29 April 2021

The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant (Romania), in partnership with the University of Plovdiv “Paissi Hilendarski” (Bulgaria), and the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations (INALCO) (France), announce for the 28th of May the workshop entitled From transcribing orality to oral writing practices. Rural and popular cultures in the digital age.
The discussions will be part of the topic of MARTOR Journal no. 27/2022 and are preliminary to this publication. The event will be online and will include mainly discussions, but also interventions on the mentioned topic in French and English.

Please announce your participation by 30 April 2021.

Contact: revistamartor@gmail.com

The discussion about orality and writing, today, inevitably takes two distinct turns: (1) one related to the orality of peasant cultures; and (2) one that emerges from the recent cultural practices of modernity, practices that combine media and the widespread use of information technology, which leads, inescapably, to the transfer of certain important areas of social life into the virtual realm. Thus, both forms of hypothesizing about the junctures between oral cultures and their written expression determine certain unavoidable methodological perspectives in re-evaluating the (dynamic and ever changing) relationship between orality and writing, in the (re)production of culture we continue to call “traditional,” and in the configuration of various local or group cultures that are mediated virtually. It is a seemingly eclectic discussion but for this very reason it offers a range of possible approaches.

The reciprocity of influence between written literature and orality is signaled as being present since Antiquity (see R. Crosby, J. Goody), the two forms of cultural manifestation constantly interacting throughout history. Moreover, writing is integrated among the mechanisms of transmission and reproduction of local (rural or popular) cultures, such that oral narrations reified in written form often are reintegrated and reinterpreted into the oral dimensions of the life of a community, mainly through storytelling. Over the years, researchers who study the relationship between orality and writing have discussed topics dealing with linguistic aspects (see J. M. Foley), or the dynamic between oral memory and written memory in the process of transmitting local cultures (see J. Goody). These studies have led to the present epistemological theoretical frame, as well as, and just as significantly, to methodological transformations.

Read more here.