Oral Tradition in the Age of Mass Reproduction

Abstract

I came here with mixed feelings. With hope, for an opportunity to rethink and clarify ideas about classifying and documenting oral tradition, and with uncertainties because of the enormity of the tasks indicated in the title of the workshop. I agree heartily that we need an international interdisciplinary forum to discuss the status (or importance, if you like) of oral tradition. I also agree with the need to discuss and launch a new indexing system, or rather, to update the existing ones that have served generations of folklorists and other users faithfully. Such a discussion is timely because research over the last thirty years has produced more narrative materials than were accessed over the previous 150 years, and from areas little or never studied before. New regional motif-lists and type-indexes from lands beyond the Aarne and Thompson’s Old World, confined between Ireland and India (and only incidentally extended to its expatriates in adjacent areas and the New World), could be fitted only with difficulty into the international classification system. As industrial growth has made the world smaller and more accessible to research, new finds signal the need for adjustment of the system to accommodate new materials. To facilitate and effectively improve our international networking and collaboration, indexing should be a priority. But this goal is not solely the responsibility of archive-and library-based folkorists anymore. There is a dire need to collaborate with field anthropologists experienced not only in preindustrial