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The Power of the Written Tradition (Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry)

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In a sense, this is Jack Goody's "Summa", even though it contains fewer than 200 pages. The book contains a series of essays in which he deals with objections to his earlier writings, makes a few objections of his own to other writers, and generally illuminates the nature of oral transmission, the interaction of literate and non and illiterate societies, the power writing gives to those who have it, and its influence on conventions such as time, narrative and poetry.

This book is of particular interest to me in relation to the Bible, because for years in the seminary I always heard that the laws of Moses, the stories of Genesis or the sayings of Jesus were transmitted verbatim because of the allegedly superior memory skills of oral cultures. Mr. Goody takes dead aim on these naive notions, and the theories of Lord and Parry, by looking at actual oral transmission in actual oral societies. It turns out that word-for-word recall of ritual recitations is non-existent, and rhyme and meter are likewise in short supply. In the observed societies, mythic recitation is collectively composed by intiates at the time of performance, and varies considerably from time to time and place to place.

Other issues considered in the book are the creation of narrative time through writing, the influence of writing on the slave revolt in Bahia in 1835, a critique of Derrida's playful, but not very accurate notion of language, and consideration of writing as a technology. This book was very hard to put down. It's a keeper!

The author is pretty sharp when he talks about how oral traditions helped develop some Indo-European languages. But he was lost when he discusses oriental languages, especially Chinese. In China, evidences of writing before 4,000 years BCE (i.e., nearly 1,000 years earlier than any signs of writing appeared in Egypt or Mesopotamia.) have been found, while he claimed the earliest evidences dated around 1,500 BCE. And he almost made himself fantastic when he sympathetically cited a claim that the Indo-Europeans, in a twisted way, helped inspire China's writing system. Indeed, nobody is sure whether or not Indo-Europeans existed when writing first appeared in China, or even in Egypt or Mesopotamia.
One more thing that reveals his ignorance is the claim that Chinese (only) uses some 8,000 characters, and that somehow proves that Chinese is the most conservative language. Though what he meant is not entirely clear, there is an obvious misunderstanding here. He must have thought that those "characters" are equivalent with "words" in English. Isn't that true?
Well, while some of them are, they are much more than that. Those 8,000 charaters, when they come into use, form at least 5*8,000 = 40,000 words, sometimes in single characters, more often in pairs, and occsionally in triplets and quadruples. It is such words which are more "equivalent" to Indo-European words. For example, Fang, one character, is similar to House; Tian, to Heaven; Shi-jie, two charaters, to World; Qi-che, to Automobile; so on and so forth.
A modestly educated Chinese knows (either reads or writes) about 13,000 characters and thus 65,000 words, making him more than an equivalent of William Shakespere, who used a little more than 35,000 words, in all his plays and sonnets and other poems.
The author should know that he is not a pastor of any Indo-European gods. When a scholar addresses a broad audience, he should know that making insane claims doesn't help to advance his cause, because many in the audience might know something he doesn't.
An old Confucius saying might sober him up: One shouldn't brag about things he doesn't know well enough.