リテラシーとオラリティを複数化する

声の文化と文字の文化の大分水嶺を越えて

抄録

Ong's seminal book Orality and Literacy has deeply influenced cultural anthropology and other cultural studies in Japan, though some of the works citing his book did not place such a high value on the academic context and the severe criticism on his and his colleagues' works. This review introduces the context of Orality and Literacy, the development of a research field called "New Literacy Studies," and suggests a vision for future orality studies.

From the outset, research on orality and literacy has been an interdisciplinary topic. Parry and Lord were two of the earliest scholars who noticed a distinct linguistic style in oral tradition. Influenced by their research, Havelock argued that there was a great transition from oral to literate culture in ancient Greece during the time of Plato, whose theory of ideas, he said, was the outcome of 'literate culture.' While that research focused on Western culture, Goody expanded its focus to "primitive" non-literate cultures, insisting on the contrastive nature between orality and literacy. A similar discussion was also seen in research on intercultural comparative psychology by Greenfield and Olson. Of course, McLuhan's media study also exerted a prevailing influence on the topic. Ong's Orality and Literacy can be seen as one of the clearest summaries of the various works on orality and literacy, with some vision to further studies of electronic media.

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