4 1

2
3
4
Oralities, Literacies, and 5
the Xenophobic Fallacy 6
7
8
Richard C. Rath 9
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11
12
13
I n Eurocentric work undertaken mostly by white scholars, oral cultures have
served largely as a foil for the visual and the literate. In what I will call the classic
theory of orality, the oral mindset exists in an ahistorical state of nature resulting from
14
15
16
the supposed ephemerality of sound and the consequent unreliability of oral histories. 17
This ephemerality is overstated, based on an understanding of oral culture as indi- 18
vidualistic and limiting the understanding of sound to speech. In fact, oral cultures 19
tend to remember things communally rather than individually, and its many error- 20
checking strategies and productive redundancies make orality as practised rather than 21
as hypothesised much more robust than its classic theorists admit. As well, acoustic 22
spaces were designed to sound in particular ways that are as telling of a culture’s his- 23
tory as any other document.1 24
Ephemerality, however, is a prerequisite for the classic theories of oral culture 25
because it erases any meaningful histories and requires approaching the subject of 26
oral culture through deduction instead. In the complementary theories of literacy and 27
orality, printed or written knowledge caused a shift in the ratio of the senses away 28
from hearing and towards more visual ways of perception. Literate modes of thought, 29
shaped by the reduction of speech to its silent visual representation on the page, 30
emerged as the figure to the ground of oral culture.2 A key turning point in theories of 31
modernity is the advent of mass print culture, where literacy affected even those not 32
able to read through its saturation of the culture. Even the illiterate were versed if not 33
knowledgeable in the print-based – and thus more visual – ways of perceiving central 34
to navigating the Western world from roughly the eighteenth century onwards. 35
Writing from a non-BIPOC frame,3 my book How Early America Sounded stands 36
as an explicit critique and response to the limits of what I am calling ‘classic orality’ by 37
setting it within a perceptual-historical frame rather than in a theoretical one. Broad- 38
ening the scope from the oral to the aural to consider soundways beyond speech can 39
help reveal a richer context in which to situate specific oralities as well as opening up 40
new documentation possibilities. By soundways, I mean 41
42
the paths, trajectories, transformations, mediations, practices, and techniques – in 43
short, the ways – that people employ to interpret and express their attitudes and 44
beliefs about sound. I am not so much concerned with the underlying beliefs, his- 45
torically inaccessible as they often are, or the concrete expressions themselves so 46
much as the ways between them.4 47

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 60 richard c. rath

1 In the book, I treat both white and BIPOC peoples through the same set of method-
2 ologies. In one notable case, I found that seventeenth-century New England Puritans,
3 perhaps the most literate population on earth at the time, had a thriving oral culture
4 throughout the seventeenth century, belying a central tenet of those who argue for a
5 literate mind as possessing a different cognitive set from oral cultures.5
6 Classic theorists of orality deduced its qualities from the presumed properties of
7 sound – its ephemerality, its presence, its local nature. Onto these they projected ways
8 of thinking – concrete not abstract, interpersonal and subjective rather than detached
9 objective reason, present-oriented rather than having history. In the leading classic
10 theory of orality, Walter Ong corrected the seeming cultural chauvinism of such a list
11 by adopting a stance of cultural relativism (while skipping the inconvenient neces-
12 sity of differentiating cultures), arguing that thinking primarily through the ears in
13 an oral culture was different from rather than inferior to thinking more visually in a
14 print-based one. Nonetheless, this created a homogenous category of people – oral,
15 ear-based, and pre-literate or illiterate – out of a vast but ever-receding swathe of the
16 world that did not experience the perceptual, cultural, and historical shift in the ratio
17 of the senses from ear to eye that believers in the classic theories attributed to the rise
18 of print and literacy.
19 Designating a culture as innately ‘oral’ or sound-based has its own long history. It
20 is an example of what I am calling here the ‘xenophobic fallacy’, in which an author’s
21 home culture has a specific history, while the rest of the known world is lumped
22 together as an undifferentiated other sharing a set of common characteristics. Despite
23 Ong’s halfway cultural relativism, authors writing from this space hold two sets of
24 beliefs about the sonic other: first, the latter is inferior and developmentally prior, and
25 second, this homogenous other sounds different from and incomprehensible to – or
26 at least in need of explication to – the home culture. In making these two assump-
27 tions, the xenophobic fallacy often frames sonic difference as the absence of reason.
28 For example, Ong limits oral culture to being capable of concrete thought, but not
29 the abstraction made possible in literate culture by offloading things that have to be
30 remembered in oral culture to the printed page.6
31 Even though Ong sought to counter the belief in orality’s inferiority to more visual
32 literate modes of thought, that belief inevitably creeps back in over time because of a
33 process that linguists call ‘taboo, euphemism, and pejoration (TEP)’7 that is central to
34 understanding the xenophobic fallacy. While Ong’s culturally relativist definitions kept
35 the taboo topics of racism and colonialism at bay for a moment, eventually they crept
36 back in to the meaning. Then, the new term, orality, has through its usage become a
37 euphemism for colonialism and racism again because the taboo topic remained unad-
38 dressed. At that point, classic orality underwent a process of pejoration, still under
39 way, as it fell from favour as a way to describe its subject communities – who are
40 nearly always BIPOC and stand in some relation to some form of colonialism. Another
41 example would be highway signs locating roadside places equipped for the acts of uri-
42 nation and defecation. The euphemism ‘facilities’ might hide the taboo topic at first,
43 but because urination and defecation still happen there, the term ‘facilities’ becomes
44 offensive to some and has to be replaced by a new term, say ‘rest stop’, where the
45 euphemism starts out well but again becomes increasingly associated with the taboo
46 that takes place there to again need replacing in an endless cycle of taboo, euphemism,
47 and pejoration. In the xenophobic fallacy, the taboo we have been skirting is that this

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 oralities, literacies, and xenophobic fallacy 61

cultural chauvinism concerning the perception and production of speech sounds might 1
actually be a form of racism, usually effected against historically colonised peoples. 2
Discussing Western culture as racist has of course happened voluminously for many 3
years, but nearly always causes defensiveness and even aggression in some quarters. 4
Indeed, when I have brought in the taboo subject of racism underlying the long his- 5
tory of literacy’s other in presenting this work at a talk, several audience members 6
denounced me as a ‘self-hating white man’ and accused me of rewriting history to 7
emphasise only the bad. While the xenophobic fallacy is not inherently racist, it can 8
and has enabled racism to be ported back into the belief systems discussed below, and 9
bringing the fallacy into the range of hearing, or, if you prefer, into the light, disables 10
that process. 11
This essay airs out the TEP cycle to consider an encouraging trend in newer 12
work that corrects the xenophobic fallacy at its source by approaching BIPOC oral 13
cultures (note the plural) in their cultural and historical specificities rather than as 14
one homogenous lump. The approach works just as well on non-BIPOC communi- 15
ties and belies the notion that literate cultures have no oralities of their own. The 16
airing out needs to be explicit to prevent it from finding its way back in. Long-term 17
theoretical advances in race studies and gender and sexuality studies combined with 18
powerful social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, and the 19
consciousness-raising around missing and murdered Indigenous women and around 20
LGBTQ+ rights have cut through these taboos, opening up new discursive terrain 21
to intervene in the millennia-old xenophobic fallacy that feeds the TEP cycle even as 22
reactionary forces such as the anti-critical race theory movement in the United States 23
threaten this progress. 24
The rising generation of BIPOC scholars, along with some older writers, have 25
taken the idea of oral cultures out of the hands of mostly white theorists. Many BIPOC 26
authors write about orality as insiders, a very different valence from classic orality 27
studies. This newer work reveals rich, variable, historically situated phenomena where 28
previously Eurocentric scholars had derived homogenous universals. 29
To give just a few examples to get the reader started (there are new ones nearly 30
daily), Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has made it a point to write first in Gikuyu, 31
his native language. He developed a theory of orature to account for the differences in 32
his storytelling from Western styles and what happens to the differences en route from 33
spoken Gikuyu to print and then to English. More recently, he has expanded orature 34
into the digital age in his discussion of cyberture, meaning the engagement of orality 35
with digital networked media. Roger Abrahams, in tune with other Black folklorists, 36
has long mined the specificities of African American oralities. Black and white sociolin- 37
guists have also marked the histories of creolised languages, as have Pacific linguists.8 38
Classic orality’s cousin, oral history, has suffered related problems even while 39
avoiding some of the former’s methodological flaws. Oral histories, being voice-based, 40
are intrinsically a function of sound and hearing. In seeking some sort of objectivity 41
to claim equal footing with paper archives, oral historians controlled as much of the 42
interview process as possible to keep things consistent. Most transcriptions and record- 43
ings were in a question and answer format that shaped the results in important ways 44
and took place with individuals in isolation rather than embedded in a community 45
context.9 Newer work by insiders to the communities they study has scrapped much of 46
the semi-scientific trappings in favour of emic (roughly, ‘insider’) approaches.10 47

