Narrative style

The influence of culture on discourse style also becomes apparent in the different distribution of orate and literate feature of speech in story telling. For example, using the short “peer narrative” film by William Chafe, Tannen asked native speakers from Anglo-American and Greek background to retell the film in their own words. (It showed a man picking pears from a tree, then descending and dumping them into one of three baskets on the ground. A boy comes by on a bicycle and steals a basket of pears. As he’s riding away, he passes a girls on a bike, his hat flies off his head, and the bike overturns. Three boys appear and help him gather his pears. They find his hat and return it to him and he gives them pears. The boys then pass the farmer who has just come down from the three and discovered that his basket of pears is missing. He watches them walk by eating pears).

In comparing the narratives told by American women in English and Greek women in Greek. Each group had a distinctive narrative style. The Greeks told better stories, by often interweaving judgments about the character’s behavior, or about the film’s message. In contrast, the Americans reportedly gave a better recollection of the original sequence of events, and gave all the details they could remember. They used their judgment to comment on the filmmaker’s technique. The Greeks seemed to draw upon an interactive experience which was focused more on interpersonal involvement: telling the story in ways that would interest the interviewer, interpreting the film’s human message. The Americans seemed to draw on their wiliness to approach a school task for its own demands. They were focusing on the content of the film, treating it as a cinematic object, with critical objectivity. Each group made differential use of orate and literate features according to the expectations their culture had prepared them to have of the task at hand. So, given the same situation and the same task, people from different cultures will interpret the situation and the demands of the task differently, and thus behave in different ways.

Summary

The ways in which language means, both as sign and as action, differ according to the medium used. The spoken medium bears the marks of more or less orality, more or less literacy, as measured against the characteristic features of conversational-spoken vs. essayist-written language.

Through the social organization of talk, culture is constructed across day-to-day dialogues, through the choice of frames and footing that speakers adopt vis-à-vis their own and others’ discourse, and through the way they collaborate in the necessary facework within a variety of discourse types.

Culture puts its imprint on the conversational and narrative styles of the members of a social group.

Print language, literate culture

The technology of writing and print technology have over time not only changed the medium of language use, but irrevocably changed our way of thinking and talking about culture.

Written language, textual culture

The invention of writing around 3000 BC transformed oral tradition, transmitted through storytelling, bardic epics, mythical re-enactments and performances, into textual tradition, handed down by scribes. The culture of text, as exemplified in the Chinese scribal culture, passed on its wisdom not through reading, but through the faithful copying of texts. It was through the rewriting of fixe texts in one’s own handwriting that the truths of ancestors got embodied anew into generations. Copying texts was the major way of getting at the texts’ meaning, and of obtaining the social prestige that came with a literate education.

The culture of the text and its respect for and obedience to textual authority was also central to the Judaic and early Christian traditions. In these cultures, revelation was to take place through commentary, exegesis, and translation. The implication was that through the study and interpretation of the sacred texts it would be possible to recover the original truths dispensed in oral form by god, angels, and the prophets. The simultaneous desirability and impossibility of this goal have been the subject of many a scholar’s concern. It was the ultimate focus of the Kabbalah, a twelfth century school of Jewish mysticism named after the Hebrew term for “literary tradition”. What Kabbalists looked for in the Bible was not primarily philosophical ideas, but a symbolic description of the hidden process of divine life. Viewing written language itself as a micro-representation of the universe, Kabbalists built an elaborate system of meanings based on numbers and the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in an effort to accede to the unwritten secrets of the universe. So, for example, the four letters of the Hebrew name of God, Yod he vav he (Yahweh), have in Hebrew the numerical value 45 from their position in the alphabet, as does the word Adam. The God who can be apprehended by man is himself, they claimed, the First Man. One can readily see why the Catholic Church condemned the kabbalah as a heresy.

Textual cultures illustrate the dilemma represented by the invention of writing. Writing permits record-keeping, and thus can be an aid to memory; by fixing the fluidity of speech, it makes tradition into scripture, which can then be easily codified and made into norm, a canon, or a law. But writing, uprooted from its original context through the passing of time and through its dissemination in space, increases also the absurdity of the quest for the one true “original” meaning. Ancient texts can only be understood through the multiple meanings given to them by latter-day commentators, exegetes, translators. Even legal documents, that try to control and legislate people’s lives, have to be re-interpreted anew for every particular case.