Orality and Language

G. N. Devy, Geoffrey V. Davis, G. N. Devy, Geoffrey V. Davis

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367245368
• eBook ISBN: 9781000214659
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Social Sciences

Part of the series Key Concepts in Indigenous Studies, this book focuses on the concepts that recur in any discussion of the society, culture and literature among indigenous peoples.

This book, the fourth in a five-volume series, deals with the two key concepts of language and orality of indigenous peoples from Asia, Australia, North America and South America. With contributions from renowned scholars, activists and experts from across the globe, it looks at the intricacies of oral transmission of memory and culture, literary production and transmission, and the nature of creativity among indigenous communities. It also discusses the risk of a complete decline of the languages of indigenous peoples, as well as the attempts being made to conserve these languages.

Bringing together academic insights and experiences from the ground, this unique book, with its wide coverage, will serve as a comprehensive guide for students, teachers and scholars of indigenous studies. It will be essential reading for those in social and cultural anthropology, tribal studies, sociology and social exclusion studies, politics, religion and theology, cultural studies, literary and postcolonial studies, and Third World and Global South studies, as well as activists working with indigenous communities.

1
Orality in Southeast Asia

Aone Van Engelenhoven

1 Introduction to the linguistic and cultural diversity of Southeast Asia¹

Southeast Asia can be divided into two principal regions: mainland Southeast Asia, comprising Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam; and Insular Southeast Asia, covering Indonesia, the Philippines and the tiny nations of Singapore, Brunei Darussalam on the island of Borneo and Timor-Leste on the island of Timor. Malaysia is found both on the mainland and on Borneo Island, and is considered to be part of Insular Southeast Asia in this chapter. Both regions are very complex linguistically. Mainland Southeast Asia lodges about 500 languages in at least five different language families. Insular Southeast Asia, in fact, mainly lodges three language families. The largest one is the Austronesian family with about 1,200 languages. The tiny West Papua and Timor-Alor-Pantar families are represented by 26 languages whose genetic relatives are all found in New Guinea, outside of Insular Southeast Asia.

Large parts of Southeast Asia lodge literate cultures in principle. All national languages, as for example Thai on the mainland and Malay in the archipelago, have a literary tradition that dates back at least to the 15th century CE. Literary traditions of local languages like Cham in Cambodia and Javanese in Indonesia can be dated back to an even earlier time. Consequently, many oral traditions found in both regions are intimately linked to a parallel literary tradition.

In other words, in the context of Southeast Asia the characteristics of orality itself depend on whether the society has a literary tradition or not. The tradition of Buddhist monks in Laos and Northeast Thailand to elucidate their sermons by means of oral folktales is obviously oral, but nevertheless closely connected to the literary religious texts in Pali that they recite from (McDonald 2006: 64–66; Souvanxay 2005). The 6,000 folio pages in the 12 volumes of the La Galigo epic at Leiden University’s Library that are inscribed on the Memory of the World List at UNESCO obviously confirm the literary and thus erudite character of the Bugis society (Sulawesi Island, Indonesia). Nevertheless, its stories are preferably told orally and recitation from a manuscript is confined to instances when a specific reference is required (Koolhof 1999).

Ivanoff (2013: 200) rightly warns against the literate prejudice of denying the erudition in oral compositions in illiterate societies, for example the Moken sea nomads off the coast of Myanmar and Thailand. An oral epic like Biag ni Lam-ang of the Ilokano (Luzon Island, Philippines) would, according to such thinking, be necessarily inferior to a literary epic like the Thai Ramakien, although both epics display a similarly complex and elaborate composition (Flores 2016; Waradet 2014).

To bypass the complex linguistic and cultural diversity in both literate and illiterate dimensions, this contribution intends to elaborate on orality in insular Southeast Asia in the neighbouring districts of Southwest Maluku (Indonesia) and Lautém (Timor-Leste). Southwest Maluku is a regency of 16 islands in the east of Indonesia. It lodges 22 languages that are all Austronesian, except for Oirata on Kisar Island, which belongs to the Timor-Alor-Pantar family. A local variant of Indonesian functions as the main lingua franca. To the south, the area borders on Lautém, which is the easternmost municipality of Timor-Leste. In five of its administrative posts, Fataluku – another Timor-Alor-Pantar language – is spoken. In Tutuala, the easternmost administrative post, an additional secretive language called Makuva, which is Austronesian, is used. Here, Indonesian functions as the contact language with people from outside the municipality, albeit this language is replaced more and more often by Tetum, one of the official languages of Timor-Leste (Da Conceição Savio 2016). Notwithstanding this linguistic and sometimes cultural diversity, the oral traditions in both areas appear to be broadly similar.

Orality is defined in this contribution as the exclusively oral transfer of cultural knowledge. Section 2 discusses the phenomenon of storytelling and addresses in subsequent paragraphs the storytelling setting, narrative topology, and lexical and canonical parallelism. The final paragraph elaborates on “story stealing” and narrative annexation in storytelling pragmatics. Section 3 links storytelling to the practice of singing. Section 3.1 elaborates on Fataluku polyphony in Lautém and Section 3.2 describes the traditional singing practice in the Babar archipelago in Southwest Maluku. The next section provides a discussion on “literary fraud” and mystique in the pragmatics of singing. Section 4 contains a conclusion and addresses the endangerment of oral traditions.

2 Storytelling in Lautém and Southwest Maluku

Just as it is impossible to cover all ethnolinguistic groups in Southeast Asia in this contribution, it is also not possible to extensively discuss all the diverse narrative genres and performance types that are found in this part of the world. In his analysis of Malay oral narratives, Sweeney (1987: 165) defined a narrative as a combination of fixed storylines or plot patterns, which he dubbed “narrative chunks.” These invariable narrative chunks can be recombined into an endless row of new stories. In this contribution, then, a “story” or a narrative is seen as a set of person and location names that interrelate separate plot patterns within a single narrated frame of reference.

2.1 Storytelling setting

Each storytelling performance requires its own setting. The genre determines where the story is told, what kind of performer is needed and what kind of audience is expected. This is exemplified in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 shows the storytelling setting as it has been demonstrated in Southwest Maluku and Lautém. The setting as it is described here, however, may apply throughout eastern insular Southeast Asia and, with some minor adaptations, may be found everywhere in insular and mainland Southeast Asia. The outer box with the dotted line in the figure represents the private space where the audience is confined to either one person or a few people, and has established a direct and exclusive discourse relationship with the storyteller. The inner box featuring a continuous line represents the public space. Here – depending on the physical reach of the storyteller’s voice – the audience is significantly larger, but lacks the intimate discourse relationship that the storyteller and the audience have in the private space. Both boxes are cut across by a grey bar that represents the scale of sacredness of the stories told, with the most profane stories at the extreme right and stories that are most sacred at the extreme left.

Due to its two-dimensional limitations, the figure is best interpreted as a pyramid seen from the top. The public space is at the top and is the most accessible for outsiders. The private space lies below the public space, and is only accessible for insiders. As a consequence, researchers can study oral traditions in the public space of a community, but usually are locked out from performances in the underlying private space. The performance of an extremely sacred story is normally exactly the same as a storytelling performance of an extremely profane story. The highly sacred end of the scale, therefore, interlocks with the fully profane end, which makes the scale in fact circular.

The default performer in public space is a man, whether it concerns a sacred narrative or a profane story. The reason for this can differ...

Table of contents

• 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