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 62 richard c. rath

1 Nonetheless, oral history – with its emphasis on particularity and listening – holds
2 promise as a corrective to the universalism and ahistoricism of classic orality, espe-
3 cially when undertaken by community members rather than outsiders. Nēpia Mahuika
4 (Ngāti Porou), critiquing the field from a Māori perspective, calls for an end to the
5 split between the category of oral history, which tends to shy away from Indigenous
6 histories, and the category of oral tradition, into which most Indigenous cultures get
7 placed. Oral history must also make some accommodations, such as privileging voices
8 from within the community as being authors rather than data (in most versions of oral
9 history, interviews are data that the author ‘collects’ rather than being authorial voices
10 from within the community), and a focus on listening in a community context instead
11 of relying primarily on interviews with individuals.
12 Two projects from the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Hawai’i
13 illustrate Indigenous approaches to oral histories. First, the Mānoa North Shore Field
14 School led by Kānaka Maoli11 anthropologist Ty Tengan situates oral histories from
15 within communities as much as from outside. He and his students conduct oral inter-
16 views with kūpuna (elders, ancestors, starting point) in a community setting, with one
17 of the goals being to give back the knowledge of what they learn to the community
18 they learn from, in the process strengthening university–community ties and giving
19 students a sense of what the university aspires to, a Hawaiian place of learning. Sec-
20 ond, also in line with the university’s aspirations, the Center for Oral History, directed
21 by Daviana Pomokau McGregor, takes a leading role in the community in finding and
22 sharing na mo’olelo (stories, histories, with the implication of their being spoken, from
23 the root mo’o ʻōlelo, ‘succession of talk’).
24 In North American Indigenous studies, Waziyatawin Angela Wilson (Dakota)
25 wrote an oral history in both Dakota and English, doing the important work of docu-
26 menting the sounds of her community’s endangered language, accompanied by a series
27 of glosses to partially explain the material in context to non-Dakota readers. Besides
28 providing a way in for outsiders to at least a partial understanding of Dakota processes
29 – including the sounds of its language – the book serves as a media-shifted archive of
30 a specific Dakota community’s history and culture through the sounds of their voices.
31 Melissa K. Nelson (Anishinaabe/Cree/Métis (Turtle Mountain Chippewa)) lays out
32 part of the oral histories of Anishinaabe and other Indigenous women who have other-
33 than-human relations (including but not limited to sexual relations) with elements of
34 their environments from sticks to bears to the wind to the stars. These stories come to
35 her as sound and listening in its cultural context that is at its best still mostly irreduc-
36 ible to print and transcription. She argues that ‘published oral literature is contradic-
37 tory, at best. These “postcolonial literatures” have been spoken, performed, recorded,
38 translated, transcribed, published, interpreted, forgotten, reinterpreted, remembered,
39 dismembered, misinterpreted, and re-written many times in different contexts and
40 times. They are fragments of orality’, which she ‘re-presents’ as ‘messy storyscapes’
41 she understands in the medium of sound first rather than neatly packaged as oral
42 traditions. This is a nice inversion of the usual claim that orality is fragmentary and
43 unreliable rather than print.12
44 Dylan Robinson, a xwélmexw writer of Stó:lō descent, explains the connection
45 between sound studies and oral history, musical practice, and legal discourse, as a
46 function of what he calls ‘hungry listening’ and the settler practice of ‘inclusionary’
47 collaboration with Indigenous people. ‘Hungry’ is drawn from the Halq’eméylem (the

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 oralities, literacies, and xenophobic fallacy 63

xwélmexw language) word for ‘settlers’ and is drawn from their first direct contact 1
with Stó:lō people (smallpox had preceded them), when they appeared as physically 2
starving and hungry for gold, too. Thus, ‘hungry’ means ‘a settler’s starving orienta- 3
tion’. Purposely discordant, the second word is drawn from the Halq’eméylem word 4
roughly translated as listening, but indicating the Stó:lō people’s soundways, markedly 5
different from Western ones, as he demonstrates throughout the book. ‘Listening’ is 6
uncomfortably and purposively juxtaposed with ‘hungry’ to indicate that the ‘posi- 7
tionality of listening’ does not reduce settler logics to ‘white’, since the author asserts 8
that his stance is a hybrid of both the ‘hungry’ and the ‘listening’ side of the equation.13 9
More than an epistemic metaphor, Indigenous soundways structure speaking and 10
listening not from outside the Western gaze but from inside what Peg Rawes calls 11
the ‘sonic envelope’ of hungry listening. The trouble with much oral history is that 12
while the voice may be that of the interviewees, the sonic grammar or envelope of 13
their speech remains within the traditional methodology of oral history. Although 14
mostly concerned with the relations between Indigenous and classical Western musics, 15
Robinson’s discussion of what he calls ‘inclusionary’ sonic collaboration is applicable 16
to the shift that Mahuika says is necessary to bring classic orality and classic oral 17
histories together into a methodology that BIPOC scholars can use to document their 18
own soundways instead of being studied by outsiders. In contrast, Robinson’s idea 19
of inclusionary collaboration is when classical composers working with Indigenous 20
collaborators strive to include an Indigenous voice or voices but continue to structure 21
their compositions in a Western musical grammar. Instead, Mahuika advocates having 22
insiders structure orality’s sounds, and the ways they shape Indigenous oral histories 23
forms the ‘sonic envelope’ of the hybrid orality/oral history.14 24
Bringing hungry listening outside the realm of Indigenous North America, the WPA 25
Slave Narratives – which are often cited as first-person sources – are actually transcrip- 26
tions made by anthropologists, folklorists, and other fieldworkers which then went 27
through further editing, mostly by white scholars far upstream from the actual sounds. 28
Were the depictions of Black English the actual sounds of the speakers? Or merely the 29
fulfilment of the fieldworkers’ and their supervisors’ expectations? Lori Ann Garner 30
approaches the question through a comparison of interviews collected by African 31
American fieldworkers – as was the case for most of Florida – with those collected by 32
white workers. The Florida interviews reveal fewer ‘dees and dems’ while holding truer 33
to the grammatical patterns of Black vernaculars. The transcriptions in these cases were 34
no different from a written representation of a white southerner saying ‘floor’ with the / 35
R/ left unsounded in speech, then writing the ‘r’ when spelling it. Black interviewers 36
heard the white-expected ‘dees’ and ‘dems’ as ‘these’ and ‘them’. Some scholars con- 37
sider the ex-slave narratives to be all but useless for discovering much about the sounds 38
of the dialects the formerly enslaved interviewees spoke regardless of their other histori- 39
cal value, but Garner shows the value of an insider approach even on these sonically 40
unreliable written sources.15 41
The classic theory of orality seems irredeemable on its own. Why revisit a discarded 42
theory, then? For three reasons: first, the underlying problem that begat it – the xeno- 43
phobic fallacy – is alive and well. Second, these underlying principles can be traced 44
through Western high culture at least as far back as the founding era of the Greek city- 45
states. And third, the whiteness of sound studies has rightfully come under fire during 46
the past few years.16 The rest of this essay is in three parts. First is a section on the 47

