Jun
7th
Sat
7th
In the age of orality/aurality, action and speech were connected, both in how people understood language and in how language actually functioned
“he next instance of objectivity provoked by the orality/literacy collission appeared when Malinowski published “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages (1923). Like WOod, and unlike Rousseau who relied on hearsay reports, the author as a professional anthropologist had made actual contact with pre-literate societies and made the interesting observation, pregnant for later studies, that among “primitive” peoples generally language is a “mode of action”—“though he had trouble explaining what he was getting at”” (oNG 1982, P. 32). (Havelock, *The Muse Learns to Write*, 38)
