigenous communities in order to document and preserve oral traditions.

2 For societies in which traditions are conveyed more through speech than through writing, oral literature has long been the mode of communication for spreading ideas, knowledge and history. The term “oral literature” broadly includes ritual texts, curative chants, epic poems, folk tales, creation stories, songs, myths, spells, legends, proverbs, riddles, tongue-twisters, recitations and historical narratives. In most cases, such traditions are not translated when a community shifts to using a more dominant language.

1 See http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/ [Accessed 19 November 2012].

3 Oral literatures are in decline as a result of a cultural focus on literacy, combined with the disappearance of minority languages. The Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger , 1 released by UNESCO in early 2009, claims that around a third of the 6,500 languages spoken around the globe today are in danger of disappearing forever. Globalisation and rapid socio-economic change exert particularly complex pressures on smaller communities of speakers, often eroding expressive diversity and transforming culture through assimilation to more dominant ways of life. Until relatively recently, few indigenous peoples have had easy access to effective tools to document their own cultural knowledge, and there is still little agreement on how collections of oral literature should be responsibly managed, archived and curated for the future.

2 See http://www.oralliterature.org/collections [Accessed 19 November 2012].

4 The online archiving of audio and video recordings of oral literature is a technique of cultural preservation that has been widely welcomed by indigenous communities around the world. The World Oral Literature Project, established at the University of Cambridge in 2009 and co-located at Yale University since 2011, has a mission to “collect, protect and connect” endangered traditions. The Project facilitates partnerships between fieldworkers, archivists, performers of oral literature, and community representatives to document oral literature in ways that are ethically and practically appropriate. Our fieldwork grant scheme has funded the collection of audio and video recordings from nine countries in four continents. In addition, Project staff have digitised and archived older collections of oral literature, as well as contemporary recordings that are “born digital” but which were funded by other sources. At present, these collections represent a further twelve countries, amounting to over 400 hours of audio and video recordings of oral traditions now hosted for free on secure servers on the Project website. 2

• 3 See the Digital Return research network for more discussion on these issues: http://digitalreturn. (...)

5 The World Oral Literature Project’s strong focus on cooperation and understanding ensures that source communities retain full copyright and intellectual property over recordings of their traditions. Materials are protected for future posterity through accession to a secure digital archival platform with a commitment to migrating files to future digital formats as new standards emerge. Returning digitised materials to performers and communities frequently helps to protect established living traditions, with materials used for language education as well as programmes that aim to revitalise cultural heritage practices. 3 The inclusion of extensive metadata, including contextual details relating to the specific oral literature performance alongside its history and cultural significance, allows researchers and interested parties from diverse disciplines to connect with and experience the performative power of the collection. For example, while a musicologist might study the instrumental technique of a traditional song, a linguist would focus on grammatical structures in the verse, and an anthropologist might explore the social meaning and cultural values conveyed through the lyrics. Innovative digital archiving techniques support the retrieval of granular metadata that is relevant to specific research interests, alongside providing an easy way to stream or download the audio and video files from the web. In this manner, we have been able to connect recordings of oral literature to a broad community of users and researchers. In turn, this contributes to an appreciation of the beauty and complexity of human cultural diversity.

Coming together, sharing practices

6 The second annual workshop hosted by the World Oral Literature Project at the University of Cambridge in 2010, entitled Archiving Orality and Connecting with Communities , brought together more than 60 ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists and librarians. Organised with support from the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge; the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge; and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the assembled delegates explored key issues around the dissemination of oral literature through traditional and digital media. Presentations from representatives of institutions in eight countries prompted fieldworkers to consider how best to store and disseminate their recordings and metadata; while archivists and curators were exposed to new methods of managing collections with greater levels of cultural sensitivity and through cooperative partnerships with cultural stakeholders.

7 Workshop panels were focused around a central theme: When new publics consume, manipulate and connect with field recordings and digital archival repositories of linguistic and cultural content, their involvement raises important practical and ethical questions about access, ownership, and permanence. These issues are reflected in a current trend among funding agencies, including the World Oral Literature Project’s own fieldwork grants programme, to encourage fieldworkers to return copies of their material to source communities, as well as to deposit collections in institutional repositories. Thanks to ever-greater digital connectivity, wider Internet access and affordable multimedia recording technologies, the locus of dissemination and engagement has grown beyond that of researcher and research subject to include a diverse constituency of global users such as migrant workers, indigenous scholars, policymakers and journalists, to name but a few. Participants at the workshop explored key issues around the dissemination of oral literature, reflecting particularly on the impact of greater digital connectivity in extending the dissemination of fieldworkers’ research and collections beyond traditional audiences.

8 Emerging from some of the most compelling presentations at the workshop, chapters in Part 1 of this volume raise important questions about the political repercussions of studying marginalised languages; the role of online tools in ensuring responsible access to sensitive cultural materials; and methods of avoiding fossilisation in the creation of digital documents. Part 2 consists of workshop papers presented by fieldworkers in anthropology and linguistics, all of whom reflect on the processes and outcomes of their own fieldwork and its broader relevance to their respective disciplines.

4 See < http://www.oralliterature.org/research/workshops.html [Accessed 19 November 2012].

9 In keeping with our mandate to widen access and explore new modes of disseminating resources and ideas, workshop presentations are now available for online streaming and download through the World Oral Literature Project website. 4 Many of the chapters in this edited volume discuss audio and video recordings of oral traditions. Since a number of contributors have made use of online resources to illustrate their discussions on cultural property and traditional knowledge, it is hoped that readers will interact with this freely available media. URL links for referenced resources are included in a list of Online Sources in the reference section at the end of each chapter. All web resources were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated.

Part I. Principles and Methods of Archiving and Conservation

10 Thomas Widlok’s chapter discusses two aspects of digital archiving: first, he analyses what is actually involved in the process of digitisation and electronic archiving of spoken language documentation; second, he discusses notions of access and property rights in relation to the digital archives that result from such documentation. His emphasis in both cases is on identifying the elements and layers that make up the complex whole of the archive, yet he is quick to point out that there is more to this whole than is covered by his analysis. While Widlok’s evaluation is based on personal experience rather than a sample of projects, he acknowledges that themes of access and property rights in digitisation remain a recurring concern. The concluding argument of his chapter is that by viewing the component parts of the process of digital archiving for just one case study, we can see some of the contradictions and ambivalences of this process in more general terms. Through such a structural analysis, we may also begin to understand the mixed feelings that some field researchers have with regard to electronic archiving and online databasing. Widlok proposes that breaking these complex processes down into their elements may help us to make informed decisions about the extent and type of digital archiving we want to engage in.

11 David Nathan continues with the theme of digital archiving by considering the issue of access in relation to archives that hold documents of, and documentation relating to, endangered languages. Nathan defines access as the means of finding a resource; the availability of the resource; the delivery of the resource to the user; the relevance and accessibility of resource content to the user; and the user’s perceptions of their experience interacting with the archive and its resources. His discussion is centred around the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) and its online catalogue, both based at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. The system uses features that have been pioneered in Web 2.0 or social networking applications, and is innovative in applying such techniques to language archiving. Nathan illustrates how ELAR’s access system represents a true departure from conventional archival practices in the field of language documentation.

12 Nathan explains how until recently, access has been thought of as “online resource discovery through querying standardised metadata” (page 23, this volume). Where access control has been applied, it has typically been based on a formal membership criterion, such as a user account on a university’s network. ELAR’s goal is to provide an archive that is more closely tied to the needs of those working with endangered languages, and, of course, the needs of members of speech communities. Nathan reports on how this has emerged as a rich area of exploration, and, coupled with the rise of social networking applications and conventions over the last five years, has yielded a system that highlights the nuanced dynamics of access.

13 Judith Aston and Paul Matthews discuss the outcomes of a collaborative project between the authors and the Oxford-based anthropologist Wendy James. The authors report on their work with James to convert a collection of recordings into an accessible and usable digital archive that has relevance for contemporary users. Aston and Matthews describe James’ fieldwork recordings from the Blue Nile Region of the Sudan-Ethiopian borderlands, which consist of spoken memories, interviews, conversations, myths and songs. Most of the original recordings are in the Uduk language, but the collection also contains material in other minority tongues, as well as national languages. The authors highlight how this archive needs to be useful both to academics and to a wider general public, but also, and most particularly, to the people themselves who are now starting to document and recall their own experiences. It is also important that the materials contained within the archive are perceived to be part of a wider set of regional records from north-east Africa, linked to diaspora communities now living in various parts of the world.

14 A key issue that emerges from Aston and Matthews’ collaboration with James is the need to remain true to the fluidity of oral tradition over time, in order to avoid fossilisation and misrepresentation. Their chapter recommends a conversational approach through which the archive can reveal the interactions and silences of informants, both in conversation with each other and with the ethnographer, at different historical periods. In developing such an approach, the authors hope that future users of the archive will be offered an opportunity to enter a sensory-rich world of experiences, one which foregrounds the awareness and agency of the people themselves and allows their voices to be heard in their vernacular language wherever possible.

Part II: Engagements and Reflections from the Field

15 Merolla, Ameka and Dorvlo open this volume’s collection of field reports with a discussion of the scientific and ethical problems regarding the selection, authorship and audience that they encountered during a video-documentation research project on Ewe oral literature in south-eastern Ghana. Their documentation is based on an interview that Dorvlo and Merolla recorded in Accra in 2007. This interview concerns Ewe migration stories and is included in Merolla and Leiden University’s Verba Africana series that includes videos of African oral genres with translations and interpretive commentaries informed by scientific research. The authors illustrate how the documentation and investigation of African oral genres is still largely based on materials provided in written form, although nowadays it is largely accepted that collecting and analysing printed transcriptions and translations only gives a faint portrait of oral poems and tales and their literary and social functions.

16 This chapter offers an insight into the difficulties of selecting video documentation on Ewe migration stories that is suitable to be presented to a broad audience of academics, students, a public interested in African oral genres, and those involved with cultural issues or invested in specific linguistic traditions. Merolla, Ameka and Dorvlo also enter into a larger debate that is active in all disciplines in which fieldwork is a central activity: the relationship between researchers and the researched, and the locus of responsibility for what is produced and published. The authors conclude by reflecting on the yet harder questions of ownership that arise when scholars make use of audio-visual media and when the final video document is available on the Internet. They offer elegant solutions by considering individual as well as collective indigenous peoples’ rights, and advocate for stronger collaborations between researchers, performers and audience. The authors conclude by demonstrating how their own research strategies have resulted in culturally significant video documents that offer a contemporary snapshot of local knowledge.

17 Margaret Field’s account focuses on the importance of American Indian oral literature for cultural identity and language revitalisation, demonstrated through the analysis of a trickster tale. Taking the position that oral literature such as narrative and song often serve as important cultural resources that retain and reinforce cultural values and group identity, Field demonstrates how American Indian trickster tales — like Aesop’s fables found in Europe — contain moral content, and are typically aimed at child audiences. In this chapter, Field discusses an example of this genre with specific reference to the Kumeyaay community of Baja California, Mexico. She also describes how such stories are an important form of cultural property that index group identity: once through the code that is used, and then again through the content of the narrative itself. Field demonstrates how oral traditions such as trickster tales form an important body of knowledge that not only preserves cultural values and philosophical orientations, but also continues to instill these values in listeners.

18 Considering the uses of her own fieldwork, Field explains that American Indian communities typically view their oral traditions as communal intellectual property. It is therefore incumbent upon researchers who work with traditional texts in oral communities to collaborate to ensure that collected texts are treated in a manner that is appropriate from the perspective of the communities of origin. Field reminds us that it is essential for researchers to bear in mind the relationship between the recording, publication, and archiving of oral literature, community preferences regarding these aspects of research, and considerations relating to language revitalisation. Her message is particularly relevant today in light of the wide availability of multimedia and the ever-expanding capabilities for the archiving of oral literature. Through technological advancements, such recordings may be more available than ever in a range of formats (audio and video in addition to print), and ever more important (and political), as indigenous languages become increasingly endangered. Field concludes by demonstrating how her research materials were repatriated to the Kumayaay community in the form of educational resources and as reminders of cultural identity.

19 Jorge Gómez Rendón continues the discussion on revitalisation practices in the cultural heritage sector through his account of orality and literacy among indigenous cultures in Ecuador, paying close attention to contextual political factors and challenges. While Ecuador is the smallest of the Andean nations, it is linguistically highly diverse. Rendón explains that education programmes have not yet produced written forms of indigenous languages in Ecuador, which are now critically endangered. However, a resurgence of ethnic pride combined with increasing interest shown by governmental agencies in the safeguarding of cultural diversity are bringing native languages and oral practices to the foreground. This greater visibility is opening up new ways for linguistic identities to be politically managed.

20 After a review of the relative vitality of Ecuadorian indigenous languages and an evaluation of twenty years of intercultural bilingual education, Rendón focuses on two alternative approaches to orality in the fields of bilingual education and intangible cultural heritage. In discussing these two approaches, he addresses several ethical and legal issues concerning property rights, the dissemination of documentation outcomes, and the appropriation of intangible cultural heritage for the improvement of indigenous education. He provides a preliminary exploration into best practices in the archiving and management of digital materials for educational and cultural purposes in community contexts, through which Rendón proposes a “new model of intercultural bilingual education” and “safeguarding of intangible heritage […] respecting [performers’] property rights from a collective rather than individual perspective” (page 79, this volume) with the aim of ensuring the survival of endangered languages and cultures.

21 Madan Meena’s field report is based on his archiving experiences as a grantee of the World Oral Literature Project’s fieldwork grants scheme. His focal recording was made in Thikarda village in south-eastern Rajasthan — a region locally known as Hadoti — and was performed in the Hadoti language in a distinct singing style. Geographically, the area is very large (24,923 square kilometers), and there are many variations in the style of performance. Meena offers an account of his experience recording the twenty-hour Hadoti ballad of Tejaji, describing the challenges he faced in capturing the entire ballad in a manner that was as authentic as possible. Meena reports how, in the past, the ballad could only be performed at a shrine in response to a snake bite. Increasingly, however, as the belief systems behind the ballad are being challenged by education and Western medical techniques of treating snake bites, the ballad is becoming divorced from its religious roots and evolving into a distinct musical tradition of its own that can be performed at festivals for entertainment value. Meena describes the use of the project’s resultant digital recordings by community members to popularise their traditional performances, using MP3 players and mobile phone handsets to listen to recordings. He reflects on the invaluable nature of digital technology in preserving oral cultures, alongside the threats posed by these same technological developments to more traditional performance of oral traditions.