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 64 richard c. rath

1 development of orality as a concept. The second part explains how the xenophobic fal-
2 lacy came to poison what was meant as a corrective to the idea of culturally relativistic
3 ‘primitive’ societies. The third part traces the sonic history of the xenophobic fallacy
4 from its origins in ancient Greece through to the present.
5
6
7
Orality and Consciousness
8 Julian Jaynes’s 1976 The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
9 Mind provides an ideal place to begin despite not being the usual first suspect in a
10 discussion of orality. Jaynes was a cognitive scientist, not a literary theorist, anthro-
11 pologist, or historian, and he developed his theory after the introduction of the main
12 theories of orality discussed below. He did so largely in isolation, neither citing nor
13 being cited by the others. But in setting out his case, he makes clear the stakes and the
14 theoretical moves that often stay below the surface in the other accounts.
15 Jaynes proposed that ancient humans were not conscious in the way that we are
16 today.17 Consciousness as we experience it now, he claimed, is a function of the left side
17 of the brain, the rational, logical, speech-producing side, as opposed to the intuitive,
18 creative, speech-comprehending right side. Even today, everyday judgement, learn-
19 ing, and performing of tasks proceeds for the most part with little intervention of the
20 conscious mind, but we are – well – unconscious of the parts outside, so consciousness
21 has played a misleadingly great role in thinking about all these issues. Nonetheless,
22 consciousness does play an important part in what makes us human today, and it was
23 a cultural-historical development, according to Jaynes, not an evolutionary one.
24 He asserted that the Greeks of the second millennium bce drew much more on the
25 right side of the brain, which they experienced as voices giving them instructions to
26 execute. The voices would be classified as auditory hallucinations today because they
27 were not rooted in the self. Jaynes thought that the ancient Greeks and others had
28 no conscious self to which to attach the voices. They were bicameral, meaning that
29 they drew on both sides of their brain in dealing with the things that today we resort
30 to the left hemisphere for, which in the theories of 1970s cognitive science controlled
31 language, self, and consciousness.
32 He found evidence for the older way of being in the Iliad, a tale told for hundreds
33 if not thousands of years before being written down sometime in the eighth century
34 bce. The epic recounts the events of the Trojan War. In the poem, warriors and kings
35 hear and follow the instructions of different gods. Jaynes argued that the lexicon of
36 consciousness is curiously absent, along with intent and volition. When faced with a
37 difficult situation, the gods tell X to do something and it is done, much like the sub-
38 ject and verb of a sentence determine the fate of the object. Nothing resembling our
39 process of deliberation or agency, both hallmarks of modern consciousness, appears to
40 take place, giving the Iliad an odd and slightly surreal or unbelievable feel to present-
41 day readers.
42 In contrast, the Odyssey, according to Jaynes, documents the breakdown of the
43 bicameral mind resulting in the dominance of the left hemisphere we know today as
44 consciousness emerging. The epic tells the story of Odysseus’ return home from the
45 Trojan War, a travail of ten years during which he faces a disrupted and unfamiliar world
46 in which the gods became absent characters to think about and contend with rather
47 than immanent voices to blindly obey. The Bronze Age in Europe was tumultuous,

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 oralities, literacies, and xenophobic fallacy 65

and old ways of navigating the world failed to work any longer. People became 1
unmoored from their habitual social mores and were cast adrift. The quest for a new 2
way of being in the world runs as a theme throughout the story as an echo of the historic 3
task of creating consciousness that the Greeks accomplished as the first millennium bce 4
proceeded, in Jaynes’s theory. 5
For Jaynes, Odysseus’ journey is an allegory for the process of coming to conscious- 6
ness, with the left brain colonising the voices of the gods/right brain and then inter- 7
nalising them as a part of the emerging self. Consciousness, he argued, is a linguistic 8
metaphor, like a map, built up from representations of the world which, unlike in the 9
Iliad, he finds throughout the Odyssey. He thought that we can still find the remains 10
of the older way of thinking in untouched primitive societies (which, amusingly, we 11
could not know of without ‘touching’ them) and the struggles of schizophrenics. Crit- 12
ics found the idea of unconscious humans difficult to grasp, but precisely this incred- 13
ibility helps us. The move Jaynes made from a prior condition (without feature X of 14
modernity) to a more familiar subsequent condition (with X) is a hallmark of classic 15
orality theories. Jaynes has many detractors, and the fate of the theory, which is not 16
the point here, remains open.18 17
Historians of the senses, and particularly of hearing, might be able to provide a way 18
of salvaging the explanatory possibilities of the voices of the gods while jettisoning the 19
tendentious developmental model of consciousness implicit in Jaynes. The Greeks of 20
the Iliad may have had a different ratio of the senses, privileging hearing things in the 21
mind’s ear in much the same way we now privilege seeing things in the mind’s eye. 22
Rather than (visual) lines of thought, the Greeks may have conceived their worlds – 23
quite consciously – as more of a 360 degree field of surrounding sounds. This is a 24
difference in sensory modality, not consciousness. Much as we imagine visible things 25
outside ourselves, they heard imaginary sounds as coming from outside themselves.19 26
Once we attend to sense ratios, placing the visual at the apex of consciousness becomes 27
merely one historical possibility among several. Different modes of consciousness still 28
need explaining, perhaps even more so, but the explanations can be made by stretching 29
out and exercising our modes of consciousness rather than theorising, as Jaynes did, 30
their absence. 31
Once we return from the tangled briers of consciousness, the territory looks more 32
familiar. Since the groundbreaking work of Milman Parry in the 1930s and his student 33
Albert Lord’s 1960 The Singer of Tales, scholars have considered the formulation and 34
transmission of ancient Greek poetry through the lens of orality.20 Parry and Lord 35
argued that Homer, or some aggregate of writers that we have come to assemble under 36
his name, recorded oral strategies of construction and performance as part and parcel 37
of the tales. Anyone who has ever had a song stuck in their head knows the power of 38
these sonic strategies in aiding memory. In societies where writing was not widespread, 39
these methods were all the more important as one of the main conduits for everyday 40
people to learn and engage with socially significant information. 41
The oral strategies of singers and storytellers acted as recipes, formulas which made 42
possible what seem to modern people to be great feats of memory. Close examination 43
of the Homeric epics reveals the use of rhyme, rhythm, repetition, and melody. In 44
effect, the ancient Greek singer of tales would spontaneously create the actual words 45
he sang by taking a theme and repeating short metrical expository rhymes to a stock 46
remembered melody. The actual phrases came, like the melodies, from a common 47

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 66 richard c. rath

1 memorised pool. Themes would be repetitively varied and expanded upon to tell the
2 story. In this view, the epics of Homer are just one particular telling which through the
3 power of writing has come to be canonical.
4 The epics had most likely been in circulation for centuries before being transcribed.
5 The version that has come down to us is only a single instance, so Parry and Lord could
6 not rely upon the texts alone to make their case for their orality. They undertook exten-
7 sive fieldwork in Bosnia, interviewing the people they thought were the ‘purest’ progeni-
8 tors of the ancient songs. What they uncovered was a system of formulaic improvisation
9 that recreated the stories anew each time while retaining the gist. The result was that
10 the same story could be told again and again, varied in the details and adjusted for the
11 context of the telling. The notion of purity that Lord and Parry attributed to the Bos-
12 nian singers is ahistorical, relying on a structuralist model of branching and corruption
13 from an apocryphal pristine original. Scholars from the late nineteenth century through
14 the post-structuralists criticised this family tree genealogical approach to language and
15 culture. They argue instead for a wave model (nineteenth century) or a rhizomatic one
16 (post-structuralist) that, much like real families, intermix and intersperse constantly from
17 multiple origins.21 The family tree model is, however, what buys them a link between the
18 orality of the Homeric epics and that of twentieth-century Bosnian folk singers.
19 During the same time period that Lord was refining and extending Parry’s ideas,
20 Eric Havelock argued for a broader evidential base for ancient Greek orality in his
21 1963 Preface to Plato.22 He makes the case that education before the advent of literacy
22 was the province of the poets, who used the methods outlined by Parry and Lord to
23 teach. According to Havelock, learning through oral poetry led to something akin to a
24 different consciousness, not altogether distant from Jaynes’s ideas that followed later.
25 Havelock turns to Plato, who thought that poetic learning seduced students with its
26 rhythms and repetitions and led to a herd mentality: people followed the poets because
27 they sounded good. For Plato, poetic teaching was dangerous demagoguery that needed
28 to be expelled from both education and government, replaced by logic and rational
29 thought.23 Socrates, in a discussion with Phaedrus that Plato reconstructed, ripped into
30 the practice of writing, which Plato preferred to poetry. Socrates told Plato the story
31 of the ancient Egyptian god Theuth’s invention of writing. Theuth showed writing to
32 another god, Ammon, and recommended giving it to the people. ‘“This invention,
33 O [divine] king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their
34 memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”’ Ammon,
35 presumably reflecting Socrates’ position on the matter, responded:
36
37 this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use
38 it because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced
39 by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of
40 their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of
41 reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom,
42 for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know
43 many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with,
44 since they are not wise, but only appear wise.
45
46 Writing, commented Socrates, was only useful for reminding the reader of something
47 already known. He told Phaedrus that it could defend itself no better than a painting
could because it is fixed in place.24

