Tuesday, October 16, 2012

A Treasure of Written Texts

Let's think for a moment about some of the societal and political implications about orality and literacy, about having a society based on oral or on written communication. As literacy scholars have pointed out, orality came first, historically. However, the invention of writing gave a boost to empires who needed to manage the vastness of their posessions, and writing-based cultures came to think of themselves as stronger, even as 'superior' to orality-based cultures.

As it often happens though, the story gets more complicated. Orality comes to be associated with an idealized past, with a time when humanity was more innocent, closer to nature and genuine feelings, and less corrupt. Just as writing-based cultures imposed themselves, all around the world, over orality-based ones, the historical primacy of orality was elevated to superiority. Plato was the first prominent proponent of this kind of thinking, and these ideas have thrived over the centuries.

One instantiation of this type of thinking is in the studies of organizational communication, where oral exchanges are seen as far richer and more nuanced, in a word, superior to written texts. Largely, our book is an effort to show that writing is not superior or inferior to orality; in organizational contexts, it simply is a communication modality that affords the accomplishment of important tasks: creating an organizational memory, sharing and developing knowledge, expressing emotions, building communities among people who rarely if ever meet physically. So much for the supposed superiority of orality.

Lest one thinks these debates around orality and literacy are somewhat removed from present-day concerns, one can turn to Jean-Michel Djian's recently published book Les Manuscrits de Tombouctou. Djian is a professor at University Paris VIII. His book is a call to save the treasure of manuscripts kept in this city situated in the north of Mali, which was a major center of scholarship between the 14th and 17th centuries (in the 15th century over 25000 students were studying there) and is currently under siege from islamic groups.

Djian's provocative hypothesis is that this treasure of manuscripts, which sheds a very different light on Africa's intellectual life before the European conquests, has been forgotten for a very long time (til the 1980's) because the French colonists and the griots, (storytellers and singers, the repositories of oral culture) had a common interest in promoting and portraying the local culture as oral (less sophisticated for the colons, less threatening for the oral griots). For Djian, collecting, indexing, and studying the Tombouctou manuscripts is a duty for humanity who can thus re-discover its rich traditions and high level of knowledge in astronomy, mathematics, ethics, poetry, law, commerce, pharmacology. At the same time, the story Djian documents also represents an episode in the never finished battle between orality and literacy, between the power of the spoken word and that of the written sign.


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