functions of oral literature research

(Stanford users can avoid this Captcha by logging in.)

• Send to text email RefWorks EndNote printer

Contemporary oral literature fieldwork : a researcher's guide

Available online.

• EBSCO Academic Comprehensive Collection

More options

• Find it at other libraries via WorldCat
• Contributors

Description

Creators/contributors, contents/summary.

• Cover; Title page; Copyright page; Dedication; Contents; List of Pictires; List of Maps; List of Figures; List of Tables; Foreword; Acknowledgements;
• 1. Introduction; Orality and Literacy; Oral Literature as Verbal Art; Oral Literature and Tradition; Oral Literature as History; Functionality of Oral Literature; Growth of Oral Literature Scholarship in Kenya; The False Step; Anyumbaism in Kenyan Oral Literature Tradition;
• 2. Research in Oral Literature; Qualitative and Quantitative Research Methods; Demystifing Fieldwork; Multidisciplinary in Oral Literature; Fieldwork Defined.
• Responsibilities of a FieldworkerOral Literature and Globalization; Importance of Fieldwork; Critical Ethnography; Exploratory Fieldwork; Intensive Fieldwork; Supervised Fieldwork; Independent Fieldwork; Home-based Fieldwork; Outward-bound Fieldwork;
• 3. Theory and Oral Literature; Theory and Scholarship; Theory in Oral Literature; Traditional Theories of Oral Literature; Modern Theories of Oral Literature;
• 4. Methodology in Oral Literature; Methodology and Oral Literature Research; Observation Method; Structured and Unstructured Interview Methods; Fieldwork Design; Fieldwork Preparatory Phase.
• Fieldwork PhasePost-Fieldwork Phase; Qualities of a Consumate Fieldworker; Fieldwork Participants; Lead Researcher's Check-list; Field Research Assistants; Field Local Assistant; Research Driver; Fieldwork Accountant; Fieldwork and Wellness; Literature Review and Sampling; Rapport Building; Fieldwork Documentation; Interview Method; Transcription and Translation; Performance Settings; Importance of Methodology;
• 5. Documentation, Preservation and Access; Performance and Memory; Archiving Oral Texts; Disconnect between Researchers and Archivists; University of Nairobi and Archiving of Oral Text.
• Archivists and NeutralityDigital Technology and Archiving; Ong and Secondary Orality; Importance of Digitalization; Challenges of Digitalization;
• 6. Data Analysis; Oral Literature Criticism; Transcription and Translation; Data Analysis; Coding in Oral Literature; Textualization in Verbal Art; Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software; Report Outline;
• 7. Fieldwork Ethics, Challenges and Strategies; Ethics and Oral Literature; Ethics and Reciprocity; Omondi Tawo the Bard; Ethics and Accountability; Ethics and Informed Consent; Managing Expectations; Non-Compensation School.
• Self-CompensationFieldwork in Conflict Zone; Ethical Dilemmas; Ethics and Creative Deception; Release Form A; Release Form B; Other Fieldwork Challenges; Bibliography; Index; Back cover.

Bibliographic information

Browse related items.

• Stanford Home
• Maps & Directions
• Search Stanford
• Emergency Info
• Terms of Use
• Non-Discrimination
• Accessibility

© Stanford University , Stanford , California 94305 .

Open Book Publishers

• Language and Literature
• History and Culture
• Economics and Politics

Oral Literature in the Digital Age

Introduction

Texte intégral, collecting, protecting and connecting oral literature.

1 This volume is an essential guide and handbook for ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists, librarians, and all who connect with indigenous communities in order to document and preserve oral traditions.

2 For societies in which traditions are conveyed more through speech than through writing, oral literature has long been the mode of communication for spreading ideas, knowledge and history. The term “oral literature” broadly includes ritual texts, curative chants, epic poems, folk tales, creation stories, songs, myths, spells, legends, proverbs, riddles, tongue-twisters, recitations and historical narratives. In most cases, such traditions are not translated when a community shifts to using a more dominant language.

1 See http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/ [Accessed 19 November 2012].

3 Oral literatures are in decline as a result of a cultural focus on literacy, combined with the disappearance of minority languages. The Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger , 1 released by UNESCO in early 2009, claims that around a third of the 6,500 languages spoken around the globe today are in danger of disappearing forever. Globalisation and rapid socio-economic change exert particularly complex pressures on smaller communities of speakers, often eroding expressive diversity and transforming culture through assimilation to more dominant ways of life. Until relatively recently, few indigenous peoples have had easy access to effective tools to document their own cultural knowledge, and there is still little agreement on how collections of oral literature should be responsibly managed, archived and curated for the future.

2 See http://www.oralliterature.org/collections [Accessed 19 November 2012].

4 The online archiving of audio and video recordings of oral literature is a technique of cultural preservation that has been widely welcomed by indigenous communities around the world. The World Oral Literature Project, established at the University of Cambridge in 2009 and co-located at Yale University since 2011, has a mission to “collect, protect and connect” endangered traditions. The Project facilitates partnerships between fieldworkers, archivists, performers of oral literature, and community representatives to document oral literature in ways that are ethically and practically appropriate. Our fieldwork grant scheme has funded the collection of audio and video recordings from nine countries in four continents. In addition, Project staff have digitised and archived older collections of oral literature, as well as contemporary recordings that are “born digital” but which were funded by other sources. At present, these collections represent a further twelve countries, amounting to over 400 hours of audio and video recordings of oral traditions now hosted for free on secure servers on the Project website. 2

• 3 See the Digital Return research network for more discussion on these issues: http://digitalreturn. (...)

5 The World Oral Literature Project’s strong focus on cooperation and understanding ensures that source communities retain full copyright and intellectual property over recordings of their traditions. Materials are protected for future posterity through accession to a secure digital archival platform with a commitment to migrating files to future digital formats as new standards emerge. Returning digitised materials to performers and communities frequently helps to protect established living traditions, with materials used for language education as well as programmes that aim to revitalise cultural heritage practices. 3 The inclusion of extensive metadata, including contextual details relating to the specific oral literature performance alongside its history and cultural significance, allows researchers and interested parties from diverse disciplines to connect with and experience the performative power of the collection. For example, while a musicologist might study the instrumental technique of a traditional song, a linguist would focus on grammatical structures in the verse, and an anthropologist might explore the social meaning and cultural values conveyed through the lyrics. Innovative digital archiving techniques support the retrieval of granular metadata that is relevant to specific research interests, alongside providing an easy way to stream or download the audio and video files from the web. In this manner, we have been able to connect recordings of oral literature to a broad community of users and researchers. In turn, this contributes to an appreciation of the beauty and complexity of human cultural diversity.

Coming together, sharing practices

6 The second annual workshop hosted by the World Oral Literature Project at the University of Cambridge in 2010, entitled Archiving Orality and Connecting with Communities , brought together more than 60 ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists and librarians. Organised with support from the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge; the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge; and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the assembled delegates explored key issues around the dissemination of oral literature through traditional and digital media. Presentations from representatives of institutions in eight countries prompted fieldworkers to consider how best to store and disseminate their recordings and metadata; while archivists and curators were exposed to new methods of managing collections with greater levels of cultural sensitivity and through cooperative partnerships with cultural stakeholders.

7 Workshop panels were focused around a central theme: When new publics consume, manipulate and connect with field recordings and digital archival repositories of linguistic and cultural content, their involvement raises important practical and ethical questions about access, ownership, and permanence. These issues are reflected in a current trend among funding agencies, including the World Oral Literature Project’s own fieldwork grants programme, to encourage fieldworkers to return copies of their material to source communities, as well as to deposit collections in institutional repositories. Thanks to ever-greater digital connectivity, wider Internet access and affordable multimedia recording technologies, the locus of dissemination and engagement has grown beyond that of researcher and research subject to include a diverse constituency of global users such as migrant workers, indigenous scholars, policymakers and journalists, to name but a few. Participants at the workshop explored key issues around the dissemination of oral literature, reflecting particularly on the impact of greater digital connectivity in extending the dissemination of fieldworkers’ research and collections beyond traditional audiences.

8 Emerging from some of the most compelling presentations at the workshop, chapters in Part 1 of this volume raise important questions about the political repercussions of studying marginalised languages; the role of online tools in ensuring responsible access to sensitive cultural materials; and methods of avoiding fossilisation in the creation of digital documents. Part 2 consists of workshop papers presented by fieldworkers in anthropology and linguistics, all of whom reflect on the processes and outcomes of their own fieldwork and its broader relevance to their respective disciplines.

4 See < http://www.oralliterature.org/research/workshops.html [Accessed 19 November 2012].

9 In keeping with our mandate to widen access and explore new modes of disseminating resources and ideas, workshop presentations are now available for online streaming and download through the World Oral Literature Project website. 4 Many of the chapters in this edited volume discuss audio and video recordings of oral traditions. Since a number of contributors have made use of online resources to illustrate their discussions on cultural property and traditional knowledge, it is hoped that readers will interact with this freely available media. URL links for referenced resources are included in a list of Online Sources in the reference section at the end of each chapter. All web resources were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated.

Part I. Principles and Methods of Archiving and Conservation

10 Thomas Widlok’s chapter discusses two aspects of digital archiving: first, he analyses what is actually involved in the process of digitisation and electronic archiving of spoken language documentation; second, he discusses notions of access and property rights in relation to the digital archives that result from such documentation. His emphasis in both cases is on identifying the elements and layers that make up the complex whole of the archive, yet he is quick to point out that there is more to this whole than is covered by his analysis. While Widlok’s evaluation is based on personal experience rather than a sample of projects, he acknowledges that themes of access and property rights in digitisation remain a recurring concern. The concluding argument of his chapter is that by viewing the component parts of the process of digital archiving for just one case study, we can see some of the contradictions and ambivalences of this process in more general terms. Through such a structural analysis, we may also begin to understand the mixed feelings that some field researchers have with regard to electronic archiving and online databasing. Widlok proposes that breaking these complex processes down into their elements may help us to make informed decisions about the extent and type of digital archiving we want to engage in.

11 David Nathan continues with the theme of digital archiving by considering the issue of access in relation to archives that hold documents of, and documentation relating to, endangered languages. Nathan defines access as the means of finding a resource; the availability of the resource; the delivery of the resource to the user; the relevance and accessibility of resource content to the user; and the user’s perceptions of their experience interacting with the archive and its resources. His discussion is centred around the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) and its online catalogue, both based at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. The system uses features that have been pioneered in Web 2.0 or social networking applications, and is innovative in applying such techniques to language archiving. Nathan illustrates how ELAR’s access system represents a true departure from conventional archival practices in the field of language documentation.

12 Nathan explains how until recently, access has been thought of as “online resource discovery through querying standardised metadata” (page 23, this volume). Where access control has been applied, it has typically been based on a formal membership criterion, such as a user account on a university’s network. ELAR’s goal is to provide an archive that is more closely tied to the needs of those working with endangered languages, and, of course, the needs of members of speech communities. Nathan reports on how this has emerged as a rich area of exploration, and, coupled with the rise of social networking applications and conventions over the last five years, has yielded a system that highlights the nuanced dynamics of access.

13 Judith Aston and Paul Matthews discuss the outcomes of a collaborative project between the authors and the Oxford-based anthropologist Wendy James. The authors report on their work with James to convert a collection of recordings into an accessible and usable digital archive that has relevance for contemporary users. Aston and Matthews describe James’ fieldwork recordings from the Blue Nile Region of the Sudan-Ethiopian borderlands, which consist of spoken memories, interviews, conversations, myths and songs. Most of the original recordings are in the Uduk language, but the collection also contains material in other minority tongues, as well as national languages. The authors highlight how this archive needs to be useful both to academics and to a wider general public, but also, and most particularly, to the people themselves who are now starting to document and recall their own experiences. It is also important that the materials contained within the archive are perceived to be part of a wider set of regional records from north-east Africa, linked to diaspora communities now living in various parts of the world.

14 A key issue that emerges from Aston and Matthews’ collaboration with James is the need to remain true to the fluidity of oral tradition over time, in order to avoid fossilisation and misrepresentation. Their chapter recommends a conversational approach through which the archive can reveal the interactions and silences of informants, both in conversation with each other and with the ethnographer, at different historical periods. In developing such an approach, the authors hope that future users of the archive will be offered an opportunity to enter a sensory-rich world of experiences, one which foregrounds the awareness and agency of the people themselves and allows their voices to be heard in their vernacular language wherever possible.

Part II: Engagements and Reflections from the Field

15 Merolla, Ameka and Dorvlo open this volume’s collection of field reports with a discussion of the scientific and ethical problems regarding the selection, authorship and audience that they encountered during a video-documentation research project on Ewe oral literature in south-eastern Ghana. Their documentation is based on an interview that Dorvlo and Merolla recorded in Accra in 2007. This interview concerns Ewe migration stories and is included in Merolla and Leiden University’s Verba Africana series that includes videos of African oral genres with translations and interpretive commentaries informed by scientific research. The authors illustrate how the documentation and investigation of African oral genres is still largely based on materials provided in written form, although nowadays it is largely accepted that collecting and analysing printed transcriptions and translations only gives a faint portrait of oral poems and tales and their literary and social functions.

16 This chapter offers an insight into the difficulties of selecting video documentation on Ewe migration stories that is suitable to be presented to a broad audience of academics, students, a public interested in African oral genres, and those involved with cultural issues or invested in specific linguistic traditions. Merolla, Ameka and Dorvlo also enter into a larger debate that is active in all disciplines in which fieldwork is a central activity: the relationship between researchers and the researched, and the locus of responsibility for what is produced and published. The authors conclude by reflecting on the yet harder questions of ownership that arise when scholars make use of audio-visual media and when the final video document is available on the Internet. They offer elegant solutions by considering individual as well as collective indigenous peoples’ rights, and advocate for stronger collaborations between researchers, performers and audience. The authors conclude by demonstrating how their own research strategies have resulted in culturally significant video documents that offer a contemporary snapshot of local knowledge.

17 Margaret Field’s account focuses on the importance of American Indian oral literature for cultural identity and language revitalisation, demonstrated through the analysis of a trickster tale. Taking the position that oral literature such as narrative and song often serve as important cultural resources that retain and reinforce cultural values and group identity, Field demonstrates how American Indian trickster tales — like Aesop’s fables found in Europe — contain moral content, and are typically aimed at child audiences. In this chapter, Field discusses an example of this genre with specific reference to the Kumeyaay community of Baja California, Mexico. She also describes how such stories are an important form of cultural property that index group identity: once through the code that is used, and then again through the content of the narrative itself. Field demonstrates how oral traditions such as trickster tales form an important body of knowledge that not only preserves cultural values and philosophical orientations, but also continues to instill these values in listeners.

18 Considering the uses of her own fieldwork, Field explains that American Indian communities typically view their oral traditions as communal intellectual property. It is therefore incumbent upon researchers who work with traditional texts in oral communities to collaborate to ensure that collected texts are treated in a manner that is appropriate from the perspective of the communities of origin. Field reminds us that it is essential for researchers to bear in mind the relationship between the recording, publication, and archiving of oral literature, community preferences regarding these aspects of research, and considerations relating to language revitalisation. Her message is particularly relevant today in light of the wide availability of multimedia and the ever-expanding capabilities for the archiving of oral literature. Through technological advancements, such recordings may be more available than ever in a range of formats (audio and video in addition to print), and ever more important (and political), as indigenous languages become increasingly endangered. Field concludes by demonstrating how her research materials were repatriated to the Kumayaay community in the form of educational resources and as reminders of cultural identity.

19 Jorge Gómez Rendón continues the discussion on revitalisation practices in the cultural heritage sector through his account of orality and literacy among indigenous cultures in Ecuador, paying close attention to contextual political factors and challenges. While Ecuador is the smallest of the Andean nations, it is linguistically highly diverse. Rendón explains that education programmes have not yet produced written forms of indigenous languages in Ecuador, which are now critically endangered. However, a resurgence of ethnic pride combined with increasing interest shown by governmental agencies in the safeguarding of cultural diversity are bringing native languages and oral practices to the foreground. This greater visibility is opening up new ways for linguistic identities to be politically managed.

20 After a review of the relative vitality of Ecuadorian indigenous languages and an evaluation of twenty years of intercultural bilingual education, Rendón focuses on two alternative approaches to orality in the fields of bilingual education and intangible cultural heritage. In discussing these two approaches, he addresses several ethical and legal issues concerning property rights, the dissemination of documentation outcomes, and the appropriation of intangible cultural heritage for the improvement of indigenous education. He provides a preliminary exploration into best practices in the archiving and management of digital materials for educational and cultural purposes in community contexts, through which Rendón proposes a “new model of intercultural bilingual education” and “safeguarding of intangible heritage […] respecting [performers’] property rights from a collective rather than individual perspective” (page 79, this volume) with the aim of ensuring the survival of endangered languages and cultures.