22 In the final field report of this volume, Ha Mingzong, Ha Mingzhu and Charles K. Stuart describe their research on the Mongghul (Monguor, Tu) Ha Clan oral history tradition in Qinghai and Gansu provinces, China. The authors provide historical details on the Mongghul ethnic group, and justify the urgency of their fieldwork to record and preserve the cultural heritage and historical knowledge of Mongghul elders. As well as knowing a rich repertoire of songs, folktales and cultural expressions, these elders are the “last group able to repeat generationally transmitted knowledge about clan origins, migration routes, settlement areas, important local figures, […] clan genealogy, […], modes of livelihood, [and] relationships local people had with government” (page 94, this volume). Recognition is given to the importance of documenting such knowledge for the future benefit of younger generations.

23 Mingzong, Mingzhu and Stuart describe their method of recording interviews about family stories told by community members. Local reactions to their recording methods are explained, with the assurance that the fieldworkers were met with hospitality and a shared sense of the importance of the documentation from older community members, despite an initially indifferent attitude from younger members of the community. The authors provide examples of their transcriptions of interviews and demonstrate how the return of digital versions of the recordings to the community has strengthened the sense of clan unity and belonging.

Openness, access and connectivity

24 As editors of this volume, we are delighted to bring together these important contributions that reflect on the ethical practices of anthropological and linguistic fieldwork, digital archiving, and the repatriation of cultural materials. We believe that the widest possible dissemination of such work will help support the propagation of best practices to all who work in these fields. The open access publishing model practiced by our partners in this series, the Cambridge-based Open Book Publishers, is designed to ensure that these chapters are widely and freely accessible for years to come, on a range of different publishing platforms.

5 See http://www.openbookpublishers.com/ [Accessed 22 April 2013].

25 Open Book Publishers are experimental and innovative, changing the nature of the traditional academic book: publishing in hardback, paperback, PDF and e-book editions, but also offering a free online edition that can be read via their website. 5 Their commitment to open access dovetails with our Project’s mandate to widen the dissemination of knowledge, ideas, and access to cultural traditions. Connecting with a broader audience — one that was historically disenfranchised by the exclusivity of print and the restrictive distribution networks that favoured Western readers — allows the protection of cultural knowledge. This is achieved through a better understanding of human diversity, and the return of digitised collections to source communities and countries of origin. The chapters in this volume help us to understand each stage of this journey, from building cooperative relationships with community representatives in the field, designing and using digital tools for cultural documentation, through to the ethical and practical considerations involved in building access models for digital archives.

6 Published in London by Edward Arnold.

26 When Edward Morgan Forster ended his 1910 novel Howards End with the powerful epigraph “Only connect...” he could not have imagined how this exhortation would resonate with generations to come and how its meaning would change. 6 For our purposes, both in this edited collection and in our work more generally in the World Oral Literature Project, “only connect” has a powerful, double meaning. First, and perhaps overwhelmingly for young audiences and readers, it implies that one is on the path to being digitally hooked up, wired (although in an increasingly wireless world, even the term “wired” is antiquated), and ready to participate in a virtual, online conversation. Since most of our transactions and communications in the Project are digital — through email, websites, voice-over Internet Protocol, and file share applications — “only connect” reflects our fast changing world and new work practices. Second, and perhaps more profoundly, “only connect” is what we hope to achieve when we share recordings of oral literature in print, on air and online. Connectivity is all: our project would not exist without the technical underpinnings and the philosophical imperative to see information and knowledge shared. We hope that you enjoy reading this volume as much as we have enjoyed editing it and that you will, quite simply, connect.

27 Cambridge, November 2012

3 See the Digital Return research network for more discussion on these issues: http://digitalreturn.wsu.edu [Accessed 19 November 2012].

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Archiving Orality and Connecting with Communities

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The Palgrave Handbook of African Oral Traditions and Folklore pp 119–130 Cite as

Fieldwork and Data Collection

• Arinpe G. Adejumo 3 &
• Akeem Oyebamiji 4  
• First Online: 03 March 2021

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African folklore is verbal in nature. The different forms, such as as folktales, folksongs, myths, proverbs, legends, idioms, and so on, showcase the tribal peoples’ oral resourcefulness and their life in general. African folklore is passed down from mouth to mouth and from one generation to the other. Efforts have been made by scholars of African folklore to translate African folklore from its state of being intangible to being tangible through the collection of its various forms for documentation and preservation. The documentations are transcribed to form a text of African folklore, which may be used for analysis. This chapter reiterates, in a more novel dimension, necessary preparations to guide intending scholars of African folklore on fieldwork and data collection. This includes preparation for pre-field, field, and post-field activities. They are also guided on certain challenges that may confront them during their field research, especially in this era of insecurity and uncertainty. The work offers solutions to the challenges, in the form of recommendations.

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Adejumo, A.G., Oyebamiji, A. (2021). Fieldwork and Data Collection. In: Akinyemi, A., Falola, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of African Oral Traditions and Folklore. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55517-7_6

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• The Milman Parry Collection, 1933–35
• The Lord Albanian Collection, 1937
• The Lord Collection, 1950–51
• The James A. Notopoulos Collection of Modern Greek Ballads and Songs
• The Whitman-Rinvolucri Greek Shadow Theater Collection
• The Library Digital Initiative

Four Generations of Oral Literary Studies at Harvard University

Child’s legacy enlarged: oral literary studies at harvard since 1856, david e. bynum.

Poetry and storytelling began so long ago in prehistoric time that no one can scientifically even guess how or when they originated. But one thing is certain. Our biological ancestors did not cease to be a mere species of animal and become  mankind  until the capacity for rhythmic language and narration had evolved in them. In myth the world over, these mental powers are said to be god-given and divine. They are at the very least indispensable to any practical definition of humanity.

For many millenia the only instrument of rhythmic words and narrative known in any part of the world was the tongue men were born with, not the stylus or the pen, for writing was not invented until too late in human evolution for it to reveal anything about the origin of speech. So for long ages the only way  any  knowledge could survive from one generation to another was through  oral tradition . Rhythmical speech was the world’s first great medium of communication for complex ideas, and there were certainly media men of astonishing skill long before anyone on earth knew how to write.

In North America the scientific study of oral traditions began at Harvard College just a little more than a century ago. For 116 years, Harvard College has been collecting oral traditions and disseminating knowledge about them to anyone who could use that knowledge to good purpose. Three men of the Harvard faculty launched this brilliant movement in American intellectual life. They were Francis James Child, George Lyman Kittredge, and Milman Parry. The following pages are about those three men, their ideas, and their continuing impact on the life of our own time.

More than any literate men before them, Professors Child, Kittredge, and Parry saw the protean shapes of pre-literate speech at work in the earliest creations of thought and literature. Where others saw only the figures of written or printed words on paper, they had a vision of voices out of the past sounding those words in the ancient rhythms of oral tradition.

What Oral Literature Is

One of the most important developments in this century in both the popular and academic understanding of culture has been the wide growth of awareness that only a tiny percentage of man’s total creative achievement has depended on literacy. Writing is at most a comparatively recent invention, and while it is useful for keeping records of all sorts, it is a cumbersome and inefficient means of cultural communication, even with the help of printing.

Despite their mechanical awkwardness and inefficiency, writing and printing are undeniably two great tools of civilization. But they are not basic assets of human nature. The more fundamental and most distinctive cultural property of men everywhere remains their innate power of speech. Spoken words are the ultimate source of graphic communication, and any decay or diminution of the arts of speech immediately erodes the value of graphic culture. We live in an age when, moreover, other potentially civilizing inventions based on electrical recording and electrical dissemination of speech have only begun to be used and appreciated.

A large part of current speech in any language is ephemeral, and is employed for merely transient purposes. But a certain proportion of spoken communication is enduring, whether or not any record is made of it in writing or otherwise. It expresses ideas of such proven, lasting utility that special,  poetic  modes of speech exist in every language to assure the remembrance and continuation of those vital ideas in  oral traditions .  Oral literature  is the material recorded from oral traditions in every age and in every language.

The Harvard Tradition

Harvard University is today internationally known and respected as a center for the collection and study of oral literature.

The University’s prominence in this field arises partly from the devoted work of its numerous present members who are engaged in oral literary studies, and partly from an older tradition of scholarship on oral literature that goes back more than a hundred years in the history of Harvard College. Much of the best work now being done, whether at Harvard or elsewhere, is only a fulfillment and deepening of the research on oral literature that began at Harvard about the year 1856.

The entire faculty of Harvard College in 1856 numbered only fourteen men, including the President of the University, who was then James Walker. Yet within that small company of scholars there were men whose energy and ideas are still felt among the best influences on higher education in America. Benjamin Peirce, to whom the teaching of natural science at Harvard owed so much, was a member of the faculty at that time. So too was Charles William Eliot, the man who would in later years guide Harvard’s development as it grew to be one of the world’s great institutions of learning. But in 1856 Eliot was still only a Tutor in Mathematics who had himself graduated from Harvard College just three years earlier. Another, older member of the faculty of fourteen was Eliot’s forerunner as Tutor in Mathematics, Francis James Child (Harvard 1846). Professor Child had given up teaching numbers to become in 1851 the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, and it was while he occupied this chair that he began the study of oral literature at Harvard.

A faculty of fourteen men in a college with an enrollment of 382 undergraduates was not so large that any member of the faculty could give himself exclusively to his own intellectual pursuits. Still, it was large enough for this one man, Francis Child, to begin a forty-year career dedicated to study and publication of the so-called “popular” ballads of Britain.

Francis James Child

Professor Child, the former mathematician, came to his consummate interest in what he variously called “popular,” “primitive,” or “traditional” balladry not by accident but by force of logic. His valedictory address in 1846 to his own graduating class at Harvard College shows how absorbed and how extraordinarily skilled in the arts of expression he was even then. He was a right choice to be Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in later years. Child well understood how indispensable good writing and good speaking are to civilization, or as many would now prefer to say, to society. For him, writing and speaking were not only the practical means by which men share useful information, but also the means whereby they formulate and share values, including the higher order of values that give meaning to life and purpose to human activities of all sorts. Concerned as he thus so greatly was with rhetoric, oratory, and the motives of those mental disciplines, Child was inevitably drawn into pondering the essential differences between speech and writing, and to searching for the origins of thoughtful expression in English.

The obvious sources of well expressed thought in English were of course the classics of English literature. Then as now, an important service which a man like Professor Child could render to the general public was to select and edit for publication works of literature that would encourage his own generation to good thinking, good expression, and good understanding of lasting human values. So Child became the general editor of “The British Poets,” a series of more than a hundred printings and reprintings of classic English poetry issued for the general public by Little, Brown, and Company. His first personal contribution to that series was an edition of the poetry of Edmund Spenser in five small volumes.

But important as such literary poetry was for Professor Child’s aims, he knew that it was only the aftermath of an earlier and more original kind of poetic expression in English. By 1856, he was already at work on his second contribution to “The British Poets,” an edition of more than 300  English and Scottish Ballads , published in eight volumes during the years 1856-1859. Some of the fine poetic narratives which Child put into these volumes were as much the products of writing and of print as the poetry of Spenser, Chaucer, or Shakespeare. But the real meat of the edition, the pieces which Child himself believed were best, belonged to another kind of poetry the poetry of a British oral tradition that had in the course of previous centuries “found its way into writing and into print,” but which was not in fact the product of either writing or printing. Child said about this oral traditional literature that it is

a distinct and very important species of poetry. Its historical and natural place is anterior to the appearance of the poetry of art, to which it has formed a step, and by which it has been regularly displaced, and, in some cases, all but extinguished. Whenever a people in the course of its development reaches a certain intellectual and moral stage, it will feel an impulse to express itself, and the form of expression to which it is first impelled is, as is well known, not prose, but verse, and in fact narrative verse. Such poetry . . . is in its essence an expression of our common human nature, and so of universal and indestructible interest. (Walter Morris Hart, “Professor Child and the Ballad,”  PMLA , XXI (1906), 756)

Thus Child discovered in British ballads an original, pre-literary form of intellectual and moral expression. But although Child knew that the “popular” ballads of Britain belonged in principle to an immemorial oral tradition and not at all to written literature, they had nevertheless been the objects of literary tampering and imitation by so many generations of literary collectors, editors, and scribblers that it was hard work indeed to find any pure examples of oral composition, much less to reconstruct the history of oral tradition in Britain. Still, if it were ever going to be possible to understand the sources and content of our primary “literary” legacy the oral literature in our own language then pure examples of it had to be searched out, and a thorough survey of the surviving material had to be made and published, at whatever expense. It was so when Child began his work on British oral traditions in 1856, and it has remained so for scholars of oral literature in every other part of the world ever since.

From 1859 onward, Professor Child did all that he could do in a long lifetime to satisfy these two urgent needs of humanistic science: to secure the best existing evidence of the earlier British oral tradition, and to publish as complete an analytical survey of that evidence as he could compile. George Lyman Kittredge, Child’s successor at Harvard in the same work, has described Child’s great enterprise:

The book [ English and Scottish Ballads ] circulated widely, and was at once admitted to supersede all previous attempts in the same field. To Mr. Child, however, it was but the starting-point for further researches. He soon formed the plan of a much more extensive collection on an altogether different model. This was to include every obtainable version of every extant English or Scottish ballad, with the fullest possible discussion of related songs or stories in the “popular” literature of all nations. To this enterprise be resolved, if need were, to devote the rest of his life. His first care was to secure trustworthy texts. In his earlier collection he had been forced to depend almost entirely on printed books. No progress, he was convinced, could be made till recourse could be had to manuscripts. . . . It was clear to Mr. Child that he could not safely take anything at second hand, and he determined not to print a line of his projected work till he had exhausted every effort to get hold of whatever manuscript material might be in existence. . . . A number of manuscripts were in private hands; of others the existence was not suspected. But Mr. Child was untiring. He was cordially assisted by various scholars, antiquaries, and private gentlemen. . . Plate I. A typical page from the Buchan manuscript, one of professor Child’s main sources of texts, now in the Houghton Library. See full-size image of Plate I . Some manuscripts were secured for the Library of Harvard University, and of others careful copies were made, which became the property of the same library. Gradually . . . the manuscript materials came in, until at last, in 1882, Mr. Child felt justified in beginning to print. Other important documents were, however, discovered or made accessible as time went on. In addition, Mr. Child made an effort to stimulate the collection of such remains of the traditional ballad as still live on the lips of the people in this country and in the British Islands. (G. L. Kittredge, “Francis James Child,” in F. J. Child,  The English and Scotttish Popular Ballads , V, Part X (Boston, 1898), xxvii-xxviii.)

