ABSTRACT
'Orality' is a necessary yet over-determined term whose potential sphere of reference includes any or all of the following: 1
— oral tradition in general, sometimes overlapping with such terms as 'folklore' and 'popular culture';
— oral culture and its sub-divisions (primary, secondary, mixed, mediatised);
— the work of oral production, transmission, reception, conservation and (usually) repetition;
— the marking of features bearing on oral culture or practice in written texts.
At the same time as embracing these multiple fields of meaning, 'orality' works hard to define itself by opposition, though the truth is that, in terms of cultural history, it is far from easy to agree on what the oral is not. The long accredited pair 'orality and literacy' is faithfully reproduced in the title of this volume, though many of the contributions draw attention, explicitly or otherwise, to the inadequacies of that distinction. Orality/textuality? But it is common practice to refer to oral poems, for example, also as 'texts'. One thing that is clear is that the oral embraces a reality far greater than its primary meaning might suggest: it is not limited to sound or even the spoken language. While the invention of writing systems marks an undoubted break in the history of orality, the bulk of human cultural history accommodates an 'impure' orality, one that is implicated one way or another with other forms of signification and communication, whether written or iconographic or a mixture of both.