Rete Italiana Cultura Popolare

Oral tradition is a system of transmission, replicating and re-elaboration of cultural heritage, without the use of writing. Writing is a technique invented more than 3000 years ago. Many cultures for millenniums have expressed themselves only in a context of orality and there are still today cultures called “ orally spread”, to differentiate them from from primary cultures of orality, in which there is no knowledge of writing.

From ancient times, when men began to communicate through language, orality was been the best system for transmission of knowledge, as it is the most widespread and rapid mean of communication to use. The transmission of oral knowledge is, in sensory terms, stronger than the written world, because hearing is a much more involving sense than sight. In fact, Griots and storytellers always used body and sometimes music to let their tales be more interesting. It is useful to analyze even the causative power of words, which is reflected in “orally spread” societies, but also in our own traditions and rituals, like in the wedding, for example, which consecrates its procedure through an oral statement. Every system of oral tradition is combined with a set of forms of customs transmission, such as rituals, techniques, practices, tastes, behaviours and kinesthetic of bodies. These aspects are learned and revised partly verbal and partly through other symbolic systems, as well as through the imitation and experimentation.

Through orality were passed stories, songs, music, recipes, and through gestural expressiveness have come to us ritual dances, magical rituals and craftsmanship.

The oral tradition has often been a source of great value for the historical and peoples’ traditions research, against those who have defined the history as the only reliable source for knowledge of the past.

Plato condemned the writing by saying that, while in logo-centrism, namely in the sizes of orality, the soul is present in itself, in writing the soul is absent from itself, because writing expands in times the teaching and changes its essential form, the one of the present, the one of the moment. As writing remains more than the word pronounced, it removes its space-temporal position, making it susceptible to the different interpretations in the course of ages.

Today is generally accepted, that now “ everything is writing” and that “ writing has stolen the voice”, almost to justify a situation of forced opposition between these two forms of expressions.

Through this event, the Network aims to emphasize the continued contamination of speech and text, with a path showing the impact of orality on literature and popular culture in general, Italian and international.

The Festival of Popular Orality proposes, therefore, the excellence of the “ unwritten”: from poesia a braccio to canto a tenore, from folk songs to Pupi’s stories, from tammorre’s sounds to the drums of traditional dances, from popular theater to streetsingers’ stories. The effort is trying to combine them with those of other countries and regions worldwide, looking for similarities and a universal language, that combines tradition with modernity and helps to understand and protect contemporary culture, through words and “ voices” which have been handed down from generation to generation.

2009 EDITION