May 9: Sophie Strand on Oral Storytelling
interviewed by Kamea Chayne for the Green Dreamer Podcast
The transition from oral cultures into written cultures—which are technically in academia called, chirographic and textual cultures—for me, [this] really signals a conceptual change that then uproots us from an embedded, environmental, relational existence, in such a way that a certain analytical, linear, and material reductionist thinking becomes possible.
What I'm really interested in is that for thousands and thousands of years, most human history, storytelling has been oral. That's almost too simple to say. Knowledge has been oral. That if you didn't speak the knowledge constantly, you had no history book or dictionary to look it up, you had to constantly be telling stories. You had to have storytelling gatherings every week in order to keep knowledge alive. There was no residue. There was no object where you kept knowledge. Knowledge lived in relationships. It was never a solitary activity.
We have a chirographic lens of looking back on oral cultures, which is problematic. [...] We think of them as thinking with chirographic textual minds, but they wouldn't even have had a book in mind. They would experience themselves as remembering a story, word for word, but what they were really doing is constantly adapting the story to shifting political, and ecological climatological pressures.
So, stories were always updating. There's this idea that Homer and the Odyssey were one memorized story that was unchanging. But the truth is that Homer was a tradition. It probably was a collective experience by a whole culture, where you would memorize certain themes, certain epithets, that then you could recycle into these episodic shapes, so that you could tell the story in your own way.
For me, oral culture is about knowledge as relationship, and knowledge as movement. I always say oral cultures totalize. They see the whole archaic nature. They see that there's no such thing as an individual node of cognition: our intelligence is interstitial. It only exists when we come together.
Chirographic textual cultures dissect and monumentalize. So written words are residue. That's the interesting thing for me about writing. Writing makes us think that words are similar to things. When you write something down, suddenly you think an elephant is an object. Rather than breath: a word disappears as you say it. It's an event rather than an object.
So, for me, the movement from oral culture to written culture is the movement from relational consciousness to objectification. The biggest difference is you cannot and you would not tell a story alone in an oral culture. It was always about communal knowledge.