A heady reading indeed, Walter Ong makes some good and some moot points about oral tradition in Orality and Literacy.
The idea that sound as an art form is unique in the way that it surrounds the user was one of the more ponderous points for me. When something sounds so good that you just want to hear it again and again, and the seminal version of the work is on some prerecorded media, you can feel free to enjoy it as often as you like. However, if possible you may need to experience the sound in person in the form of live performance, where an artist may be better known for his or her live interpretation than the recorded version. In this regard the oral tradition is still very much alive, because while the performance can be recorded with several types of media, the ultimate work of art is the experience itself, a unique piece of work that will never be identically duplicated.
Ong also discusses on page 51 the categorization of a hammer, log, saw, and hatchet by a 25 year old illiterate man. He grouped them all together, because all the tools could be used to cut a log.
Take an iPod, cell phone, digital camera, and an iPod charger. The first three are devices, and the last is merely a means to recharge the device. Being a 21st century literate but knowing that any device without its charger is basically useless, would you still categorize the phone, camera and iPod together?
Posing those kinds of questions to illiterates, while possibly worthy of study, and presenting it in a disparaging manner in print is perhaps a bit unfair because the immediacy and importance of objects like logs, hammers, saws, and hatchets to their lives. Log+saw+hammer+hatchet=house.
The Pirahã tribe of northwestern Brazil was the subject of a fascinating article published by the New Yorker on April 16, 2007. Dan Everett, the American Professor who lived with them, makes a strong argument that disproves Noam Chomsky‘s theory that recursion can be found in all spoken and documented languages, that it is a trait we are born with. In it, among other things, you will find examples of their peculiar language. For example, if you ask a member of this tribe how many sticks you are holding in your hand, the member might respond with confusion because their culture simply does not care how many of one object another posseses. Great read!