Blog #9 --Oral communication--Jessica Moore

From some of the outside reading I did for my research paper, I learned a lot about oral culture and traditions. I knew before going into the paper that oral cultures practice the tradition of myth telling/story telling and do so by passing myths down from generation to generation. However, I also looked at newly literate cultures like the ones from the Bedouin tribes in the Jordan. One of the literate men, Muhammad, is a Behouin historian who translates and writes the "talk of the elders" and wants to someday publish his works to celebrate his tribal heritage. He considers himself a "conservator and scribe", not an author. He says: "“If you want the details of the ‘Adwani History’, you must sit with the elders and listen to their talk, then record it. That is my method. See? I create documents. And this is important work because when the old men die, their sons will forget these poems and stories; not all of them, but each generation forgets until a century from now. What is left? That is the problem. We Adwan do not write our own history. Everything is talk and oral recollections” This is a great example of how important it is to preserve an oral cultures' history and how easy it would be for things to get lost or misunderstood in the passing from one generation to the next. It makes me wonder how much history and cultures we have lost from the unreliable oral way of passing information.