21 Madan Meena’s field report is based on his archiving experiences as a grantee of the World Oral Literature Project’s fieldwork grants scheme. His focal recording was made in Thikarda village in south-eastern Rajasthan — a region locally known as Hadoti — and was performed in the Hadoti language in a distinct singing style. Geographically, the area is very large (24,923 square kilometers), and there are many variations in the style of performance. Meena offers an account of his experience recording the twenty-hour Hadoti ballad of Tejaji, describing the challenges he faced in capturing the entire ballad in a manner that was as authentic as possible. Meena reports how, in the past, the ballad could only be performed at a shrine in response to a snake bite. Increasingly, however, as the belief systems behind the ballad are being challenged by education and Western medical techniques of treating snake bites, the ballad is becoming divorced from its religious roots and evolving into a distinct musical tradition of its own that can be performed at festivals for entertainment value. Meena describes the use of the project’s resultant digital recordings by community members to popularise their traditional performances, using MP3 players and mobile phone handsets to listen to recordings. He reflects on the invaluable nature of digital technology in preserving oral cultures, alongside the threats posed by these same technological developments to more traditional performance of oral traditions.

22 In the final field report of this volume, Ha Mingzong, Ha Mingzhu and Charles K. Stuart describe their research on the Mongghul (Monguor, Tu) Ha Clan oral history tradition in Qinghai and Gansu provinces, China. The authors provide historical details on the Mongghul ethnic group, and justify the urgency of their fieldwork to record and preserve the cultural heritage and historical knowledge of Mongghul elders. As well as knowing a rich repertoire of songs, folktales and cultural expressions, these elders are the “last group able to repeat generationally transmitted knowledge about clan origins, migration routes, settlement areas, important local figures, […] clan genealogy, […], modes of livelihood, [and] relationships local people had with government” (page 94, this volume). Recognition is given to the importance of documenting such knowledge for the future benefit of younger generations.

23 Mingzong, Mingzhu and Stuart describe their method of recording interviews about family stories told by community members. Local reactions to their recording methods are explained, with the assurance that the fieldworkers were met with hospitality and a shared sense of the importance of the documentation from older community members, despite an initially indifferent attitude from younger members of the community. The authors provide examples of their transcriptions of interviews and demonstrate how the return of digital versions of the recordings to the community has strengthened the sense of clan unity and belonging.

Openness, access and connectivity

24 As editors of this volume, we are delighted to bring together these important contributions that reflect on the ethical practices of anthropological and linguistic fieldwork, digital archiving, and the repatriation of cultural materials. We believe that the widest possible dissemination of such work will help support the propagation of best practices to all who work in these fields. The open access publishing model practiced by our partners in this series, the Cambridge-based Open Book Publishers, is designed to ensure that these chapters are widely and freely accessible for years to come, on a range of different publishing platforms.

5 See http://www.openbookpublishers.com/ [Accessed 22 April 2013].

25 Open Book Publishers are experimental and innovative, changing the nature of the traditional academic book: publishing in hardback, paperback, PDF and e-book editions, but also offering a free online edition that can be read via their website. 5 Their commitment to open access dovetails with our Project’s mandate to widen the dissemination of knowledge, ideas, and access to cultural traditions. Connecting with a broader audience — one that was historically disenfranchised by the exclusivity of print and the restrictive distribution networks that favoured Western readers — allows the protection of cultural knowledge. This is achieved through a better understanding of human diversity, and the return of digitised collections to source communities and countries of origin. The chapters in this volume help us to understand each stage of this journey, from building cooperative relationships with community representatives in the field, designing and using digital tools for cultural documentation, through to the ethical and practical considerations involved in building access models for digital archives.

6 Published in London by Edward Arnold.

26 When Edward Morgan Forster ended his 1910 novel Howards End with the powerful epigraph “Only connect...” he could not have imagined how this exhortation would resonate with generations to come and how its meaning would change. 6 For our purposes, both in this edited collection and in our work more generally in the World Oral Literature Project, “only connect” has a powerful, double meaning. First, and perhaps overwhelmingly for young audiences and readers, it implies that one is on the path to being digitally hooked up, wired (although in an increasingly wireless world, even the term “wired” is antiquated), and ready to participate in a virtual, online conversation. Since most of our transactions and communications in the Project are digital — through email, websites, voice-over Internet Protocol, and file share applications — “only connect” reflects our fast changing world and new work practices. Second, and perhaps more profoundly, “only connect” is what we hope to achieve when we share recordings of oral literature in print, on air and online. Connectivity is all: our project would not exist without the technical underpinnings and the philosophical imperative to see information and knowledge shared. We hope that you enjoy reading this volume as much as we have enjoyed editing it and that you will, quite simply, connect.

27 Cambridge, November 2012

3 See the Digital Return research network for more discussion on these issues: http://digitalreturn.wsu.edu [Accessed 19 November 2012].

Du même auteur

• Afterword: Sharing Located in Searching for Sharing , , 2017
• Preface in Long Narrative Songs from the Mongghul of Northeast Tibet , , 2017
• 15. Indigenous Language Resurgence and the Living Earth Community in Living Earth Community , , 2020
• Tous les textes
• Oral Literature in the Digital Age , , 2013

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY 4.0 . Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Archiving Orality and Connecting with Communities

Vérifiez si votre institution a déjà acquis ce livre : authentifiez-vous à OpenEdition Freemium for Books. Vous pouvez suggérer à votre bibliothèque/établissement d’acquérir un ou plusieurs livres publié(s) sur OpenEdition Books. N'hésitez pas à lui indiquer nos coordonnées : OpenEdition - Service Freemium [email protected] 22 rue John Maynard Keynes Bat. C - 13013 Marseille France Vous pouvez également nous indiquer à l'aide du formulaire suivant les coordonnées de votre institution ou de votre bibliothèque afin que nous les contactions pour leur suggérer l’achat de ce livre.

Merci, nous transmettrons rapidement votre demande à votre bibliothèque.

Volume papier

Référence électronique du chapitre, référence électronique du livre, collez le code html suivant pour intégrer ce livre sur votre site..

OpenEdition est un portail de ressources électroniques en sciences humaines et sociales.

• OpenEdition Journals
• OpenEdition Books
• OpenEdition Freemium
• Mentions légales
• Politique de confidentialité
• Gestion des cookies
• Signaler un problème

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• African Literatures
• Asian Literatures
• British and Irish Literatures
• Latin American and Caribbean Literatures
• North American Literatures
• Oceanic Literatures
• Slavic and Eastern European Literatures
• West Asian Literatures, including Middle East
• Western European Literatures
• Ancient Literatures (before 500)
• Middle Ages and Renaissance (500-1600)
• Enlightenment and Early Modern (1600-1800)
• 19th Century (1800-1900)
• 20th and 21st Century (1900-present)
• Children’s Literature
• Cultural Studies
• Film, TV, and Media
• Literary Theory
• Non-Fiction and Life Writing
• Print Culture and Digital Humanities
• Theater and Drama
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Oral culture: literacy, religion, performance.

• Cara Anne Kinnally Cara Anne Kinnally Department of Spanish, Purdue University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.437
• Published online: 25 January 2019

While cultural critics and historians have demonstrated that print culture was an essential tool in the development of national, regional, and local communal identities in Latin América, the role of oral culture, as a topic of inquiry and a source itself, has been more fraught. Printed and hand-written texts often leave behind tangible archival evidence of their existence, but it can be more difficult to trace the role of oral culture in the development of such identities. Historically, Western society has deeply undervalued oral cultures, especially those practiced or created by non-Westerners and non-elites. Even before the arrival of the first printing presses to the Americas, starting with the very first encounters between Spaniards and indigenous peoples in the Americas in the late-15th and early-16th centuries, European conquerors understood and portrayed European alphabetic written script as a more legitimate, and therefore more valuable, form of history and knowledge-making than oral forms. Those cultures without alphabetic writing were deemed barbaric, according to this logic. Despite its undervaluation, oral culture was one of the principal ways in which vast numbers of Latinas/os were exposed to, engaged with, and exchanged ideas about politics, religion, social change, and local and regional community identity during the colonial period. In particular, oral culture often offers the perspective of underrepresented voices, such as those of peasants, indigenous communities, afro-Latinas/os, women, and the urban poor, in Latina/o historical, literary, and cultural studies. During the colonial period especially, many of these communities often did not produce their own European script writing or find their perspectives and experiences illuminated in the writings of the letrados , or lettered elites, and their voices thus remain largely excluded from the print archive. Studies of oral culture offer a corrective to this omission, since it was through oral cultural practices that many of these communities engaged with, contested, and redefined the public discourses of their day.

Oral culture in the colonial period comprised a broad range of rich cultural and artistic practices, including music, various types of poetry and balladry, oral history, legend, performance, religious rituals, ceremonies, festivals, and much more. These practices served as a way to remember and share ideas, values, and experiences both intraculturally and interculturally, as well as across generations. Oral culture also changes how the impact of print culture is understood, since written texts were often disseminated to the masses through oral practices. In the missions of California and the present-day US Southwest, for example, religious plays served as one of the major vehicles for the forced education and indoctrination of indigenous communities during the colonial period. To understand such a play, it is important to consider not just the printed text but also the performance of the play, as well as the ways in which the audience understands and engages with the play and its religious teachings. The study of oral culture in the Latina/o context, therefore, includes an examination of how literate, illiterate, and semi-literate Latinas/os have engaged with, resisted, or repurposed various written forms, such as poetry, letters, theater, testimonios , juridical documents, broadsides, political treatises, religious texts, and the sermon, through oral cultural practices and with various objectives in mind. Oral culture, in all of its many forms, has thus served as an important means for the circulation of knowledge and the expression of diverse world views for Latinas/os throughout the colonial period and into the 21st century.

• oral culture
• indigeneity
• colonial Latin America
• performance

Colonizing Language(s)

Throughout the colonial period and into the independence movements of late 18th and early 19th century Latin America, to lay claim to or create a written history meant to possess knowledge and to be part of civilization and progress, according to European standards. In both North and South America, the lack of a written language served as an affirmation of the barbarism of indigenous communities and, therefore, a justification for their subjugation at the hands of supposedly more advanced colonizers. In the early years of contact between Europe and indigenous America, Columbus and other European explorers often portrayed indigenous peoples as not possessing language (sometimes even oral language). 1 Similarly, Europeans often failed to recognize indigenous forms of writing, graphic representation, and visual and tactile arts as forms of communication; more often they portrayed these societies as lacking in such forms. 2 When forms of writing or graphic representation were acknowledged, European colonizers often labeled them evil and heretical. 3 In the Andean region, for example, Spanish authorities attempted to destroy images of pre-Hispanic myths as a way of controlling and redirecting the religious beliefs of the indigenous population. 4 In what is now Mexico, Diego de Landa, one of the first Franciscan missionaries to arrive to the Yucatán peninsula in the mid- 16th century , is well known for having burned huge collections of Maya codices. According to him and many other missionaries, these writings promoted idolatry and represented the words of the devil. At the same time, Diego de Landa was intensely interested in chronicling pre-Hispanic Maya culture and history; in effect, he replaced indigenous texts with his own texts and versions of Maya understandings of their world. As Diego de Landa’s actions highlight, Spaniards recognized the power of indigenous languages and forms of writing, while simultaneously working to destroy and replace them. To rename a place in the Spanish (or Portuguese) language or to retell a story in translation in a European tongue meant not only to silence indigenous voices and languages, but also to take possession of those lands and indigenous ways of knowing the world.

European script writing and printed texts served not only as a justification for colonization over those communities that did not possess such forms of communication but also as a colonizing tool. In The Lettered City , influential Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama showed how, in colonial Latin American spaces, letrados (urban lettered elites), constructed, imposed, and maintained a European ideal of the city and of the society that would inhabit it. This European ideal city was imagined through their writing and was set in opposition to “all local expressions of particularity, imagination, or invention.” 5 Through their writing, letrados facilitated “the concentration and hierarchical differentiation of power” in the colonies, and carried out the empire’s civilizing mission. 6 This involved establishing and maintaining colonial administrative units; evangelizing and overseeing the transculturation of millions of indigenous people; and spreading the ideological propaganda of the Catholic Church and the monarchy to the masses. 7 All of this was done through the writing of the letrados . Letrados , who were almost exclusively men, not only transmitted ideological messages and cultural models from monarchs or administrative heads in Europe to the masses in the Americas, they also helped to produce and maintain these messages and models, and to transform their societies through these processes. The ability to read and write—specifically in a European tongue—led to a fetishization of European languages and literacy during the colonial period and later. 8 Writing, linked to both ecclesiastical and royal authority in the colonial period, took on an almost sacred aura in Latin America.

In other words, writing in European languages, starting in the colonial period and lasting through at least until the early 19th century , was a central way in which European powers established and maintained their control, not only over the land, but also over the minds of the people of Latin America. Language and writing, memory and archiving, along with other representational forms such as cartography, were vital technologies of colonization. 9 Replacing indigenous languages with European vernaculars, whether written or oral, was an attempt not only to obliterate the production of knowledge in the native tongue, but also to deny recognition of indigenous languages as languages through erasure of the history of their very existence.

Orality and the Canon

During the colonial period in Latin America, Spanish and Portuguese imperial authorities, with the help of letrados , established and maintained a rigid hierarchy of power through their use of the written (European) text. The fetishization of writing in both colonial and ecclesiastical enterprises in Latin American established the power and legitimacy of European languages (Spanish and Portuguese) and also diminished the prestige and power of indigenous and creole languages and other local, oral and performative forms of expression, which were rarely seen as valid forms of knowledge or worthy of inclusion in the archive.

It is important to note that, during this same time period, another linguistic hierarchy of power was emerging within the Western world that placed Northern European languages on a higher plane than Spanish and Portuguese. Toward the beginning of the 17th century there was a reorientation of philosophical and scientific discourses towards certain languages—English, German, and French—that established these as the languages of modernity and their associated cultures as the heart of Europe. 10 As the power of the Spanish and Portuguese empires further declined in the 18th and early 19th centuries , they and their empires were seen in Europe and the Americas as non-modern empires, or as communities perpetually “late” to modernity, never fully achieving “true” or “authentic” modernity. The supposed backwardness of the Spanish and Portuguese empires became increasingly seen as a cultural and racial degeneracy, a discourse that was, in turn, internalized as an inferiority complex by elites throughout Latin America. 11 As the colonial period waned, Spanish and Portuguese languages became progressively understood as markers of a lack of modernity and of racial inferiority—a sign of subalternity—in the Western world. And American indigenous and creole languages, the subaltern of the subaltern, became that much more stigmatized, further marginalizing communities that did not have access to or knowledge of a written European language, even if a stigmatized one. 12 Thus, in colonial Latin America, language, written and spoken, was an important component of identity and a marker of one’s place within incredibly complex regional as well as international hierarchies of privilege and power.

Although writing and European languages remained a vital weapon of colonialism in the Americas, for the vast majority of Latinas/os, oral/aural practices and creative forms were the central way in which they participated in, changed, contested, and helped to create public discourse throughout the colonial period. Written texts created and sustained official discourse, but individuals and communities used oral cultural forms to record and create local histories, participate in politics, voice concerns, and contest (or reinforce) elite discourses. While written or printed texts capture the words, thoughts, and worldviews of mostly European or European-identifying elites, the vision of public discourses contained within such written texts is partial at best. Texts produced primarily by and for elites did not often directly reflect the voices of the majority of Latinas/os, especially non-elite communities and individuals—those who were indigenous, Afro-mestizo, female, not Spanish-speaking, or poor. These texts also did not capture the ways in which communities—both letrados and those who could not read—understood, engaged with, circulated, changed, and repurposed the ideas contained in such texts.

The fetishization in Western society of the printed text, the archive, and European vernaculars has led to oral culture being frequently understudied and undervalued in Latina/o cultural studies, despite the vibrancy, longevity, and centrality of oral culture to Latina/o cultural production throughout the colonial period. In addition, to create an opposition between print and oral culture is misleading, as these forms were constantly altered by one another and always in conversation with one another. Even those people who could not read or write still engaged in other ways with various written forms—such as poetry, letters, testimonios , political essays, religious texts, histories, theater, sermons, and governmental publications—through oral (and aural) cultural practices.

Although print culture was produced almost exclusively by elites in the colonial period, and the written word was seen and understood in quasi-religious terms, the division between print culture and oral culture was not clear cut. While reading in the early 21st century is largely considered a solitary endeavor, in colonial Latin America, texts were written with the explicit knowledge that such texts would circulate orally among the vast majority of the population—that reading, in other words, was a communal endeavor. 13 Indeed, texts from the time period cannot be fully understood without also considering how print culture and oral/aural culture worked together to produce meaning in and through such texts, as well as outside of the texts. Furthermore, to limit the study of Latina/o literature, culture, and history to the written word means to reproduce “the historical violence of a lettered elite that counted as texts only those written in Spanish and Portuguese; that is, literary history in the past reproduced the colonial power installed by the colonial model and continued by the internalized colonialism of nation-builders.” 14 The study of oral culture, as well as the ways that oral and print culture functioned as complements of one another to create meaning for readers, listeners, and other participants, can shed light on the experiences and worldviews of the vast masses of Latinas/os during the colonial period and can open up new avenues of inquiry that question colonial power as all-encompassing.

