Language Documentation
and Description
ISSN 1740-6234___________________________________________
This article appears in: Language Documentation and Description, vol8: Special Issue on Oral Literature and Language Endangerment.
Editors: Imogen Gunn & Mark Turin

Editor's Preface and List of Contributors(LDD 8)IMOGEN GUNN, MARK TURIN
Cite this article: Imogen Gunn (2010). Editor's Preface and List ofContributors (LDD 8). In Imogen Gunn & Mark Turin (eds) Language
Documentation and Description, vol 8: Special Issue on OralLiterature and Language Endangerment. London: SOAS. pp. 5-12
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Editors’ Preface
Imogen Gunn and Mark Turin, World Oral Literature Project, University ofCambridge
This special issue of Language Documentation and Description derives frompresentations at the 2009 World Oral Literature Project Workshop, held on 15
and 16 December at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences andHumanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. Videos of the talks
are available at <http://www.oralliterature.org/research/workshops.html>.The
contributions published here represent seven of the sixteen papers presented at
the workshop, along with an additional paper by Roger Blench and FredelizaCampos, whose fieldwork was funded by the World Oral Literature Project.
Taken as a whole, this volume addresses some of the theoretical and practicalissues related to the collection, recording, preservation and dissemination oforal literature by taking the conversation held at the workshop to a wider andmore varied audience. We are grateful to Peter Austin for his suggestion that
Language Documentation and Description might be a suitable vehicle forpublishing these papers. We would also like to thank Tom Castle for his hard
work on preparing this issue for publication.
Subscribers and regular readers of this journal will need no reminding of
the challenges of language endangerment, and can take a small measure of
comfort in the response of linguists working with the Hans Rausing
Endangered Languages Project (HRELP) and the Volkswagen Foundationfunded Documentation of Endangered Language (DoBeS) project, to namebut two existing initiatives. To date, however, anthropologists have notoffered a coordinated response to similar pressures that lead to the evergreater homogenisation of indigenous cultures, and the forces that threaten theoral traditions of people across the globe.
For many communities around the world, the transmission of oral
literature from one generation to the next lies at the heart of cultural practice.
While our European epics or classics are widely published and regularly
taught as literature, oral narratives have rarely had that chance and have been
looked down on precisely because they are not thought to be ‘literature’according to Western conventions. Yet oral literature is as complex, beautiful
and sophisticated as the writings of the great published authors of Europe.
Moreover, these creative works are an invaluable part of a community’s
heritage that may be threatened when their mother tongue becomesendangered or even lost when a language dies out, as such traditions are often
Imogen Gunn and Mark Turin 2010. Editors’ Preface. In Imogen Gunn and Mark Turin (eds.) Language
Documentation and Description, Vol 8, 5-10. London: SOAS.

6

Imogen Gunn and Mark Turinleft untranslated when a community switches to speaking a more dominantlanguage.
As Ruth Finnegan (page 13) discusses in her contribution to this volume,‘oral literature’ is by no means an uncontested or neutral term. While it comeswith considerable intellectual baggage, by taking stock of the issues involved,
our choice to use it can:[pull] us out of the cold assumption that only in written text canhuman imagination and wisdom be clothed, opening a door to thevast oral creativity of humankind so often devalued in the printdominated outlook of western scholarship… To speak of ‘oral
literature’ is already to widen our intellectual horizons and move us
behind the limited confines of the written canon.
In its widest sense, then, ‘oral literature’ may include ritual texts, curative
chants, epic poems, musical genres, folk tales, creation stories, songs, myths,spells, legends, proverbs, riddles, tongue-twisters, word games, recitations,
life histories or historical narratives. Most simply, however, ‘oral literature’refers to any form of literature that is transmitted orally.
In response to the challenges discussed above, the World Oral Literature
Project (WOLP) was established in January 2009 to document and makeaccessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record.
The project is based at the University of Cambridge, where it is affiliated to
the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Our primary goal is tosupport fieldworkers and local communities engaged in the collection andpreservation of all forms of oral literature by providing funding for original
research, in addition to hosting an online digital repository of contemporary
and heritage recordings. When appropriate, open access has been granted tothese collections through our website.
Since its foundation up to the time of publication, WOLP has disbursed
more than £78,000 ($120,000) in grants to fund eighteen time-sensitive
research projects, including recordings of ceremonial chanting in the Vaupés
region of Colombia, an audio archive of the vocal repertoire of the last royal
singer of Mustang, Nepal, and a collection of Altaian heroic epics sung byritual practitioners. More recently, we began to host digitised copies of thesecollections online as well as depositing them with local communities. At thetime of going to press, our online Collections portal included audio and video
content collected in Taiwan, China, Nepal and Bhutan, dating from the 1950s
to the present. By early 2011, this steadily growing corpus will have expanded
to include other world areas.