It thus took Professor Child together with his backers and collaborators no less than twenty-two years to locate and gather a bare minimum of the textual evidence of British ballad tradition, and even then the toil of securing the necessary documentation was not over. Such an expense of human and financial resources would seem prodigal if one did not remember that, unlike written literature, oral traditions do not come neatly packaged and ready-to-hand in printed books or other prepared forms. Yet nothing can be known for certain about oral tradition in any language until hundreds of texts have been recorded, collected, and carefully compared. The task of oral literary researchers in this respect has not diminished since Child’s time.

By 1882, Child had been deeply engaged in the study of British oral literature for more than a quarter-century. Even some of his admirers reproached him for being too uncreative in so long a time. But he was the first pioneer of his subject and, while others carped, he wrought the foundations upon which all the principal departments of activity essential to oral literary studies still rest. He did a little collecting of his own, writing down the words and tunes of a few oral ballad performances from living singers, but he was in addition an unequalled collector of other, earlier collectors’ manuscripts. The time, ingenuity, and critical acumen which scholars in simpler fields might expend freely on direct “creativity” Child gave gladly to the inconspicuous but indispensable business of  collecting . Then, when the collecting was thoroughly done, there came the demanding process of  comparative analysis  to establish what relationships various texts had to one another in oral tradition. For as one of Child’s own best students later wrote:

“It is well known that ballad-texts are kittle-cattle to shoe; it is easy to print all the versions, but when selection is attempted, a hundred questions rise.”  Publication  was of course the motive for so much painstaking preliminary work. But when at last in 1882 Child began to publish, what he printed was a monument that both excelled and outlasted the published work of all his contemporaries.

Plate II. Francis James Child. This photograph, apparently taken by Charles Eliot Norton, was found among Kittredge’s papers in the Houghton Library; it shows Child, who was famous for his rose-gardening, in the yard of his home on Kirkland Street.

See full-size image of Plate II .

It is a curious and – in retrospect – an absurd fact that for nearly a hundred years none of Harvard’s great scholars of oral literature ever taught in the curriculum what they spent decades of their mature lives studying in private the texts and facts of oral traditions. Child did not pioneer in the development of formal  instruction  on oral literature. But he was nevertheless the founder of  public education  in this field. Throughout the more than forty years of his publishing career from 1856 to 1898, his editions of ballads were never mere textbooks. He meant his editions to be, and they were, of lasting utility to an educated, reading public at large. His extracurricular lectures both in and away from Cambridge were another influential contribution toward the improvement of common knowledge outside of universities.

All of Professor Child’s accomplishments in founding oral literary studies have endured the passage of time, but none has so increased in value since his era as the Folklore Collection which he created in the Harvard College Library. Decades before men like Archibald Cary Coolidge made fashionable the donation and procurement of large lots of books on specialized subjects for the College Library, Child had already formed the nucleus of the polyglot Folklore Collection. With the help of such supporters as Charles Minot, that collection had grown to more than 7,000 volumes by the end of Child’s career, and many of the books which he gathered in the nineteenth century are today the Collection’s most precious properties.

Professor Child’s interest in developing a  library of printed book resources  was the direct outgrowth of his conviction that the study of oral literature could not be departmentalized by languages or nationalities. British balladry was the focus of his lifelong research on oral traditions, but it was a focus that gathered light from hundreds of sources outside Britain. When at last his collection of British manuscripts had proceeded far enough to give him some confidence in his own understanding of that tradition, he wrote: “There remains the very curious question of the origin of the resemblances which are found in the ballads of different nations, the recurrence of the same incidents or even the same story, among races distinct in blood and history and geographically far separated.” (Hart, op. cit., 758.) For that reason, as G. L. Kittredge later reported, “. . . concurrently with the toil of amassing, collating, and arranging texts, went on the far more arduous labor of comparative study of the ballads of all nations; for, in accordance with Mr. Child’s plan it was requisite to determine, in the fullest manner, the history and foreign relations of every piece included in his collection.” (Kittredge, op. cit., xxviii.) So from his initial studies in British balladry Child found himself obliged by that tradition itself to enlarge the scope of his research and to examine the wider European oral tradition of which the ballads of England and Scotland were only a part. In the end, there was scarcely any language of Europe which Child had not managed in some way to consult for various details of its oral literature. In this too his experience a hundred years ago was typical for scholars of oral literature ever since, whose subject simply cannot be defined by ethnic or linguistic frontiers. The Folklore Collection in the Harvard College Library is today four times the size it was when Child died in 1896, but its polyglot heterogeneity is still its greatest virtue in service to comparative research on oral traditions.

Francis James Child was still working on the tenth and final volume of his definitive edition of  The English and Scottish Popular Ballads  when his death occurred in the autumn of 1896. It was his fiftieth year of continuous service to Harvard College, and the fortieth year of his continuous service to oral literary scholarship as editor, accumulator, and comparativist of British and European balladry

The Kittredge Era

The passage of Child caused no interruption of the work which he had begun. Even before the death of his teacher, George Lyman Kittredge (Harvard 1882), Child’s former student, was already pressing on with the same activities of collecting, publishing, public education, and library improvement.

Kittredge began his long career at Harvard as an Instructor in 1888, and by 1894 he had succeeded to the professorship in English which Child had occupied since its inception in 1876. It was Kittredge who completed the last volume of Child’s great ballad compendium and saw it through to publication.

But that was only the beginning. Child had left behind a wealth of manuscripts, copies, and other material pertaining to his studies in ballad, much of it in the working disarray that is inevitable in the papers of an active scholar. Kittredge spent hundreds of hours organizing this material for the Harvard College Library, and the order which he imposed upon it may still be seen in the thirty-three folio volumes of Child’s papers kept in the Houghton Library.

Plate III. George Lyman Kittredge in 1882.

See full-size image of Plate III.

Like his teacher, Kittredge was an untiring accumulator of data. The Harvard University Archives hold no less than sixty-four volumes of his notes and collectanea, and more than half of these pertain to oral literature and folklore. As would be expected, ballad and other sung verse have the place of honor in these volumes, accounting for twenty of the sixty-four. Under “Kitty’s” constant tending, the Folklore Collection in the Library also grew to more than 20,000 volumes, or thrice the size it had been when he inherited the responsibility for it from Child.

But Kittredge was not content just to continue Child’s various enterprises; his interest in oral traditions was even broader than Child’s had been. The focus of Child’s work was balladry, and Kittredge gathered new material and published on that subject amply. But other genres of oral tradition occupied more of Kittredge’s mind, including such diverse subjects as proverbs, folktales, and the history of witchcraft beliefs. Besides the eight volumes of material he gathered into his notes and scrapbooks relevant to witchcraft beliefs and trials, he published three important monographs on that subject between 1907 and 1917.

Kittredge ranged beyond the scope of Child’s activity in other ways too. More than Child, he was interested in the continuation of British and European oral literature and folklore in America. And he paid particular attention throughout his career to works of ancient and medieval literature which had the stamp of close association with oral tradition. His published works in this department ranged from his edition of Ovid’s  Metamorphoses  to his several writings on Arthurian legends. He kept abreast of the work of other prominent folkiorists of his time such as Andrew Lang, and he was for a time President of The American Folklore Society. Kittredge is perhaps most often remembered for his work in English, but his awareness and his writings on oral literature and folklore extended well beyond the English-speaking peoples to include such diverse materials as Old Norse, Finnish, Russian, and even Japanese folklore.

Those who knew him agree that Kittredge had an unusual capacity for work, and he worked hard on oral literature. But he exerted his most lasting influence on future oral literary studies through his recruitment of disciples for this field and his  encouragement of graduate learning . It is ironic that his greatest success should be measured in the later work of his students when one recalls how many of them remember him for the distinctive acerbity of his public dealings with them. But his sometimes brusque manner was rarely mistaken for malice, and “Kitty” was an able patron when he chose to be. Few American scholars have promoted humanistic learning so decisively in so many fields as he did through his students and protégés.

The recruitment of disciples and sponsoring of graduate work on oral literature was another of the activities inherited from Child. Kittredge himself was a product of it, for the soft-spoken, mild-mannered Child had personally chosen “Kitty” to continue his work, and despite their very different manners, the two men were close friends. Kittredge’s staunchest ally in ballad studies after Child’s death was another of Child’s disciples, Francis Barton Gummere (Harvard 1875), who was for a few years Instructor in English at Harvard before he went permanently to be Professor of English at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. A lifelong scholar of oral literature and patron in turn of other, younger men in the same field, Gummere did not cease to contribute to the welfare of these studies at Harvard when he removed to Pennsylvania. In time he sent his son, Richard Mott Gummere, to study the Classics at Harvard, and Richard Gummere stayed to become the Dean of Admissions at Harvard College, an office which he held for 18 years. It was he who during his long tenure “nationalized” the admissions program of the College, bringing the ablest young men he could find from all parts of the country to study for Harvard’s A.B. degree. More than one young scholar of oral literature in the present generation owes his place in this field, however indirectly, to Richard Gummere’s thorough reform of admissions policy.

Others of Child’s protégeés advanced the cause of oral literary studies in major American institutions besides Harvard. Perhaps the most prominent. of these was a very early disciple indeed, Jeremiah Curtin of the Class of 1863. Curtin was a polymathic personality, and he arguably did more in his time for the “public relations” of oral literary learning than any man before or after him. As collector, translator, and publicist, he was able to gain the interest and even the financial support of such prominent individuals as Charles H. Dana, the famous publisher of the New York  Sun , and of such prominent public institutions as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Curtin was no great interpreter of oral traditions, and his scholarship was no match for his practical enthusiasm. But he travelled indefatigably throughout his entire lifetime of 71 years, motivated mainly by his interest in oral literature. Besides the usual facility in ancient and foreign languages of educated men in his time, he spoke Irish Gaelic and Russian, and knew a good deal of American Indian languages. His principal works of translation and commentary on oral traditions were from American Indians, from Russian and Siberian peoples of the Russian Empire, and from Ireland. He knew all of these peoples at first hand. In Ireland, where with American backing he collected Gaelic oral traditions, Curtin’s advanced collecting procedures set a new standard for fieldwork that was ultimately incorporated into the working methodology of the Irish Folklore Commission, the institution which has the largest single national archive of oral literature in the world today.

During the few years in the early 1890s when Child and Kittredge were together on the faculty of Harvard’s English Department, several young scholars of oral traditions enjoyed the sponsorship of both men. The most eminent of these was Fred Norris Robinson of the Class of 1891. He took his Master’s and Doctor’s degrees at Harvard in quick succession (1892 and 1894), then Child and Kittredge sent him to Freiburg in Germany to learn the principles of Celtic philology in what was the world’s foremost school of Celtic languages in that era. Child and Kittredge both regretted knowing no Celtic, and they were determined that the time had come when the Celtic component of British and other European oral traditions must be scientifically understood. The enthusiastic but inexact work in Celtic of such earlier lights as Curtin could no longer satisfy Harvard’s two doyens of oral literature, and so they delegated Robinson to bring Celtic studies to Cambridge. Robinson’s return to Harvard in the fall of 1896 with an appointment as instructor coincided with the death of Child, but Child like Kittredge would have been delighted with Robinson’s success. From that time until his retirement in 1939 Robinson remained at Harvard, training one generation after another in Celtic. Almost singlehandedly he established Celtic studies as a permanent department of humanistic learning in America.

The study of oral literature had begun at Harvard as the personal preoccupation of one man, and as such it was one of the oldest foci of intellectual effort in the modern University. But after 1890 it became also a major generator of new technical disciplines not only for Harvard but also for higher learning in the nation as a whole. As the drive to learn more about the contents and origins of oral literature gained momentum over the decades, it set in motion many new subsidiary developments and careers like that of Robinson in Celtic. Kittredge loomed as the presiding genius of this new phase.

Child’s followers had for the most part enlisted in his cause one by one, and their careers were mainly independent of each other. But in the years from 1900 to the beginning of the Great Depression, a veritable constellation of diverse personalities and talents formed around Kittredge. Through the force of his persuasion and example, “Kitty” attracted and shaped the first coherent  cadre  of oral literary scholars in America. His students and followers began to specialize in particular  genres  of oral literature, and a vigorous commerce of knowledge and ideas arose among them. Gradually the members of Kittredge’s pleiad dispersed to other centers of learning and education throughout the United States, but the friendships and intellectual alliances formed under his aegis in Cambridge persisted.

Walter Morris Hart was one of Kittredge’s early disciples who became a considerable figure in the West as Professor of English at the University of California. Hart’s specialty was the still-debated relationship between ballads and epic poetry, and in his search for solutions to that problem he developed and taught a method in the philology of medieval English which helped many generations of students to read the epic and romance literature of England. Another of Kittredge’s students who went west was Sigurd Bernhard Hustvedt, a second-generation Norwegian-American from the Mid-West who worked under Kittredge during the years 1912-1915. He went afterwards as Professor of English to the University of California at Los Angeles, where he taught until 1949. His book  Ballad Books and Ballad Men  is still a landmark.

Another senior member of the Kittredge constellation was Archer Taylor, who specialized in Germanic traditions and studied closely some of the basic forms of wisdom literature, such as the poetry of proverbs. Taylor followed Hart to the University of California at Berkeley, where he remained active into the closing years of the 19605. Taylor and Stith Thompson of Indiana University are generally regarded as the founders of modern folklore scholarship in America. They met at Harvard in 1912, later travelled together overseas, and thus struck up a friendship that has continued ever since – they vying amicably with each other throughout their lives as to which of them would live longest and do most for folklore studies. At this writing, both are still living and their contest is undecided. (Between the writing and publication of this paper, Archer Taylor died, 30 September 1973.)

Some of Kittredge’s disciples, like Taylor and Thompson, have been great codifiers of oral literature, whose major energies have gone toward establishing typologies and classifications for the various kinds of texts derived from oral traditions. They have also tried to determine how the contents of oral tradition have spread or diffused from place to place and people to people in the course of history.

Others of the Kittredge constellation, such as Newman Ivey White of North Carolina, became great editors of oral literature, continuing the Child tradition of publishing definitive compendiums to make the various forms of oral tradition besides ballad available in print.