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 oralities, literacies, and xenophobic fallacy 67

The visual nature (‘like a painting’) of writing, in other words, stopped the work- 1
ings of experience, time, and relationships intrinsic to sounded speech and froze them 2
in place unnaturally in a way that sounded language did not, and indeed could not. 3
Socrates concluded that the written word was the illegitimate offspring – and the spo- 4
ken word the legitimate heir – of language and wisdom. A learned speaker would 5
know when to speak and when to remain silent, and could defend ideas and make 6
whatever point needed to be made in the best way to suit the context. For Socrates, 7
and presumably the ancient Greek poets, the sound form of words was truly the sound 8
form, but we must not lose the irony of his thoughts coming to us only through the 9
writings of Plato. 10
11
12
Orality and Literacy 13
What happens if we generalise from Parry’s, Lord’s, and Havelock’s ideas? The result, 14
which achieved currency in the 1960s and beyond, is the classic theory of orality intro- 15
duced above. Orality provides the necessary precedent that makes hypotheses about 16
literacy work. The literacy hypothesis deduces cognitive characteristics of orality dis- 17
guised as historical observations. It reflects a hypothetical modern/pre-modern split that 18
has been a part of the Western intellectual tradition for centuries and has repeatedly 19
come under fire for its racist assumptions only to return cloaked in a new terminology. 20
In 1962, Marshall McLuhan argued that Europeans and, later, European Americans 21
increasingly came to a hypervisual way of thinking, first as a result of writing technolo- 22
gies and later as a result of print. In effect, he took the findings of Parry and Lord and 23
projected them onto literacy by paying attention to how writing and print affected what 24
McLuhan had earlier labelled the ‘sense ratios’ of sound to vision. By dint of us taking 25
in much of the world serially through our eyes using a small set of infinitely repeatable 26
and reusable characters (as I presume you are doing now), McLuhan derived Western 27
science, industry, arts, philosophy, and politics as predictable if not inevitable outcomes 28
of literacy.25 29
In 1963 anthropologist Jack Goody and literary critic Ian Watt took the first foray 30
into generalising from literacy to a teleological pre-literate set of ‘oral’ cognitive capac- 31
ities. They drew on scholarly precedents strikingly similar to McLuhan’s, though with- 32
out reference to the latter’s recently published Gutenberg Galaxy. They combined a 33
discussion of orality and literacy among the Greeks with two things: first, a discussion 34
of how forms of media could have the ability to restructure consciousness, and second, 35
the results of Goody’s fieldwork with the supposedly oral culture of the Vai people 36
of Northern Ghana. Goody would later expand that fieldwork into two influential 37
and highly contested books.26 Goody’s critics pointed to other fieldwork with the Vai 38
people that uncovered all the cognitive strategies which Goody argued they lacked, 39
from list-making to abstract thought, concluding that while there were differences in 40
the ways oral and literate people went about tasks, they do not entail any cognitive 41
restructuring.27 42
A few years after Goody and Watt’s article, literary critic Walter Ong, a student 43
of McLuhan’s, undertook the challenge of generalising the findings of Lord to all cul- 44
tures where an absence of literacy prevailed and extending the range of the theory by 45
deducing features of the oral mind from the properties of sound itself and then imag- 46
ining it as a foil for some quality ascribed to literate minds: oral cultures are additive 47
in the sense of accreting meaning through addition, as opposed to the neatly nested

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 68 richard c. rath

1 subordination of written thought epitomised by the writers’ outline. Ong’s conception

2 of orality is aggregative rather than analytic, so stock phrases – he uses ‘the brave sol-
3 dier’ and ‘the beautiful princess’ – rather than single words. He contrasts it with the
4 analytic qualities of literate culture. Ong’s orality uses redundancy as reinforcement,
5 and it is conservative rather than innovative, placing a value on keeping things the
6 same because of having no written records, only an individual’s (not a community’s)
7 memory to rely on. And so the list goes on to make a total of nine derivations of orality
8 from the qualities of cognition, sound, and hearing. In a scathing critique, Jonathan
9 Sterne called Ong’s comparison of so-called oral cultures to so-called visual ones ‘the
10 audiovisual litany’. Sterne uses the phrase to underscore Ong’s theological background
11 as a Catholic priest doing something akin to creating a liturgy to believe in, as opposed
12 to Ong’s stated goal of deducing cognitively equivalent categories.28 Sterne’s essay has
13 become somewhat of a stock response to any mention of classic orality, but its reifica-
14 tion obscures another problem than crypto-Catholicism, namely the way the xeno-
15 phobic fallacy creates a homogenous category of oral culture by failing to differentiate
16 any cultures beyond his own with everything else transmogrified into a category rather
17 than a vast pool of diversity, difference, and cultural and historical specificity.
18
19
20 The Xenophobic Fallacy
21 The cultural chauvinism of classic orality has a long history and a much broader scope
22 than this or that medium combined with the xenophobic fallacy. It stretches back at
23 least to the Greeks and got honed by a fetish for science and a Cold War love of devel-
24 opmental, evolutionary models that served to directly compete with Marxism’s own
25 developmental model.29 Tracing that genealogy is important to understanding oral
26 culture as a historical category. Our ultimate goal here is not to dismiss the historical
27 West or the global North, but to reveal the xenophobic fallacy that allows racism’s
28 and colonialism’s ancestors to keep returning as the result of the xenophobic fallacy.
29 Only once we address the fallacy can we pursue historically grounded understandings
30 of oralities.
31 Western scholarship has long marked its others: first as ‘barbarian’, then ‘savage’,
32 then ‘primitive’, then ‘oral’ and its cousin, ‘developing’. Each of these terms started
33 out as a neutral label for outsiders, but because of a categorical error built into the
34 definition – the xenophobic fallacy – each gradually folded all sorts of prejudices into
35 its successor until it too had to be replaced. We find this binary of insider/outsider at
36 least back to the Athenian notion of ‘barbarian’. It first occurs in the Iliad. There, the
37 Athenian Greek word barbarophonos meant ‘rough voiced’. It referred at first to the
38 language of the Carians, who allied with the Trojans against the Athenians in the Tro-
39 jan War. It meant approximately ‘the people whose speech sounded like “bar bar bar”’
40 to the Athenians. The geographer Strabo (64/63 bce–c. 24 ce) argued that the usage
41 ‘was at first uttered onomatopoeically in reference to people who enunciated [Greek]
42 words only with difficulty and talked harshly and raucously’.30 The earliest reference
43 to barbarians that I have found comes from the same period that Jaynes and Havelock
44 mark as a transformative period in the Greek thought. During this time, the meaning
45 of ‘barbarian’ broadened to become a reference to any non-Greek. As we defined the
46 xenophobic fallacy, there were two categories, ‘Greeks’ and ‘Everyone Else’.31
47