Preface

7

The study of oral literature is situated at the intersection of anthropology
and linguistics and, while drawing from both – and other – disciplines,
researchers must contend with challenges that are unique to this area of study.
To date, there are relatively few dedicated support mechanisms forscholarship on oral literature. In response, WOLP is committed to providing aplatform for discussion, collaboration and dissemination to all those working
on oral literature across disciplinary and national borders. We publish
collections of oral literature, in the form of our Occasional Paper series, bothonline and in print, and we host an Occasional Lecture series and a yearlyworkshop at which participants gather to share their experiences of working
on endangered narrative traditions.
Our first workshop, from which the substance of this volume derives, washeld in December 2009 and brought more than sixty students, linguists,anthropologists, community representatives, museum curators and archivists
from all over the world to Cambridge. This being our first gathering, our goal
was to discuss ethical strategies for collecting, recording, preserving anddisseminating endangered oral literature. A wide range of stimulating papers
were presented on the responsibilities of researchers, their engagements withlocal communities as partners, the place of Western universities as archival
repositories of living practices and the role of digital archives and community
cultural centres as sites of knowledge transfer, teaching and research. All
presentations were recorded, and video podcasts of the papers are available
online in a variety of media formats at <www.oralliterature.org> so that any
interested party can continue to benefit from the content of the papers andresulting discussion in their own time. The workshop was made possible bygenerous financial support from C-SAP (the Higher Education Academy
Subject Network for Sociology, Anthropology, Politics), the Onaway Trustand the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research.
For a number of participants, the December workshop was their firstopportunity to attend an event dedicated exclusively to issues relating to oral
literature research. The enthusiasm of the presenters and of the gatheredaudience created a lively, collaborative environment that, in turn, led to thispublication. Through case studies and theoretical considerations, the eightcontributions presented here address the major themes that arose during theworkshop: practical concerns in studying and reproducing oral literature;techniques for facilitating collaboration between local and foreign researchers;
the costs and benefits of elicited versus spontaneous performance; andevaluations of the diverse threats to oral traditions around the world.
Ruth Finnegan, who served as keynote speaker and principal discussant at
our workshop, sets the scene for this publication by carefully examining therewards and difficulties experienced by those who work on oral literature.