The field of musicology is especially indebted to the Kittredge constellation for a whole series of outstanding specialists in folk music -the musical component of many forms of oral literature. After William Weld Newell, who began work in Child’s era, came Phillips Barry, Helen Hartness Flanders, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, Bertrand Harris Bronson, and Samuel Bayard, to name but a few exceptionally prominent musicologists of oral tradition from the Age of Kittredge. But to name only a few is misleading. D. K. Wilgus, Sigurd Hustvedt’s continuator at the University of California in Los Angeles, has best described how the example of Child and the active encouragement of Kittredge created a national movement of folksong collecting and research:

The most important single fact of American collection has been its close relationship to educational institutions. The institutions themselves have not always officially approved and supported folksong collection; but academic folklore interest encouraged teachers to take advantage of the American emphasis on universal education, which brought into the classroom informants and contacts with traditional culture. In the early years of the century the work of Professors Child and Kittredge had made Harvard University an unofficial center of folksong study. . . . The direct and indirect influence of Harvard University produced results which, when archives and theses are eventually surveyed, will be truly staggering. (D. K. Wilgus,  Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898  (New Brunswick, 1959), pp.173-174.)

Not all of Kittredge’s disciples in folksong research were professional scholars and academics. John Avery Lomax and his son Alan James represent another kind of following that added a distinctive lustre of its own to the Kittredge constellation. John Lomax was a Mississippian who got his A.M. degree under Kittredge in 1907. As a boy John had lived on the Chisholm trail in Texas, and after finishing his preparatory work on ballad for his degree at Harvard, he was eager to collect the oral traditional singing of the cattlemen in the country where he had been raised. Kittredge got him three summer fellowships from Harvard for that purpose, and Lomax used them to discover and record on his portable phonograph innumerable pieces of American song tradition including such now-famous songs as “Home on the Range,” “Git Along, Little Dogies,” “The Old Chisholm Trail,” and “The Boll Weevil.” John Lomax’s vocation for folksong remained the dominant purpose in his life from then on. He continued to collect until his death in 1948 at the age of 8o, and eventually extended his range to include all parts of the United States where oral traditions of song could be found. His son Alan, who came to Harvard College in 1931, inherited his father’s same engrossment with the collection and popularization of folksong, with the difference that whereas John Lomax confined his activity to North America, Alan has undertaken to popularize folksong from all corners of the world for Anglo-American audiences.

Professor Kittredge launched one productive career after another by securing a little fellowship money for the right student at the right moment. His aim was ever to improve oral literary studies in some facet where he sensed a deficiency, but the accomplishments that rewarded his patronage usually far outran the limited goals which he set for his prote’ge’s. A case in point was Ernest J. Simmons, ’25. As earlier he had regretted knowing no Celtic, so too Kittredge regretted that he knew no Russian, because Russian oral narrative had come to interest him greatly in his later years. He promised Ernest Simmons that if Ernest would learn Russian, he would find a way to send him to Russia, and in 1928 he kept that promise. The experience of a year in Russia was decisive for Simmons, who thereafter turned entirely to Slavic studies. In the years after 1945, Simmons was the guiding force in the rapid growth of Russian and Soviet studies at Columbia University, which was the hotbed from which the scions of this new field were transplanted to Harvard and subsequently to other academic centers throughout the United States. Perhaps too often, Kittredge’s prote’ge’s were, like Simmons, carried so far afield by the impetus which “Kitty” imparted to them that the originally intended service to oral literary studies never materialized. Russian oral narrative, which is among the most richly attested in all of Europe and Asia, remains today a virgin field for comparative study in the Harvard tradition.

In an age rife with literary ethnocentricity, Kittredge was as readily and as genuinely interested in Russian ballads or American Indian folktales as in the plays of Shakespeare. There was, moreover, within the broad circle of his influence no great chasm between literary populists and élitists such as afflicts contemporary literary scholarship. Kittredge’s intellectual hospitality toward “foreign” traditions and his equanimity toward “vulgar” ones appear in retrospect as perhaps the most important sources of his influence.

Not all the students who responded to Kittredge’s philoxenia were catapulted as suddenly into foreign studies as were F. N. Robinson and Ernest Simmons. Some reacted to it more gradually, while others who withstood its effects in their own careers nevertheless fostered it in those who in turn came under their tutelage.

Two of Kittredge’s disciples who stayed at Harvard continued his tradition of oral literary studies in English after his retirement in 1936.

One of these was Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. (Harvard 1916). A specialist in Anglo-Saxon and Old English literature, Professor Magoun was later to be the first influential figure in his field who recognized the applicability of Parry’s Oral Theory to such works of Anglo-Saxon poetry as  Beowulf . His understanding of oral literature was thus a unique fusion of the early Kittred ge and later Parry legacies. Together with Alexander Krappe, he was the first scholarly English translator of the Grimm Brothers’ German folktales. While looking among Britain’s neighbors in Europe for possible modern analogues to old English epic poetry, Magoun also became interested in the oral poetry of Finland which the Finn Elias Lönnrot had collected and published in the nineteenth century under the title  The Kalevala .

So in middle age Magoun set about learning Finnish, for he retained throughout his life the same willingness that Kittredge had to work in whatever materials would best serve the enlargement of knowledge about oral traditions. Gradually books in Finnish began to displace the volumes on medieval English in the library at Magoun’s home on Reservoir Street. His studies and translations of  The Kalevala  won him singular recognition not only in the English-speaking world but also in Finland itself. Long after his retirement in 1961, Magoun was still publishing new work in the field of Finnish oral literature.

Plate IV. George Lyman Kitteredge in 1926, portrait by Charles S. Hopkinson, reproduced by permission of Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.

See full-size image of Plate IV .

A decade younger than Magoun, Bartlett Jere Whiting came to Harvard College as a freshman in 1921. First as student and then as teacher, he remained in the English Department continuously from that time until his retirement in 1975. Whiting first attracted Kittredge ‘s attention with an undergraduate paper on traditional wisdom – the lore of proverbs – in Chaucer. The same unusual fidelity which those who later knew Whiting experienced in his personal friendship, expressed itself also in his intellectual activities. He remained true to both Chaucer and the English proverb throughout his long subsequent professional career of fifty years. Shortly after graduating, Whiting became F. N. Robinson’s assistant in the English Department’s large undergraduate course on Chaucer, and when Robinson retired, Whiting became and remained head of that course until 1975.

Another form of English literature that was oral or depended heavily on oral tradition was the Middle English romances – the long metrical and prose tales in Middle English about such legendary figures as Sir Gawain, Havelok the Dane, and Bevis of Hamtoun. These were a central personal interest of Kittredge, who taught this subject in the English Department until 1928, when he relinquished it to Whiting. Here again Whiting was tenaciously faithful to his commission, continuing to teach and propagate research on the romances without interruption for the next forty-six years.

Meanwhile, in his own research, Whiting worked steadily on proverbs and traditional wisdom, painstakingly compiling piece by piece his definitive reconstruction of English oral wisdom from the period between the Norman Conquest and 1500. The book resulting from this life-long work,  Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly Before 1500  (Cambridge, 1968), is a unique accomplishment in oral literary historiography.

In no other single career was Child’s and Kittredge’s legacy so directly enlarged as in that of B. J. Whiting. Several times chairman of the English Department, Whiting not only sustained Child’s, Kittredge’s, and Robinson’s tradition of English oral literary studies for half a century, but also freely used his considerable influence to help and encourage the work of innumerable other scholars in this field. More than anything else, this spirit of collaboration and mutual encouragement, so apparent in the Kittredge constellation, created the tradition of oral literary studies at Harvard.

Kittredge, his students, and his associates collaborated in every development of knowledge that might improve understanding of oral literature and popular culture. As a devoted member and sometimes President of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Kittredge promoted awareness of folklore as a force in the local history of New England. In addition to languages, literature, folklore,musicology, and regional history, he and his allies took a lively interest also in the history of religions. From its beginning about 1899, Kittredge, W. W. Newell, and F. N. Robinson were faithful members of the Harvard Religions Club, a group of about a dozen Harvard faculty members who met on one evening a month during term-time to dine together and hear accounts of each other’s work on topics in religion. Subsequently renamed the History of Religions Club, this unofficial alliance of faculty members for the promotion of religious studies still functions at Harvard. Clifford Herschel Moore (Harvard 1889), another early member of the Club, later shared with his fellow classicist C. N. Jackson the initiative that brought Milman Parry to Harvard’s Department of the Classics.

By the time of his retirement in 1936, Kittredge, like Child before him, had given forty years of his energy and thought to oral tradition and its various cognates in both written literature and unwritten popular culture. From the very beginning, he had grasped the essential object of oral literary studies. As early as 1898 he wrote in connection with his own and Francis Child’s work on balladry:

Few persons understand the difficulties of ballad investigation. . . . What is needed is . . . a complete understanding of the “popular” genius, a sympathetic recognition of the traits that characterize oral literature wherever and in whatever degree they exist. (Kittredge, op. cit., xxx.)

Since “the traits that characterize oral literature” were neither confined to any one place or people nor necessarily the same from one people to another, the man who would know those traits would have to transcend conventional limits of nationality in his quest for “a complete understanding of the ‘popular’ genius.

Milman Parry

While Kittredge discerned perfectly what should be the goal of oral literary studies, he also knew that no one in his day, not even the most cosmopolitan of literary scholars, possessed any such complete understanding of oral literature as he had specified. There was no lack of the will to understand in Kittredge or in other men like him. But in spite of the tireless effort of Child to accumulate all the texts of oral poetry that he could obtain from Britain, and the heartening growth of the Harvard Library’s Folklore Collection, there was still a crippling lack of essential information. Wherever in the world writing had come into use for literary purposes and some form of belles lettres had been developed, there had been some writing down of texts from oral tradition; the amount was more or less, depending upon local factors such as the intrinsic ease or difficulty of particular writing systems, or the attitude of local religions toward oral tradition. In some parts of the world, like Britain, there had been a lot of random collecting of this kind for centuries, and it might well take a lifetime, as it had taken Child, to accumulate a substantial amount of that  sporadic  evidence of oral literature. Nevertheless, as late as 1930, there had still never been anyone who had systematically collected a  whole  oral tradition anywhere in the world – or, if there had been, his collections had not survived intact to inform literate and educated men in Europe and America.

Thus it was one thing to know, as Child and Kittredge knew from the many dismembered bits and pieces of oral poetries, that oral traditions existed in various languages, but it was something else again to know first-hand how such literature came into being in the traditional, unwritten poetic performances of oral bards. Without being able to consult the full record of an oral tradition, one could never know with even approximate certainty the origins of anything in it, or distinguish between the effects of precedent and the effects of individual invention in traditional compositions. And without the direct, personal experience of oral poetic performances, it was not possible to formulate an exact discrimination between literature created by writing on the one hand, and literature created by traditional modes of poetic speech on the other. Those accomplishments in “recognition of the traits that characterize oral literature” had to await the coming of some great collector with a methodical turn of mind who would investigate not only the fossilized texts of dead oral traditions, but also the live acts of oral traditional composition performed by living oral poets. The primary focus of oral literary studies had to be shifted from research on the static contents of oral traditions to research on the dynamic processes that gave life to a tradition. The contemplation of dead literary specimens had to give way to observation of living poetries in their natural settings.

So the vision of a general theory of oral literature which Kittredge had glimpsed in 1898 could not even begin to be realized at that time. It fell to the lot of another, younger man to be America’s first great collector of oral traditions in Europe, and to formulate the first principles of what has since become known as the Oral Theory.

That younger man was the classicist Milman Parry, and he represented the third generation in the growth of oral literary scholarship at Harvard.

Milman Parry’s early intellectual development paralleled Child’s in several fateful ways. The similarity of their minds had roots in the similar circumstances of their childhood. Child’s father, a sailmaker, and Parry’s father, a carpenter, were both independent artisans whose modest incomes afforded no material luxury or educational advantage for their children. Born to the idea of reliance on their own talent and work, both Child and Parry were practical men as well as extraordinary scholars. Both men had also a constitutional appreciation of custom and usage that revealed itself in their personalities at an early age. By the time they had finished their college studies, each had developed a keen awareness of the power of tradition in shaping not only literature but also the patterns of real experience which literature symbolized. Imbued with this strong consciousness of tradition, Child and Parry both went to great European centers of learning soon after the conclusion of their college studies to gain more knowledge about the mechanisms of literary language. The difference of eighty years between the careers of Child and Parry was not so great as the likeness of their motivation to the study of languages and literature.

Child went to Germany in 1849 his first journey to Europe to meet the famous Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and to hear their lectures at the University of Berlin. Germanic philology and classical antiquity were the subjects which Child followed for two years at Berlin and in the lectures of the Grimms’ close associates at the older University of Göttingen. The comparison of ancient and modern European culture implicit in this combination of interests was no accident; such historicism was a cardinal principle with the Grimm brothers and informed all their learned work in the various fields of medieval literature, historical linguistics, legal history, comparative mythology, and folklore. The stimulation which Child derived in those two years from the Grimms and their circle remained by his own admission the dominant force in his intellectual activity from that time on. Kittredge tells us that for the rest of his life Child kept a portrait of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm on the mantel over the fireplace in his study.

In regard to higher literary learning, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1851 was still a wilderness, and Child had found in the Brothers Grimm and in their circle of like-minded German scholars a true Mecca for comparative study of literary traditions. But it was not just the example of their historicism or their comparative studies of literature that Child esteemed so much, for he had known about that before he went to Germany. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm exercised a lifelong influence on him because they were the first great modern collectors of oral traditions in Europe. Through their famous collection of German folktales, which had already been published in three successive editions by 1849, and in their related scholarly writings, the Grimms had taught the world how much of European culture owed nothing to literacy, and how much literature itself might be indebted for its best traditions to Volkspoesie – the unwritten poetic compositions of ordinary, unlettered people. (The Grimm brothers in turn owed their first knowledge of oral tradition to their professor of law at Marburg University, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, who introduced them in 1803 to the two momentous, cognate ideas: the importance of unwritten custom in the history of law, and of unwritten poetry – Volkspoesie -in the formation of literature.) Francis Child went to Germany with the idea that tradition was responsible for what was best in European literature. He came home to Cambridge with the more specific idea that oral tradition was an older and more fertile constituent of European culture than even literature. In this sense Kittredge’s judgment was correct, that Child’s own greatest contribution to learning, his ten-volume edition of  The English and Scottish Popular Ballads , was the fruit of his two-year stay in Germany.

