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Not long ago we were quite confident about how to go about thinking. If we wanted to think about some fundamental value—say, justice—we charted the course of our exploration over the broad and silent ocean of historical and philosophical knowledge accumulated in libraries. Within the last few decades, however, we have discovered, to our dismay, that knowledge has burst the boundaries of print to attack not only eyes, but ears, touch—the whole sensorium. Ease of travel and the wonders of electronics have launched us into an informational universe of too many dimensions. We can be almost anywhere. We can watch space lift-offs and half-an-hour later watch magnified human sperm travel into the womb and beyond. We can "see" the color-coded temperature of Jupiter and look back from beyond the Earth. We can see and hear war happen.

Cover -- Half Title -- Series -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- List of maps -- Notes on contributors -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1 Orality in Southeast Asia -- 2 The languages in India and a movement in retrospect -- 3 Indigenous languages of Arnhem Land -- 4 Orality and writing in Spanish America: a translation perspective -- 5 "How to write an oral culture": indigenous tradition in contemporary Canadian native writing -- 6 Indigenous languages in Canada -- Index

Recent work on political liberalism attempts to find ways to bring divergent cultural practices under a single rubric. This article examines one of the limits of the cultural commensurability of modern liberal legality. It argues that Western forms of evidentiary proof are not amenable to oral history testimony given by indigenous litigants. Current anthropological research on oral history and indigenous culture shows that oral history is not simply a "record" or "chronology" of events, but is a particular cultural practice that draws its members into the fold – and this is an event of its own. Western forms of evidence, however, traditionally treat testimony as "reporting" or as "creating a record" of a prior set of events in time. This article suggests that the distance between these two conceptions of "events" and "record" is significant enough to warrant rethinking the place of traditional trial practices in the treatment of oral history. It also suggests that the Western form of legality is grounded in an understanding of temporality that eschews any other way of thinking about events and their occurrence, a legality oriented against orality.

The essays in Between Orality and Literacy address how oral and literature practices intersect. Their topics range from Homer and Hesiod to the New Testament and Gaius' Institutes, from epic poetry and drama to vase painting, historiography, mythography, and the philosophical letter

Religious scholars take up various questions relating to the relationship between orality and literacy in the context of colonized people in antiquity, and explore the role of orality in relation to this hegemony. Among the topics are theoretical and methodological foundations, Mithra's cult as an example of religious colonialism in Roman times, th

In exploring the everyday workplace and community environments of adults with liminal literacy, this book demonstrates how a media ecology perspective allows adult literacy and orality to be reimagined within a deeper and more holistic way than possible within disconnected disciplinary areas.

The paper traces the ordinary—yet extraordinary—life story of a Bedouin woman, Amneh, in historic Southern Palestine from the 1930s to the 1970s. Amneh's oral narratives and memories combine the personal and the political, drawing a picture of the lives that the often forgotten Palestinian Bedouin population of the South lived before, during and after theNakba, the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948. Her counter-narrative challenges and complicates the hegemonic settler-colonial, ethno-nationalist, elite and male-dominated historiography of the region, and confirms her as an historical actor who finds her ways through difficult social, political, economic and cultural constraints. Although unique, her story is not exceptional, nor is it representative of 'Bedouin women of the Naqab'. Rather, it offers a lens through which the much more intricate and messy historical realities in the Naqab can be unfolded. As such, Amneh's biography, as told by her, is also telling of the wider social and political dynamics, relations and events in the region at the time.