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 oralities, literacies, and xenophobic fallacy 69

Plato, writing in the historical voice of the Stranger of Elea, a follower of Parmenides 1
(who was active early in the fifth century bce), pointed out the error in the Greek usage 2
of ‘barbarian’ that is at the heart of the xenophobic fallacy: 3
4
It was very much as if, in undertaking to divide the human race into two parts, 5
one should make the division as most people in this country do; they separate the 6
Hellenic race from all the rest as one and to all the other races, which are countless 7
in number and have no relation in blood or language to one another, they give the 8
single name ‘barbarian’; then, because of this single name, they think it is a single 9
species.32 10
11
In much the same way, the classic theories of orality take literacy, and by implication, 12
the Western intellectual tradition, as one exceptional category with a civilisation and a 13
history, and everyone else is elided into orality. 14
Aristotle wrote that Greek male citizens, by dint of their reasoned speaking (logos), 15
became the only political animal. Hearing made logos possible, ‘for rational discourse 16
is a cause of instruction in virtue of its being audible’. Other animals, as well as some 17
people, had ‘mere voice’ as one translation puts it, or ‘bare voice’, a phrase that has 18
gained considerable theoretical currency. The word for bare voice, phoné, should look 19
familiar from our rough-voiced (barbarophonos) Carians of the Iliad. Logos sat at the 20
conjuncture of voice and language, translatable as both speech and reason. According 21
to Aristotle, free Greek male citizens alone possessed the faculty of logos. In contrast, 22
phoné was the sound without real language or reason. Some dependent people, like 23
women, slaves, or barbarians, were able to apprehend logos, but they did not possess 24
it. Theirs was bare voice, more a sonic expression of feeling than reasoned articulation, 25
but with comprehension enough, conveniently for the citizen men, to take instructions. 26
Similarly, calling people barbarians placed them outside of logos and denied them the 27
capacity for reasoned speech, locating barbarians in the xenophobic ‘everyone else’ 28
category.33 As the Romans rose and conquered Greece and much more, ‘barbarian’ 29
changed its scope again, coming to mean anyone not Greek or Roman. This definition, 30
meant to take in all that was uncivilised, also began to falter when it became obvious 31
that many of the barbarians within the Roman Empire were as ‘civilised’ as the Greeks 32
and Romans. The rise of Christianity and the fall of Rome further complicated mat- 33
ters, and the terms ‘heathen’ and ‘infidel’ came into widespread usage to distinguish 34
Christians from the ‘everyone else’ category.34 35
Another word, silvātĭcus – meaning ‘of or belonging to the woods’, with the con- 36
notation of wildness evolving into it – began to take hold to solve the insider/outsider 37
problem. The barbarians of previous generations became ‘people of the forest’. The 38
forest was an uncultivated place, and culture, cultivation, and civilisation were all 39
caught up in one another. Silva, the root of the word, implied ‘a crowd, mass, abun- 40
dance’. As the idea spread throughout the Christian world, it shifted in spelling and 41
meaning, so that by the fourteenth century, Middle English had the word ‘savage’. 42
When referring to land, it meant uncultivated, to animals, not domesticated, and to 43
people, uncivilised. Savage people were fearless and violent, perhaps reckless, frenzied, 44
or even mad, and most of all, not Christian, thus again reinserting the xenophobic fal- 45
lacy into Christianity’s understanding of anyone outside the realm.35 46
47

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 70 richard c. rath

1 As in barbarism, sound played a central role in determining who was civil and who
2 was savage, falling out along the xenophobic category of ‘us’ and ‘everyone else’ in
3 much the same way as the Greeks distinguished logos and phoné. Seventeenth-century
4 New England Puritans understood themselves to have landed in a ‘howling wilder-
5 ness’.36 What was a wilderness that it howled? With twentieth-century notions of wil-
6 derness as a place devoid of people, the reader may first think of wolves, wind, and
7 storms, but the Puritan notion was different. In part because they had not yet displaced
8 them – the dispossession being a central and necessary component of creating today’s
9 artificial wilderness spaces and their imagined soundscapes – the Puritan wilderness
10 was teeming with human life. In short, what howled in the Puritan wilderness were
11 those they considered savage, the Indigenous peoples whose land they were invading.
12 A note on wilderness opens up the meaning of howling wilderness and connects it
13 to the ideas of savagery and sound once it is associated with the howling part of the
14 stock phrase. The wilderness was a savage place outside of belonging, where one was
15 no longer properly possessed by Puritan Christianity and its God. The distinctions of
16 social class and good and evil on which Puritan society depended for order fell away
17 in the wilderness. It was a place where will – possibly the root of the word – replaced
18 this order. It belonged to wild savages, who, not under the sway of the Puritan God,
19 were by definition evil and of the devil. Far from realising the violence of their own
20 incursions, English settlers across Eastern North America understood themselves as
21 besieged by the wild and savage forces enveloping them. Like weeds on the edge of
22 a cultured field, the wild was forever invading them rather than vice versa. To be
23 clear, this self and other perception allowed settlers to justify their own violence: the
24 wilderness served as a great screen (pardon the anachronistic metaphor) onto which
25 they could project their own violence and give themselves a terrible and violence-
26 reinforcing fright by attributing it to the Indigenous peoples whose land they were on.
27 The wilderness howled for New England Puritans and other English settlers in many
28 ways. Native Americans, construed as ‘hellish fiends’, howled in the poet Michael
29 Wigglesworth’s imagination. Serving as a Narragansett captive during Metacom’s War,
30 Puritan Mary Rowlandson spoke of the Narragansetts as ‘a company of hell-hounds’
31 she described primarily through their non-linguistic (to her) sounds of ‘roaring, singing
32 and dancing, and yelling’ that evoked ‘the howlings and Torments of the pitt beneath’.
33 Travelling Narragansett parties met each other on the trails with ‘an outrageous roar-
34 ing and hooping’. When her master’s child died away, mourners came not to grieve
35 with the mother, but to ‘howl with her’. Not to make xenophobia a purely white phe-
36 nomenon, Recollect Missionary Chrestien Le Clerq reported that Micmac people of
37 eastern Canada thought the French sounded like ducks and geese to them since they
38 all talked over one another, unlike the Micmac emphasis on listening and turn-taking.
39 Savages were the opposite of civil during the age of exploration and the Enlighten-
40 ment. Even the noble savages of Montesquieu and Rousseau were no more than the
41 negative definitions of the worst of civilisation. The point is not that savages were val-
42 ued as good or bad, but that because of the xenophobic fallacy, they served as a foil for
43 the civil rather than carrying any meaning of their own. This should be familiar since
44 it is the same figure/ground dynamic that inserts the xenophobic fallacy into the classic
45 theories of orality and literacy. Actual explorers tended to speak of Native Americans
46 in more specific terms. John Smith, for example, referred to the Powhatan Indians as
47 ‘savages’ but would go beyond generalisations to provide specific observations about