The Brothers Grimm gave Child all the inspiration he needed for a lifetime, but another man, a Danish ballad collector named Svend Grundtv’ig, later taught him other things which he could not do without. The eminent Dane was a source of invaluable practical advice on the whereabouts of texts, and Grundtvig taught Child most of the working methodology he ever knew.

Eighty years later, Milman Parry similarly went to Paris to study philology at the Sorbonne under Jacob Grimm’s intellectual descendant, the renowned historical linguist and Indo-Europeanist, Antoine Meillet. Parry was a Hellenist whose interest in literary tradition came to a focus in his study of Homer. But like Child, he saw tradition at work most plainly in those mechanisms of literary language that distinguish literature from common discourse. Parry was in Paris for three years, from 1925 to 1928. He described the evolution of his own ideas during those years in these words:

My first studies were on the style of the Homeric poems and led me to understand that so highly formulaic a style could be only traditional. I failed, however, at the time to understand as fully as I should have that a style such as that of Homer must not only be traditional but also must be oral. It was largely due to the remarks of my teacher M. Antoine Meillet that I came to see, dimly at first, that a true understanding of the Homeric poems could only come with a full understanding of the nature of oral poetry. It happened that a week or so before I defended my theses for the doctorate at the Sorbonne that Professor Mathias Murko of the University of Prague delivered in Paris the series of conferences which later appeared as his book “La poésie populaire épique en Yougoslavie au début du XXe siècle.” I had seen the poster for these lectures but at the time I saw in them no great meaning for myself. However, Professor Murko, doubtless due to some remark of M. Meillet, was present at my soutenance and at that time M. Meillet as a member of my jury pointed out with his usual ease and clarity this failing in my two books. It was the writings of Professor Murko more than those of any other which in the following years led me to the study of oral poetry in itself and to the heroic poems of the South Slavs. (Milman Parry’s unpublished autograph typescript in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature in the Harvard College Library, quoted in A. B. Lord,  The Singer of Tales  (Cambridge, 196o), pp. 11-12.)

So Paris was to Parry what Berlin and Göttingen had been to Child, and Parry’s Jacob Grimm and Svend Grundtvig were Antoine Meillet and Mathias Murko. Parry returned to the United States in 1928 as Child had in 1851 with the new idea of  orality  firmly wedded in his mind to the old idea of  tradition  which he had taken with him to Europe. In both cases, a prominent European collector of oral literature and an eminent philologist had together catalyzed the fusion of those two ideas in the Americans’ thinking. Jacob Grimm, Svend Grundtvig, and Mathias Murko were all men who had personally seen and heard oral traditional poetry performed, and collected the performances with their own hands. Neither Child nor Parry shared the experience of collecting during their student years in Europe, but their indirect knowledge of it gave decisive new direction to their careers. In the end, the two Americans excelled even their European teachers in putting that knowledge to use.

But putting the knowledge to use was not easy. It meant a serious deflection of thought and energy from the customary preoccupations of academic literary studies, and such deflections were then, as they are now, professionally very perilous for the young scholar who was not yet established in the eyes of his academic elders.

For five years from 1851 to 1856, Child’s new awareness of the oral traditional component in European culture lay hidden from view, with no notable consequences in his teaching or publication. In a similar manner, Parry returned to the United States in 1928 to the beginning of what seemed at first an unexceptional career as a teacher of the Latin and Greek classics. For five years from 1928 to 1933, Parry’s teaching and publication revealed nothing of the new enterprise to which he was privately committed: a concerted program of field-collecting in the Old World. After a year of teaching at Drake University in Iowa, Parry joined the faculty of Harvard’s Department of the Classics in the autumn of 1929 with the rank of Instructor. He was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1932, and then in the summer of 1933, after years of quietly preparing himself, he set out on a brief journey that was to have remarkable consequences not only for his own field of Homeric studies but also for the whole of humanistic science in the twentieth century.

Parry’s path to his first knowledge of oral tradition was the same as Child’s, but once he had that knowledge, his response to it was quite different. Child became a great editor and accumulator of old books, manuscripts, and broadsides relating to oral tradition. Parry too accumulated material of that kind, but he was not satisfied with merely collecting other peoples’ collections. To some extent Child had always remained subject to the nineteenth-century bourgeois prejudice that rural or agrarian life was incompatible with culture of high quality. Parry, who had been a poultry farmer for a year before he went to Paris, had no such prejudice. So although he set out along the same path that Child had followed, he soon went much further along that path than Child had. Parry knew how radical his procedure had to be if he was to break through the charmed circle of scholarly ignorance about the mechanisms of oral tradition that had persisted for centuries in Europe and America. Though a Classicist by profession, he preferred to think of himself as a professional hybrid – a “literary anthropologist.” It was an apt expression.

Plate V. Milman Parry. From a photograph in the Herbert Weir Smyth Classical Library, Harvard University.

See full-size image of Plate V .

As a scholar of Homeric poetry, Parry was initially interested in the problem of how the author of the ancient Greek  Iliad  and  Odyssey  had composed those two great narrative poems at the very beginning of European literary tradition. His study of that problem led him to the hypothesis that the  Iliad  and  Odyssey  were not originally literary at all, but rather the products of an archaic Greek oral tradition that was older than any written literature in Europe. In order to test that theory, and to learn the distinctive traits of oral literature from a living oral tradition, Parry went in 1933 into the hinterland of Yugoslavia where he had heard five years previously from Meillet and Murko that an oral tradition of heroic poetry still persisted. There he observed and recorded in writing numerous live performances by illiterate masters of the traditional epic mode of speech in South Slavic dialects. By analogy with this evidence from a modern Balkan culture, Professor Parry was convinced that indeed Homer had been an oral poet whose superb knowledge of archaic Greek oral tradition made any dependence on writing not only unnecessary but even impossible in the original composition of the  Iliad  and the  Odyssey . This hypothesis, which Parry argued with masterly technical precision, quickly became known among the international brotherhood of classical scholars as the Oral Theory. It is today widely recognized as the single most important theoretical advance in classical studies in this century. But its effects were not confined to classical learning.

Parry’s discovery of an analogy between modern South Slavic and ancient Greek oral epos, and his corollary suggestion that literature began in Europe with the writing down of an oral tradition, amazed and stimulated scholars of the humanities everywhere. For centuries it had been common knowledge among educated men that oral traditions existed among the illiterate classes in Europe and elsewhere. Child, Kittredge, and all of their wide circle of students and allies had thrived on that knowledge. But if oral traditions were ever capable of producing such masterpieces as the  Iliad  and  Odyssey , then it was suddenly very important to understand exactly how such traditions worked, and what kinds of “literature” belonged to them. Parry knew that he would need more detailed proof than he had brought from Yugoslavia in 1933 to sustain his theory, and to demonstrate all the mechanics of oral literature literature totally without writing. A momentous shift of emphasis was taking place in the fundamental direction of oral literary research from the study of content to the study of process in oral traditions.

So with the financial backing of Harvard and the American Council of Learned Societies, Parry returned in 1934 to the outlying mountain districts of Yugoslavia with a specially designed sound-recording apparatus, determined to make a thorough collection of the South Slavic oral literature. Using the new technology of recording sound on aluminum discs, he devoted fifteen months in 1934 and 1935 to a complete exploration of the modern oral epic tradition throughout the Slavic-speaking region of the western Balkans. The collection which he thus formed was not only the most complete that had ever been made in terms of that region, but also the first large, durable collection of sound-recordings in the entire history of oral literary studies.

Parry’s monumental collection from the years 1933-1935 is the nucleus of the present Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature in the Harvard College Library.

That nucleus is, of course, unique and irreplaceable, because nothing in it, if lost, could ever be duplicated from any other source whatsoever. It contains more than 12,000 individual texts, and more than 3,500 recorded twelve-inch aluminum discs. The longest epic songs ever recorded in sound anywhere in the world are in this collection, alive and complete; the longest of these exceeds 13,000 verses in length.

The Present Generation

Since Parry’s death in 1935 there have been a number of important additions to his collection, with the result that it is now several times its original size.

In 1937, the Honorary Curator, Albert B. Lord, added more than a hundred epic and ballad texts from northern Albania. They are invaluable for studying the processes by which stories pass from one language to another. After World War II, Lord returned to Yugoslavia to revisit in 1950 and 1951 most of the places where Parry had collected; this was in accord with the plan of further field work which Parry himself had envisaged. During these two years Lord added to the Collection many new texts by recording on magnetic wire. Later, in 1958 and 1959, he also added texts from field recording in Bulgaria, so that the evidence of Balkan oral tradition in the Parry Collection now reaches from the Adriatic to the Black Sea.

The decade of the sixties saw the greatest additions to the Collection in number of texts recorded, in areas covered, and in chronological depth. The present curators of the Collection, Albert B. Lord and David Bynum, made an intensive effort during the five years 1962-1967 to acquire evidence of oral tradition from localities and singers which Parry had not been able to study in the 1930s [Note:  Oral Literature at Harvard Since 1856  was originally published in 1974. The current curators of the Parry Collection are Steven Mitchell and Gregory Nagy.]. Some of these were in areas that were inaccessible to Parry; in more than one Balkan village which they visited in 1963 and 1964, Lord and Bynum were the only foreigners who had come there within living memory. A number of the epic singers collected in these years had been raw youths in Parry’s time, but matured into good oral traditional poets in the thirty-year interval. Several had learned their traditions from Parry’s singers, and so represented the rare and invaluable opportunity to study the direct passage of oral literary tradition from one generation to another. The five years of carefully planned field-work in 1962-1967 brought in a rich harvest of new recordings from Serbia, Bosnia, Hercegovina, and Montenegro. Whole new tracts of territory were closely surveyed, linking together for the first time such prominent centers of Parry’s original collecting as Novi Pazar and Bijelo Polje.

Parry chose to make his field study of oral literature in the mountains of the western Balkans because, of all places in the world where oral epic tradition was known to persist in this century, the Balkans promised the surest immediate results for use in his analogical study of Homeric poetry. He fully intended to make similar field studies elsewhere at a later time; Africa and the Middle Last were uppermost in his mind. The Balkans were thus only the first of several regions where he wanted to gather texts and facts about oral literature.

But having made the western Balkans his first choice, he quickly became the most methodical and comprehensive collector of oral tradition who ever worked there. He was not the first or only collector; scores of others before and after him made more limited manuscript collections from the same tradition. A majority of these manuscripts had by 1960 been gathered into State archives in the two principal metropolitan centers of Yugoslavia: Belgrade and Zagreb. During the period from 1963 to 1972, microfilm copies of these holdings were acquired for the Parry Collection, thus extending its coverage of the western Balkan tradition to include most of the existing manuscripts from the very beginnings of collecting in the Napoleonic era down to the present day. With the financial backing of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Arts, much of this material has been electro-printed to facilitate its use, and the prints bound in durable volumes.

With the microfilms from Yugoslavia and the earlier recordings from the thirties, fifties, and sixties, the Milman Parry Collection is by far the finest collection of any one oral poetic tradition anywhere in the world.

Milman Parry’s untimely death in a tragic accident with a firearm in December of 1935 prevented his using his own collection for the intended purpose. He lived long enough to write only a few pages of general observations on his epoch-making first-hand experience with a living tradition of oral epic poetry. Those pages have been published, reprinted, and quoted numerous times since 1935.

Parry also left a typescript of about 275 pages consisting of eight short South Slavic texts with his own detailed commentary on them. Extensive excerpts from this typescript have been published; a verbatim edition of it is to be published soon by the Parry Collection and the Harvard University Press.

Luckily, Parry did not go alone to collect in the Balkans in 1934-1935. He took with him one of his former students just graduated from Harvard College, Albert B. Lord, ’34, as a technical assistant and bookkeeper. As an honors student of the Classics under Parry, Lord had learned at first-hand about his teacher’s aims in cultural exploration of the Balkans. When Parry was killed, Lord was the obvious choice to carry out Parry’s intended exposition of the dynamics of oral literature from the Parry Collection.

A number of time-consuming preliminary clerical operations had to be performed before the collection could be put to systematic use. First, the Slavic texts had to be written down, or  transcribed , word for word from the aluminum records. Next, the rough transcriptions needed to be  typed  to provide fair working copies. Then the stenography transcription and typing had to be  checked  for accuracy; the language was often difficult and mistakes easily crept into even the most conscientious stenography. All this preliminary work had to be done for the total content of the aluminum records, which was more than 360,000 typed lines in various South Slavic dialects. After that, each of the nearly 13,000 texts in the collection required cataloguing. And when that was done, Lord next made complete inventories of all the oral poets and all the individual narratives represented in the collection. Even with expert stenographic help in this labor it naturally took Lord many months to put the collection into usable form. All this archival processing and analysis was a new department of activity added to the more familiar ones of collecting, publishing, library improvement, and public education established by Child.

Even before the archival chores were done, Lord began to collaborate with the Hungarian composer and musicologist Béla Bartók on a joint volume of music, texts, and translations from the Parry Collection. After years of work by both men, and after the disruption of World War II, that book was published by the Columbia University Press: Béla Bartók and Albert B. Lord,  Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs; Texts and Transcriptions of Seventy-Five Folk Songs from the Milman Parry Collection and a Morphology of Serbo-Croatian Folk Melodies  (New York, 1951). The appearance of this book marked a new stage in the growth of the musicological branch of oral traditional studies at Harvard. For the first time, an important tradition of sung oral poetry outside the Anglo-American world had been studied and published. In this respect too, Parry and his followers accomplished what Kittredge had been unable to do, expanding Harvard’s tradition of oral literary studies to include discovery and research on materials from all parts of the world, not just Britain and America. Child’s habit, continued by Kittredge, of relying entirely on foreign scholars for information about foreign oral traditions, had now to be abandoned. Oral literary studies at Harvard had advanced to a point where foreign scholars were no longer able to supply the necessary data, and henceforth the men from Cambridge would themselves range the globe in search of oral poets and composers. The reason for the quest was as universal as the quest itself, for as Parry had written in 1934 about the purpose of his collection:

… the present collection of oral texts has . . . been made . . . with the thought of obtaining evidence on the basis of which could be drawn a series of generalities applicable to all oral poetries; which would allow me, in the case of a poetrv for which there was not enough evidence outside the poems themselves of the way in which they were made, to say whether that poetry was oral or not, and how it should be understood if it was oral. In other words the study of the South Slavic poetry was meant to provide me an exact knowledge of the characteristics of oral style, in the hope that when such characteristics were known exactly their presence or absence could definitely be ascertained in other poetries. . . (Milman Parry, op. cit., quoted in Parry and Lord,  Serbocroatian Heroic Songs , I (Cambridge and Belgrade, 1954), 4.)