8Imogen Gunn and Mark TurinFinnegan’s contribution commences with a nuanced unpacking of the term
itself, and ventures through questions of authenticity to culminate in a
discussion of the contested process of transcription. She concludes that thestudy of oral literature is inherently (perhaps even necessarily) complex
because humans – and thus their social products – are complex, messy andfascinating beings. The complications that surround oral literature should not
be viewed ‘as obstacles to its study but as indicators of its rich complexity anddeep human significance’ (page 24).
Finnegan offers cautionary words on the process of rendering textual thatwhich was formerly only oral, it being ‘too easy when looking at the neat
resultant print to forget the performed reality of the original and ignore theintervening hands and far-from-neutral social conventions that shaped thefinal text’ (page 19). These points are further developed by Martin Gaenszle
in his contribution on ceremonial wedding dialogues among the Mewahang
Rai in East Nepal. Gaenszle’s opening question of whether it is‘methodologically legitimate to stage a performance in order to make it morecomprehensible’ (page 67) is a practical challenge, and he goes on to address
specific examples of elicited practice through his experiences of documenting
endangered oral traditions. The reader emerges from Gaenszle’s balanced
discussion of in vitro versus in situ performances with an appreciation of bothstyles, which, when taken together, are an ‘an ideal starting point for
ethnographic textualising’ (page 81).
In her contribution, Carole Pegg takes up the question of in situ versus in
vitro documentation to offer a third option: allowing the performer to selectwhere and how he or she will be recorded, thus providing greater context as
well as additional information to the researcher, not to mention improved
recording conditions. This, as Pegg puts it, is ‘not a question of authenticity
but rather how the performer (re)creates self and personhood’ (page 134). The
author explores this third way as part of her larger examination of kai throatsinging in the Republic of Altai, and articulates how multimedia, combinedwith textualisation, can assist in preserving the ‘spirits’ of the performances.
Sara Shneiderman addresses a theme that was repeatedly discussed
throughout the workshop and one which speaks to researchers more generally,
namely: what is the most ethical approach for producing a textual form of achant, song or epic for which there is no community consensus and no single
established and accepted version? In entering into this discussion, the authordraws on her research documenting Thangmi oral traditions in Nepal andnorthern India where these issues are particularly potent. Working in a context
where members of the community had differing and conflicting interests inthe textualisation of these rituals, the scholarly role of creating a writtenversion (or versions) of oral shamanic recitations is politically fraught.

Preface

9

Shneiderman argues that, as scholars, we must ‘fully acknowledge our own
complicit roles in producing certain kinds of textual forms’ (page 159), which
she does both in this publication and through the workshops which she has led
with Thangmi community members. Shneiderman concludes by suggestingthat the process of using non-linear, rich audio-visual recording media, locallyreferred to as ‘videoalisation’, may in fact provide a complement totextualisation as a means of mediating potential conflicts between oral andliterate worldviews.
Gerald Roche, a grantee of the World Oral Literature Project
Supplemental Grants Programme, and his seven co-authors and collaborators
examine the benefits of participatory approaches to cultural documentation
through the lens of their fieldwork on the Tibetan Plateau. The authors suggestthat ‘participatory approaches assert that communities have the right to define
their problems and negotiate appropriate solutions and that problems are mostefficiently and completely addressed in this manner’ (page 149), and go on topropose that the ‘skills and knowledge of outside professionals are moreeasily acquired, …the more complex and valued form of knowledge is local
expertise’ (page 150). Given the high level of cultural diversity amongneighbouring communities on the Plateau, the authors suggest thatparticipatory techniques are not only more ethical and appropriate, but more
effective in such research environments. While stridently worded, the authors
are careful not to present an overly prescriptive methodology: ‘[w]e must be
realistic about balancing community goals and providing objective
documentation. To thus label our work ‘participatory’ in the fullest sense issomewhat misleading’ (page 153).
In his contribution, Michael Oppitz provides a detailed, elegant overview
of the Parched Grain Chant, one modular element in the shamanic healing
ritual oeuvre of the Magar of Nepal. Oppitz’s approach is at once stylisticallytraditional, using liturgical terminology in Latin to mark subsections of theritual, and intellectually adventurous, humanising the ritual through theprecise articulation of all of its structural parts. His contribution offers bothsynchronic detail and comparative breadth, concluding with a particularly
helpful reflection on the scholarly study of parallelism and verse structure.
Peter Austin examines the endangered and poorly documented tradition oflontar reading among the Sasak of Lombok, Indonesia. After describing thehistorical and linguistic context in which the literary tradition of writing on
the dried leaves of the lontar palm arose, Austin goes on to offer one of thefirst published accounts of the performance of actually reading the lontars(pepaòsan). Lontar texts are highly elliptical and poetic and theirinterpretation must be taught, and there is increasing evidence to suggest thatboth the actual manuscripts and the performance tradition are now under10

