The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa (review)

Ruth Finnegan has been writing about orality for nearly half a century, mostly on Africa. As she points out in this work, her scholarly career has spanned a time from when orality was only a nascent genre to a time when it has become a central theme for studying African societies, and she is not shy about pointing out (e.g., 140–41) that her work has played a prominent role in this transformation. Finnegan describes this work as "a second look" (xi) on how collecting and interpreting oral literature has changed during the past fifty years, nearly forty years after publishing her Oral Literature in Africa. However, this perspective is somewhat mitigated by the fact that eight of the twelve chapters are versions of articles published between 1969 and 1992, sometimes lightly altered to bring in new data or arguments.

As always, Finnegan is less interested in the accuracy of the content of oral texts than in their appositeness, flair, individuality, dynamism, and narrative fluidity. Indeed, as Finnegan points out, "one of the striking elements of much Limba oral art was in fact the scope for verbal variation on different occasions and among different exponents, and the creative qualities brought to it by the immediacy of situation-based performance" (27).

In this work Finnegan shows little, if any, interest in oral texts as vehicles for carrying historical information across time—the work of Jan Vansina and others is not cited. By no means, however, does this imply that historians should neglect her arguments. To cite only one example, a persistent theme throughout The Oral and Beyond is that treating literacy and orality as hermetic genres is misguided in practice and analytically pointless—in fact, erroneous. Such a notion—that the oral and the written influence each other reciprocally—mirrors much work being done for other times and other places (particularly late medieval/early modern Europe). This is an argument against treating oral tradition (i.e., oral information handed down from the past) as sufficiently static to have retained true accounts of a past more than a few generations distant.

Finnegan is also insistent that "literature" is an appropriate word to apply to the creative discourse of oral societies. This seems fair; in any case, in practice the term retains only a subliminal etymological connection with writing. Nonetheless, it is worth adding that there do remain inherent differences between "literature" and "oral literature."

Seemingly in contrast to her osmotic argument noted above, Finnegan argues (103) that "there seems ample evidence that neither literacy nor an acquaintance with written literature necessarily interfere with oral composition and performance," but I wonder. I am thinking not so much of the overlap in performers or informants, but what effect the knowledge that their audiences are—or might be—aware of alternative written versions would have on circumscribing improvisation. Finnegan notes that the examples she cites date to before 1976, but also contends that "many parallel cases could be drawn from more recent work" (102 n.3) This all reflects on the notion—which some believe and others do not—that writing and the Internet will eventually drive orality, or at least oral art, from the marketplace. While even the most literate societies will always retain an oral dimension, the question is: will this become an increasingly marginalized mode of transmitting information beyond the face-to-face?

Although The Oral and Beyond is wide-ranging—indeed, virtually comprehensive—I failed to notice any discussion of the disposition of field notes. Sharing field notes, whether aural or written, is one of the most efficacious ways to spread the word, as it were, for it endows speakers' words with an afterlife that will endure in time and space.

This is not an easy work to absorb, but I wholeheartedly recommend it. It is especially valuable to historians for its likely sobering effect...