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 oralities, literacies, and xenophobic fallacy 71

particular peoples (along with massive fabulations in other places, lest we mislabel 1
him as a reliable source). Nonetheless, explorers and their contemporary pundits both 2
called Native Americans ‘savages’ far more than they used ‘Indian’ or the Indigenous 3
names. Although actual experience with Indigenous peoples complicated the picture, 4
exploration, Christianity, an insatiable drive for wealth, and a superiority complex all 5
went together in sounding the Indigenous people of the Americas and elsewhere as 6
savage, leaving opportunities for colonialism and exploitation rife as well as righteous. 7
Critics of this reading of the term ‘savage’ have argued that it is anachronistic to 8
impute the negative values (the taboos of the TEP cycle) since it just meant ‘people of 9
the forest’, but this misses the slow tidal shifts in TEP processes.37 ‘Savage’ may have 10
begun as a somewhat neutral way of referring to forest people, but it picked up its nega- 11
tive connotations from the failure to examine the xenophobic fallacy, pushing ‘savage’ 12
from euphemism to pejorative over time. In the Virginia colony, a tenuous proposition 13
for its first few decades, our unreliable reliable narrator John Smith described Pow- 14
hatan ceremonies as ‘howling devotions’ made by ‘devils’. William Strachey, another 15
early Virginia leader, only heard ‘shouting, howling and stamping their feet’ in a simi- 16
lar ceremony he witnessed. Our ubiquitous ‘hello’, a linguistic artefact of telephony, 17
meant a loud greeting in the wilderness rather than the polite answer to a point-to- 18
point audio signal. In a sort of folk etymological assemblage, seventeenth-century Eng- 19
lish usage remixed hello with howling and hollering, and perhaps hailing, as when 20
Smith was about to be captured by the Powhatan war leader Opechancanough and he 21
heard a ‘halloing of Indians’. 22
Back in New England, where second- and third-generation Puritan missionaries 23
experimented with turning Indigenous converts into subservient second-class worship- 24
ers, minister John Eliot collaborated on a Massachusetts-language Bible translation 25
with the English- and Massachusetts-speaking Sassamon. Eliot reduced his vital col- 26
laborator to ‘Printer John’ on the title page in a move both civilising – by dint of the 27
Christian name – and silencing – by dint of the reduction of Massachusetts speech to 28
print and having Sassamon occupy that role as ‘printer John’. Eliot’s phonetic scheme 29
for pronouncing the language relied on a similar reduction, this time of the sounds of 30
Massachusetts to Latin orthography. This even though the Massachusetts language 31
had a number of phonemes that simply do not exist in the European languages Eliot 32
knew. This sort of micro-colonial practice of subsuming the sounds of one language 33
into the Procrustean bed of another, and then lopping off all the sounds which did not 34
fit, recalls Robinson’s idea of inclusionary collaboration, where Western music incor- 35
porates rather than converses with the Indigenous music of collaborators. 36
Racism steeped in cultural chauvinism sat at the root of TEP as barbarism devel- 37
oped into savagery. It took a darker and more visual turn in the nineteenth century, 38
as the xenophobic fallacy got folded into biological racism and some of the worst of 39
European and US colonial endeavours. Although there is not much of a sonic element 40
(perhaps future research can find it), a quick review is necessary to set up the return 41
of the ear with the introduction of classic orality as the corrective. Here, the histori- 42
cally conscious self was the ‘Caucasian’ race and the semi-homogenous others were 43
the ‘Negroid’ and ‘Mongoloid’ races. One set of theories made a hard distinction 44
between the capacities of the races, like Aristotle’s differentiation of logos and phoné, 45
while a second took a developmental approach, arguing that the non-white races 46
were simply at an earlier stage of development than the ‘Caucasian’ race.38 This latter 47

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 72 richard c. rath

1 version provides a handy moral justification for colonisation and proselytism, and its
2 heirs persist in developmental models today.
3 In the twentieth century, two new strands of anthropology, pioneered in the United
4 States by Franz Boas and his students, and in Europe by the structuralist movement,
5 adopted a stance – at first partially and with much hedging – of the newly minted idea
6 of cultural relativism, meaning that cultures were all different but equally valuable,
7 and they needed to be studied in their specifics through research in the field. As part
8 of this set of innovations, the term ‘savage’ was retired because of its by-then-obvious
9 racism. Here we seem to have a hint of the cultural if not historical specificity recent
10 BIPOC scholarship has established as necessary to understand orality, although the
11 approach was still decidedly etic, or outsider-led. In place of ‘savage’, the anthropolo-
12 gists used the more-neutral-at-first notion of ‘primitive’ to evacuate the racism from
13 the older term. Both European and US anthropologists understood history as faintly
14 audible and receding into silence in so-called primitive societies, so they sought to
15 record elders first and capture hints of what their critics have called the golden past.
16 These faint echoes of the past were offset by a deep dive – in the structuralist case,
17 quite literally – into the idea of deep structure. What the structuralists found was a
18 sort of universal ‘primitive mind’ which manifested in countless and varied present-
19 day expressions. Thus, anthropologists ported the xenophobic fallacy back in, covered
20 over by a patina of cultural relativism.39
21 The rise of fieldwork-based anthropology incorporated the new sound recording
22 technologies of the early twentieth century to capture the voices of the newly minted
23 others, ‘primitive’ people. These early recordings were utterly decontextualised. The
24 machines required a set if not yet a studio to make successful recordings. A speaker
25 would have to converse with the attached recording horn (later the microphone) in
26 an artificially quiet isolated setting.40 This may have been part of the origins of oral
27 history’s tendency to pull interviewees out of their community context and record
28 them alone.
29 Once racism had been imported into the idea of the primitive by way of the xeno-
30 phobic fallacy, it required a new euphemism, which brings us back to Ong’s notion
31 of orality. Ong thought of his formulation as emancipating orality from the cultural
32 baggage that had attached itself to ‘primitive’ in the same way that ‘primitive’ had
33 distanced itself from ‘savage’. Changing the name to orality but leaving the xenopho-
34 bic fallacy intact means that the taboos of racism and colonialism will yet again find
35 their way into whatever the new euphemism is unless the taboos of the TEP process
36 are directly and uncomfortably confronted, as happened in the cases of classic orality,
37 savagery, and barbarism before.
38
39
40
Conclusion
41 In fact, there are no such ‘oral’ people as McLuhan, Ong, and Goody posit. This does
42 not mean there is no such thing as orality. What it means is that there are as many
43 oralities as there are peoples. As discussed at the beginning, oralities must be carefully
44 situated in their historical and cultural contexts. And the xenophobic fallacy must be
45 recognised as an uncomfortably still-present practice that keeps reimporting racism
46 and colonialism into the new terms through the TEP process. The xenophobic process
47

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 oralities, literacies, and xenophobic fallacy 73

makes this happen through its tendency towards reducing heterogeneous cultures into 1
a single homogenous other. This has led to some confusion, as many white scholars 2
still think of oral culture as a unified thing with a universal set of qualities. Thus, white 3
theorists can speak of the orality while at the same time scholars from within cultures 4
that have substantial and specific histories use the same term, and the two are able to 5
speak past each other with neither realising they are speaking and meaning different 6
things. Simply criticising oral culture without addressing the xenophobic fallacy can 7
quickly lead to conflict and misunderstanding. 8
Nor are oralities and literacies (for they also are plural) mutually exclusive. Oralities 9
are alive and well, not only in BIPOC cultures and communities, but in the white 10
Western world. Standard English pronunciation still pulls a great weight in the United 11
States as does Received Pronunciation in Great Britain. The sounds of these dialects 12
become the unmarked case, considered as just ‘English’ rather than an orality com- 13
bined with global power relations. In another example, a situated orality is emerging 14
in a distinctive form in gaming. Players speak to each other over an audio channel as 15
part of gameplay since their hands and eyes are too busy to type or read. The speech 16
patterns are informal but reflect white, straight, male, and cis-gendered as a tenuous 17
norm with strong emotional responses evoked if, for example, a woman or a non- 18
native speaker out themselves through their voices. These spaces are still working out 19
their protocols but racism, sexism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, and homophobia 20
are all rampant and on the surface. As they become suppressed into taboos, we can 21
expect the TEP process to start its cycle. It will be interesting to listen for whether the 22
xenophobic fallacy creeps in to this new configuration of orality when the world is 23
increasingly globally connected as it is in the gaming universe. 24
Orality remains alive and well despite the onslaught of print and literacy, and, 25
being part of the human condition, it is not limited to this culture but not that one 26
(with the possible exception of the deaf community). The purpose of this critical essay 27
is to historically situate the myriad oralities in place and time to jettison the xenopho- 28
bic fallacy, not to besmirch the Western intellectual tradition but to take part in the 29
hard work of continuing to decolonise the academy.41 Once that process is engaged, it 30
becomes clear that classic orality as it is conceived in the Western intellectual tradition 31
is a flawed concept and that Europeans and their American descendants have their 32
own thriving oral cultures too. The classic theories of orality asserted that the need 33
for deduction rather than evidence derives from the ephemerality of sound and speech. 34
Historical work on sound studies belies this, as does the newer scholarship on oral- 35
ity by BIPOC authors working from within cultures rather than seeking to penetrate 36
them. Without overtly addressing the xenophobic fallacy, the taboo item – in our dis- 37
cussion, mostly racism, colonialism, and their ancestors – will creep back in. Centring 38
the work of BIPOC authors goes a long way towards correcting it, but to take hold 39
and grow, white scholars and their kin will need to confront and reject the racism that 40
the xenophobic fallacy continually and unconsciously reintroduces through the TEP 41
process. This goes well beyond rejecting particular terms such as orality or civilisation 42
to attend to the underlying pattern of lazily constructing an all-encompassing other as 43
a coherent category. The belief in a singular literacy and a singular orality is hubris: 44
exceptionalism that needs to be checked and replaced with myriad oral and literate 45
cultures set in their own contexts and histories. 46
47

