What is Orality?

Coming to Terms with Orality: A Holistic Model CHARLES MADINGER

In mi.ssiological circles, “orality” promotes reaching oral learners, but it often gets isolated to methodologies, neglecting to consider the principles and disciplines that make those tnethods work. A holistic approach defines orulity as a complex whereby oral learners receive, remember; and replicate news, information, and truths. Seven disciplines converge in that complex, which, as they are more fully incorporated, cun proportionately increase the transfm-inutive power of a message: Culture (interpreting the message), Language (receiving of the message), Literacy (understanding the message), Social Networks (relating the message), Memory (retaining the messuge), The Arts (packaging the message), and Media (delivering the message).

As mission organizations, denominations, and churches form strategies for reaching an increasingly complex world, the term “orality” surfaces in evangelical circles as a growing phenomenon. But what is orality? How does it relate to the Kingdom mission? Some claim it at the linguistic level for Bible translation factors dealing with literacy and illiteracy among unreached people groups. Others reduce orality to “Bible Storying” that targets non-literate and oral tradition peoples. Business ventures and some Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) claim it for media - audiohideo technology production and distribution.

Sigmund Freud coined the term “orality” as a classification in his theories on psychosexual developmental behaviors’ (Freud/Richards 1991 : 3 9 4 1 ) . In the 1950s, Walter Ong, a Roman Catholic priest and Harvard-educated English professor at St. Louis University, then used “orality” to describe the phenomenon of cultures that had no experience of written language and no knowledge of the possibility of its existence. He categorized these as primary oral cultures, sometimes referred to as pre-literate (Ong 1982:9). These oral tradition cultures place a high value on the spoken word and store important lessons in songs, stories, proverbs, and folktales.

In contrast, secondary oral cultures experience oral communication through writing and reproduced through electronic broadcast media; while it is oral in transmission, Charles Madinger served 27 years in pastoral ministry (ten as a mission pastor), helped launch two non-profits (Voice for Humanity and T4Global) with programs in 15 countries, then founded Global Impact Missions to help others build organizational capacity for orality-framed strategies.

He may be contacted at rhcrrles.mndin~er~~mail.uom.

Missinlop: An lntrrnrrtionnl Rrvirw, Vol. XXXVIII, no. 2, April 2010

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this language use is nonetheless shaped by written texts. In essence, Ong postulated that orality is the graduated reliance from the spoken word to written language for communication. It is graduated in the sense that language is eventually reduced to written symbols and ultimately regenerated through electronic media. Radio, theater, motion pictures, and similar media, all rely on written scripts to produce a message delivered through audio and visual forms (1982: 135-1 38).

In the process, Ong sited the days of Plato the use of oral tradition and the eventual technology of writing words. Additionally, he found in the same period roots to our newfound ability to choose, craft, and reflect on our words with more precision as we, seeking to communicate and remember truths, moved from oral formulas to the written word (1982: 16-29). In doing so, Ong helped clarify technological transformations from oral to printed expression and their impact through cultural conditioning on human consciousness. He recognized that psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, philosophy, linguistics and other studies eventually needed to shape and direct the applications of his observations. Accordingly, he actually employed these fields of study for exploring the complex interrelationships between the spectrum of oral-to-written communication and the totality of human existence (1982:5).

These original works of Ong and others laid the foundation for numerous disciplines, including missiology, to build educational constructs for cultures that draw heavily on oral traditional roots. As others reflected on the simplification of orality to describe a communication phenomenon, it became clear that oral cultures and lettered cultures differed from one another on basic levels, a difference that fueled a colonial approach to evangelism, discipleship, and ecclesiology (see Figure 1).

The International Orality Network (ION)2 developed out of the Oral Bible Network (2001) and the 2004 Lausanne Consultation, and led the quest to discover better principles for church planting movements among non-literate and oral learners around the world. Women and men like Dorothy Miller, Dr. James Slack, Avery Willis, and others committed research and resources to ensure that the oral majority could hear and respond to our message (i.e., the gospel as communicated by lettered missionaries). The ensuing discussions on orality helped in many ways to critique our attempts to deliver the good news, and uncovered that nearly all missiological methods of the twentieth century were constructed from lettered culture perspectives. Our educational systems likewise took oral culture leaders and immersed them in models that took them farther and farther away from the people they passionately served, and thereby created new social hierarchies through literate educational values, standards, and achievements.

Western missionaries of the past entered oral cultures and taught the people hymns that had been written from a Western perspective, using Western musical and literate forms. Colonial missionaries transferred to oral peoples a liturgy in rote recitation of hymns and choirs wearing Western robes and mortarboards with tassels. They answered theological, ethical, and philosophical questions that emerged in Westerdliterate historical contexts. African and Asian seminaries fought the rationalistic battles of Europe and the U.S. rather than addressing contextual issues like demonology or traditional religion (e.g., witchcraft), because they were seen as theologically peripheral issues by Western rationalists. In truth, such issues were primary

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Figure 1. Tendencies of Oral and Lettered Cultures’ LETTERED CULTURES

ORAL CULTURES

Literary

COMMUNICATION

Outline

Information archived in writing Memorize what is read LIFESTYLE

Individualism

Time and Music: measured, metered and enjoyed Deferred Linear Individually Oriented Values the information

Word is not the “thing”

Storyline

Information stored by story song, etc.

