Oral Tradition and Folkloristics

For a folklorist it is difficult to think about oral tradition other than through the perspectives provided by our discipline. It is oral communication that links people into those small groups who create and re-create folklore, while reading is a solitary activity. Walter Ong has shown how literacy has penetrated our oral discourses, but it is also possible to see elements of orality in written texts (1982). A folklore performance that has been transformed into an archival unit still remains a manifestation of oral tradition. The main problem in reading these texts lies in our ability to discern them as a part of the tradition, which remains invisible. Oral tradition always implies going beyond the borders of individual creation and single performances; it means relying upon the words that have already been spoken and on a dialogical relationship, as noted by Mikhail Bakhtin (1986). Our object of research is not the text as a singular unit but its relationships with the rich phenomena beyond its written form, such as the generic, situational, cultural, and performative contexts. If we are able to perceive and study these contexts, we can also comprehend the textual meanings that are not explicit at first glance. Text is a gateway into these realms, ruled by tradition. There are certain key concepts in folkloristics that mark it as a distinctive, autonomous scholarly discourse, such as "tradition," "group,"