Legal Writing

Oral culture: people doing

In the absence of elaborate analytic categories that depend on writing to structure knowledge at a distance from lived experience, oral cultures must conceptualize and verbalize all their knowledge with more or less close reference to the human lifeworld, assimilating the alien, objective world to the more immediate, familiar interaction of human beings.
A chirographic (writing) culture and even more a typographic (print) culture can distance and in a way denature even the human, itemizing such things as the names of leaders and political divisions in an abstract, neutral list entirely devoid of a human action context.
An oral culture has no vehicle so neutral as a list. In the latter half of the second book, the Iliad presents the famous catalogue of the ships?over four hundred lines?which compiles the names of Grecian leaders and the regions they ruled, but in a total context of human action: the names of persons and places occur as involved in doings (Havelock 1963, pp. 176?80).

Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong
p. 42 (v) Close to the human lifeworld

Full post as published by Building Rapport on July 28, 2008 (boomark / email).