Allow me to make it clear to you how oral societies work from what I observed working among them. When we worked in Sulawesi, Indonesia among the Rongkong we had to collect and collate language material in order to learn the language. How do you begin to work with a group of people who do not have written material related to their language? Do you go around asking people to tell you a sentence in their language while using the National language? Not that is not very reliable. The best way is to get them to tell you one of their traditional stories and record it. Once you have recorded it you can work on the transcription of the text and analyse how the language goes together and what the grammatical and phonological rules are which govern the way the language works. The best way is to ask them to tell you their traditional ancestral stories.
I asked the village chief if I could record their traditional stories and publish them in a book. I asked if he could call the village story tellers together and I would record the first of their stories. The night was set for the recording of the first of their ancestral stories – Batu Karodi. I can still remember the night vividly as a result of what happened. The village headman’s house was filled with people squeezed in tightly together, as many who could fit in. That way everyone who wanted could hear and see the story of Batu Karodi being recorded and later it would be put into a book . The house was overflowing with people. Those who couldn’t fit in the house gather outside pressed up against the outside, looking through the gaps in the bush-sawn wall boards on all four sides of the house. Then there were the ones who filled the space under the house and peered up through the floorboards to get a look at the action and hear the very familiar story told and the later they would be able to read it in their language. The atmosphere was electric.
Three story tellers took prime place at the front but the microphone was clipped to the t-shirt of the recognized prime story teller. As he told the story, I was captivated by the fact that as I looked around the room all mouths were moving in sync with the words of the story teller was telling. Everyone knew the story word for word. But at one point in the story one of the other story tellers yelled, “No! You are wrong. Stop the recording. That’s wrong!” Everyone insisted I wind the tape back and record this portion again. They couldn’t have this mistake included in the book of their stories. They insisted he start back at a particular point which I found on the recorder and we were ready to begin the re-record. Without them knowing I turned down the volume and pushed the fast forward button for a few seconds to ensure I had the mistake recorded as well. At the end of the night everyone was happy. The story of Batu Karodi had been told as it should be.
On checking the recording later I found the mistake the story teller had made. He had substituted a key verb with another word which had the same meaning, but he had not used the accepted verb that everyone had memorized. So it was unacceptable. That is how oral tradition works. We citizens of the 21st Century lack understanding of how the oral transmission process works but we are quick to jump to conclusions that it could not be possibly be reliable. How wrong we are.