Literacy and Education

Literacy rates remained woefully low throughout the colonial period and well into the 19th century in all of Latin America—only about 10 percent (or perhaps even less) of the inhabitants in Spanish America, for example, were considered literate by the beginning of the 19th century . 15 School attendance rates were even lower, with 1 percent or less of the population participating in formal education in many regions of Latin America in the first half of the 19th century . 16 But these literacy and school attendance rates tell only a partial story of how texts and ideas circulated and were understood by Latinas/os in the colonial period. Indeed, to rely solely upon literacy rates (or even more dangerously, school attendance rates) ignores the multifaceted ways in which communities engaged with, changed, and manipulated the written word and written texts. 17 It also ignores the many types and gradations of literacy that existed; many Latinas/os who could read, for example, could not write. 18 And lastly, these statistics discount non-European, oral, and performative forms of communication, knowledge production, and memory-making.

Despite the fact that people engaged with texts in a diversity of ways other than through private or solitary reading, however, literacy rates were understood as important markers of the level of development and modernization of a community from the Renaissance forward. Education and literacy (and specifically, literacy in a European language) were seen and portrayed as a means toward “civilizing” and “enlightening” the masses in the Western world. 19

Education was also one of the primary endeavors of the earliest missionaries in Latin America, and remained a central concern for Latinas/os even after independence—although formal education, especially higher education, was reserved for a tiny minority of elites, even throughout most of the 19th century . 20 In Spanish America in the 19th century , for example, education was understood a way of freeing Latinas/os from the supposed ignorance in which they had lived for centuries under oppressive Spanish colonial rule. It is significant that many of Latin America’s earliest statesmen, such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in Argentina, were also educators, because it emphasizes just how important education was understood to be for new Latin American nations during their first decades of independence. Education was seen as fundamental to the building of a new nation. Accordingly, the goals of statesmen and educators overlapped: the construction of a new nation and an educated citizenry. Latina/o travelers in the 19th century invariably commented in their travel narratives upon the educational systems of the places they visited, frequently comparing them to the systems in their home countries and using them as a yardstick to gauge the supposed modernization of that other country, and their own, through comparison. In what is now the US Southwest, in the early decades of annexation and incorporation into the United States in the late 19th century , Latinas/os similarly saw education as proof of their right to be included as full citizens within the United States, and they used their local presses to educate their Latina/o communities. 21 Latinas/os thereby internalized these European standards of literacy and education as measurements of the level of civilization of both individuals and communities, and of their worthiness or suitability for full citizenship in their national communities.

Further evidence of this concern with education is provided by the rapidity with which schools and universities were established throughout Latin America. Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492 , and only ten years later, the first missionary and convent schools were already being founded. 22 During the colonial period in Latin America, higher education was controlled by the Catholic Church and was reserved for elites. One of the main goals of such institutions was to create good Christians who were faithful to both Catholicism and the Crown. Indeed, the conquest of what is today Latin America was just as much a spiritual as a military conquest; the political and the religious were densely intertwined. The intellectual education of European-identifying elites prepared them, as letrados , to be the leaders of their local communities, and to manage and sustain Spain’s colonizing project in the Americas. Educating and indoctrinating the elite Latin American youth in a European-style university, in European culture, and from a European viewpoint, also worked as safeguards to the hegemonic power of both the Church and the Crown.

Evangelization and Education

The Church’s other principal endeavor related to education in the New World, and the one that relates most directly to discussions of oral culture, was to evangelize the indigenous masses—to teach them about and convert them to Christianity. Literacy in European alphabetic script was a part of the education of native populations during the early colonial period—especially for elite indigenous who came from noble families, since it was necessary to incorporate indigenous elites into European culture to advance the acculturation process and involve indigenous leaders in that process. 23 But the vast majority of evangelizing, intended for the indigenous masses, was carried out through oral culture, especially public rituals, song, theater, and other sorts of performances. This sort of education was intended to indoctrinate indigenous communities in European language, culture, history, and, most importantly, Christianity, while simultaneously working to strip away indigenous religious beliefs, languages, cultures, and ways of life.

In central Mexico, for example, where Franciscan missionaries were some of the first Spaniards to seek to evangelize indigenous communities in the Americas, poetry, music, singing, processions, festivals, and theater served as principal ways in which they sought to convert the indigenous to Christianity and indoctrinate them in the Spanish language and culture. In fact, this was not a practice first attempted in the New World, as there is evidence that Franciscans had used scriptural plays as part of their evangelical endeavors in Europe since the emergence of their order, and that they had used European vernacular religious dramas since the middle ages for evangelical and educational purposes. 24 The friars used music, lyric, and drama to make scripture more tangible and relevant to the daily life of ordinary people. 25 Although the content of such practices was not always recorded in the archives, the ubiquity of archival references to the existence of improvised dramas, music, and other sorts of performance illustrates how important oral cultural forms were in both Europe and the Americas, for both literate and illiterate alike, prior to and up through the 19th century .

In their new American context, Spanish missionaries quickly recognized the discursive and ideological power of public performance and theater, particularly when communication was difficult. Supporting elements, such as the visual and the gestural, along with “music, regulated bodily engagement, group performance, images of santos , and ritual care of sacred spaces” were obviously useful for reinforcing complex religious dogma, especially when language could not always be relied upon. 26 Public ritual had also held a vital role in many pre-conquest societies, and missionaries capitalized on this fact, realizing that one of the most effective ways to attract large numbers of indigenous to Christianity was through the continuance of the tradition of public ritual performance in the form of songs, dance, plays, and processions. 27 Spanish missionaries also might have been seeking a way to “transplant some of Spain’s own traditions of public religious celebrations to fill the terrible void that the suppression of pre-Hispanic rituals had left behind.” 28 There is evidence, for example, that some Spanish priests imitated native oral literary genres and patterns in their written sermons, because they were aware of their Indian audience’s appreciation for these forms of expression. 29 And Franciscan missionaries in Central Mexico promoted the rhythmic singing of prayers in unison, often accompanied by musical instruments, thereby creating a more intensive and memorable experience, but also in the process transforming “the doctrinal text from its script status into the somatic and densely aesthetic experience of group intoning.” 30 In this way, Spanish missionaries used oral, ritualistic, and performative genres to facilitate indigenous acceptance of new Christian and European cultural content, since the form in which these new ideas were delivered was already familiar to and respected by their indigenous audiences.

In the hands of Spanish conquistadors and missionaries in the Americas, evangelization was carried out for the indigenous masses through these types of didactic oral/aural and physical/bodily experiences, and often by establishing connections—not discontinuities—with pre-Hispanic religious and cultural practices and beliefs. 31 Spaniards capitalized upon the discursive and cultural power of such forms and used them to their own ends. In the northern frontiers of New Spain (present-day New Mexico and Arizona), for example, one of the very first things that newly arrived friars and Spanish conquistadors did when they reached the banks of the Río Grande in 1598 was, significantly, to produce and perform dramas depicting the defeat of indigenous communities at the hands of Spanish conquistadors as well as autos sacramentales , didactic religious plays based on biblical narratives and popular Christian traditions. Through repetition of these didactic plays and performances, Spaniards created a historical consciousness among the Pueblo Indians of their own conquest, humiliation, and subsequent embrace of Christianity. 32 The purpose of such performances “was to indoctrinate the Indians with a highly ideological view of the conquest, simultaneously forging in their minds a historical consciousness of their own vanquishment and subordination from the Spanish point of view.” 33 Even though this was a historical fabrication by the Spaniards, through the ritualistic repetition of such didactic plays, Pueblo Indians eventually internalized the Spaniards’ messages and vision of their own history. Through their use of theater, Spaniards thus “inculcated into the Pueblo Indians a historical consciousness of their own defeat.” 34 Furthermore, such performances taught the Pueblo Indians “the meaning of their own defeat, of Spanish sovereignty, and of the social hierarchies under Christian rule.” 35

Evangelization and religious indoctrination, like many others form of education, was a double-edged sword: it suppressed indigenous cultures, ways of knowing, and expression, but it also, sometimes, established continuities between that past and the colonial present, thereby often helping to preserve certain elements of non-European cultures. Similarly, while a reading of the early colonial religious texts and a consideration of their evangelizing purpose rightly confirms the ways in which written language was used as a weapon of colonization, a deeper consideration of the ways in which the text circulated and was used, performed, changed, and understood among a variety of people—Spanish clerics, indigenous actors, or indigenous audience members—reveals the complex ways in which oral cultural forms, such as drama and ritual performance, could also be used as forms of resistance to colonization and domination.

Oral Culture, Performance, and Resistance

Spaniards employed oral cultural forms in their colonial evangelical endeavors throughout Spanish America, but it is also important to consider how indigenous and mestizo, or mixed race, Americans actually understood, altered, and re-employed these forms for their own purposes, sometimes as forms of resistance—although not always a form of resistance that was recognizable to Spanish ecclesiastical or governmental authorities or that was perhaps not even a conscious choice on the part of such communities and individuals.

Mexico and the northern Mexican regions (present-day US Southwest) once again provide poignant examples of the complexity of evangelical theater during the colonial period. While originally only Spaniards performed in the didactic theatrical performances addressed to indigenous audiences, playing the roles of both Spanish conquistadors and vanquished Indians, eventually the production and enactment of the performance was handed over to indigenous actors, who performed the roles of both conquerer (Spaniard) and conquered (indigenous). These sorts of performances thereby gave indigenous communities the chance to manage public space again, incorporate new meanings into the plays, and possibly encode hidden messages of resistance for their indigenous audience. 36 Moreover, the written texts that have survived cannot communicate the ways in which indigenous actors might have used comic gestures, altered word play, or engaged in burlesque behavior during the performance to invert or undermine messages in the original text for their indigenous audiences. 37 In sum, while such spectacles had explicit didactic purposes, they also provided opportunities for indigenous actors and their audiences to “reactivate, if not reaffirm, their collective memory and to embody many of their cultural categories and values.” 38 Embodied performances, in other words, had the power to transmit and create knowledge, preserve social memory, and foster communal identity, often contradicting the original content or purpose of the text that was being performed. 39

In New Spain, Nahuas already had a strong tradition of communal ritual performance, and the continuation of this tradition, albeit in a forever altered form, could be understood as a way of maintaining pre-Hispanic forms of community expression. Paradoxically, then, indigenous performances in New Spain were “transferred and reproduced within the very symbolic system designed to eliminated them: Roman Catholicism.” 40 In other locales across Latin American, research has shown the ways in which indigenous culture was preserved within other cultural forms, such as poetry, religious festivals, dance, and music—in other words, how syncretism became a dominant feature of Latin American culture, especially in religious practices and beliefs. 41 Although ecclesiastical or governmental authorities might not have fully recognized the continued presence of indigenous culture and beliefs in such practices, indigenous communities used such forms of syncretism, consciously or not, to preserve essential aspects of their community’s culture and identity, thereby resisting complete domination and erasure.

Festivals offered additional didactic opportunities for ecclesiastical as well as political authorities. Reasons for having a festival, which often took place over several days, included the celebration of a patron saint’s feast day, the ascension of a new king or ruler, celebrations in honor of regal authorities (such as the viceroy), holy days, and other similar events or dates. Such festivals and feast days, similar to theatrical performances, offered opportunities for syncretic expression—both appeasement of ecclesiastical and European political authorities and maintenance of (some) non-European beliefs and practices. For instance, El divino narciso ( 1690 ), an auto sacramental written for the feast of Corpus Christi by the celebrated Mexican nun and writer, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, employs syncretism of Hispanic and indigenous cultural and linguistic features. 42 Other dramas dedicated to the Virgin of Copacabana and the Virgin of Guadalupe—similarly mixing Hispanic and indigenous culture, language, and images—were performed in public squares for a predominantly indigenous public in a plethora of locales. 43

In the Andean region, to give another example, such festivals established the importance and maintained the vitality of indigenous oral traditions by including theater and dialogue, including performances in Quechua. 44 Grand festivals such as the festival of Corpus Christi involved theatrical performances, both secular and religious, with the secular plays performed in coliseums and playhouses and the religious performed in churches or church plazas; processions; parades; mascaradas , masquerades or nocturnal parades in which the participants dressed up in disguises and costumes; bull fights; games; fireworks; chariot races; and other street performances. 45 Indigenous masses participated in and often dominated the street performances and mascaradas . Furthermore, they incorporated their own cultural and religious components into such festivities by continuing certain pre-Hispanic forms of creative and religious expression, sometimes in their native tongue, and by using such opportunities to challenge colonial ecclesiastical and political authorities through mimicry, humor, burlesque acting, and other forms of oral and visual subversion. Although there are few surviving textual records of the exact content of many such street processions/performances, mascaradas , or plays (especially in Quechua or other indigenous languages), the archives do mention the abundance of such activities, further confirming their importance and popularity in the colonial period. 46

Other sorts of oral and bodily performances were used in festivals throughout Latin America and displayed religious and cultural syncretism, with layers of meaning that would have been intelligible in distinct ways for different audience members (indigenous versus Spanish, for example). In central Mexico, during pre-colonial times indigenous communities performed popular and ritual dances as dramatized performances, accompanied by dialogues and speeches. 47 While many missionaries tried to ban these after the conquest, they just as often adapted them to the new Christian pantheon, thus allowing indigenous communities to maintain pre-Hispanic performative and oral cultural expressions, although now mixed with Hispanic religious content. 48

In the Caribbean, where indigenous communities were largely exterminated, oral forms of expression similarly came to be a way of preserving African religion, culture, languages, and beliefs, while also helping to create new syncretic cultures and forms of expression. In this context, Afro-Latinas/os fused African religions and Catholic beliefs in their worship of African deities; they predominantly used creole languages to do so, conducting their worship orally, through songs, incantations, and spells. 49 Their religious practices and the very language they used to maintain them are examples of syncretism. Thus, even as European masters suppressed African culture and forced African slaves to acculturate, African slaves (and, later, freed Afro-Latinas/os) employed the colonial languages of their masters as well as creole languages as forms of liberation, and as a means to retain features and beliefs of their original African cultures. Afro-Latinas/os also used music to preserve many aspects of African culture, even when that music was ostensibly being used in Christian ceremonies or rituals. Drums, or the use of drum-like beats and rhythms when drums were not available, for example, have been recognized as a form of writing and communication maintained by Afro-Latinas/os. 50 Drumming, or “drum writing,” was (and is) a form of ritual performance that maintained a connection with the African past of Afro-descendants in Latin American. 51 It also functioned as way of transmitting information that would not have been understood in the same way, if at all, by slave masters. Even when participating in and seemingly adapting to Christian religious practices, then, Afro-Latinas/os used various forms of oral performance, especially music and song, to maintain African culture, to communicate with other Afro-Latinas/os, and to preserve their history and ways of knowing the world. 52

Religious festivals, feast days, and other ritual celebrations were ways for Europeans to impose a new culture and religion on marginalized groups; but when the role of the masses in such practices is looked at more closely, it becomes more apparent that such celebrations offered opportunities for marginalized communities to make these events their own—and in many cases, to mix old and new beliefs together through the incorporation of non-European or non-Christian oral cultural elements, such as music, theater, dialogue, song, poetry, dance, and other sorts of performative acts. In doing so, such communities often appeared to be participating in and accepting their own indoctrination, but they were often simultaneously maintaining their connections to pre-Hispanic or African culture and memory, while also creating new syncretic forms of expression that could potentially undermine the dominant group’s goals of indoctrination. Written texts, while important, cannot fully capture the ways in which such marginalized communities made these texts and events their own through oral as well as bodily performative acts and interpretations. To consider the possible roles of oral culture and bodily performance in such texts and spectacles opens up new layers of meaning and a deeper consideration of the ways in which marginalized communities both succumbed to and also resisted colonization and erasure.

