How oral tradition shapes family identity and cultural memory

¶ … walk down the busy city street. It is a beautiful day, 70 degrees, clear, blue sky. The early morning sun is beginning to shine down for warmth and comfort. The jackets will come off. The shorts will be put on. The sidewalks team with hundreds, thousands of people rushing, rushing....Do they know where? Do they know why?

How communication has changed in the last decade, even over the last three years. First everyone carrying cell phones, and now more and more people having strange plastic and metal attachments behind their ears.

The development of language was one of the greatest human achievements. It united separate individuals with a bond of understanding. People could work together, share thoughts and feelings and pass on their beliefs, values and culture through stories. Over generations, they passed on ideas to young ones through oral history.

The manidogisik had fifty smaller manidog or little people to protect him. When one of these manidog threw a rock, it was a bolt of lightning. As the windigo approached, the manidog heard him coming and ran out to meet him and began to fight. Finally they knocked him down with a bolt of lightning. The windigo fell dead with a noise like a big tree falling. As he lay there he looked like a big Indian, but when the people started to chop him up, he was a huge block of ice. They melted down the pieces and found, in the middle of the body, a tiny infant about six inches long with a hole in his head where the manidog had hit him. This was the baby who had turned into a windigo. If the manidog had not killed it, the windigo would have eaten up the whole village. (Oral Tradition)

I always loved the holiday dinners when growing up. After big meals at Thanksgiving, Easter or Christmas, everyone was pleasantly filled, mellow, comforted by the food and drink. They leaned back in the chairs and began reminiscing, telling stories and catching up with news. They quickly forgot that I was there, quietly sitting on my chair, hearing, listening, absorbing their words, their gestures, their laughs and tears that no one would dare tell a young kid.

This is when I learned why I no longer saw Aunt Muriel and Uncle Thomas together, and who was that strange lady I saw with Uncle Thomas at the restaurant (when my mother and father huddled at our table and whispered...every so often glancing over to Uncle Thomas.) "But I want to say hello. "No...no, honey, not now." "But..." "No. Now let's eat."

I heard words that never were said in front of children. Words I never heard my parents say before, that they always said were "bad." I heard deep laughter at "dirty jokes" I would not understand for years to come.

As I became older and participated in the conversations, I learned about my heritage. How my ancestors arrived in this country. Who are my relatives? Here was modern oral tradition. Passing on stories about family.

It was not hard to imagine the prehistoric men returning to their Paleolithic caves in Lascaux France, painting scenes of their hunts and describing harrowing events while young boys looked up in awe. Horns, antlers, claws, mammoths, tiger-tooths, humans running, throwing spears, images of hunts and wars appeared like rudimentary comic strips on the cave walls. This was just like my Thanksgiving dinners. It bonded the family, the clan, the tribe together. Each generation telling the next about the great animals, the hunts, the warriors, creating a sense of pride and building a strong tradition.

Heredity

I am the family face;

Flesh perishes, I live on,

Projecting trait and trace

Through time to times anon,

And leaping from place to place

Over oblivion.

The years-heired feature that can

In curve and voice and eye

Despise the human span

Of durance -- that is I;

The eternal thing in man,

That heeds no call to die.

Thomas Hardy)

In The Idea of Wilderness, Oelschlaeger asks, (350), "Do we dare think that we are nature watching nature?," a question that makes the modern-day reader realize a paradox. Humans are now part of nature. Meanwhile, they stand apart from nature, observing nature and developing their culture apart from, but in relation to, nature. How can this paradox be resolved? Oelschlaeger provides an overview of interaction with nature from the earliest times of human existence until present times in order to determine the answer to this yet unresolved concern.

According to Oelschlaeger, the distancing from wilderness has occurred over the evolution of humankind, but has increased incrementally with the development of Western civilization. "Although the ideological, economic, political, technological, and ecological changes that aggregated over time, literally thousands of years, were profound, revolutionary in sum, they developed slowly" (25). Throughout Neolithic times, humans became increasingly skilled at and aggressive in developing the land and began to recognize themselves as beings partially dependent upon yet separate from the natural world. They created complex stories, myths and religions to explain their interaction with the world around them and the unknowns they saw in their daily lives. They had a limited mastery over the land through technology, but promoted the concept that humans could not by any means control all aspects of the natural world.

Remember when you passed someone on the street talking to him/herself? You shook your head and mumbled, "crazy," under your breath. Now, every where I go, people are walking and talking out loud on the bus, the street, the elevator in an office.

Communication is changing. We increasingly talk through machines, not face-to-face.

