A Dialogic Perspective on Oral Tradition

Abstract

Oral tradition has a long history of research both in linguistics and anthropology, being the vast corpus of ethnic narrative one of its main achievements. This outstanding documentation of worldwide cultural verbal creations has to a certain degree already been published, other materials remain in archives or as part of unpublished texts, while much more is being gathered in contemporary research. Yet, a critique to this enormous academic effort may be that analysis and interpretation of data has been left behind, to favor the ethnographic and linguistic documentation and rescue of the vanishing oral heritage of endangered native cultures. This paper discusses such analytical shortcoming and advances a dialogic perspective based on Bakhtin's theoretical framework, with particular interest in concepts derived from musical theory, such as voice, intonation, and polyphony. In fact, even though Bakhtin's interests were centered on rather canonical written literature, and not on folklore and the