Oral Histories and Storytelling

As first-hand connections with pre-Hispanic or African cultures died with the older generations of indigenous and Afro-mestiza/os communities, and as mestizo culture—a mixture of European, indigenous and/or African—and syncretism became more dominant during the later centuries of the colonial period in Latin America, oral performance and other cultural forms remained important ways of recording history and sharing communal experiences, culture, and history intergenerationally. Although oral culture did not have the prestige that written language did in official discourses such as governmental communications or state-sanctioned histories, it nonetheless remained a vital resource for the vast majority of Latinas/os, both elites and non-elites alike. While it is true that letrados helped to plan, imagine, and write the new cities of Latin America (along with their complex hierarchies of power), stories and storytellers helped (and help) to construct something just as important: a community’s sense of identity and belonging. 53 Scholars have long recognized the important role that 19th-century romantic novels, for example, had in the discursive founding of nations in Latin America. 54 But literary critics and historians have not always recognized the importance of oral storytelling as part of the cultural history of a community, despite the fact that orality was one of the primary ways in which communities in Latin America created and maintained their own histories and culture, given the high levels of illiteracy during the colonial period. 55 One of the principal ways in which Latinas/os have long shared stories, histories, fables, and myths about themselves and their community is through the oral performance of the storyteller or narrator, and many of these forms have had, perhaps for this reason, extremely long traditions, many of which endure to the present day.

What differentiates oral storytelling from a written tradition? To begin, there is a performative element, with an immediate audience. 56 The storyteller is both a narrator and a performer for this audience. The subject matter can vary widely in oral storytelling. However, repetition and variation are key components, in both the form and content. The story is repeated hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times, by different narrators/performers, and they often change the form of their telling and the details of the narrative slightly to fit their own ever-changing needs and those of their audiences. Oral storytelling and oral literature are in constant transition; to perform and to hear an oral story is a fleeting experience, one only fully experienced in the moment of recitation. 57 The vibrancy of oral storytelling is that, through this repetition and constant change, the story’s meaning is continually renewed and “grows, enriched by the community’s historical knowledge—interpreting, judging, analyzing, and thereby incorporating current events.” 58 Most, but not all, forms incorporate rhythm, meter, rhyme, and/or alliteration; they are often accompanied by music and sometimes dance. 59 Such features also function as a mnemonic devices for the narrator, and, later, for audience members who might repeat the story to others and themselves become storytellers.

While oral history or oral storytelling does sometimes record the events of heroes or major historical figures, it also significantly “rescues that which is the everyday thing, the transcendental, the historical past expressed by word of mouth, in the style of its various protagonists—the very universe that builds diverse histories, finally integrating them into only one, in which its makers, plain men and women, are recognized.” 60 In other words, while letrados created official visions of their communities through the written word, oral historians and storytellers recorded and disseminated stories about the everyday lived experiences of their communities, both elites and non-elites alike. They also remembered and maintained histories of their communities as told by non-elite members of their communities. Oral histories and storytelling served as forms of both individual and collective memory, as well as ways of remembering and communicating these experiences to successive generations. Oral histories and oral storytelling during the colonial period preserved connections to the culture, history, and beliefs of indigenous, African, and other marginalized groups, while also mixing orality with dominant literary forms and content, in the process creating hybrid stories that spoke about the experiences of the masses in a form that was accessible to them.

A final key component of oral history or oral storytelling is that these forms are understood by their communities as expressing the true character and values of their community; they help to define and maintain a sense of identity for their community. In this sense, oral histories largely strive to maintain, not challenge, the traditions of a community. 61 Yet it is also important to note that while such forms are conservative (of traditions) within their own communities, they are frequently performed by and representative of marginalized social groups within a larger regional or national community. Oral histories and storytelling are often a means for maintaining a marginalized community’s identity and its history, and making that history heard by the larger society.

Because of these features, oral history and oral storytelling have endured in various forms for hundreds of years in Latin America. In the Southern Cone, for example, gauchos have been improvising payadas , lyrical compositions in the form of a dialogue between two or more speakers, probably since at least the 17th century . 62 The payador , or narrator of the payadas , a “contrapuntal singer who traveled through what is now Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, and the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, was the main propagator of the oral literature that predominated in the region until the beginning of the 20th century .” 63 Like other forms of oral storytelling, payadas were lyric narratives, containing meter and rhyme, which also served as mnemonic devices for the payadores . Thus, oral, aural, and performative components were key to this genre—it is a form that should be recited or performed for an audience to be fully experienced. Improvisation, also an important component, emphasized the fluidity and malleability of the genre. Originally, the payada reflected the colloquial language and expressions of the people of these regions, mixing Spanish, indigenous words, and neologisms unique to the region. It was, in other words, a form accessible to and performed for and by non-elites. It was a radical form in that it thus celebrated the common man (it was almost exclusively dominated by men), especially the gaucho . 64 However, while the payador represented a somewhat marginal voice within the colonial societies of the Southern Cone, during the 19th and early 20th centuries his voice came to be equated with the nation and the dominant group, eventually being incorporated into written texts, thus in some ways changing the role of the payada and the payador within Southern Cone communities, while still maintaining its importance as a representative voice of community values and identity, and as an intergenerational archive of community history and culture. 65

Corridos are another prime example of the longevity, richness, and proliferation of oral storytelling for Latinas/os in the colonial period and up through today. A corrido can be recited or sung, commonly using four-lined octosyllabic strophes, with assonant or consonant rhyme in alternating verses. Like the payada , it is a lyrical-narrative genre that often contains elements of the epic. It was a popular form of storytelling for communities during the colonial period in what is today Mexico, and continues to be a popular genre today, especially in Northern Mexico and in the US-Mexico borderlands. 66 Unlike the payada , however, the corrido today tends to be associated with marginal groups. 67 It is also a hybrid form in multiple senses. The corrido , for example, has much in common with the medieval romance , or ballad, which originated in Spain and was brought over to the Americas during the colonial period. It straddles the line between history and fiction, between individual and collective representation, and between subjective memory and historical documentation, just as it snakes among multiple genres—music, lyric poetry, narrative, and history. 68 Like other forms of oral narrative, the corrido has, perhaps most importantly, been a way for marginalized communities to record their own histories and has served “mnemonically to package and pass down from generation to generation the values and the historical and cultural meaning of events that constitute a tradition” for those marginalized groups. 69

Other examples of the centrality of the oral storyteller abound across the time and space of colonial Latin America, including popular narrators such as indigenous shamans, the hablador of Peruvian Amazonia, the akpalô or negra velha of the Afro-Brazilians, and the Santería priestess of Afro-Cuban culture. 70 Oral storytelling in the colonial period served as an archive of communal history, culture, and memory. It worked to create and preserve stories that spoke to a community’s values, sense of belonging, and identity. Its power and longevity came from the fact that it functioned as an intergenerational repository of knowledge and as a fluid archive that could be changed or adapted to different circumstances with each storyteller or narrator, with different audiences, and in different historical and cultural contexts as those communities changed.

What all of these examples reveal is not only the importance of oral culture for Latinas/os in the colonial period, but also the vitality and longevity of the various expressive and creative forms of oral culture that emerged during and following the conquest in Latin America. Oral culture has been and continues to be both a ubiquitous and malleable form of expression in Latina/o cultures. It maintains traditions, as seen in the corrido or the Afro-Latina/o use of “drum writing,” but it often contests the traditions of the dominant culture. It can be used as a form of oppression, as exemplified through the use of oral culture in evangelical theater, and as a means of liberation, as illustrated through the subversive performative elements in that same theater of evangelization. It often incorporates both European and non-European elements, in the process creating new hybrid and syncretic forms of expression that demonstrate both the power of European colonialism to eradicate non-European cultures and the tenacity of these same cultures to adapt to new social and cultural contexts.

Discussion of the Literature

Various fields of study engage with Latina/o oral culture in the colonial period. Folklore and ethnography have played a vital role in studies of Latina/o oral culture. Starting with such landmark works as With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero and A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border from Américo Paredes, the Chicano public intellectual and pioneer in Border Studies and Chicano Studies, close attention has long been paid to popular culture, folk forms, and non-dominant cultural forms, including such forms as the corrido , that have their origins in oral culture. 71 This tradition continues in the 21st century with works such as John Holmes McDowell’s ¡Corrido!: The Living Ballad of Mexico’s Western Coast . 72

Work in folklore and ethnography also stimulated an intensified interest in publishing original indigenous sources from the colonial period, many of which were originally oral histories or based upon oral accounts. Miguel León-Portilla’s groundbreaking Visión de los vencidos: Relaciones indígenas de la conquista [ The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico ], for example, was one of the earlier attempts to capture, at least partially, the experiences and stories of indigenous Americans before and during the conquest and colonial period. 73 The goal of Visión de los vencidos , like other ethnohistorical works from this time period, was to retell the history of the conquest from the perspective of the colonized and, frequently, through analysis, and sometimes publication and translation, of source materials in indigenous languages. Such studies contributed to a growing scholarly interest in alternative modes of communication and knowledge production, oral histories, and, especially, indigenous voices in the early colonial period.

Starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s, specialists trained in postcolonial theory and influenced by Subaltern Studies sought to uncover the relationship between writing and colonization, as well as the less understood role of oral culture during the colonial period in Latin America. Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of the Renaissance , for example, focused on the role of European script, cartography, and literacy in the colonization of the New World. 74 Rolena Adorno’s Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru examined how marginalized communities, as represented through the figure of Guaman Poma, were able to use Spanish tools, including writing and European literary genres, for subversive purposes. 75 Starting in the 1990s and moving into the first decades of the 21st century , scholars have sought to more fully understand and uncover the role of alternative, non-European forms of both written and oral expression in newly rediscovered canonical colonial texts and creative forms of expression, while also working to break down long-held Western-centric dichotomies of literate versus illiterate, or oral versus written cultures. Numerous works on the Inca knotted khipu highlight the presence and importance of alternative forms of indigenous writing and communication. 76 Additional examples of scholarly work that examine the importance and role of alternative forms of writing and expression include Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo’s collection of essays, Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes . 77

Sometimes indirectly, many of these critical works, in their discussion of literature and writing as forms and tools of Western colonization and in their work to uncover the role of non-European forms of writing and expression, have paved the way for further analysis of the importance and influence of oral culture and for a renewed interest in the ways in which indigenous communities, especially, but also other marginalized communities, such as women and Afro-Latinas/os, contested, appeased, or integrated themselves into conquest-era and colonial societies through written and oral creative expression. The revisionist New Conquest History, for example, emerged in the 1990s and took more definite shape around the turn of the 21st century . New Conquest History expanded on previous interest in archival and paleographic recovery work that focused on indigenous voices and manuscripts. It complicated a conquest narrative that focused on Spanish conquistadors and friars by focusing instead on a multiplicity of actors and accounts from the conquest period, new source materials (often in indigenous languages), the voices of indigenous and other marginalized groups, and peripheral, understudied regions of the Americas. Important works that encapsulate new trends in New Conquest History include Laura E. Matthew and Michel R. Oudjik’s collection of essays, Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica , which demonstrates the central (not peripheral) role that Nahuas and other indigenous Mesoamerican communities played in the Spanish conquest; and Laura E. Matthew’s monograph, Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala , which similarly focuses on the indigenous allies of the Spanish during the conquest, and the enduring legacy of conquest for these allies during the colonial period. 78

While many of the scholarly texts that form a part of New Conquest History focus on written archives, in the early decades of the 21st century , scholars have further sought to question and expand the canon of early colonial Latin America by also looking more closely at performative, visual, and aural genres of expression and communication. Gary Tomlinson’s The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact , for example, uncovered the fundamental, but little recognized, role of song in the making of indigenous and colonial American worlds. 79 Lisbeth Haas’s Saints and Citizens: Indigenous Histories of Colonial Missions and Mexican California turns not only to indigenous textual archives but also to genres like dance, to more fully explore mission life, as a place of destruction and as a creation of culture from the perspective of indigenous communities. 80

Performance Studies offers another lens for reassessing the Latina/o and Latin American canon and for correcting the long-held view that printed texts and writing are the only ways of preserving culture or transmitting and creating knowledge. Although performance studies as a field of inquiry had its origins in the 1970s, it was principally starting in the 1990s that it became a prominent theoretical lens for understanding and interpreting colonial Latina/o and Latin American culture and history. Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas , for example, showed how bodily performances have served as key forms for producing and transmitting knowledge, conserving memory, and consolidating group identity. 81 Her work questions the assumed endurance of the traditional archive (literary and historical documents, written texts, etc.) and the supposedly ephemeral qualities of what she called the “repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge,” which includes spoken language, dance, sports, and ritual, among other acts. 82 Other works in Performance Studies, such as Patricia A. Ybarra’s Performing Conquest: Five Centuries of Theater, History, and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico , uncovered how performance and performative acts connect Latina/o communities across time and space, thus questioning neat disciplinary, geographic, and national categories of belonging. 83 Works in the burgeoning field of Performance Studies, such as Taylor’s and Ybarra’s, have contributed to the continuing scholarly interest in reassessing the canon of colonial Latin America and in rethinking and revising past dominant narratives of conquest, colonization, and nation formation in Latin America. Such works displace the historic role that writing has been assumed to play throughout the colonial period. They acknowledge that not only those who could (or chose to) read and write transmitted knowledge, claimed social memory, or created concepts of community and identity; and they recognize that other important forms of cultural power and knowledge-making, besides writing and reading, existed during the colonial period (and today) in communities throughout the Americas.

Within Latin American literary and cultural studies, critics have long been interested in the intimate connections between writing and orality, and between language and colonialism, with Ángel Rama’s groundbreaking study, La ciudad letrada [The Lettered City] serving as a prime example. 84 But, as this discussion of different areas of research has shown, from the 1990s to the early decades of the 21st century , scholars have critiqued, in various ways, the idea that writing and print culture were the sole ways of transmitting and creating knowledge, forming community identity, and preserving communal memories. Within Latina/o Studies, especially in the context of Latinas/os in the United States, scholars have similarly begun to more fully and critically examine the connections between the Spanish language and colonialism. This is a more recently developing field, opening up mostly in the 21st century . The situation of Latinas/os in the United States is perhaps more complex than a context in which there is one dominant culture and one (or more) cultures being colonized and repressed, as is the case of most of Spanish America, for example, with the imposition of Spanish culture and language. Spanish is both the colonizer’s language and a subversive and colonized language for Latina/o communities within the United States and more broadly within the Western world, where, since the colonial period, it has been seen as a lesser European language, a language of derivative literary production, and a marker of racial and cultural backwardness. Texts such as José Aranda’s When We Arrive: A New Literary History of Mexican America have begun to look at these complexities, particularly for Latinas/os in the United States from the 19th century and later. 85 Nicole Guidotti-Hernéndez’s recent book, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries , is another example of such recent critical work, as it reexamines the dual positioning of Latinas/os and critically assesses the ways in which narratives of mestizaje and resistance to Anglo America have obscured histories of violence within Latina/o communities. 86 More recent criticism in both Latin American and Latina/o Studies has looked rather critically at the idea that mestizaje or syncretism are always signs of rebellion or resistance, just as it has also examined more closely how Spanish-speakers are both colonizers and colonized in the Western world.

Recovery work, not just in the field of indigenous Latin America but also in the context of recovering Latina/o voices within the United States, represents another important field related to the concern for rescuing or maintaining marginalized oral histories. Great strides have been made in the recovery of such work. 87 Works abound, for example, on the Mexican, Mexican American, and borderlands corridos of the 18th and 19th centuries . 88 Recovery scholars have completed work on the testimonios of 19th-century Californios, particularly those of women. Rosaura Sánchez’s Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonies , Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz’s Testimonios: Early California through the Eyes of Women, 1815 – 1848 , and Gregorio Mora Torres’s Californio Voices: The Oral Memoirs of José María Amador and Lorenzo Asisara offer examples of the sort of stimulating work being done in this area in the early 21st century . 89

Links to Digital Materials

• Archivo de Música Colonial Americana and Instituto de Investigación Musicológica Carlos Vega , Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina: Archive of colonial American music

Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano

Collection of Stories and Legends from Latin America .

Collection of Sheet Music and Musical Scores from Latin America .

• “ California’s Missions: Decline and Revival ,” online exhibit on Spanish missions of California.
• Fundación Histórica Tavera : Guide to ethnographic documentary sources for the study of indigenous communities in Latin America.
• Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics .
• Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Blog .
• Slave Societies Digital Archive , Vanderbilt University.
• The Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings , UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.

Further Reading

• Aguirre Salvador, Rodolfo , ed. Espacios de saber, espacios de poder. Iglesia, universidades y colegios en Hispanoamérica. Siglos XVI – XIX . Mexico City: Bonilla Artigas Editores, 2013.
• Blayer, Irene Maria, F. , and Mark Cronlund Anderson , eds. Latin American Narratives and Cultural Identity . New York: Peter Lang, 2004.
• Boone, Elizabeth Hill , and Walter D. Mignolo , eds., Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
• Brill, Mark . Music of Latin American and the Caribbean . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011.
• Díaz Balsera, Viviana . The Pyramid under the Cross: Franciscan Discourses of Evangelization and the Nahua Christian Subject in Sixteenth-Century Mexico . Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2005.
• Herrera-Sobek, María , ed. Reconstructing a Chicano/a Literary Heritage: Hispanic Colonial Literature of the Southwest . Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1993.
• Horcasitas, Fernando . El teatro náhuatl. Épocas novohispana y moderna . México City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1974.
• Jara, René , and Nicholas Spadaccini , eds. Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
• León-Portilla, Miguel . Visión de los vencidos. Relaciones indígenas de la conquista . Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1959.
• Lienhard, Martin . La voz y su huella . Mexico City: Ediciones de Casa Juan Pablos, 2003.
• Matthew, Laura E. , and Michael Oudijk , eds. Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica . Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.
• Mignolo, Walter . The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
• Rama, Ángel . The Lettered City . Edited and translated by John Charles Chasteen . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
• Taylor, Diana . The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
• Uzcátegui, Emilio . Historia de la educación en Hispanoamérica . Quito, Ecuador: Editorial Universitaria, 1973.
• Valdés, Mario J. , and Djelal Kadir , eds. Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History , Vols. 1 and 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

1. María Herrera-Sobek, Reconstructing a Chicano/a Literary Heritage: Hispanic Colonial Literature of the Southwest , ed. María Herrera-Sobek (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993), xix .