In short, the Parry Collection was meant to benefit the study of oral literature in all languages, not just Slavic. Like Child and Kittredge before him, Parry perceived from the outset that oral literary studies had to be comparative in character.

Plate VI. Three modern oral poets whose works are recorded in the Milman Parry Collection.

See full-size image of Plate VI .

There were two ways to render Parry’s intended contribution to comparative studies, and both ways were equally essential. One way was to publish a series of representative texts and translations. Through a consistent program of publication covering the whole tradition in all its regions, a knowledgeable editor could in some twenty volumes reconstitute the anatomy of South Slavic oral tradition in book form. Other scholars who could read English or Slavic could then see for themselves what an oral literature was in its entirety and reach their own conclusions about it. Lord had already made a good beginning in this task through his collaboration with Bartók. In 1953 and 1954 he issued a further installment in two volumes of his own editing and translation:  SerboCroatian Heroic Songs , volume one (Novi Pazar: English Translations) and volume two (Novi Pazar: SerboCroatian Texts) published simultaneously in Cambridge and Belgrade. A third and fourth volume of texts and translations, this time from Montenegro, are at this writing also about to be published by the Harvard University Press. A fifth and sixth volume, representing the oral epic tradition of northern Bosnia, are in preparation.

Besides publishing, the other way to make the benefits of the Parry Collection broadly available was, as Parry had said, by “drawing a series of generalities applicable to all oral poetries.” This meant a major work of research and textual analysis in the Parry Collection, with some supplementary study of other possibly oral poetry in other languages. Lord began to meet this responsibility too with the publication of his book  The Singer of Tales  (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).

But Parry’s legacy at Harvard was not limited to his Collection nor to those who continued the particular work that he had intended to do with it. A rich treasure of rare books passed from his personal library to the College Library’s Folklore Collection at the time of his death. Moreover, a number of distinguished senior professors in the present Faculty of Arts and Sciences were associates or students of Parry during the five years that he taught at Harvard. Joining a faculty where such lights from the Kittredge constellation as Bartlett Jere Whiting still shone, the new men of the Parry era have been greatly instrumental in the continuing infusion of oral literary studies throughout Harvard’s humanistic curriculum. Among these influential continuators of Parry’s purpose are Reuben A. Brower, Cabot Professor of English Literature, John H. Finley, Eliot Professor of Greek Literature, Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Wales Professor of Sanskrit, and Harry T. Levin, Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature. Another of this number is Robert S. Fitzgerald, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, the man who now occupies that same professorial chair upon which Child began Harvard’s great tradition of oral literary studies more than a hundred years ago.

The total influence of this century-old scholarly tradition is difficult to appraise exactly, because it has been so profound and far-reaching. The initial effects at each new stage of the tradition were felt most keenly in the world of higher learning, which was as it should be, for it was preeminently an  academic  tradition. But few academic traditions at Harvard or at any other American university have palpably influenced  common culture  in the English-speaking world to such a degree as this one has. In the twentieth century, one does not need to be a student or a professional academic to feel the influence of Harvard’s oral literary scholarship. That influence touches the daily lives of ordinary Americans in numerous ways.

Leaving aside the professorial personalities who have given their genius and energy to oral literary studies at Harvard, it is possible to describe the academic tradition which they have created as a tradition of successful research a series of basic discoveries, each discovery laying the ground for the next one. Child discovered the common denominator of myriad English poetic fragments, which was the fact that they all derived from an oral tradition. Kittredge discovered the co-existence in the same oral tradition of other poetry and other ideas besides the poetry and ideas found in ballads. Parry discovered how the minds of traditional oral poets work to create simultaneously a great poetry and a great understanding of the life which those poets share with their audiences. The worldwide impact on learning of just the latest phase of Harvard’s oral literary studies can be measured exactly in another of the Milman Parry Collection’s publications, the  Haymes Bibliography of the Oral Theory , which is Number One in the  Planning and Documentation Series  of the Milman Parry Collection. Thus the study of oral literature at Harvard has been one hundred and twenty years of constant research that has constantly spawned other research in the same directions at other locations and in other institutions throughout the world.

But basic research in the humanities is like any other basic research – the dividends are always exponentially greater than the investment, and they accrue in unpredictable ways. Child’s research on the ballad was highly esoteric when he performed it in the nineteenth century. Yet in the twentieth century it was the mother of the so-called Ballad Revival that has done so much to enrich popuhr musical life throughout the western world. The fusion of local historiography and folklore study which Kittredge pioneered academically has entered into popular awareness and continues today to do as it has done for more than fifty years, shaping the attitudes of millions in America toward their ancestral past and their own identities. Parry’s and Lord’s technical research on oral tradition has had a similar unexpected impact outside academic life. The publication in 1962 of Herbert Marshall McLuhan’s book,  The Gutenberg Galaxy , marked the beginning of a widespread popular interest in the implications of oral traditions for modern communications. Thus the professional cinema and television script-writer who recently wanted to attend a popular Harvard course on oral narrative is only one of many people who have realized that as the visual effects and spoken words of electronic media increasingly displace printed matter in everyday cultural communication, there is much of practical utility to be learned from a previous age when  all  cultural expression was necessarily oral.

Nor is it surprising that the academic study of oral tradition should incidentally enrich cultural life outside as well as within the colleges and universities of America. The study of oral tradition is ultimately a study of common culture. The only thing esoteric about such a study is the uncommon application of rigorous intellectual discipline to the analysis of common culture in a humanistic curriculum such as Harvard’s, which is otherwise devoted mostly to esoteric art and literature.

If four consecutive generations of oral literary studies at Harvard have proven anything conclusive about the relationship between literature and oral traditions, it is that neither form of expression can be properly understood without the other. The study of oral literature must continue at Harvard, because it continues to be needed. It is especially necessary at a time when young people are so much concerned as they are in the present era with witnessing and achieving “authentic experience,” and when books are too often thought to be artificial and dehumanizingly impersonal. It is necessary at such a time as this to go on discovering in our academic research and to teach in our programs of humanistic education how living men’s facility with oral traditions has been the foundation of philosophy and the arts throughout cultural history. The contemporary eagerness of the young to understand every cultural achievement in personal terms makes this an ideal time to learn and to teach more fully than we have the content and the mechanics of those cultural traditions that have sustained men solely by word of mouth for longer than writing has been in existence.

©1974 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

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• Published: 01 March 2021

Trends and developments in oral health literacy: a scientometric research study (1991–2020)

• Yue Sun   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1185-8091 1 ,
• Chunying Li 2 ,
• Yan Zhao 3 &
• Jing Sun   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2983-8053 1  

BDJ Open volume  7 , Article number:  13 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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• Dental education
• History of dentistry
• Preventive dentistry

This study aimed to establish the current situation, intellectual base, hotspots, development trends, and frontiers of oral health literacy (OHL) from the literature.

We analyzed 1505 bibliographic records dated between January 1990 and December 2020 retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection and the Scopus database. We used CiteSpace for word frequency analysis, co-occurrence analysis, co-citation analysis, clustering analysis, and burst analysis.

The total number of publications increased year-on-year, with the majority of publications coming from the USA. Most studies focused on the relationship between (oral) health literacy and oral health, and the development of OHL instruments. The top 10 keywords by frequency were “health literacy”, “oral health”, “attitude to health”, “dental caries”, “adult”, “children”, “dental care”, “knowledge”, “questionnaire”, and “adolescent”. The keyword with the highest burst intensity was “dental health education”.

Conclusions

OHL research is a thriving field. The field is focused on the development of an OHL instrument and health promotion practice. Strategic cooperation among countries, institutions, authors, hospitals, and communities will be important to encourage further OHL research and address oral health problems.

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Introduction

The World Health Organization (WHO) (2016) suggested that oral health is a key indicator of overall health, well-being, and quality of life. 1 It can influence people’s lives, and cause pain, discomfort, disfigurement, and even death. 2 Oral diseases are highly preventable, but remain common in many countries. 3 The Global Burden of Disease Study 2017 estimated that oral diseases affect 3.5 billion people worldwide, with untreated dental caries being among the most prevalent noncommunicable diseases. 3

Oral health literacy (OHL) is the “degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process and understand basic oral health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions”. 4 It is therefore about individual capacity to understand and use dental information to transform oral health behaviors. Low OHL limits the capacity to understand dentists’ instructions, which hinders the maintenance of oral health. 5

Many studies have shown that there is strong evidence linking oral health status with OHL. 6 , 7 Baskaradoss 6 found that more than a third of people with limited OHL had high periodontal risk, compared with about 7% of those with adequate OHL. Das et al. 8 found that 60% of research participants with periodontal pocket formation had low OHL, compared with just 36% among those with good OHL. In another study, people with limited OHL had poorer periodontal health. 5 Low parental OHL was associated with dental caries among children. 9 Improving OHL may help to increase adherence to medical instructions, and improve self-management skills and overall treatment outcomes. 6 OHL should therefore be a priority in oral health promotion programs as a determinant of oral health. 10

Since OHL was first defined by the US Department of Health and Human Services, there have been numerous publications and studies in the field, and our understanding of OHL has advanced significantly. However, there has been no review that reveals the diversified content of OHL. Therefore, it is particularly important to use bibliometric methods to quantitatively analyze the characteristics of the literature in the field of OHL and to objectively evaluate the subject’s research status and development history.

Scientometrics refers to the study of measuring and analyzing scientific literature. 11 Scientometrics is the analysis of the general characteristics of research and development (R&D) output, research hotspots, intellectual structures, and the R&D capability of countries in a certain field, using information from papers and patents such as titles, keywords, abstracts, and texts. The methods include the analysis of word frequency, citations, authorship, co-citations, co-authorship, co-words, and counts of authors, research groups, and countries. 12 CiteSpace is one of the most popular analysis tools, and plays an important role in scientometrics to explore the core structure, development history, hotspots, and overall knowledge structure of a discipline. 13 , 14

To date, no scientometrics analysis of OHL has been performed. Our study aims to generate visualized knowledge maps of OHL and analyze the current situation, intellectual base, hotspots, and development trends. We hope to provide an insight into OHL and a basis for future research.

Data sources

Literature was retrieved online through the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) and the Scopus database. We used the search string in WoSCC: TS = (“oral health literacy” OR “oral health literate” OR “oral medical literacy” OR “oral medical literate” OR “oral health knowledge” OR “literacy in dentistry” OR “Estimate of Literacy in Dentistry” OR “Test of Functional Health Literacy in Dentistry” OR “Oral Health Literacy Instrument” OR “Oral Health Literacy Assessment” OR “Comprehensive Measure of Oral Health Knowledge” OR “Oral Health Literacy Adults Questionnaire”) OR (TS = (“patient medical knowledge” OR “patient understand knowledge” OR “health literacy”) AND TS = (oral OR dentistry OR dental* OR Periodont*)); and in Scopus: (TITLE-ABS-KEY (“oral health litera*” OR “oral medical litera*” OR “oral health knowledge” OR “literacy in dentistry” OR “Estimate of Literacy in Dentistry” OR “Test of Functional Health Literacy in Dentistry” OR “Oral Health Literacy Instrument”) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY (“Oral Health Literacy Assessment” OR “Comprehensive Measure of Oral Health Knowledge” OR “Oral Health Literacy Adults Questionnaire”)) OR (TITLE-ABS-KEY (“patient medical knowledge” OR “patient understand knowledge” OR “health literacy”) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (oral OR dentistry OR dental* OR periodont*)). Document type = article; time span: January 1990 to July 2020. There were no language restrictions. The initial sample included 941 articles from WoSCC and 1314 articles from Scopus.

Data from both databases were imported into CiteSpace. Importing the Scopus data required converting ris-files to a text-file format using the software’s import features, whereas the WoSCC data were imported directly into CiteSpace from text files. Duplicate papers were eliminated, resulting in a final sample of 1505 articles.

Analysis tool

CiteSpace (7.1.R5, 64 bit) was used for analysis. This software generates node link graphs, citation network maps, and other visual results. In the CiteSpace knowledge maps, nodes reflect different elements, such as authors, countries, and cited references. The size of the nodes indicates the number of publications or frequency (i.e., citation count). A larger node shows more publications or higher frequency. The different colors within the nodes represent different times, the connection lines between the nodes reflect the relationship between them, and the color of the line reflects the date of the first cooperation or co-citation. 15 Centrality is a turning point in a field and is shown by purple on the node ring in the knowledge map. It represents the significance of nodes in a network. The thickness of the purple betweenness centrality trim shows the strength of the betweenness centrality. A key node is defined as a node with a betweenness centrality ≥ 0.1 in the network. 16 Citation bursts provide a useful means to trace the development of a research focus. Citation rings in red show the time slices in which citation bursts, or abrupt increases in citations, are detected. 17 Cluster analysis used the clustering function of CiteSpace. The modularity and mean silhouette scores of clustered co-citation networks are two indicators of the general structural properties of a research front. The modularity value ( Q ) measures the extent to which a network can be divided into independent modules, modularity Q  > 0.3 is convincing. A silhouette value ( S value) close to 1 indicates that references within a cluster contain highly consistent or similar content. 18 , 19 In this study, the parameters of CiteSpace were: time slicing (1991–2020), years per slice (1), term source (all selection), node type (choose one at a time), selection criteria (top 50), and pruning (pathfinder).

Trends in the literature

Figure  1 shows that the literature on OHL relating to published articles and citations grew significantly between 1991 and 2020. For articles, in 2019, 198 published articles were recorded in the databases, six times more than in 2009. From 2016 to 2020, 835 articles were published, 422 more than the 413 published from 2011 to 2015. Citation counts have seen a similar evolution and increase. In 2019, 2019 citations appeared in Scopus and 1543 in WoSCC, compared with 276 and 240 citations in the respective databases in 2009. From 2016 to 2020, 9004 citations appeared in Scopus and 6713 in WoSCC, compared with 3952 and 3480 citations in the respective databases from 2011 to 2015. These results show that the amount of research in this field is increasing, seemingly indicating increasing interest in the field over recent years.