Imogen Gunn and Mark Turinthreat. Austin concludes that there is an urgent need for a professional studyof these now endangered practices.
Through a discussion of the oral genres of the Ifugao in the northern
Philippines, Roger Blench and Fredeliza Campos also examine the broader
issue of researchers recording traditions ‘where its performers are now
embedded in contexts very different from those in which this repertoire
evolved’ (page 50). In the case of the Ifugao, this realignment is in part theresult of cultural revival movements driven by the urban elite and additionallya consequence of the national School of Living Tradition (SLT) scheme that,the authors argue, has had a lasting impact on how performers dress, whatinstruments they use, the amount of compensation they require and the lengthof the performance. Blench and Campos take the position that while thisreinvented tradition may in time become a new tradition, and that modernisers
may suggest that such a reinvention is simply part of the evolution of atradition, it nevertheless remains imperative to make recordings of ‘older,richer performance styles grounded in the community’ (page 61) or risk
‘betray[ing] the generations of performers who evolved the diverse styles thathave survived up to the present’ (page 61).
The issues of authenticity in performance, and the relationships between
orality and textuality, and modern and traditional forms of cultural production
run throughout this issue of Language Documentation and Description asstrong, guiding themes. We would do well to recall Ruth Finnegan’s (page 23)compelling statement in her introduction to this volume:
By now we are sceptical about the idea of fixed, ‘pure’ or‘uncontaminated’ tradition untouched by human interaction andactive processing, and have to accept that those who perform, record,inscribe, edit and translate at any given period also have a part in theprocess by which some product attains wider distribution orpreservation. The important thing is no doubt to be open about how
particular cases were recorded and uttered, and what parties wereinvolved in their processing, and not to peddle them as somethingwhich they are not.
As editors of this collection, we are delighted to have the opportunity to bring
together these rich and diverse contributions under the roof of this publication.
We hope that you will enjoy reading these papers as much as we have enjoyedcompiling them.
Cambridge
October 2010

List of Contributors
Peter K. AustinDepartment of Linguistics,
SOAS
Thornhaugh Street,
Russell SquareLondon
WC1H 0XG
UKMartin Gaenszle
Institut für Südasien-, Tibet- undBuddhismuskunde
Bereich Südasienkunde
Uni-Campus AAKh, Hof 2.1
Spitalgasse 2-4
A-1090 Wien
Austria

pa2@soas.ac.uk

martin.gaenszle@univie.ac.at

Roger Blench
Kay Williamson Educational
Foundation
8 Guest Road
Cambridge CB1 2AL
UK

Tshe ring rnam gyal
Independent scholar
Xining City,
Qinghai Province
China 810008

rogerblench@yahoo.co.uk

cairangnanjie@gmail.com

Fredeliza CamposMusic Department
Hung Hing Ying Building
The University of Hong Kong
Pokfulam Road
Hong Kong

G.yu lha
Independent scholar
Xining City,
Qinghai Province
China 810008

izza.campos@gmail.com

abayina@gmail.com

Ruth Finnegan
Faculty of Social Sciences
The Open University
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AAUK

Zla ba sgrol ma
Independent scholar
Xining City,
Qinghai Province
China 810008

r.h.finnegan@open.ac.uk

dege.irene@gmail.com

12Imogen Gunn and Mark Turin

Ban+de mkhar
Independent scholar
Xining City,
Qinghai Province
China 810008

Gerald Roche
Griffith University/ Qinghai Normal
University
Xining City,
Qinghai Province
China 810008

wendekar@gmail.com

gjroche@gmail.com

Michael Oppitz
Museum of Ethnography
Zurich University
Pelikanstrasse 40
CH - 8001 Zurich
Switzerland

Sara Shneiderman
Research Fellow in Anthropology
St Catharine's College
University of Cambridge
Cambridge CB2 1RLUK

oppitz.berlin@googlemail.com

sbs31@cam.ac.uk

Bkra shis bzang po
Independent scholar
Xining City,
Qinghai Province
China 810008

Snying dkar skyid
Independent scholar
Xining City,
Qinghai Province
China 810008

narongcarver@gmail.com

guide.margery@gmail.com

Carole Pegg
Faculty of Music & Department ofSocial Anthropology (MIASU)
University of Cambridge
Cambridge CB2 3RF
UKCharles Kevin Stuart
Department of English
College of Foreign Languages
Shaanxi Normal University
Xi'an City 710062
PR China

carolea.pegg@ntlworld.com

koknor@gmail.com