2. In fact, most of the major pre-Hispanic societies had graphic, visual, and/or tactile forms of communication and notation. See pp. 53–62 in Martin Lienhard, La voz y su huella (Mexico City: Ediciones de Casa Juan Pablos, 2003) , for a brief introduction to those used in different regions of Latin America, including the kipu , or quipu , in the Andean region and Mesoamerican glyphs. See also, Frank Salomon and Sabine Hyland, eds., “Graphic Pluralism: Native American Systems of Inscription and the Colonial Situation,” Special issue, Ethnohistory 57, no. 1 (2010); and Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo, eds., Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994) .

3. Lienhard, La voz y su huella , 66–67.

4. Teresa Gisbert, “Art and Resistance in the Andean World,” trans. Laura Giefer, in Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus , ed. René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 629–676 , esp. 631.

5. Ángel Rama, The Lettered City , trans. and ed. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 10 .

6. Rama, The Lettered City , 16.

7. Rama, The Lettered City , 19–20.

8. Lienhard, La voz y su huella .

9. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) . See also René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini, 1492–1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 10.

10. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance , vi–vii.

11. See Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 70–71, for more information on how modernity was viewed by Latin American intellectuals, politicians, etc., and how these discourses of modernity became linked to the Spanish and Portuguese languages, thus eventually leading to the racialization of these languages.

12. For a discussion of how the Spanish language also became a racial marker within the United States, see Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez and Amy Lutz, “Coloniality of Power, Immigration, and the English-Spanish Asymmetry in the United States,” Nepantla: Views from South 4, no. 3 (2003): 523–560.

13. Raúl Coronado, A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 217–218.

14. Walter Mignolo, “Introduction,” in Literary Cultures of Latin America , Vol. 2, eds. Mario J. Valdés and Djelal Kadir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), xvi .

15. Carlos Newland, “La educación elemental en hispanoamérica: desde la independencia hasta la centralización de los sistemas educativos nacionales,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 71, no. 2 (May 1991): 357.

16. Newland, “La educación elemental,” 357.

17. Coronado, A World Not to Come , 217–218.

18. Newland, “La educación elemental,” 340.

19. See for example, Newland’s discussion of the role of education in 19th-century Spanish America, “La educación elemental,” 337–340.

20. Newland, “La educación elemental,” 337–338.

21. For a discussion of the importance of education to the 19th-century generation of Hispanic writers in New Mexico, see Gabriel Meléndez, Spanish-Language Newspapers in New Mexico, 1834–1958 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005).

22. For a general introduction to the history of education in Spanish America, see Emilio Uzcátegui, Historia de la educación en Hispanoamérica (Quito, Ecuador: Editorial Universitaria, 1973) . For a focus specifically on the colonial period in Spanish America, see Rodolfo Aguirre Salvador, ed., Espacios de saber, espacios de poder: Iglesia, universidades y colegios en Hispanoamérica. Siglos XVI – XIX (Mexico City: Bonilla Artigas Editores, 2013) .

23. See, for example, Kelly McDonough’s study of Nahua scholars and writers from the 16th through 20th centuries, The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014).

24. Viviana Díaz Balsera, The Pyramid under the Cross: Franciscan Discourses of Evangelization and the Nahua Christian Subject in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005), 53 .

25. Díaz Balsera, The Pyramid under the Cross, 53.

26. William F. Hanks, Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 114.

27. For an analysis of how this was used in the context of Nahua evangelization in Central Mexico, see for example, Díaz Balsera, The Pyramid under the Cross , 54.

28. Díaz Balsera, The Pyramid under the Cross , 54.

29. Leonardo Manrique Castañeda, “The History of Oral Literature in Mexico,” trans. Suzanne D. Stephens, in Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History , Vol. 1., ed. Mario J. Valdés and Djelal Kadir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 449 .

30. Hanks, Converting Words , 114.

31. See for example, Gisbert, “Art and Resistance,” pp. 632–633.

32. Ramón Gutiérrez, “The Politics of Theater in Colonial New Mexico: Drama and the Rhetoric of Conquest,” in Reconstructing a Chicano/a Literary Heritage: Hispanic Colonial Literature of the Southwest , ed. María Herrera-Sobek (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993), 54–56 .

33. Gutiérrez, “The Politics of Theater,” 55–56.

34. Gutiérrez, “The Politics of Theater,” 49.

35. Gutiérrez, “The Politics of Theater,” 50.

36. Díaz Balsera, The Pyramid under the Cross , 63.

37. Gutiérrez, “The Politics of Theater,” 62. See also, Hanks, Converting Words , 112–114.

38. Díaz Balsera, The Pyramid under the Cross , 63.

39. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 30–31 .

40. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire , 44.

41. The following essays offer counterpoints from other regions of Latin America. Luz María Martínez Montiel, “African Orality in the Literary Culture of the Caribbean,” trans. Suzanne D. Stephens, in Literary Cultures of Latin America , Vol. 1., ed. Valdés and Kadir, 460–470; José Antonio Giménez Micó, “Orality and Literature in the Peruvian Andean Zone,” trans. Suzanne D. Stephens, in Literary Cultures of Latin America , Vol. 1., ed. Valdés and Kadir, 471–482; Eva Grosser Lerner and Eduardo Lucio Molina y Vedia, “Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay: A History of Literary Orality,” trans. Suzanne D. Stephens, in Literary Cultures of Latin America , Vol. 1., ed. Valdés and Kadir, 483–495; and Jerusa Pires Ferreira, “Oral Literature in Brazil,” trans. Glaucia Gonçalves and Thomas LaBorie Burns, in Literary Cultures of Latin America , Vol. 1., ed. Valdés and Kadir, 496–503.

42. For analysis of syncretism and hybridity in El divino narciso , as well as a brief synopsis of previous interpretations of the play, see Chiara Donadoni and Eugenia Houvenaghel, “La hibridez de la tradición judeocristiana como reivindicación del sincretismo religioso en la Nueva España: El divino narciso de Sor Juana,” Neophilologus 94, no. 3 (July 2010): 459–475.

43. K. Alfons Knauth, “Cultural Institutions in Latin America,” Literary Cultures of Latin America , Vol. 2, ed. Valdés and Kadir, 43. See also, Gisbert, “Art and Resistance,” 642–650.

44. Gisbert, “Art and Resistance,” 634.

45. Gisbert, “Art and Resistance,” 637.

46. Gisbert, “Art and Resistance,” 638.

47. Leonardo Manrique Castañeda, “The History of Oral Literature in Mexico,” trans. Suzanne D. Stephens, in Literary Cultures of Latin America , Vol. 1., ed. Valdés and Kadir, 450.

48. Manrique Castañeda, “The History of Oral Literature in Mexico,” 450.

49. Martínez Montiel, “African Orality in the Literary Culture of the Caribbean,” 463.

50. See Janheinz Jahn, Las culturas neoafricanas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica,1963).

51. Jahn, Las culturas neoafricanas .

52. Martínez Montiel, “African Orality in the Literary Culture of the Caribbean,” 463–466.

53. See Mario J. Valdés, “Story-Telling and Cultural Identity in Latin America,” in Latin American Narratives and Cultural Identity , ed. Irene Maria F. Blayer and Mark Cronlund Anderson (New York: Peter Lang, 2004) .

54. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991).

55. Valdés, “Story-Telling and Cultural Identity,” 13.

56. Valdés, “Story-Telling and Cultural Identity,” 17.

57. See Valdés, “Story-Telling and Cultural Identity,” 17–18. See also Manrique Castañeda, “The History of Oral Literature in Mexico,” 437–438.

58. Eugenia Meyer, “Orality and Literature,” trans. Suzanne D. Stephens, in Literary Cultures of Latin America Vol. 1., ed. Valdés and Kadir, 431–435.

59. Manrique Castañeda, “The History of Oral Literature in Mexico,” 437. For a broader study of the importance of rhythm and meter in oral traditions, see also Alfred B. Lord, The Singer of Tales , 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 30–67.

60. Eugenia Meyer, “Oral History in Mexico and the Caribbean,” in Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology , 2nd ed., ed. David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996), 344.

61. Daniel F. Chamberlain, “The Mexican Corrido : Identity Configurations, Time, and Truth Claims,” in Latin American Narratives and Cultural Identity , ed. Irene Maria F. Blayer and Mark Cronlund Anderson (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 30 .

62. Grosser Lerner and Molina y Vedia, “Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay,” 489.

63. Grosser Lerner and Molina y Vedia, “Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay,” 489.

64. For a classic introduction to gaucho poetry, see Rafael R. Rodríguez López, La poesía gauchesca en lengua culta , ed. Esteban Echeverría, Bartolomé Mitre, Juan María Guitiérre, and Rafael Obligado (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ciroda and Rodríguez Editores, 1943).

65. Grosser Lerner and Molina y Vedia, “Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay,” 489.

66. For a classic study of the importance and form of the corrido in US Latina/o history and culture, see Américo Paredes, “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971).

67. Chamberlain, “The Mexican Corrido ,” 30.

68. Chamberlain, “The Mexican Corrido ,” 34–35.

69. Chamberlain, “The Mexican Corrido ,” 30.

70. Knauth, “Cultural Institutions in Latin America,” 44.

71. Paredes, “With His Pistol in His Hand”; and Américo Paredes, A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976).

72. John Holmes McDowell, ¡Corrido!: The Living Ballad of Mexico’s Western Coast (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2015).

73. Miguel León-Portilla, Visión de los vencidos. Relaciones indígenas de la conquista (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1959) .

74. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance .

75. Rolena Adorno, Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

76. Gary Urton, Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). Frank Salomon, The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

77. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo, eds., Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994) .

78. Laura E. Matthew, and Michael Oudijk, eds., Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007) . Laura E. Matthew, Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

79. Gary Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

80. Lisbeth Haas, Saints and Citizens: Indigenous Histories of Colonial Missions and Mexican California (Berkeley, CA: University of Californiai Press, 2013).

81. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) .

82. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire , 19.

83. Patricia Ybarra, Performing Conquest: Five Centuries of Theater, History and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009).

84. Ángel Rama, The Lettered City , trans. and ed. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996) .

85. José F. Aranda, When We Arrive: A New Literary History of Mexican America (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003).

86. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

87. The Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project and the associated Arte Público Press, both directed by Nicolás Kanellos, have paved the way in this field, working to locate, preserve, and disseminate literature and writings related to Hispanic culture in the United States, from colonial times until the 1960s.

88. See, for example: Antonio Avitia Hernández, El corrido históricomexicano , 5 vols. (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1997); Vicente T. Mendoza, El corrido mexicano (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995). See María Herrera-Sobek, The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), for a feminist analysis of the corrido.

89. Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities: The Californio testimonies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz, trans. and comm., Testimonios: Early California through the Eyes of Women, 1815–1848 (Berkeley, CA: Heydays Books, 2006). Gregorio Mora Torres, trans. and ed., Californio Voices: The Oral Memoirs of José María Amador and Lorenzo Asisara (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2005).

Related Articles

• Indigeneity and Early American Literature
• Latino/Latina Fiction in America
• Decoloniality and Identity in Central American Latina and Latino Literature
• The Presence of Coloniality in Central American-American Fictions
• Interlingual Literature, Tropicalization, and Bilanguaging
• Spanish Language in Chicana/o Literature

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Literature. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 17 April 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [66.249.64.20|81.177.182.159]
• 81.177.182.159

Character limit 500 /500

Enable JavaScript and refresh the page to view the Center for Hellenic Studies website.

See how to enable JavaScript in your browser.

• Current Residential Fellows
• Previous Fellows
• Library Visitor Policies
• Research Guides
• Seminars and Workshops
• Current Exhibits
• Student Opportunities
• Faculty Programs
• Introduction to Online Publications
• Primary Texts
• Research Bulletin
• Prospective Authors

Fellowships

• Fellowships in Hellenic Studies
• Early Career Fellowships
• Summer Fellowships
• CHS-IHR Joint Fellowship
• Previous Fellows Previous Fellows – Chronological Lists

The Library

• Publications Articles Books Prospective Authors Primary Texts Serials

The Singer Resumes the Tale

Citation:   Use the following persistent identifier: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_LordA.The_Singer_Resumes_the_Tale.1995 .

1. The Nature and Kinds of Oral Literature

[In this on-line version, the page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{69|70}” indicates where p. 69 of the printed version ends and p. 70 begins. These indications will be useful to readers who need to look up references made elsewhere to the printed version of this book.]

No. 80 A Vladymir knjaz’ da stol’njo-kievskoj             Prince Vladimir of the capital Kiev

He uses a different construction at the opening of

No. 80 Zavodil pochesten pir da j pirovan’ice,             He held an honorable feast, and a feasting,

No. 81 Zavodil on pochesten pir pirovan’ico,             He held an honorable feast, a feasting,

and continues:

Other examples of those two lines can be easily found.

            Many princes and boyars,             Glorious, mighty, powerful bogatyrs;

No. 80 Na mnogih knjazej da na vsih bojarov,             Na vsih sil’nih rus’skiih moguchih na bogatyrej.

            Many princes and all boyars,             All mighty, Russian, powerful bogatyrs.

No. 81 A j na vseh-to na knjazej na bojarov,             Da j na rus’skih moguchih bogatyrej,

At this point the two stories begin to diverge, but they both present a speech from Vladimir. There is further setting for it in No. 81:

depicting the reaction of the company to the request for a messenger on a possibly dangerous mission, which we have seen before. And once again appears: {9|10}

It is to be noted that within the verbal repetitions there is a subtle kaleidoscopic mutation and recombination of elements.

Written literature can, of course, easily imitate this usage of noun-epithet formulas, which arises from the necessity of being able to use the needed noun in a variety of metrical circumstances, but it would be imitation of the oral traditional style. No poet in a written literary style would create such lines. Were he to do so, he would be severely criticized. We cannot employ the criteria of written poetics to such a passage without doing an injustice to the oral traditional poetics that formed it and that finds it normal and “right.”

They became:

Learn Anthropology

No products in the cart.

Username or Email Address

Remember Me Forgot Password?

A link to set a new password will be sent to your email address.

Your personal data will be used to support your experience throughout this website, to manage access to your account, and for other purposes described in our privacy policy .

Get New Password -->

Oral Literature

• Last Updated: Aug 7, 2023

Oral literature, as the term implies, refers to the cultural material and tradition transmitted orally from one generation to another [1] . The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form of folktales, ballads, songs, chants, proverbs, or folklores. From an anthropological standpoint, oral literature has been a crucial tool for understanding the cultural, social, and historical contexts of diverse societies.

Understanding Oral Literature

Definition and characteristics.

Oral literature is defined as the art form that uses words to create forms of traditional imaginative culture [2] . This literature comes in many different types, but some general characteristics include:

• Memorability : These narratives typically include repetition, alliteration, and other mnemonic devices to aid in retention.
• Verbal artistry : Oral literature is usually marked by a high degree of verbal artistry.
• Formularity : Oral narratives often have a certain set structure or format they adhere to.
• Performance : They are not merely spoken or recited; they are performed and thus have a theatrical element.

Cultural and Historical Significance

Oral literature plays a crucial role in preserving cultural heritage, traditions, and wisdom. It has been a primary medium of recording history for societies without written language and remains significant even in literate societies for preserving aspects of culture that are not typically written down [3] .

Anthropological Research on Oral Literature

Anthropological research on oral literature involves the study of this form of literature in its cultural context, considering the societal norms, values, and customs in which these narratives are embedded. The oral narratives offer a wealth of knowledge about the past societies’ worldviews and provide insight into the human experience across different cultures and epochs [4] .

Challenges in the Field

Despite its importance, studying oral literature anthropologically poses several challenges:

• Language barriers and translation issues can potentially alter or omit nuances in the narratives [5] .
• Societal biases can be reflected in the researcher’s interpretations.
• The fluidity of oral narratives means that there are often several versions of a single tale, which complicates the study and interpretation.

