While researching around for a topic for my final paper, I referred back to Ong and definitely took ideas from his book "Orality and Literacy," but there are a lot of different things I found interesting in his book therefore thats probably why my final paper topic isn't quite nailed down yet.
If I had unlimited time and resources I would go get the physical copy of Ong's book, read it, maybe even read his other book, "Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness," and most likely research the differences between mostly oral cultures, and literate cultures as far as how they think, how they deal with problems, what their values are, etc. I know literate cultures are obviously more educated, but aside from education I would want to find out what benefits come from being a purely oral culture, and what the major cultural differences are. There has to be a reason why oral cultures still exist, (even though there are few of them) and what the culture as a whole claims they will lose if they change to literacy. I am interested to find out if oral cultures are more creative right-brain thinkers? (since they use art and visual aesthetics to preserve history and values).
It may even be interesting to find out the differences between dreams from people in an oral culture and dreams of a literate person, because that would explain a lot about what is going on in the minds of each, and also just the simple question of how each interpret their dreams.
However to find out all this information I would probably have to use my unlimited time and resources to travel to a couple different oral cultures and hang out with them, observe, record, learn, etc.
I really like all of the questions posted here and would love to see analysis of them at some point but I understand as well that we dont have all the time in the world. But I find your ideas of dreams to be the most interesting. I took a class at one point that was all about oral cultures and their languages and it covered many topics of the way they do things and think. But to explore their dreams is something I have never heard of. I even often wonder what my own dreams mean in comparison to anyone else in our culture, but to think of them in comparison to someone that doesn't write is fascinating.
ReplyDeleteI agree that it would be interesting to study the differences between oral and literate cultures. Everything from the way they interpret information and share it to the way they operate on a daily basis would be affected by whether or not the culture is literate. I think a more current way of studying such differences in cultures would be to examine how a technologically-advanced culture operates compared to one that is several steps back from being up to date in the digital world. It may turn out that there are similar difference compared to the study you are speaking about.
ReplyDeleteI really thought the dreams aspect of your blog was very interesting. All the questions you presented were interesting as well but I wanted to know what you thought about them! The way we interpret text and oral stories I find interesting. So much is based on the tone during oral story telling and I find our interpretation of written text is so heavily based on our previous experiences.
ReplyDelete