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 74 richard c. rath

1 Notes
2
3 1. Richard Cullen Rath, ‘Hearing American History’, The Journal of American History 95,
4 no. 2 (2008): 417–31.
2. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto:
5
University of Toronto Press, 2012).
6 3. The term ‘BIPOC’, which seems to have been coined on Twitter in 2013 but has come
7 into prevalence more recently, since about 2019, stands for ‘Black, Indigenous, and People
8 of Color’. See Sandra E. Garcia, ‘Where Did BIPOC Come From?’, New York Times,
9 17 June 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-bipoc.html. The term is meant as
10 a unifying umbrella for anti-racist, self-determination, and decolonising work that is set
11 on its own terms rather than in reference to the oppression that the term is deployed to
12 oppose. In contrast to ‘non-white’, BIPOC distinguishes the component groups rather than
13 defining them by a lack or absence. If one writes about a particular group, South Asians,
14 African Americans (although there is some criticism that this term should be replaced
15 by ‘Black people’), or Diné (Navaho), then the more specific term is used instead. There
is a mistaken belief that the coordinating conjunction ‘and’ grammatically subordinates
16
People of Color to the experiences of Black and Indigenous people. This holds within
17 some anti-racist work as well as among advocates of more traditional terminology. For a
18 starting point, see the Wikipedia entry for BIPOC within the definition of ‘People of Color’
19 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color#BIPOC_2. In a coordinate clause, which
20 BIPOC is, all the components are equal. To make the claim of inequality hold any sway,
21 the phrase would need to be ‘Black and Indigenous, and (then) People of Color’. Time will
22 tell whether usage overcomes grammar in privileging the experiences of Black and Indig-
23 enous people over other People of Color. Germane to this essay, BIPOC is a set of umbrella
24 terms comprising an umbrella term. Except when using it as a unifying term in decolonial,
25 antiracist, and self-determination solidarity work, the most specific term that a people call
26 themselves is preferred to the umbrella term: e.g., it is preferable to write ‘Dakota’ when
speaking of Dakota people rather than ‘Sioux’ (imposed name), or Native American, or
27
even the currently preferred umbrella term, ‘Indigenous’. This somewhat future-proofs
28 one’s terminology, as specific names age much more gracefully than umbrella terms.
29 4. Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 2.
30 5. Ibid., 3.
31 6. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London; New York:
32 Methuen, 1982), 48–56.
33 7. John Algeo and Carmen A. Butcher, The Origins and Development of the English Language
34 (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2013), 235.
35 8. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Litera-
36 ture (London; Portsmouth: J. Currey; Heinemann, 1986) (orature); Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o,
37 Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (New York: Columbia University Press,
2012) (cyberture); Roger D. Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African
38
American Culture in the Plantation South (New York: Pantheon, 1992). The best entry point
39 for pidgin and creole studies is the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages (Amsterdam:
40 John Benjamins).
41 9. For an introduction to oral history ‘classic’ methodology that emphasises the aural
42 throughout, see Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds, The Oral History Reader, 3rd
43 edn, Routledge Readers in History (London; New York: Routledge, 2016).
44 10. For an introduction to the ideas of ‘emic’ used here and ‘etic’, used below, see Dell Hymes,
45 ‘Emics, Etics, and Openness: An Ecumenical Approach’, in Emics and Etics: The Insider–
46 Outsider Debate, ed. Thomas M. Headland, Kenneth Lee Pike, and Marvin Harris (Newbury
47 Park: Sage, 1990), 120–6, along with the other essays in that volume.

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 oralities, literacies, and xenophobic fallacy 75

11. Cynthia Kanoelani Kenui, ‘Na Kānaka Maoli: The Indigenous People of Hawai‘i’, in 1
Diversity in Human Interactions: The Tapestry of America, ed. John D. Robinson and 2
Larry C. James (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 93–110. 3
12. Nēpia Mahuika, Rethinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous Perspective, Oxford 4
Oral History Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/
5
oso/9780190681685.001.0001; North Shore Field School, https://northshorefieldschool.org/
6
(accessed 26 June 2022); ‘Center for Oral History, Ethnic Studies (ES), UH Mānoa, Hawai’i’,
Ethnic Studies (ES), UH Mānoa, Hawai’i, https://ethnicstudies.manoa.hawaii.edu/center- 7
for-oral-history (accessed 27 June 2022); Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, Remember This!: 8
Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor Narratives, trans. Wahpetunwin Carolyn Schom- 9
mer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); Melissa K. Nelson, ‘Getting Dirty: The 10
Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literatures’, in Critically Sovereign: Indigenous 11
Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, ed. Joanne Barker (Durham, NC: Duke University 12
Press, 2017), 229–60 (40), https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373162. 13
13. Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Min- 14
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). 15
14. Ibid.; Peg Rawes, ‘Sonic Envelopes’, Senses and Society 3, no. 1 (2008): 61–76.
16
15. Lori Ann Garner, ‘Representations of Speech in the WPA Slave Narratives of Florida and the
17
Writings of Zora Neale Hurston’, Western Folklore 59, no. 3/4 (2000): 215–31; Toniesha
Taylor, ‘Saving Sound, Sounding Black, Voicing America: John Lomax and the Creation of the 18
“American Voice”’, Sounding Out!, 8 June 2015, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/06/08/ 19
john-lomax-and-the-creation-of-the-american-voice/; Sterling A. Brown, ‘On Dialect Usage’, 20
in The Slave’s Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Oxford; New York: 21
Oxford University Press, 1985), 37–9. The rest of this book remains an excellent starting 22
point for using the WPA Narratives well. 23
16. Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, ‘Canonization and the Color of Sound Studies’, Sounding Out! 24
(blog), 6 August 2018, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2018/08/06/canonization-and-the-color- 25
of-sound-studies/; Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes, eds, Remapping Sound Studies (Durham, 26
NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Marie Thompson, ‘Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in
27
Sound Studies’, Parallax 23, no. 3 (2017): 266–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1
28
339967.
17. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind 29
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). 30
18. The quickest way to catch up on critical responses to Jaynes is ‘Book Reviews’, Julian Jaynes 31
Society (blog), https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/articles/book-reviews/ (accessed 22 32
June 2022). 33
19. Edmund Carpenter introduces the idea of acoustic space in an ethnocentric reading of 34
Inuit sensory ways in Eskimo Realities (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 35
33–5 and ‘Eskimo Space Concepts’, Explorations 5 (June 1955): 131–45. The most 36
explicit, still ethnocentric, but also still useful for opening up the idea of acoustic space is 37
Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, ‘Acoustic Space’, in Explorations in Commu-
38
nication: An Anthology, ed. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Boston: Beacon
39
Press, 1960), 65–70, https://archive.org/details/explorationsinco00carp. On the accuracy
of Inuit maps, see Robert A. Rundstrom, ‘A Cultural Interpretation of Inuit Map Accuracy’, 40
Geographical Review 80, no. 2 (1990): 155–68. 41
20. Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, 42
ed. Adam Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales 43
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). 44
21. For the origins of the family tree model and the wave theory critique, see William Labov, 45
‘Transmission and Diffusion’, Language 83 (2007): 344–87; Winfred P. Lehmann, ‘August 46
Schleicher’, in A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics, 47