Methodology

Researching oral literature from an anthropological perspective typically involves:

• Fieldwork : The researcher immerses themselves in the culture being studied. This may involve living among the community and participating in their practices to gain a deep understanding of the context of the oral narratives.
• Recording and Transcription : The researcher records oral narratives, then transcribes them. This might also involve translation if the narratives are in a different language.
• Analysis : The researcher then analyses these narratives, interpreting them in the context of the wider cultural and historical backdrop.

Impact of Technology on Oral Literature

With the advent of technology, the face of oral literature has been radically changing. Here is how:

Digital Archiving

Previously, the transitory nature of oral literature posed significant challenges to its preservation. However, digital archiving offers a solution. Audio and video recordings can capture and store oral narratives, complete with their performance elements. This digital storage allows future generations access to traditional oral narratives in their original performed state.

Accessibility and Dissemination

Technology has not only made oral literature more accessible to a broader audience but also facilitated its wider dissemination. Platforms like YouTube, Podcasts, and other online mediums offer an array of oral literature from various cultures, breaking geographical boundaries.

Influence on Oral Tradition

However, the digitization of oral literature brings a significant change. Oral narratives were traditionally fluid, with each performance differing based on the performer’s interpretation and the audience’s reaction. In contrast, once a performance is recorded and disseminated digitally, it becomes a fixed representation of that narrative, altering the traditional fluidity associated with oral literature.

Oral Literature: A Living Heritage

Even with the modern age’s literacy and digital revolution, oral literature has remained a vital aspect of human culture. It continues to adapt and evolve, finding new life and forms in the contemporary world, all while holding onto the essence of the past. Oral literature’s endurance underlines the human penchant for storytelling and the shared desire to connect with our roots.

In essence, the anthropological study of oral literature opens a window into the human experience’s richness and diversity. By focusing on oral literature, we access a wealth of knowledge, wisdom, and tradition that allows us to connect the past with the present, tradition with innovation, and ultimately, humanity with its cultural heritage.

In conclusion, oral literature is a significant repository of societal values, norms, and history, and anthropological research in this field can offer valuable insights into past and present cultures. Despite the associated challenges, this area of research continues to be pivotal in our quest to understand the complexities of human societies through their narratives.

[1] Finnegan, R. (2012). Oral Literature in Africa. Open Book Publishers.

[2] Foley, J. M. (2002). The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology. Indiana University Press.

[3] Vansina, J. (1985). Oral Tradition as History. University of Wisconsin Press.

[4] Leavy, P. (2017). Research Design: Quantitative, Qualitative, Mixed Methods, Arts-Based, and Community-Based Participatory Research Approaches. Guilford Publications.

[5] Briggs, C. L. (1988). Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Vasundhra, an anthropologist, embarks on a captivating journey to decode the enigmatic tapestry of human society. Fueled by an insatiable curiosity, she unravels the intricacies of social phenomena, immersing herself in the lived experiences of diverse cultures. Armed with an unwavering passion for understanding the very essence of our existence, Vasundhra fearlessly navigates the labyrinth of genetic and social complexities that shape our collective identity. Her recent publication unveils the story of the Ancient DNA field, illuminating the pervasive global North-South divide. With an irresistible blend of eloquence and scientific rigor, Vasundhra effortlessly captivates audiences, transporting them to the frontiers of anthropological exploration.

Newsletter Updates

Enter your email address below and subscribe to our newsletter

I accept the Privacy Policy

Related Posts

Leave a Reply Cancel Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Research Grants for the Documentation of Oral Literature and Traditional Ecological Knowledge

In the service of indigenous peoples in their efforts to record their arts and sciences.

• Mission Statement
• Firebird Foundation Board of Directors
• Firebird Foundation Committees
• History of Development
• Publications
• Contributions
• Nature and Function of Oral Literature
• Sabah Oral Literature Project
• Community Based Field Methods
• Guide to the Varieties of Oral Literature in Borneo
• Rungus Classes of Oral Literature
• Rungus Ritual Text from the Sabah Oral Literature Project
• Rungus Metaphorical and Poetic Phrases
• A Cultural Dictionary for the Translation and Exegesis of Texts
• Rungus Varieties of Rice
• Rungus Phonemes
• Sacred Groves Among the Rungus Dusun of Northern Sabah: Relict Areas of Biodiversity
• Ethical Issues of Collecting Oral Literature
• Collection Issues and Suggestions
• Some Thoughts on the Collection of Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Discovery and Loss
• Linguistic Charts for Articulatory Phonetics
• Bibliography of Introductory Linguistics
• Codes for Recording
• Codes for Transcription and Translation
• Selected Bibliography of Oral Literature
• Bhutan Oral Literature Project
• Laura W. R. and George N. Appell Research Grants
• In Memoriam: George N. Appell
• In Memoriam: Laura W.R. Appell
• Ethical Dilemmas of Public Access
• Research Grants Awarded 2022-
• Fellowships Awarded 2008-2020
• Urgency of the Project

THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF ORAL LITERATURE

Oral literature is the repository of the critical knowledge, philosophy, and wisdom for non-literate societies. This literature through narrative, poetry, song, dance, myths and fables, and texts for religious rituals provides a portrait of the meaning of life as experienced by the society at its particular time and place with its unique existential challenges. It encapsulates the traditional knowledge, beliefs and values about the environment and the nature of the society itself. It arises in response to the universal aesthetic impulse to provide narratives that explains the nature of life and describes human responses to challenges. This literature portrays how one is to live a moral life and explains the nature of one’s relationships to divinity. It thus retains the society’s knowledge to be passed on to succeeding generations. It contains the history of the society and its experiences. In various forms this oral literature portrays the society’s belief systems that makes sense of life. It provides a guide to human behavior and how to live one’s life. With the arrival of literacy, the core of this literature and its art rapidly disappears.

It is also the repository of artistic expression in a society. Its beauty resonates across cultural frontiers . As such this literature is a response to the universal human instinct to find balance, harmony, and beauty in the world and the need to understand pain, suffering, and evil. It explains the causes of human suffering, justifies them, and suggests ways of mediation and the healing of suffering. Oral literature also functions to fulfill the need for religious belief and spiritual fulfillment necessary for human existence. This universal human realm, peopled by spiritual beings and their personalities, is revealed through stories, tales, songs, myths, legends, prayers, and ritual texts. Such literature recounts the work of the gods, explains how the world and human existence came about, and reveals the nature of human frailty. Oral literature serves to communicate ideas, emotions, beliefs and appreciation of life. This literature defines, interprets, and elaborates on the society’s vision of reality and the dangers in the world. It deals with the human adventure and achievements against odds. Through the texts of the society’s rituals and ceremonies the ecological elements that are critical to the society’s livelihood are portrayed and their functions sanctified.

Oral literature is also a form of entertainment and fosters feelings of solidarity with others who have had similar experiences. In sum, oral literature may encompass many genres of linguistic expression and may perform many different functions for the society.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

The Genres and the Uses of Oral Literatures in the Utterances of Sayyid Haji Ali Wale and Sayyid Roba Garbi in Bale Zone, Oromia

Journal of Literature, Languages and Linguistics

Related Papers

International Journal of English and Literature

Muktar Ahmed Ware

SMART M O V E S J O U R N A L IJELLH

Abstract This paper tries to map the problems and challenges faced by the researchers in researching and interpreting the oral literature especially Dhangar1 oral literature and Dhangari Ovis2 . The Main idea of this paper has evolved from Joseph Muleka’s study on African Oral literature.3 and has been contextualized in Maharashtra to understand the rural Dhangar Oral literature. We, as researchers, always find it difficult to choose theory which is more relevant to the topic related to a particular community Oral literature and its analysis to build a more reliable narrative of the community. It is easy to find out the theory for written work or for literary analysis of that particular literature. This theory can facilitate to the researcher who works on written literary work. On the other hand, the problem arises when a particular community is least researched or the availability of written literature on that community is scanty. In such scenario, the researcher has to rely on the oral literature of that community. Here the role of the performer comes into picture. At the same time the researcher is grappled with another problem of choice of theory because the nature of oral literature is unpredictable and transient. It is the performer who decides how to present or perform the literary piece. This puts the researcher of the oral literature in to dilemma about the choice of theory to analyze the oral literature to build the history of a particular community. Even many scholars have argued on this issue what I believe there is acute need

Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research

International Journal of Humanities and Social Science

pratap kumar dash

Agus wahdian

The purpose of this research is: first, describe the structure, function and value of oral literature in Sumenep Regency. Second, obtain data objectively about the oral literary tradition in Sumenep Regency. Third, it examines the structure, function and value of oral literary tradition as one of the entertainment media, adhesives and silaturrahim forming mental as well as compiling Textbook-based Indonesian Language Education Oral literary tradition with ISBN. Indonesia as the country with the symbol of Bhinneka Tunggal Ika must uphold all forms of diversity and ethics that is rahmatan lil &#39; alamin. Indonesia is made up of many different tribes, ethnicities, cultures, religions, languages and traditions must maintain the integrity of the Union and the unity of the nation. It is this diversity that later gave birth to traditional knowledge andcultural expressions that are not owned by other Nations in the world. Oral literary tradition that developed in the island as a manifesta...

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Culture

Ida Bagus Nyoman Mantra

The main concern of the present study is to analyze the educational values of the oral text of genjek oral tradition performed by several genjek groups in Karangasem, eastern part of Bali. Genjek is one of the most popular oral traditions in Bali and it is a spontaneous performing oral art by a group of young villagers to express their feeling, thought, and criticisms to the existing conditions of the country. All criticisms and suggestions are conveyed through songs in common Balinese language accompanied by acoustic Balinese bamboo music instruments. Their performances are usually funny and entertaining. Most of the lyrics are created spontaneously during the performance. As an oral traditional, genjek is mainly performed for entertainment and the education of their supporting society. This study found that most of the oral text of genjek Karangasem contains educational values which are really important to maintain the harmony of the social life of the society. In addition, the pr...

Jonathan Tanihu

LITERARY ANALYSIS OF DANGME TRADITIONAL WORK SONGS Abstract This paper presents a descriptive analysis of the literary devices in Dangme ( a Kwa language of South-Eastern part of Ghana) traditional work songs. The Dangme people are traditionally known for their traditional industries, agricultural and native economic activities. These activities crave the occasion for some sort of songs to be used. These traditional work songs are used in contexts in which wearisome labour is involved. The songs are considered ‘special purpose poetry’ because they have some direct connection with particular occasions and actions. This paper analyses these traditional work songs and brings to bear the literary devices deployed in them as they accompany specific work(s). Data for this paper was collected from both primary and secondary sources. The data analysis is descriptive with much emphasis on the literary devices in the songs. It has been revealed that literary devices such as repetition, idiophones, parallelism and the like provide aesthetic and beauteous values to the work songs. This aids to soothe the workers’ psychological and physical bodies in order to increase their efficiency and work output.

US-China Education Review B

Rennie SARANZA

Journal of Indonesian Language Education and Literary

Literary learning is a series of learning that integrated with the teaching of Indonesian and it was taught at all educational levels. The common problem is the lack of learning materials related to literature in the form of stories which are the local wisdom of local students, especially in Wajo Regency. Whereas the existence of these folklore in the community has always existed which incarnated into various forms of oral literature such as Folk song. This study is a qualitative research with data that is the focus of research is the classic Bugis story (literature) contained in the singing of the Buginese people&#39;s Pakkacapi. The objective and urgency of the research in this study is the existence of Pakkacapi which has very rarely made the existence of a classic Bugis story contained in it also endangered. Data collection techniques used are interview and documentation techniques as well as data analysis techniques by doing repeated readings that focus full attention on the e...

David Wilson

RELATED PAPERS

Szymon Malinowski

Case Research Journal

Anne Lawrence

Engenharia no Século XXI – Volume 7

Gilberto Murakami

ARPN journal of engineering and applied sciences

Arif abdul Rahman

National Journal of Maxillofacial Surgery

Shreyas Orvakonde

Ziyn Engdasew

Journal of Psychopharmacology

Steven Blair

BMC Research Notes

Chioma Onwuka

Dimitar Dontchev

Journal of Natural Gas Science and Engineering

abubakar Isah

Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Social and Political Development (ICOSOP 2017)

Fajar U T A M A Ritonga

Archeopages

Erwan Bergot

International Journal of Chronic Diseases

Hatice Eroğlu

Revue de l'OFCE

Sandrine Levasseur

Military Medical Research

Alexis Rump

Transformación

Oscar Márquez Lizaso

Marcelo Garson

Birth defects research

Beata Emoke Madari

Chiedozie Ojide

Nature Communications

Thomas Bianchi

Policies/politics, heritages and arts in contemporary cities

Otávio Raposo

Environmental Modeling & Assessment

Paul Gaertner

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

The Ohio State University

• BuckeyeLink
• Find People
• Search Ohio State

CFAES COVID-19 Resources:    Safe and Healthy Buckeyes   |   COVID-19 Hub   |   CFAES Calendar

Department of Animal Sciences

Search form

Ming yan wins oral presentation at the 2024 congress on gastrointestinal function and edward f. hayes advanced research forum, breadcrumb menu.

Ming Yan is fourth year PhD student in the Department of Animal Sciences within the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences at The Ohio State University. Ming is supervised by Dr. Zhongtang Yu studying rumen microbiome, specializing in bioinformatics, microbial genomics and ecology. Both of Ming's presentations centered around his work with rumen viruses– titled "Interrogating the diversity and ecological importance of viral dark matter in the rumen ecosystem." The presentation summarizes Ming's findings published at top-tier journals of Nature Communications  titled "Interrogating the viral dark matter of the rumen ecosystem with a global virome database" and at Microbiome (under publication)   with the title "Viruses contribute to microbial diversification in the rumen ecosystem and are associated with certain animal production traits."

Please join us in congratulating Ming Yang on this accomplishment!

Advertisement

Functions of rhizosheath on facilitating the uptake of water and nutrients under drought stress: A review

• Review Article
• Published: 21 June 2023
• Volume 491 , pages 239–263, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

• Meysam Cheraghi 1 ,
• Seyed Majid Mousavi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8068-3950 2 &
• Mohsen Zarebanadkouki 3  

1037 Accesses

8 Citations

Explore all metrics

Background and Aims

The optimal management of plant nutrition is an effective strategy for sustainable agriculture under various conditions. Soil drying is one of the main limiting factors for plant nutrient acquisition. Plants imposed to these limitations have evolved several strategies such as modifying root-to-shoot ratio, modifying their root anatomy, modifying microbial diversity, and engineering their surrounding soil via rhizodeposition and rhizosheath formation. Rhizosheath is referred to as the soil that remained attached to the root system after being removed from the soil and shacked. Here we reviewed the processes contributing to rhizosheath formation and the mechanisms underlying how it affected the plant's ability to uptake water and nutrients.

To shed light on the unexplored aspects of rhizosheath and identify potential research directions, we conducted a comprehensive review of the relevant literature on the mechanisms of rhizosheath formation and its impacts on water and nutrient uptake.

The results showed that the presence of mucilage, root hairs and dry-rewetting cycles play a vital role in the formation and strength of rhizosheath. Rhizosheath enables plants to adapt to their environment by keeping the soil and roots hydraulically connected during a soil drying cycle and promoting water and nutrients uptake at the roots-soil interface.

It is concluded that the rhizosheath is the most chemically and biologically active part of the soil. Breeding plants to strengthen their ability to form stable rhizosheath may be one solution to achieving a sustainable agricultural system and maintaining agricultural production under drought stress.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price includes VAT (Russian Federation)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Rent this article via DeepDyve

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

The rhizosheath: a potential root trait helping plants to tolerate drought stress

Majid Basirat, Seyed Majid Mousavi, … Mohsen Zarebanadkouki

Biochar soil amendment on alleviation of drought and salt stress in plants: a critical review

Shafaqat Ali, Muhammad Rizwan, … Ahmad Naeem Shahzad

The rhizosheath: from desert plants adaptation to crop breeding

Papa Mamadou Sitor Ndour, Thierry Heulin, … Laurent Cournac

Data availability

Data are available upon request to the corresponding author.

