Essay On Oral Tradition

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If such continuity is not maintained such epics or themes in it seize to exist. In effect society thinks according to totalities; it attaches one notion to another and groups these into more complex representations of persons and events which in their turn are comprised in still more complex notions.5 Nora further claimed that groups select certain dates and people to commemorate, deliberately eliminate others from representation (collective amnesia), and invent traditions to support the collective memory. That is the reason events and situations in an oral epic are often forgotten when irrelevant or inconvenient. Thus there is also the controlled dissemination of oral practices to limit the scope of alteration in the epics or stories and a …show more content…

In its core oral tradition embodies the power of expression and in many ways creates a space for interactive story telling. Oral epic often requires performances through which an epic is told. All the message of an oral tradition have a “social surface”,10 this social surface can change the message. That is why performances of oral epics do not occur randomly and they appear at particular moments and their content is related to the occasion.11 Each message also changes by the particular interests of the performed. There is an active role played by the public audience. The public interacts with the teller and the teller provokes this interaction by asking questions, welcoming exclamations and turning to as song sung by all at appropriate points of the action. Thus every performance is new yet the tale and its massage remains the same.12 Each time the song is sung, the tale is told, the epic performed changes. The interaction of both the performer and the viewer are aspects of the reinforcement of the idea of a story or an identity being historical. Such can be seen among the Nzebi and the Bulaang where historical knowledge creates clan relationship and hence social structure with its ideology or it generates redundancy with competing claims for

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