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 76 richard c. rath

1 Indiana University Studies in the History and Theory of Linguistics (Bloomington: Indiana
2 University Press, 1967), 87–96; and Guus Meijer and Pieter Muysken, ‘On the Beginnings
3 of Pidgin and Creole Studies: Schuchardt and Hesseling’, in Pidgin and Creole Linguistics,
4 ed. Albert Valdman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 21–45. The ideas are
also still being played out in post-structuralist theory drawing the idea of genealogy in
5
Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader (New York: Pan-
6
theon, 1984), 76–100; and the rhizomatic model of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A
7 Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London; New York: Continuum, 2004).
8 22. Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA; London: Belknap Press, 1982).
9 23. Plato, ‘Republic’, trans. Paul Shorey, in Plato in Twelve Volumes (London: William Heine-
10 mann, 1969), vols 5–6, books 2, 3, 10, Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.
11 edu (hereafter PDL).
12 24. Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, trans. Harold N. Fowler, in Plato in Twelve Volumes (Cambridge, MA:
13 Harvard University Press, 1925), 9:274–76, PDL.
14 25. McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy.
15 26. The initial theory is laid out in the groundbreaking and influential article by Jack Goody
and Ian Watt, ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History
16
5, no. 3 (1963): 304–45; Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge:
17
Cambridge University Press, 1977); Jack Goody, The Interface Between the Written and
18 the Oral, Studies in Literacy, Family, Culture, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
19 versity Press, 1987).
20 27. The relevant literature is ably and concisely covered by Daniel Chandler, ‘Biases of the
21 Ear and Eye: “Great Divide” Theories, Phonocentrism, Graphocentrism & Logocentrism’
22 (c. 1994), http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel//Documents/litoral/litoral1.html (accessed 20
23 July 2023). For rejection of Goody, see Carol Fleischer Feldman, ‘Oral Metalanguage’, in
24 Orality and Literacy, ed. David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance (Cambridge: Cambridge
25 University Press, 1991), 47–65 as well as the rest of the essays in that volume; and Sylvia
26 Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology of Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1981).
27
28. The initial work is Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cul-
28
tural and Religious History, The Terry Lectures A Clarion Book (New York: Simon and
29 Schuster, 1970); summarised in Ong, Orality and Literacy, 36–56. For ‘the litany’, see
30 Jonathan Sterne, ‘The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality’, Canadian Journal of
31 Communication 36, no. 2 (2011): 207–25; and Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cul-
32 tural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 14–18.
33 29. Giovanni E. Reyes, ‘Four Main Theories of Development: Modernization, Dependency,
34 World-Systems, and Globalization’, Nómadas: Critical Journal of Social and Juridical Sci-
35 ences 4, no. 2 (2001): 109–24.
36 30. For barbarophonos, βαρβαροφώνων, see Homer, The Iliad, trans. A. T. Murray (Cambridge,
37 MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), book 2, l. 867; Walter Leaf, ‘Commentary on the
Iliad’, in The Iliad, ed. Walter Leaf (London: Macmillan, 1900), commentary to book 2, l.
38
867; Thomas D. Seymour, ‘Commentary on Homer’s Iliad, Books I–III’, in Homer’s Iliad:
39
Books I.–III. (Boston: Ginn, 1891), commentary to book 2, l. 867; Henry George Liddell
40 and Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, s.v. βαρβα^ρό-φωνος; Henry George Liddell
41 and Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon, s.v. βαρβαρόφωνος φωνή; Georg
42 Autenrieth, A Homeric Dictionary for Schools and Colleges, s.v. βαρβαρό – φωνος; Strabo,
43 trans. A. T. Murray, book 14, chapter 2, section 28 (all the above from PDL); and OED
44 Online, https://www.oed.com, s.v. barbarous.
45 31. This can be tracked through its 335 occurrences in PDL.
46 32. Plato, ‘The Statesman’, trans. Harold N. Fowler, in Plato in Twelve Volumes (Cambridge,
47 MA: Harvard University Press, 1921), 12:262, PDL; emphasis added.

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 oralities, literacies, and xenophobic fallacy 77

33. Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (London; Cambridge, MA: W. Heinemann; 1

Harvard University Press, 1944), 1253a–55, quote from 1260a, PDL; Aristotle, ‘De 2
Sensu’, in The Parva Naturalia, trans. John I. Beare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 3
437.a.12 (on hearing and reason). For the theoretical and political implications of bare 4
voice, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel
5
Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7–8.
6
34. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civili-
zation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965); Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: 7
Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W. W. Norton for the Institute 8
of Early American History and Culture, 1975), 3–14, 43–57. 9
35. ‘Savāğe’, in Electronic Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 10
2001), http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/; Charlton Lewis, A Latin Dictionary Founded on 11
Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary; Latin Dictionary (New York: American 12
Book Co., 1890), s.v. silva (all of the above from PDL); OED Online, s.v. sylvan n. and 13
adj., savage adj. and n.1. 14
36. Unless otherwise noted, this and the following three paragraphs are distilled from Rath, 15
How Early America Sounded, 145–52. All primary source references can be found there in
16
the notes on pp. 213–15.
17
37. For a negatively valued analysis of the civil/savage binary, see Jennings, Invasion of America.
For the observation that actual explorers were more specific and particular than armchair 18
pundits, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America 19
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). For an excellent summary of recent arguments 20
about savage and civil that overestimates the neutrality of the term ‘savage’ in seventeenth- 21
century North America, see Thomas G. M. Peace, ‘Deconstructing the Sauvage/Savage in 22
the Writing of Samuel de Champlain and Captain John Smith’, French Colonial History 7, 23
no. 1 (2006): 1–20. 24
38. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: 25
Columbia University Press, 1983); Walter D. Mignolo picks up on this idea in an American 26
context in The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization
27
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). On biological racism, see George Mosse,
28
Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: H. Fertig, 1978).
Although it spends little time on orality per se, the best starting point for understanding 29
the connections between sound and racism in the nineteenth-century United States remains 30
Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of 31
North Carolina Press, 2001). 32
39. Regna Darnell, The History of Anthropology: A Critical Window on the Discipline in 33
North America, Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology (Lincoln: University of 34
Nebraska Press, 2021). 35
40. Sterne covers the artificiality of early ethnographic recording in Audible Past, 311–24. 36
41. While some of the newer works have been discussed, the classics Thiongʼo, Decolonising 37
the Mind and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous
38
Peoples (London: Zed, 1999) remain touchstones and excellent starting points for this work.
39
40
Select Bibliography 41
Carpenter, Edmund and Marshall McLuhan, ‘Acoustic Space’, in Explorations in Communica- 42
tion, an Anthology, ed. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Boston: Beacon Press, 43
1960), 65–70, https://archive.org/details/explorationsinco00carp. 44
Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya, ‘Canonization and the Color of Sound Studies’, Sounding Out! 45
(blog), 6 August 2018, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2018/08/06/canonization-and-the- 46
color-of-sound-studies/. 47

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 78 richard c. rath

1 Jaynes, Julian, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston:
2 Houghton Mifflin, 1976).
3 Mahuika, Nēpia, Rethinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous Perspective, Oxford
4 Oral History Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/
oso/9780190681685.001.0001.
5
Nelson, Melissa K., ‘Getting Dirty: The Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literatures’,
6
in Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, ed. Joanne Barker
7 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 229–60, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373162.
8 Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London; New York:
9 Methuen, 1982).
10 Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, trans. Harold N. Fowler, Perseus Digital Library
11 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 9:227–79, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu.
12 Rath, Richard Cullen, ‘Hearing American History’, The Journal of American History 95, no. 2
13 (2008): 417–31.
14 Steingo, Gavin and Jim Sykes, eds, Remapping Sound Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University
15 Press, 2019).
Sterne, Jonathan, ‘The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality’, Canadian Journal of Com-
16
munication 36, no. 2 (2011): 207–25.
17
Thompson, Marie, ‘Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies’, Parallax 23, no. 3
18 (2017): 266–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1339967.
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