Abis L, Loubet B, Ciuraru R, Lafouge F, Houot S, Nowak V, Tripied J, Dequiedt S, Maron PA, Sadet-Bourgeteau S (2020) Reduced microbial diversity induces larger volatile organic compound emissions from soils. Sci Rep 10:1–15

Article   Google Scholar  

Adu MO, Asare PA, Yawson DO, Ackah FK, Amoah KK, Nyarko MA, Andoh DA (2017) Quantifying variations in rhizosheath and root system phenotypes of landraces and improved varieties of juvenile maize. Rhizosphere 3:29–39

Ahmad F, Ashraf N, Da-Chuan Y, Jabeen H, Anwar S, Wahla AQ, Iqbal S (2019) Application of a novel bacterial consortium BDAM for bioremediation of bispyribac sodium in wheat vegetated soil. J Hazard Mater 374:58–65

Article   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Ahmed MA, Kroener E, Holz M, Zarebanadkouki M, Carminati A (2014) Mucilage exudation facilitates root water uptake in dry soils. Funct Plant Biol 41:1129–1137

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Alami Y, Achouak W, Marol C, Heulin T (2000) Rhizosphere soil aggregation and plant growth promotion of sunflowers by an exopolysaccharide-producing Rhizobium sp. strain isolated from sunflower roots. Appl Environ Microbiol 66:3393–3398

Article   CAS   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Albalasmeh AA, Ghezzehei TA (2014) Interplay between soil drying and root exudation in rhizosheath development. Plant Soil 374:739–751

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Alp D, Bulantekin Ö (2021) The microbiological quality of various foods dried by applying different drying methods: a review. Eur Food Res Technol 247:1333–1343

Amato M, Bochicchio R, Mele G, Labella R, Rossi R (2018) Soil structure and stability in the spermosphere of myxosdiaspore chia (Salvia hispanica L.). Soil Res 57:546–558

Aminiyan MM, Rahman MM, Rodríguez-Seijo A, Hajiali Begloo R, Cheraghi M, Aminiyan FM (2022) Elucidating of potentially toxic elements contamination in topsoils around a copper smelter: Spatial distribution, partitioning and risk estimation. Environ Geochem Health 44:1795–1811

Andrade G (2008) Role of Functional Groups of Microorganisms on the Rhizosphere Microcosm Dynamics. In: Varma A, Abbott L, Werner D, Hampp R (eds). Plant Surf Microbiol. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74051-3_4

Ashraf M, Hasnain S, Berge O, Mahmood T (2004) Inoculating wheat seedlings with exopolysaccharide-producing bacteria restricts sodium uptake and stimulates plant growth under salt stress. Biol Fertil Soils 40:157–162

Ashraf M, Hasnain S, Berge O (2006) Effect of exo-polysaccharides producing bacterial inoculation on growth of roots of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) plants grown in a salt-affected soil. Int J Environ Sci Technol 3:43–51

Aslam MM, Karanja JK, Dodd IC, Waseem M, Weifeng X (2022) Rhizosheath: An adaptive root trait to improve plant tolerance to phosphorus and water deficits? Plant Cell Environ 45:2861–2874

Aslam MM, Karanja JK, Yuan W, Zhang Q, Zhang J, Xu W (2021) Phosphorus uptake is associated with the rhizosheath formation of mature cluster roots in white lupin under soil drying and phosphorus deficiency. Plant Physiol Biochem 166:531–539. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plaphy.2021.06.022

Bacher H, Sharaby Y, Walia H, Peleg Z (2022) Modifying root-to-shoot ratio improves root water influxes in wheat under drought stress. J Exp Bot 73:1643–1654

Basirat M, Mousavi SM, Abbaszadeh S, Ebrahimi M, Zarebanadkouki M (2019) The rhizosheath: a potential root trait helping plants to tolerate drought stress. Plant Soil 445:565–575

Belimov A, Ulianich P, Syrova D, Shaposhnikov A, Safronova V, Dodd I (2022) Modulation of tomato root architecture and root hair traits by Pseudomonas brassicacearum and Variovorax paradoxus containing 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate deaminase. Biol Plant 66:228–239

Benard P, Zarebanadkouki M, Brax M, Kaltenbach R, Jerjen I, Marone F, Couradeau E, Felde VJ, Kaestner A, Carminati A (2019a) Microhydrological niches in soils: How mucilage and EPS alter the biophysical properties of the rhizosphere and other biological hotspots. Vadose Zone J 18:1–10

Benard P, Zarebanadkouki M, Carminati A (2019b) Physics and hydraulics of the rhizosphere network. J Plant Nutr Soil Sci 182:5–8

Benard P, Schepers JR, Crosta M, Zarebanadkouki M, Carminati A (2021) Physics of viscous bridges in soil biological hotspots. Water Resour Res 57:e2021WR030052

Bergmann D, Zehfus M, Zierer L, Smith B, Gabel M (2009) Grass rhizosheaths: associated bacterial communities and potential for nitrogen fixation. W N Am Nat 69:105–114

Bidondo LF, Bompadre J, Pergola M, Silvani V, Colombo R, Bracamonte F, Godeas A (2012) Differential interaction between two Glomus intraradices strains and a phosphate solubilizing bacterium in maize rhizosphere. Pedobiologia 55:227–232

Bochicchio R, Labella R, Vitti A, Nuzzaci M, Logozzo G, Amato M (2022) Root morphology, allometric relations and rhizosheath of ancient and modern tetraploid wheats (Triticum durum Desf.) in response to inoculation with Trichoderma harzianum T-22. Plants 11:159

Borie F, Rubio R, Morales A (2008) Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and soil aggregation. Revista de la ciencia del suelo y nutrición vegetal 8:9–18

Brax M, Schaumann GE, Diehl D (2019) Gel formation mechanism and gel properties controlled by Ca2+ in chia seed mucilage and model substances. J Plant Nutr Soil Sci 182:92–103

Bristow CE, Campbell G, Wullstein L, Neilson R (1985) Water uptake and storage by rhizosheaths of Oryzopsis hymenoides: a numerical simulation. Physiol Plant 65:228–232

Brown L, George T, Thompson J, Wright G, Lyon J, Dupuy L, Hubbard S, White P (2012) What are the implications of variation in root hair length on tolerance to phosphorus deficiency in combination with water stress in barley (Hordeum vulgare)? Ann Bot 110:319–328

Brown LK, George TS, Neugebauer K, White PJ (2017) The rhizosheath–a potential trait for future agricultural sustainability occurs in orders throughout the angiosperms. Plant Soil 418:115–128

Bucci SJ, Scholz FG, Goldstein G, Meinzer FC, Franco AC, Campanello PI, Villalobos-Vega R, Bustamante M, Miralles-Wilhelm F (2006) Nutrient availability constrains the hydraulic architecture and water relations of savannah trees. Plant Cell Environ 29:2153–2167

Burak E, Quinton JN, Dodd IC (2021) Root hairs are the most important root trait for rhizosheath formation of barley (Hordeum vulgare), maize (Zea mays) and Lotus japonicus (Gifu). Ann Bot 128(1):45–57

Capitani MI, Ixtaina VY, Nolasco SM, Tomás MC (2013) Microstructure, chemical composition and mucilage exudation of chia (Salvia hispanica L.) nutlets from Argentina. J Sci Food Agric 93:3856–3862

Carminati A, Vetterlein D (2013) Plasticity of rhizosphere hydraulic properties as a key for efficient utilization of scarce resources. Ann Bot 112:277–290

Carminati A, Moradi AB, Vetterlein D, Vontobel P, Lehmann E, Weller U, Vogel H-J, Oswald SE (2010) Dynamics of soil water content in the rhizosphere. Plant Soil 332:163–176

Carminati A, Schneider CL, Moradi AB, Zarebanadkouki M, Vetterlein D, Vogel H-J, Hildebrandt A, Weller U, Schüler L, Oswald SE (2011) How the rhizosphere may favor water availability to roots. Vadose Zone J 10:988–998

Carminati A, Benard P, Ahmed MA, Zarebanadkouki M (2017) Liquid bridges at the root-soil interface. Plant Soil 417:1–15

Chen Y, Chen C, Zhou Q, Hu J, Lei Y, Liu W (2021) Specific rhizobacteria responsible in the rhizosheath system of Kengyilia hirsuta. Front Plant Sci 12:785971–785971

Chen Y, Yao Z, Sun Y, Wang E, Tian C, Sun Y, Liu J, Sun C, Tian L (2022) Current studies of the effects of drought stress on root exudates and rhizosphere microbiomes of crop plant species. Int J Mol Sci 23:2374

Cheraghi M, Motesharezadeh B, Alikhani HA, Mousavi SM (2023a) Optimal management of plant nutrition in tomato (Lycopersicon esculent Mill) by using biologic, organic and inorganic fertilizers. J Plant Nutr 46:1560–1579

Cheraghi M, Motesharezadeh B, Mousavi SM, Ma Q, Ahmadabadi Z (2023b) Silicon (Si): a regulator nutrient for optimum growth of wheat under salinity and drought stresses-a review. J Plant Growth Regul:1–25. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00344-023-10959-4

Contesto C, Desbrosses G, Lefoulon C, Béna G, Borel F, Galland M, Gamet L, Varoquaux F, Touraine B (2008) Effects of rhizobacterial ACC deaminase activity on Arabidopsis indicate that ethylene mediates local root responses to plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria. Plant Sci 175:178–189

Costa OY, Raaijmakers JM, Kuramae EE (2018) Microbial extracellular polymeric substances: ecological function and impact on soil aggregation. Front Microbiol 9:1636

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Danin A (1996) Plant adaptations to environmental stresses in desert dunes. Plants of desert dunes. Springer

Google Scholar  

Daryanto S, Wang L, Jacinthe P-A (2016) Global synthesis of drought effects on maize and wheat production. PLoS ONE 11:e0156362

De la Fuente CC, Simonin M, King E, Moulin L, Bennett MJ, Castrillo G, Laplaze L (2020) An extended root phenotype: the rhizosphere, its formation and impacts on plant fitness. Plant J 103:951–964

De la Fuente CC, Diouf M, Ndour P, Debieu M, Grondin A, Passot S, Champion A, Barrachina C, Pratlong M, Gantet P (2022) Genetic control of rhizosheath formation in pearl millet. Sci Rep 12:1–13

Delhaize E, Gruber BD, Ryan PR (2007) The roles of organic anion permeases in aluminium resistance and mineral nutrition. FEBS Lett 581:2255–2262

Delhaize E, James RA, Ryan PR (2012) Aluminium tolerance of root hairs underlies genotypic differences in rhizosheath size of wheat (Triticum aestivum) grown on acid soil. New Phytol 195:609–619

Dodd IC, Diatloff E (2016) Enhanced root growth of the brb (bald root barley) mutant in drying soil allows similar shoot physiological responses to soil water deficit as wild-type plants. Funct Plant Biol 43:199–206

Esmaeelipoor Jahromi O, Knott M, Mysore Janakiram RK, Rahim R, Kroener E (2022) Pore‐scale simulation of mucilage drainage. Vadose Zone J:e20218. https://doi.org/10.1002/vzj2.20218

Etesami H (2021) Potential advantage of rhizosheath microbiome, in contrast to rhizosphere microbiome, to improve drought tolerance in crops. Rhizosphere 20:100439

Fathi A, Tari DB (2016) Effect of drought stress and its mechanism in plants. Int J Life Sci 10:1–6

Fernandez AL, Sheaffer CC, Wyse DL, Staley C, Gould TJ, Sadowsky MJ (2016) Associations between soil bacterial community structure and nutrient cycling functions in long-term organic farm soils following cover crop and organic fertilizer amendment. Sci Total Environ 566:949–959

Galloway AF, Pedersen MJ, Merry B, Marcus SE, Blacker J, Benning LG, Field KJ, Knox JP (2018) Xyloglucan is released by plants and promotes soil particle aggregation. New Phytol 217:1128–1136

Galloway AF, Akhtar J, Burak E, Marcus SE, Field KJ, Dodd IC, Knox P (2022) Altered properties and structures of root exudate polysaccharides in a root hairless mutant of barley. Plant Physiol 190:1214–1227

Gardner W, Parbery D, Barber D (1982) The acquisition of phosphorus by Lupinus albus LI Some characteristics of the soil/root interface. Plant Soil 70:107–124. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02374754

George TS, Brown LK, Ramsay L, White PJ, Newton AC, Bengough AG, Russell J, Thomas WT (2014) Understanding the genetic control and physiological traits associated with rhizosheath production by barley (H ordeum vulgare). New Phytol 203:195–205

Gregory PJ (2006) Roots, rhizosphere and soil: the route to a better understanding of soil science? Eur J Soil Sci 57:2–12

Grunert O, Robles-Aguilar AA, Hernandez-Sanabria E, Schrey SD, Reheul D, Van Labeke M-C, Vlaeminck SE, Vandekerckhove TG, Mysara M, Monsieurs P (2019) Tomato plants rather than fertilizers drive microbial community structure in horticultural growing media. Sci Rep 9:1–15

Hale M, Moore L (1980) Factors affecting root exudation II: 1970–1978. Adv Agron 31:93–124

Haling RE, Richardson AE, Culvenor RA, Lambers H, Simpson RJ (2010) Root morphology, root-hair development and rhizosheath formation on perennial grass seedlings is influenced by soil acidity. Plant Soil 335:457–468

Haling RE, Brown LK, Bengough AG, Young IM, Hallett PD, White PJ, George TS (2013) Root hairs improve root penetration, root–soil contact, and phosphorus acquisition in soils of different strength. J Exp Bot 64:3711–3721

Haling RE, Brown LK, Bengough AG, Valentine TA, White PJ, Young IM, George TS (2014) Root hair length and rhizosheath mass depend on soil porosity, strength and water content in barley genotypes. Planta 239:643–651

Hartman S (2020) Trapped in the rhizosheath: root-bacterial interactions modulate ethylene signaling. Am Soc Plant Biol 183(2):443–444. https://doi.org/10.1104/pp.20.00379

Hartnett DC, Wilson GW, Ott JP, Setshogo M (2013) Variation in root system traits among African semi-arid savanna grasses: Implications for drought tolerance. Austral Ecol 38:383–392

He H, Wu M, Su R, Zhang Z, Chang C, Peng Q, Dong Z, Pang J, Lambers H (2021) Strong phosphorus (P)-zinc (Zn) interactions in a calcareous soil-alfalfa system suggest that rational P fertilization should be considered for Zn biofortification on Zn-deficient soils and phytoremediation of Zn-contaminated soils. Plant Soil 461:119–134

Hendriks P-W, Ryan PR, Hands P, Rolland V, Gurusinghe S, Weston LA, Rebetzke GJ, Delhaize E (2022) Selection for early shoot vigour in wheat increases root hair length but reduces epidermal cell size of roots and leaves. J Exp Bot 73:2499–2510

Holz M, Zarebanadkouki M, Kaestner A, Kuzyakov Y, Carminati A (2018a) Rhizodeposition under drought is controlled by root growth rate and rhizosphere water content. Plant Soil 423:429–442

Holz M, Zarebanadkouki M, Kuzyakov Y, Pausch J, Carminati A (2018b) Root hairs increase root exudation and carbon input into soil. Ann Bot 121:61–69

Honvault N, Houben D, Firmin S, Meglouli H, Laruelle F, Fontaine J, Lounès-Hadj Sahraoui A, Coutu A, Lambers H, Faucon MP (2021) Interactions between belowground traits and rhizosheath fungal and bacterial communities for phosphorus acquisition. Funct Ecol. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.13823

Huang B, North GB, Nobel PS (1993) Soil sheaths, photosynthate distribution to roots, and rhizosphere water relations for Opuntia ficus-indica. Int J Plant Sci 154:425–431

Huang J, Liu W, Deng M, Wang X, Wang Z, Yang L, Liu L (2020) Allocation and turnover of rhizodeposited carbon in different soil microbial groups. Soil Biol Biochem 150:107973

Hussain HA, Men S, Hussain S, Chen Y, Ali S, Zhang S, Zhang K, Li Y, Xu Q, Liao C (2019) Interactive effects of drought and heat stresses on morpho-physiological attributes, yield, nutrient uptake and oxidative status in maize hybrids. Sci Rep 9:1–12

James RA, Weligama C, Verbyla K, Ryan PR, Rebetzke GJ, Rattey A, Richardson AE, Delhaize E (2016) Rhizosheaths on wheat grown in acid soils: phosphorus acquisition efficiency and genetic control. J Exp Bot 67:3709–3718

Jungk AO (2002) Dynamics of nutrient movement at the soil-root interface. Plant roots. CRC Press

Karanja JK, Aslam MM, Qian Z, Yankey R, Dodd IC (2021) Weifeng X (2021) Abscisic acid mediates drought-enhanced rhizosheath formation in tomato. Front Plant Sci 12:658787. eCollection 2021.  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2021.658787

Koehler T, Schaum C, Tung S-Y, Steiner F, Tyborski N, Wild AJ, Akale A, Pausch J, Lueders T, Wolfrum S (2023) Above and belowground traits impacting transpiration decline during soil drying in 48 maize (Zea mays) genotypes. Ann Bot 131:373–386

Kong D, Wang J, Yang F, Shao P (2018) Rhizosheaths stimulate short-term root decomposition in a semiarid grassland. Sci Total Environ 640:1297–1301

Kroener E, Zarebanadkouki M, Kaestner A, Carminati A (2014) Nonequilibrium water dynamics in the rhizosphere: How mucilage affects water flow in soils. Water Resour Res 50:6479–6495