The annual number of the literature relating to published articles and citations in oral health literacy research from 1990 to 2020.

Analysis of countries

Generating a country map in CiteSpace gave 52 nodes and 107 links (Fig.  2 ). Publications on OHL came from 52 countries. The top 5 countries for co-occurrence and centrality are listed in Table  1 . The USA contributed the most publications (500), followed by Australia (111) and India (84). The top 3 countries by centrality (≥0.1) were the USA (0.68), UK (0.39), and Canada (0.20). The USA was the most important research source by publication number and centrality. Figure  2 shows extensive collaboration between the USA, Australia, UK, Canada, and Iran. The strongest collaborations were among Brazil, Sweden, and Norway.

The network map of countries related to oral health literacy research.

Analysis of authors and co-cited authors

The co-author map showed 202 nodes and 382 links (Fig.  3 ). The 1505 articles were by 202 authors. The top 5 authors are shown in Table  2 . Three large cooperation networks had been formed. There were some collaborations among Jessica Y. Lee, A. Diane Baker, William F. Vann Jr, Kimon Divaris, and R. Gary Rozier, among Fabian Calixto Fraiz, Saul Martins Paiva, Fernanda Morais Ferreira, and Ana Flavia Granvillegarcia, and among Yan Si, ChunXiao Wang, WenSheng Rong, Xing Wang, and BaoJun Tai. No other large collaboration networks had been formed.

The network map of active authors offered to oral health literacy research.

The author co-citation map had 460 nodes and 1614 links (Fig.  4 ). The author with the highest co-citation count was Poul Erik Petersen (161 citations), followed by Jessica Y. Lee (157 citations) and David W Baker (110 citations). Table  3 shows that the top 8 co-cited authors with centrality > 0.1 (“core strength” researchers) were Poul Erik Petersen, US Department of Health and Human Services, Miranda R. Andrus, Darren A. DeWalt, WHO, Mark D. Macek, Ruth Freeman, and Micheala Jones.

The network map of co-cited authors offered to oral health literacy research.

Analysis of journals and co-cited journals

The co-citation journal map had 214 nodes and 872 links (Fig.  5 ). More highly cited journals included Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology (2019 impact factor (IF): 2.135), the Journal of Public Health Dentistry (2019 IF: 1.743), the Journal of the American Dental Association (2019 IF: 2.803), the Journal of Dental Research (2019 IF: 4.914), and BMC Oral Health (2019 IF: 1.911). Table  4 shows the top 5 co-cited journals by centrality (≥0.1). The journal with the highest centrality was Social Science & Medicine (2019 IF: 3.616), followed by the American Journal of Public Health (2019 IF: 6.464).

The network map of co-cited journals related to oral health literacy research.

Analysis of the intellectual base

The co-citation reference map had 613 nodes and 1716 links (Fig.  6 ). Table  5 lists the top 5 co-cited references by centrality. The cited article with the highest centrality was by Jessica Y. Lee et al. 20 This study indicated that differences in OHL levels between racial groups persisted after adjusting for educational attainment and sociodemographic characteristics.

The co-citation cluster map of references from publications in oral health literacy research.

The clustering of similar references resulted in co-citation clusters. The modularity ( Q value) was 0.7521, and the S value was 0.4228. We used the local linear regression (LLR) algorithm to label the clusters. Figure  6 shows the co-citation reference clusters. In total, 14 clusters were identified, including 6 major clusters (Table  6 ). Cluster #0, which was labeled “oral health literacy”, contained 110 references ( S value = 0.798) about OHL status and the relationships among OHL, oral health behavior, and oral health status. Cluster #1 was labeled “early childhood caries” and contained 44 references ( S value = 0.873), and was mainly about the prevention of early childhood caries and parental health literacy influence. Cluster #2 was labeled “reading ability” and contained 41 references ( S value = 0.863), and was mainly about health literacy or functional health literacy. Cluster #3 was labeled “oral health education program” and contained 39 references ( S value = 0.909), and was mainly about oral health care programs, especially for pregnant women. Cluster #4 was labeled “young children” and contained 37 references ( S value = 0.889), and was mainly about the impact of caregiver literacy on children’s oral health outcomes and the development of an OHL instrument. Cluster #5 was labeled “pediatric nonprescription liquid medication” and contained 37 references ( S value = 0.877), and was mainly about literacy and the misunderstanding of prescription labels. The top 5 co-cited references by the number of citations and centrality were mainly from these six clusters.

Analysis of hotspots

Figure  7 presents the time span of the most frequently occurring keywords and their respective co-occurrence links. “Oral health”, “health”, and “attitude to health” were three of the earliest keywords. Over time, “knowledge”, “dental caries”, “oral hygiene”, “dental care”, “adult”, “health literacy”, and other keywords developed. More recently, “impact”, “risk factor”, “internet”, “psychology”, and “surveys and questionnaire” emerged. New keywords for 2019 and 2020 included “community”, “human experiment”, and “validity”.

The time zone view of co-occurring keyword from publications in oral health literacy research.

Table  7 shows the top 10 keywords by frequency and centrality. The keyword with the highest frequency was “health literacy”, followed by “oral health”. The keyword with the highest centrality was “controlled study”.

Figure  8 shows the co-citation keywords clusters. The modularity ( Q value) was 0.5074, and the S value was 0.4012. We used the LLR algorithm to label the clusters. There were ten keyword clusters, including three major clusters. The largest of the three major clusters, Cluster #0, included 62 keywords and a mean S value of 0.685. The literature in this cluster describes OHL and OHL assessment scales. The hotspot focused on the impact of OHL, oral health behavior, or oral health knowledge on oral health status, and the development and psychometric validation of OHL scales. The second largest cluster (Cluster #1) included 59 keywords and a mean S value of 0.826. It mainly discussed the oral health knowledge, attitudes and practice status of different populations, and dental education programs, such as information seeking behavior, available health care services, and health communication between dentist and patient. The third largest cluster (Cluster #2) included 56 keywords and a mean S value of 0.726. These studies covered factors influencing oral health and the intervention program.

The co-citation cluster map of keywords from publications in oral health literacy research.

So-called “burst words” are words that are cited frequently over a period of time. 21 Figure  9 shows the top 24 keywords with their burst impact. The strongest citation burst keywords appeared from 1990 to 2020. “Attitude to health”, “oral hygiene”, “questionnaire”, “health behavior”, and “dental caries” were the earliest burst keywords. “Attitude to health” had the longest duration of burst, from 1990 to 2009. “Statistics and numerical data” and “psychology” were the most recent burst keywords. “Dental care” (strength: 10.3831) had the highest burst intensity.

The keywords with strong citation bursts from publications in oral health literacy research.

OHL has become an increasingly important area of oral health research. Our study represents the first attempt to analyze the research on OHL using CiteSpace software. CiteSpace has been widely used to detect and visualize scientific knowledge, trends in the literature, and future directions of research. 16 , 19 For example, it was used to analyze publications on the relationship between betel quid chewing and oral cancer from 1998 to 2017. 22 Other researchers have used it to gain an overview of studies of traumatic dental injuries. 23 We used CiteSpace to analyze articles on OHL from 1991 to 2020 to evaluate the origin, current trends, and hotspots of research on OHL.

The time distribution and growth trends of academic papers are the most direct manifestation of academic attention and knowledge in this field. 24 Over the last 30 years, an upward trend has been observed in citations regardless of in WoSCC and Scopus database (Fig.  1 ). Besides, we identified an increasing number of research publications about OHL, which can be divided into two periods—elementary (1990–2009) and rapid development (2010–2020) (Fig.  1 )—indicating that OHL research is likely to continue to increase in the future.

An important output of research is the quantity of publications in peer-reviewed academic journals. 25 Scientific publication is considered a component of constructing a knowledge-based economy. Better economics and expenditure for scientific research in developed countries may have a positive influence on research productivity and quality. 14 The USA, an economically powerful country, is a key player in scientific research on OHL, contributing about one-third (500/1505, 33.2%) of total literature. Table  2 shows that a total of 60% of the most productive researchers were from the USA. These findings show that the USA, as a developed country, plays a leading role in the field of OHL research. This is consistent with findings showing that the level of oral health care is closely connected to economic factors. 2 This study is not the first to show the leading role of the USA in producing and publishing scientific literature. 26 , 27

Mapping the countries’ and authors’ cooperation networks revealed an essential class of scientific social networks, showing the key structures of scientific collaboration. 14 Growing global contacts and exchanges have eroded isolation. 14 However, our results showed that there was perhaps insufficient cooperation among the countries and authors in this field. For instance, in Fig.  2 , 52 nodes and 107 links are shown, meaning that 52 countries produced the literature, with 107 cooperative relationships among them—more links mean more collaboration. 25 This is consistent with other studies, 22 , 25 , 28 and suggests insufficient cooperation. Figure  3 also showed distinct clusters representing disciplines or colleges. For example, Jessica Y. Lee, Kimon Divaris, R. Gary Rozier, William F. Vann Jr, and A. Diane Baker are all from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. More autonomy, international academic exchanges, and cooperation are therefore necessary to promote the development of the discipline. 28

The academic influence of authors can be determined by the number of publications and the frequency of citations. 25 Citation frequency analysis highlighted Jessica Y. Lee, who was involved in research on the development of an OHL instrument and survey, and explored the relationships among OHL, self-efficacy, and oral health status. 20 , 29 , 30 , 31 Table  3 also showed several “core strength” researchers, whose studies have had an important influence on the field. 25 However, few authors had a centrality > 0.1, indicating the lack of an influential core author group in the field of OHL. This result suggested that more research on OHL is needed and more researchers should contribute to this field. 25

We also identified the core journals publishing on OHL, reflecting the use and influence of articles published in these journals. 25 The top 5 journals had a centrality > 0.1 (Table  4 ), indicating that articles published in these journals were of higher quality and greater influence on OHL studies. By combining the citation frequency analysis and centrality analysis, we found that the American Journal of Public Health , the International Dental Journal , and Pediatrics are all highly cited and high-centrality journals. These three journals have published many high quality articles, and their academic influence was higher than other similar journals in the field of OHL.

By analyzing references, we identified the intellectual base in the field of OHL. Studies of key nodes with relatively high centrality are the foundation of the research field. 16 Articles with high centrality rankings focused on OHL levels, improvement of oral health through OHL, and relationships between health literacy and health outcomes (Table  5 ). 20 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 The clustering of similar references resulted in co-citation clusters, which could be used to explore the main topics. 19 By analyzing the co-cited references of the six major clusters (Fig.  6 ), we found that the intellectual base topics were relationships between health literacy/OHL and oral health, improving oral health care practice programs, and development of an OHL instrument. The 14 clusters were relatively concentrated, non-dispersed, and overlapping, indicating that the topics in the intellectual base are concentrated. The intellectual base in the field of OHL is closely related to the field of health promotion theory and health literacy.

A hotspot is a scientific issue or topic discussed in a group of documents that are linked to a period of time. 25 An analysis of high frequency keywords can be used to determine research hotspots as well as to monitor the research frontier transitions in a field. 21 The highest frequency keyword was “health literacy” (Table  7 ), indicating that OHL was closely related to health literacy. Other high frequency keywords included “oral health”, “adult”, “knowledge”, “dental caries”, “children”, “questionnaire”, and “attitude to health”. We can deduce that there is a focus in the field on the relationship between OHL and oral health in the whole population. Most publications included descriptive and cross-sectional studies, with a lack of randomized controlled intervention studies. These results suggest that there is a need in this field for more intervention research on improving OHL to enhance the oral health level of the entire population.

Detection of a citation burst indicates dramatically increasing literature citation frequencies, which can last for multiple years or a single year. 14 A stronger burst indicates that there is more focus on this research topic. 14 The emergence date of burst words shows when topics became the focus of attention. A word with high burst strength may indicate a significant turning point in the field of research. 25 Analysis of the time zone view (Fig.  7 ) and the strongest citation burst keywords (Fig.  9 ) therefore reveals the hot topics and frontiers in different periods. 17 Before 2010, the total number of keywords was relatively small. Keywords such as “oral health”, “dental caries”, “attitude to health”, “knowledge”, and “health education” appeared first. The strongest citation burst keyword was “dental health education”, a topic of early attention in this field. 36 , 37 In 2000, OHL was first defined in the US Department of Health and Human Services policy, Healthy People 2010, 38 and since then there have been more studies about the association of health literacy with oral health status. 39 , 40 , 41 Subsequently, keywords such as “health promotion”, “health literacy”, and “association” appear successively. There was rapid growth from 2010 to 2020 in several areas, including dental care and OHL instruments. “Dental care” and “word recognition instrument” had the highest burst strength during this time, demonstrating the focus of attention in this field. In 2007, researchers developed a word recognition instrument to test health literacy in dentistry: the REALD-30. 29 Reports released by the American Dental Association (ADA) and the US Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) also underpinned the importance of OHL. In 2009, the Health Literacy in Dentistry Action Plan 2010–2015 was released by the ADA, 42 and in 2011, the IOM released a report on advancing oral health in America. 43 Bursts also showed that oral health education and OHL instruments continued to develop. Keywords such as “early childhood caries”, “pregnancy”, “young adult”, “impact”, “risk factor”, “psychology”, “surveys and questionnaires”, and “validity” also appeared. This indicates that there were many studies on oral health status in different populations, and that risk factors and validation of tools remained hot topics. In the recent years, “psychology” has been a popular burst keyword, indicating that research on the development of an instrument for psychometric evaluation may be one of the frontiers in the field of OHL. The existing instruments to evaluate OHL use two main strategies: word recognition and reading comprehension. 44 However, some aspects of oral and dental health literacy are ignored by the existing tools. Further work is therefore needed on a comprehensive OHL instrument for international use, ensuring that it is both simple and brief. 45 A comprehensive, valid, and reliable scale could assist in identifying factors affecting oral health.

Strengths and limitations

To our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically analyze the research on OHL using the scientometric method. This study provided an insight into OHL and valuable information for OHL researchers to identify new perspectives on potential collaborators, cooperative countries, hotspots, and future research directions. However, this study also has some limitations. The scientometric analysis was based on papers obtained from the WoSCC and Scopus databases to meet the reference format requirements of the CiteSpace software. Although these databases embrace a relatively comprehensive range of studies, it would be better if more databases had been included for the bibliographic analysis. Furthermore, most countries in the world have their own database resources using different languages. Therefore, it is hoped that future studies will analyze and compare a range of different databases in the OHL area.