Marshall McLuhan, the communication guru, coined the term "global village" and the way humans extend themselves through the human body and mind in a fashion that is new. If he were alive, do you think that McLuhan would agree that going down the supermarket aisle and talking through the headset and asking "What peas do you want?" is extending ourselves?

McLuhan also talked about "amputation." Every extension of humankind, especially technological extensions, have the effect of amputating, cutting off some other extension. The motive-force for technological innovation is defensive and biological: The nervous system wants to find protection against sudden changes in the surrounding environment by using the physical organs, that is, the technologies that extend these organs as buffers. Yet each of these extensions of individual organs is also an acceleration and intensification of the external environment. Thus, people place themselves in a vicious circle of:

high stress = inventions of new technologies to protect ourselves= acceleration of the environment= high stress...).

McLuhan wanted to make people realize that it is essential to admit how technology is completely interwoven and actually a part of us. The only way people can actually understand technology become aware how it changes our perception of the world. What happens when a person does not have his/her cell phone? What takes place when someone loses his/her Blackberry? Are we really free?

According to McLuhan, there is no way to comprehend the subliminal effects of technology and be able to apply it to enhanced intelligence, creativity, and freedom, if people do not first become aware of the double-effect of the technological experience-- that all technologies are simultaneously extensions and self-amputations of some human mental or physical faculty.

The other day I was sitting in a booth at a restaurant. A 40 ish man sat down with his mother, 65-70. She sat there huddled over her food as he made one phone call after another into his cell phone. I heard every word he said. What happened to privacy, let alone sitting, eating and talking with family? Do I want to know what happened to him in court today? Do I want to know that his tenants are being thrown out and hiring a lawyer? Do I actually want to hear about him and his wife's argument over this?

What will happen when I become older? Will my children take me out to lunch and talk into some extension of their bodies -- then, perhaps, visual as well -- while I huddle over my food?

Expressive communicators make no distinction between thought and expression. They see communication as a process in which persons express what they think or feel so others will know what they think or feel, and see expression as the only job that communication can accomplish. Expressive individual, communication is successful only to the degree that it is clear and has free disclosure of thoughts and feelings (O'Keefe).

The communication map for expressive communication is arranged in table format of six columns. The first column (Communication by Recognition) represents basic communication and progresses in complexity to the sixth column (Symbolic Communication)

Communication by Recognition

Facial expressions

Contingency Communication

Vocalizations

Body Movement

Calling Switch

Instrumental Communication

Touch Person

Manipulate Person

Touch Object

Conventional Communication

Extend Object

Simple Gestures

Pointing

Two Switch Communication

Emerging Symbolic Communications (Adaptations)

Complex Gestures

Miniature Objects

Pictures/Drawings

Other Tactual Symbols

Symbolic Communication

Manual Signs

Non-Symbolic Speech

Electronic Systems

Stacey Chillemi

Where are we headed on the communication path? More than ever, we talk about being "stressed out," "unhappy," "depressed." We are searching for answers through any mean possible, yet we are breaking ties with the one thing that can hold us together. Will technology replace the only gatherings, story tellings, we have? Will we eat together over videoconferencing or teleconferencing? How will children learn about their tradition? Oral tradition is an essential part of all societies, despite the growing reliance on written and electronic records and accounts. These traditions account for the ways the world is and the way it should be. It assists people in educating the young and teaching important lessons about the past and about life.

The undeniable loss of tradition in the modern word does not at all entail a loss of the past, for tradition and past are not the same, as the believers in tradition on one side and the believers in progress on the other would have us believe - whereby it makes little difference that the former deplore this state of affairs while the latter extend their congratulations. With the loss of tradition we have lost the thread which safely guided us through the vast realms of the past, but this thread was also the chain fettering each successive generation to a predetermined aspect of the past. It could be that only now will the past open up to us with unexpected freshness and tell us things no one has yet had ears to hear. But it cannot be denied that without a securely anchored tradition - and the loss of this security occurred several hundred years ago - the whole dimension of the past has also been endangered. We are in danger of forgetting, and such an oblivion - quite apart from the contents themselves that could be lost - would mean that, humanly speaking, we would deprive ourselves of one dimension, the dimension of depth in human existence. For memory and depth are the same, or rather, depth cannot be reached by man except through remembrance. (Arendt 94)

Is it time for us to review what technology is becoming, has become? Is it time to review our positive extensions and amputations? Will we be able to draw on our cave walls in future generations what has happened in the past to help those coming in the future?

The world is waiting to be known; Earth, what it has in it! The past is in it;

All words, feelings, movements, words, bodies, clothes, girls, trees, stones, things of beauty, books, desires are in it; and all are to be known;

Afternoons have to do with the whole world;

And the beauty of mind, feeling knowingly the world! (Siegel)