Memorize what is heard

writing

Institutional

Oral

TIME AND SPACE

GRATIFICATION LIFE PERSPECTIVE

Communal

Individualized Groups Time and Music: an event to be experienced Immediate Circular

LEARNING PATTERNS Group Oriented

Values the source of information

LEXICON

Word is the “thing”

Adapted from William C. Parker (1980: 45-48) and central to reaching the populations of the Two-Thirds World. We structured denominational and congregational governance based on Western models, arrogantly referring to them as “biblical” with no reflection on the cultural contexts into which we imposed them. We evangelized whole nations using methods that only marginally worked in our own cultures, and missed the opportunities to let the Word of God bring real Kingdom transformation within those cultures. We exported our books, seminars, conferences, and methodologies, paying only minor attention to the cultural context, and justifying it by claiming: “we employ national workers and interpreters in the process, so surely it fits their needs.” But most of these workers were trained in, by, for, and through Western literate programs that never developed a focus on the oral nature of the people they helped equip.

The results have been both amazing and catastrophic. It is amazing that a growing majority of Sub-Saharan Africa entered the twenty-first century declaring allegiance to Christianity. It is catastrophic that this Christianity promoted segregation and apartheid, genocide, corruption and civil war due, at least in part, to our Western literate methods and a failure to convert peoples at their primary worldview levels.

Only when we come to terms with holistic missiological principles can we build new strategies that transcend the elementary principles of this world and bring transformation to the whole person. What follows here is an attempt to clarify a holistic model of orality that frames the strategies for preaching, instruction, and training among oral culture peoples.

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A Definition of Orality I define orality here as a complex of how oral cultures receive, remember and replicate (pass on) news, important information, and truths.4 Orality itself crosses into numerous fields of study and their subsequent discipline^,^ each of which brings vantage points for understanding the principles at work, but none of which fully captures the relevance of orality for discipling nations into Kingdom transformation. What follows here is not new, but simply reorganizes what we already know into a simplified model for designing strategies and instruction for oral cultures.

Orality is a complex by means of addressing a whole concept composed of complicated yet related parts. It is a model because it can be used in multiple applications,’ but in all applications the content delivered reigns supreme, and orality serves the needs of any message to be received, remembered, and passed on to others. Space limits the ability to present the host of clarifying questions demanded by each component of orality, and it should be noted that general applications and those specific to the Kingdom mission of discipling nations deserve a much more complete presentation than is possible in this over vie^.^ A general confusion rises when any one discipline or application of orality lays claim to its own peculiar definition of orality. One could easily be persuaded to focus on literacy (specifically the ability to read and write) as the antithesis of orality, but literacy in this sense only plies orality to reorient learners to the abstract process of reducing thoughts and words to and from print. Aprinted word is not the thing itself (an orange, for example), but only a symbol that calls to mind the thing (the o-r-a-n-g-e).

Schoolchildren learn to make lines and curves that eventually become “letters” or “characters.” Those letters or characters are then arranged by sets of rules into words on a page that represent concrete realities and actions: dog, cat, nose, mouth, run, eat, smell, and so on.

Similarly, storytelling or “storying” uses the principles of orality but is more precisely an application of its principles.’ Thus, orality is not equivalent to storytelling.

Saying it is equivalent is like a coffee lover defining the culinary arts as making a good cup of coffee. The coffee results from successful application of culinary arts but is not exhaustive of those arts. In the same way, storying is a product of orality. To use a more comprehensive description, orality consists of the principles and processes that make many products real to those receiving them.

We thus need a more comprehensive model for understanding orality, what I will call the holistic model of orality. Such a model is an effective news-delivery construct that employs seven converging disciplines. Each of the descriptive disciplines asks essential questions before, during, and after any attempt to deliver news, information, or training among the illiterate or semi-literate, or within oral tradition cultures (see Figure 2). Delivery of the Good News to the poor releases prisoners (real change), and, once the delivered message is accepted, it spreads virally, just as it did from Ephesus to all Asia (Acts 19:8-10). That news spread orally, and upon closer examination we will find that even the apostolic evangelists used these same disciplines to enhance the kerygma to Jews and Gentiles alike. The early church inherently employed what we will isolate in the following paragraphs as disciplines in our attempt to apply them in the design and deployment of strategies and instruction.

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Figure 2. A Holistic Model of Orality

n

Discipline One: Culture“ How will these people interpret our tnesscige? Who are they, and what makes them. them, and us, us? Do they have to become like us to be disciples of Jesus in his kingdom (Acts 15: 1-31)? Raising questions out of an attempt to understand a culture helps break through unseen barriers often overlooked by outsiders and taken for granted by insiders, for cultural norms function as the filters through which a people orders the realities around it.“’ Culture is that God-given capacity that helps a people interpret its realities and make a sense-filled world. It is “a way of behaving, thinking. and reacting,” writes Nida (2001:29),“but we do not see culture,’’ and we tend to want others to believe, think, and react in the same ways we do. Culture is a roadmap to the center of a unique world and offers talking points and cues for our making the Good News good news to any given people. Stray but a little from the path charted by the recipients’ culture, and our delivery of good news will miss the center of our target audience.

The Apostle Paul deliberately tailored his message based on the worldview of Greek mythology and superstition when addressing the Gentile crowds of Lystra (Acts 141, but with the nearby Jewish audience, he used rabbinic methods of reading and explaining the scrolls. We often quote him saying, “I became all things to all men so that by all means some might be saved.” This piece of orality functions as the stakes in the ground that plot where and how we build our message.

C~l.seStudy

The Kambari people of Nigeria, Niger, and Benin live in a “shame and honor” culture (worldview). Their practice of wife snatching, where a man can pay the chief

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