The field of OHL is currently thriving, and we expect this to continue. The development of an OHL instrument and health promotion practice are current focus areas, and the development and psychometric evaluation of a comprehensive OHL instrument may be the next frontiers in the field of OHL. Strategic cooperation among countries, core authors, institutions, hospitals, and communities should be encouraged so that resources can be shared to promote the development of OHL and address problems in the field.

Data availability

All data sets generated for this study are included in the paper.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank for the librarians for their assistance in document retrieval and collation. We thank dentist Jun Hong-Zhou, from Zhong Guan Cun Hospital, Beijing, China, for participating in discussion and analysis results of the research.

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Y.S. conceived and designed the study, collected the data and performed software analysis, and drafted the first vision. J.S. conceived and the study, interpreted and discussed the findings, and provided important feedback regarding the paper. C.L. made substantial contributions to literature retrieval and data analysis. Y.Z. made extra contributions to the data processing and paper revising. All authors approved the final paper as submitted.

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Sun, Y., Li, C., Zhao, Y. et al. Trends and developments in oral health literacy: a scientometric research study (1991–2020). BDJ Open 7 , 13 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41405-021-00066-5

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Published : 01 March 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41405-021-00066-5

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Oral Literature Research/Field Work - English Oral Literature Notes

« Previous Topic Short Forms - English Oral Literature Notes

Introduction

Key stages in field work, common problems encountered during field work.

•  The student to relive the performance of oral literature materials (recordings, videos etc.)
•  Experience firsthand, the community’s customs and beliefs.
•  Recording and storage of oral literature materials to be used by the future generations.
•  To enable a student know and explore new knowledge not covered by earlier researchers.
•  To help the student acquire research skills in academic study.
•  It involves stating the purpose and scope of study and objectives or research to guard against digression. It also involves identifying the location for the research, familiarization with earlier works on the study or literature review, establishing contact with useful people like informants, deciding on the key methods to be used in collecting data e.g. questionnaires or interviews, securing permissions to conduct research from relevant authorities, buying or hiring of recording materials and budgeting for accommodation and transport.
•  This is done through various methods of collecting date e.g. interviews, questionnaires, observation etc.
•  Recording is done through writing, typing, using tape recorders etc.
•  This involves scrutinising of information collected in preparation for interpretation and documentation, transcription, interpretation, classifying into genres, themes, styles and making a conclusion.
• This is the spreading the information gathered through media.
• Loss of memory especially for details not recorded.
•  Outrageous demands from sources of information like payments.
•  Harsh or unpredictable weather.
•  Breakdown or problems of transportation, delays, hiked fares etc.
•  Informants giving wrong or distorted information.
•  Accidents and misfortunes or ill fate e.g. death
• Sickness in the middle of fieldwork.
•  Prohibitions, lack of access, customs etc.
•   Loss of equipment like camera etc.

Field work should be carried out in relevant and appropriate places like rural areas where there is ethnically authentic information and performance; elders would give detailed oral testimony or material, display great experience and skill while children would easily perform riddles, singing games and tongue twisters.

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Oral Literature

• Last Updated: Aug 7, 2023

Oral literature, as the term implies, refers to the cultural material and tradition transmitted orally from one generation to another [1] . The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form of folktales, ballads, songs, chants, proverbs, or folklores. From an anthropological standpoint, oral literature has been a crucial tool for understanding the cultural, social, and historical contexts of diverse societies.

Understanding Oral Literature

Definition and characteristics.

Oral literature is defined as the art form that uses words to create forms of traditional imaginative culture [2] . This literature comes in many different types, but some general characteristics include:

• Memorability : These narratives typically include repetition, alliteration, and other mnemonic devices to aid in retention.
• Verbal artistry : Oral literature is usually marked by a high degree of verbal artistry.
• Formularity : Oral narratives often have a certain set structure or format they adhere to.
• Performance : They are not merely spoken or recited; they are performed and thus have a theatrical element.

Cultural and Historical Significance

Oral literature plays a crucial role in preserving cultural heritage, traditions, and wisdom. It has been a primary medium of recording history for societies without written language and remains significant even in literate societies for preserving aspects of culture that are not typically written down [3] .

Anthropological Research on Oral Literature

Anthropological research on oral literature involves the study of this form of literature in its cultural context, considering the societal norms, values, and customs in which these narratives are embedded. The oral narratives offer a wealth of knowledge about the past societies’ worldviews and provide insight into the human experience across different cultures and epochs [4] .

Challenges in the Field

Despite its importance, studying oral literature anthropologically poses several challenges:

• Language barriers and translation issues can potentially alter or omit nuances in the narratives [5] .
• Societal biases can be reflected in the researcher’s interpretations.
• The fluidity of oral narratives means that there are often several versions of a single tale, which complicates the study and interpretation.

Methodology

Researching oral literature from an anthropological perspective typically involves:

• Fieldwork : The researcher immerses themselves in the culture being studied. This may involve living among the community and participating in their practices to gain a deep understanding of the context of the oral narratives.
• Recording and Transcription : The researcher records oral narratives, then transcribes them. This might also involve translation if the narratives are in a different language.
• Analysis : The researcher then analyses these narratives, interpreting them in the context of the wider cultural and historical backdrop.

Impact of Technology on Oral Literature

With the advent of technology, the face of oral literature has been radically changing. Here is how:

Digital Archiving

Previously, the transitory nature of oral literature posed significant challenges to its preservation. However, digital archiving offers a solution. Audio and video recordings can capture and store oral narratives, complete with their performance elements. This digital storage allows future generations access to traditional oral narratives in their original performed state.

Accessibility and Dissemination

Technology has not only made oral literature more accessible to a broader audience but also facilitated its wider dissemination. Platforms like YouTube, Podcasts, and other online mediums offer an array of oral literature from various cultures, breaking geographical boundaries.

Influence on Oral Tradition

However, the digitization of oral literature brings a significant change. Oral narratives were traditionally fluid, with each performance differing based on the performer’s interpretation and the audience’s reaction. In contrast, once a performance is recorded and disseminated digitally, it becomes a fixed representation of that narrative, altering the traditional fluidity associated with oral literature.

Oral Literature: A Living Heritage

Even with the modern age’s literacy and digital revolution, oral literature has remained a vital aspect of human culture. It continues to adapt and evolve, finding new life and forms in the contemporary world, all while holding onto the essence of the past. Oral literature’s endurance underlines the human penchant for storytelling and the shared desire to connect with our roots.

In essence, the anthropological study of oral literature opens a window into the human experience’s richness and diversity. By focusing on oral literature, we access a wealth of knowledge, wisdom, and tradition that allows us to connect the past with the present, tradition with innovation, and ultimately, humanity with its cultural heritage.

In conclusion, oral literature is a significant repository of societal values, norms, and history, and anthropological research in this field can offer valuable insights into past and present cultures. Despite the associated challenges, this area of research continues to be pivotal in our quest to understand the complexities of human societies through their narratives.

[1] Finnegan, R. (2012). Oral Literature in Africa. Open Book Publishers.

[2] Foley, J. M. (2002). The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology. Indiana University Press.

[3] Vansina, J. (1985). Oral Tradition as History. University of Wisconsin Press.

[4] Leavy, P. (2017). Research Design: Quantitative, Qualitative, Mixed Methods, Arts-Based, and Community-Based Participatory Research Approaches. Guilford Publications.

[5] Briggs, C. L. (1988). Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Vasundhra, an anthropologist, embarks on a captivating journey to decode the enigmatic tapestry of human society. Fueled by an insatiable curiosity, she unravels the intricacies of social phenomena, immersing herself in the lived experiences of diverse cultures. Armed with an unwavering passion for understanding the very essence of our existence, Vasundhra fearlessly navigates the labyrinth of genetic and social complexities that shape our collective identity. Her recent publication unveils the story of the Ancient DNA field, illuminating the pervasive global North-South divide. With an irresistible blend of eloquence and scientific rigor, Vasundhra effortlessly captivates audiences, transporting them to the frontiers of anthropological exploration.

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African Oral Literatures, new media and technologies

African oral literatures, new media and technologies: challenges for research and documentation

This project aimed to create and implement international cooperation in new fields of African Oral Literature Studies. To this end, a series of conferences and workshops were organized by the African Departments of Leiden University, the University of Hamburg, the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales INALCO (Paris), the University of Naples L'Orientale, and the School of African and Oriental Studies SOAS (London). The research group underpin international cooperation by producing joint research programs.  This project was jointly funded by NWO, The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and partner Universities Oral literatures represent a fundamental component of the intangible heritage of African cultures and the humankind. The importance of studying Oral Literatures is recognized by anthropological, linguistic, historical and literary research (Barber and Moraes Farias 1989, Boyer 1990, Finnegan 1992, Hamilton 1998, Hayward and Lewis 1996, Kashula 2001, Okpewho 1998). Mythical and epic narratives, folktales, heroic and love poems, funeral lamentations, ritual incantations as well as urban songs, popular theatre and many other oral genres are appreciated and studied as a cultural harvest of human and artistic worth addressing and giving form to fundamental questions and acquisitions of individuals and their societies.  Nowadays, the study of African Oral Literatures faces new research challenges due to expanding technologies of audio-video recording and their increasing popularisation and mass-diffusion (Beck and Wittmann 2004, Ricard and Veit-Wild 2005).  The series of conferences and workshops will address these challenges and the integration of technology into a novel approach of African Oral Literature as ‘total event’. That is to say, the researchers will discuss methodological and theoretical implications in - and offer new directions for - the study of all the relevant aspects of the African oral genres (language, form and content, performance, literary and social context, history) when these genres are recorded or produced on audio-visual and electronic devices. The researchers will further assess a preliminary inventory of African Oral Literature video recording existing as documentaries and private materials of researchers at the respective institutions, they will evaluate the geographical, linguistic and literary areas recorded and yet to be investigated, and related scientific publications. Building on the discussion and results of the conferences, the workshops will offer the organisational forum for producing a joint research program on Technological Research, Analysis, Documentation, and E-learning of African oral literatures to be submitted at European calls for tenders.

Project background

The audio-visual recording technology affects documentation as well as theory and methodology of research in African Oral Literature and the way this knowledge is taught in an academic setting. Scholars and students have become aware that collecting and analysing printed transcriptions and translations only give a faint portrait of oral poems and tales and their literary and social functions in Africa (Finnegan 1992, Okpewho 1992, Schipper 1990). The difference is like documenting and studying a live pop-concert or the written text of the songs: the pop-concert is a ‘performance’, i.e. an artistic, cultural and social event that constructs meanings and networks including but also going beyond the written text. What get lost in the written text are the intonation and the gestuality along with the eventual musical accompaniment, the interactions between performer and public, the clothing and scenography, and the context and politics of the performance. Furthermore, the necessity of new forms of documentation and research is strengthened by the changing conditions of oral production in the last decade, given by the increasing number of African “artists of the word” – storytellers, singers etc. – that make use of new media technologies to create and spread their songs and poems. These changes reopen questions about definition, interpretation and research methodology in the field of orality and ‘popular cultures’ in Africa (Barber 1997, Cosentino 1987, Furniss 1996, Ricard and Veit-Wild 2005).  Documentation and investigation of African oral genres are however largely based on material accessible in written form (Coulet Western 1975; Baumgardt and Bounfour 2000, Görög-Karady 1981; Westley 1991), while only a handful of experimental projects offer a few examples of new technological documentation and research methodologies (Furniss 2006, Merolla’s ongoing project 2006).   The academic meeting series  African oral literatures, new media and technologies: challenges for research and documentation  intends to address problems and potentialities of African Oral Literature Studies in relation to the expanding Audio-Visual Technology and to produce new international research projects. Assessing the present range of investigation and technological documentation of oral performances in African studies and raising new questions by means of pan-African comparative perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches (literature, linguistics, anthropology, folklore studies, history), the researchers will also contribute to discuss and redefine the cross-disciplinary (anthropological, historical, linguistic and literary) fields of research on Orality and Popular Culture.  Importance and surplus value of international cooperation for local research group and for the international partners.  Documenting and studying Oral Literatures constitute a pivotal enterprise in the scientific investigation of African cultures. Thanks to the cross-disciplinary approach of conferences and organizational workshops, the project  African oral literature and technology: challenges for research and documentation  will foster integration and synergy of individual and institutional expertise leading to a major scientific joint project for the study and preservation of African intangible heritage and for the position and visibility of this field of study.  Internationally, the project will attract research and funding for the field of Oral Literatures in the framework of African Studies. Locally, the project  African oral literature and technology: challenges for research and documentation  will enhance research and publication in this field of study and the research focus on Orality and Technology in the framework of the CNWS, the University of Leiden and the Africa Studies Centrum.

Leiden University

• dr. Daniela Merolla (project coordinator)
• dr. Jan Jansen (project coordinator)
• dr. Felix Ameka
• Prof. dr. Maarten Mous

University of Hamburg, Germany

Contact person: Prof. dr. Mechtild Reh

Asia-Africa Institute Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), Paris, France

Contact person: Prof. dr. Abdellah Bounfour, CRB.

University of Naples L'Orientale, Italy

Contact person: Prof. dr. Giorgio Banti, Department of Study and Research on Africa and Arab Countries

The World Oral Literature Project

Contact person: Dr. Mark Turin

The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, England

Contact person: Prof. dr. Graham Furniss, Centre of African Studies

The specialist’s meetings in the form of conferences and workshops will produce several durable results: 

• A research network supported by the network website providing information on the network activities, access to existing data bases, a virtual forum for scientific exchange amongst institutions and researchers in the field of African Oral Literature and Technology, and virtual accessibility and openness of the network activities for the scientific community. 
• An inventory of published and unpublished video materials and related scientific research already existing at the African Departments of the network and at the respective libraries, internet collections etc.
• Publications in the form of articles and a final volume integrating new questions and answers from the areas of research indicated in the project. 
• A joint research program to be submitted at European tenders.
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• Beck, rose Marie, and Frank Wittmann (Eds.),  African Media Cultures, Transdisciplinary Perspectives , Köln: Köppe Verlag, 2004.
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• Baumgardt, Ursula and Abdellah Bounfour,  Panorama des littératures africaines , L’Harmattan, Paris, 2000.
• Cosentino D.J., 1987, Omnes cultura tres partes divisa est?  African Studies Review  30, 3, 85-90.
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