Liu X, Zhang W, Wang X, Cai Y, Chang J (2015) Root–soil air gap and resistance to water flow at the soil–root interface of Robinia pseudoacacia. Tree Physiol 35:1343–1355

Liu T-Y, Chen M-X, Zhang Y, Zhu F-Y, Liu Y-G, Tian Y, Fernie AR, Ye N, Zhang J (2019) Comparative metabolite profiling of two switchgrass ecotypes reveals differences in drought stress responses and rhizosheath weight. Planta 250:1355–1369

Liu TY, Ye N, Wang X, Das D, Tan Y, You X, Long M, Hu T, Dai L, Zhang J (2021) Drought stress and plant ecotype drive microbiome recruitment in switchgrass rhizosheath. J Integr Plant Biol 63:1753–1774

Liu S, Li J, Ji X, Fang Y (2022) Influence of root distribution patterns on soil dynamic characteristics. Sci Rep 12:1–14

CAS   Google Scholar  

Lynch JP, Chimungu JG, Brown KM (2014) Root anatomical phenes associated with water acquisition from drying soil: targets for crop improvement. J Exp Bot 65:6155–6166

Lynch JP, Strock CF, Schneider HM, Sidhu JS, Ajmera I, Galindo-Castañeda T, Klein SP, Hanlon MT (2021) Root anatomy and soil resource capture. Plant Soil 466:21–63

Ma X, Liu Y, Zarebanadkouki M, Razavi BS, Blagodatskaya E, Kuzyakov Y (2018) Spatiotemporal patterns of enzyme activities in the rhizosphere: effects of plant growth and root morphology. Biol Fertil Soils 54:819–828

Mahmood T, Mehnaz S, Fleischmann F, Ali R, Hashmi Z, Iqbal Z (2014) Soil sterilization effects on root growth and formation of rhizosheaths in wheat seedlings. Pedobiologia 57:123–130

Marasco R, Mosqueira MJ, Fusi M, Ramond J-B, Merlino G, Booth JM, Maggs-Kölling G, Cowan DA, Daffonchio D (2018) Rhizosheath microbial community assembly of sympatric desert speargrasses is independent of the plant host. Microbiome 6:1–18

Marin M, Feeney D, Brown L, Naveed M, Ruiz S, Koebernick N, Bengough AG, Hallett P, Roose T, Puértolas J (2021) Significance of root hairs for plant performance under contrasting field conditions and water deficit. Ann Bot 128:1–16

Marschner P, Rengel Z (2023) Nutrient availability in soils. Marschner’s mineral nutrition of plants. Elsevier

McCully ME (1999) Roots in soil: unearthing the complexities of roots and their rhizospheres. Annu Rev Plant Biol 50:695

McCully M, Boyer J (1997) The expansion of maize root-cap mucilage during hydration. 3. Changes in water potential and water content. Physiol Plant 99:169–177

Miller R, Jastrow J (1990) Hierarchy of root and mycorrhizal fungal interactions with soil aggregation. Soil Biol Biochem 22:579–584

Minemba D, Martin BC, Ryan MH, Veneklaas EJ, Gleeson DB (2020) Phosphate fertiliser alters carboxylates and bacterial communities in sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam.) rhizosheaths. Plant Soil 454:245–260

Mo X, Wang M, Wang Y, Zhang P, Zhang A, Kong D, Zeng H, Wang J (2022) High content and distinct spectroscopic characteristics of water-extractable organic matter in rhizosheath soils in a semiarid grassland. Rhizosphere 23:100553

Moradi AB, Carminati A, Vetterlein D, Vontobel P, Lehmann E, Weller U, Hopmans JW, Vogel HJ, Oswald SE (2011) Three-dimensional visualization and quantification of water content in the rhizosphere. New Phytol 192:653–663

Morel JL, Habib L, Plantureux S, Guckert A (1991) Influence of maize root mucilage on soil aggregate stability. Plant Soil 136:111–119

Moshiri F, Ebrahimi H, Ardakani MR, Rejali F, Mousavi SM (2019) Biogeochemical distribution of Pb and Zn forms in two calcareous soils affected by mycorrhizal symbiosis and alfalfa rhizosphere. Ecotoxicol Environ Saf 179:241–248

Mousavi SM, Motesharezadeh B, Hosseini HM, Alikhani H, Zolfaghari AA (2018) Root-induced changes of Zn and Pb dynamics in the rhizosphere of sunflower with different plant growth promoting treatments in a heavily contaminated soil. Ecotoxicol Environ Saf 147:206–16

Mousavi SM, Srivastava AK, Cheraghi M (2023) Soil health and crop response of biochar: an updated analysis. Arch Agron Soil Sci 69:1085–1110

Nambiar E (1976) The uptake of zinc-65 by oats in relation to soil water content and root growth. Soil Res 14:67–74

Ndour PMS, Heulin T, Achouak W, Laplaze L, Cournac L (2020) The rhizosheath: from desert plants adaptation to crop breeding. Plant Soil 456:1–13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-020-04700-3

Newcomb CJ, Qafoku NP, Grate JW, Bailey VL, De Yoreo JJ (2017) Developing a molecular picture of soil organic matter–mineral interactions by quantifying organo–mineral binding. Nat Commun 8(1):396

Nilsen-Nygaard J, Hattrem MN, Draget KI (2016) Propylene glycol alginate (PGA) gelled foams: A systematic study of surface activity and gelling properties as a function of degree of esterification. Food Hydrocolloids 57:80–91

North GB, Nobel PS (1997) Drought-induced changes in soil contact and hydraulic conductivity for roots of Opuntia ficus-indica with and without rhizosheaths. Plant Soil 191:249–258

Opoku VA, Yawson DO, Asare PA, Afutu E, Kotochi MC, Amoah KK, Adu MO (2022) Root hair and rhizosheath traits contribute to genetic variation and phosphorus use efficiency in cowpea (Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp). Rhizosphere 21:100463

Othman AA, Amer WM, Fayez M, Hegazi N (2004) Rhizosheath of Sinai desert plants is a potential repository for associative diazotrophs. Microbiol Res 159:285–293

Pang J, Ryan MH, Siddique KH, Simpson RJ (2017) Unwrapping the rhizosheath. Plant Soil 418:129–139

Peterson RL, Farquhar ML (1996) Root hairs: specialized tubular cells extending root surfaces. Bot Rev 62:1–40

Pinton R, Varanini Z, Nannipieri P (2000) The rhizosphere as a site of biochemical interactions among soil components, plants, and microorganisms. The rhizosphere. CRC Press

Prendergast-Miller M, Duvall M, Sohi S (2014) Biochar–root interactions are mediated by biochar nutrient content and impacts on soil nutrient availability. Eur J Soil Sci 65:173–185

Price SR (1911) The roots of some North African desert-grasses. New Phytol 10:328–340

Rabbi SM, Tighe MK, Flavel RJ, Kaiser BN, Guppy CN, Zhang X, Young IM (2018) Plant roots redesign the rhizosphere to alter the three-dimensional physical architecture and water dynamics. New Phytol 219:542–550

Rabbi SM, Warren CR, Macdonald C, Trethowan RM, Young IM (2022) Soil-root interaction in the rhizosheath regulates the water uptake of wheat. Rhizosphere 21:100462, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rhisph.2021.100462

Rabbi SM, Warren CR, Macdonald C, Trethowan RM, Young IM (2021) Soil-root interaction in the rhizosheath regulates the water uptake of wheat. Rhizosphere:100462

Raynaud X, Leadley PW (2004) Soil characteristics play a key role in modeling nutrient competition in plant communities. Ecology 85:2200–2214

Razavi BS, Zarebanadkouki M, Blagodatskaya E, Kuzyakov Y (2016) Rhizosphere shape of lentil and maize: spatial distribution of enzyme activities. Soil Biol Biochem 96:229–237

Roberson EB, Firestone MK (1992) Relationship between desiccation and exopolysaccharide production in a soil Pseudomonas sp. Appl Environ Microbiol 58:1284–1291

Rovira AD (1969) Plant root exudates. Bot Rev 35:35–57

Ryan MH, Kidd DR, Sandral GA, Yang Z, Lambers H, Culvenor RA, Stefanski A, Nichols PG, Haling RE, Simpson RJ (2016) High variation in the percentage of root length colonised by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi among 139 lines representing the species subterranean clover (Trifolium subterraneum). Appl Soil Ecol 98:221–232

Sasaki T, Yamamoto Y, Ezaki B, Katsuhara M, Ahn SJ, Ryan PR, Delhaize E, Matsumoto H (2004) A wheat gene encoding an aluminum-activated malate transporter. Plant J 37:645–653

Schmidt R, Etalo DW, De Jager V, Gerards S, Zweers H, De Boer W, Garbeva P (2016) Microbial small talk: volatiles in fungal–bacterial interactions. Front Microbiol 6:1495

Shane MW, McCully ME, Canny MJ, Pate JS, Huang C, Ngo H, Lambers H (2010) Seasonal water relations of Lyginia barbata (Southern rush) in relation to root xylem development and summer dormancy of root apices. New Phytol 185:1025–1037

Sharma M, Pang J, Wen Z, De Borda A, Kim HS, Liu Y, Lambers H, Ryan MH, Siddique KH (2021) A significant increase in rhizosheath carboxylates and greater specific root length in response to terminal drought is associated with greater relative phosphorus acquisition in chickpea. Plant Soil 460:51–68

Song L, Pan Z, Dai Y, Chen L, Zhang L, Liao Q, Yu X, Guo H, Zhou G (2020) Characterization and comparison of the bacterial communities of rhizosphere and bulk soils from cadmium-polluted wheat fields. PeerJ 8:e10302

Unno Y, Okubo K, Wasaki J, Shinano T, Osaki M (2005) Plant growth promotion abilities and microscale bacterial dynamics in the rhizosphere of Lupin analysed by phytate utilization ability. Environ Microbiol 7:396–404

Van Veelen A, Koebernick N, Scotson CS, McKay-Fletcher D, Huthwelker T, Borca CN, Mosselmans JFW, Roose T (2020) Root-induced soil deformation influences Fe, S and P: rhizosphere chemistry investigated using synchrotron XRF and XANES. New Phytol 225:1476–1490

Vives-Peris V, de Ollas C, Gómez-Cadenas A, Pérez-Clemente RM (2020) Root exudates: from plant to rhizosphere and beyond. Plant Cell Rep 39:3–17

Volkens G (1887) Die Flora der aegyptisch-arabischen Wüste auf Grundlage anatomisch-physiologischer Forschungen. Borntraeger

Walker TS, Bais HP, Grotewold E, Vivanco JM (2003) Root exudation and rhizosphere biology. Plant Physiol 132:44–51

Wang H, Inukai Y, Yamauchi A (2006) Root development and nutrient uptake. Crit Rev Plant Sci 25:279–301

Watt M, McCully M, Jeffree C (1993) Plant and bacterial mucilages of the maize rhizosphere: comparison of their soil binding properties and histochemistry in a model system. Plant Soil 151:151–165

Watt M, McCully ME, Canny MJ (1994) Formation and stabilization of rhizosheaths of Zea mays L. (Effect of soil water content). Plant Physiol 106:179–186

Wei M, Xue-Xian L, Chun-Jian L (2011) Modulation of soil particle size and nutrient availability in the maize rhizosheath. Pedosphere 21:483–490

Wen Z, Pang J, Tueux G, Liu Y, Shen J, Ryan MH, Lambers H, Siddique KH (2020) Contrasting patterns in biomass allocation, root morphology and mycorrhizal symbiosis for phosphorus acquisition among 20 chickpea genotypes with different amounts of rhizosheath carboxylates. Funct Ecol 34:1311–1324

Wen Z, Pang J, Ryan MH, Shen J, Siddique KH, Lambers H (2021) In addition to foliar manganese concentration, both iron and zinc provide proxies for rhizosheath carboxylates in chickpea under low phosphorus supply. Plant Soil 465:31–46

Whalley WR, Riseley B, Leeds-Harrison PB, Bird NR, Leech PK, Adderley WP (2005) Structural differences between bulk and rhizosphere soil. Eur J Soil Sci 56:353–360

Williams A, de Vries FT (2020) Plant root exudation under drought: implications for ecosystem functioning. New Phytol 225:1899–1905

Williams A, Langridge H, Straathof AL, Muhamadali H, Hollywood KA, Goodacre R, de Vries FT (2022) Root functional traits explain root exudation rate and composition across a range of grassland species. J Ecol 110(1):21–33

Wu A, Fang Y, Liu S, Wang H, Xu B, Zhang S, Deng X, Palta JA, Siddique KH, Chen Y (2021) Root morphology and rhizosheath acid phosphatase activity in legume and graminoid species respond differently to low phosphorus supply. Rhizosphere 19:100391

Wullstein L (1980) Nitrogen fixation (acetylene reduction) associated with rhizosheaths of Indian ricegrass used in stabilization of the Slick Rock, Colorado tailings pile. Rangel. Ecol 33:204–206.

York LM, Carminati A, Mooney SJ, Ritz K, Bennett MJ (2016) The holistic rhizosphere: integrating zones, processes, and semantics in the soil influenced by roots. J Exp Bot 67:3629–3643

Young I (1995) Variation in moisture contents between bulk soil and the rhizosheath of wheat (Triticum aestivum L. cv. Wembley). New Phytol 130:135–139

Yu RP, Li XX, Xiao ZH, Lambers H, Li L (2020) Phosphorus facilitation and covariation of root traits in steppe species. New Phytol 226:1285–1298

Yuan J, Zhao M, Li R, Huang Q, Raza W, Rensing C, Shen Q (2017) Microbial volatile compounds alter the soil microbial community. Environ Sci Pollut Res 24:22485–22493

Zarebanadkouki M, Kim YX, Carminati A (2013) Where do roots take up water? Neutron radiography of water flow into the roots of transpiring plants growing in soil. New Phytol 199:1034–1044

Zarebanadkouki M, Fink T, Benard P, Banfield CC (2019) Mucilage facilitates nutrient diffusion in the drying rhizosphere. Vadose Zone Journal 18:1–13

Zarebanadkouki M, Kuzyakov Y, Carminati A (2016) A new method to enhance rhizosheath formation. Publication: EGU General Assembly Conference Abstracts; Bibcode: 2016EGUGA..18..325A. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016EGUGA..18..325A/abstract

Zargar SM, Gupta N, Nazir M, Mahajan R, Malik FA, Sofi NR, Shikari AB, Salgotra R (2017) Impact of drought on photosynthesis: Molecular perspective. Plant Gene 11:154–159

Zhang Y, Du H, Gui Y, Xu F, Liu J, Zhang J, Xu W (2020a) Moderate water stress in rice induces rhizosheath formation associated with abscisic acid and auxin responses. J Exp Bot 71:2740–2751

Zhang Y, Du H, Xu F, Ding Y, Gui Y, Zhang J, Xu W (2020b) Root-bacteria associations boost rhizosheath formation in moderately dry soil through ethylene responses. Plant Physiol 183:780–792

Zhang Y, Xu F, Ding Y, Du H, Zhang Q, Dang X, Cao Y, Dodd IC, Xu W (2021a) Abscisic acid mediates barley rhizosheath formation under mild soil drying by promoting root hair growth and auxin response. Plant Cell Environ 44:1935–1945

Zhang Z, Su R, Chang C, Cheng X, Peng Q, Lambers H, He H (2021b) Effects of oxytetracycline on plant growth, phosphorus uptake, and carboxylates in the rhizosheath of alfalfa. Plant Soil 461:501–515

Zou Y-N, Chen X, Srivastava A, Wang P, Xiang L, Wu Q-S (2016) Changes in rhizosphere properties of trifoliate orange in response to mycorrhization and sod culture. Appl Soil Ecol 107:307–312

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express their sincere gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers who provided valuable feedback on the first version of our manuscript. Their insightful comments and constructive recommendations and suggestions were fundamental in shaping the final version of this work.

“The authors declare that no funds, grants, or other support were received during the preparation of this manuscript.”

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Soil Science, University College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Meysam Cheraghi

Soil and Water Research Institute, Agricultural Research, Education and Extension Organization (AREEO), Karaj, Iran

Seyed Majid Mousavi

Professorship of Soil Biophysics and Environmental Systems, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany

Mohsen Zarebanadkouki

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

All authors contributed to reviewing the literature, writing, and editing of the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Seyed Majid Mousavi .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

“The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.”

Additional information

Responsible Editor: Andrea Schnepf.

Publisher's note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cheraghi, M., Mousavi, S.M. & Zarebanadkouki, M. Functions of rhizosheath on facilitating the uptake of water and nutrients under drought stress: A review. Plant Soil 491 , 239–263 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-023-06126-z

Download citation

Received : 15 January 2023

Accepted : 12 June 2023

Published : 21 June 2023

Issue Date : October 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-023-06126-z

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Environmental health
• Plant nutrition
• Rhizosphere
• Sustainable agriculture
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research