Cognitive predispositions and cultural transmission

This chapter is about the cultural memory and transmission of oral traditions, especially those that use poetics and music. The latter include many of the best studied and most stable forms of oral traditions, including children rhymes, ballads, songs, and epic poetry. Oral traditions are of interest because, unlike written traditions, they depend primarily on memory for their survival. Thus, by examining the products of long periods of oral transmission, we can learn something about the processes of memory used. Working in the other direction, by using our knowledge of memory, we can better understand how the products came into being and what their likely limitations are. Although they are often viewed only as art forms in current times, oral traditions did, and often still do, transmit valuable practical and moral information and in many forms, such as the epics sung in the Balkans, give insight into major conflicts (Foley, 1991; Havelock, 1978; Lord, 1960; Ong, 1982). In large part, this chapter is drawn from my earlier work on oral traditions (e.g., Rubin, 1995), but here I intend to show how it provides a more general view of memory as used in the cultural transmission of information. My goal is to show that current theories of memory need to be expanded in principled and theoretically well-supported ways if they are going to be maximally useful in helping us understand individual and collective memory.