Practice · Worldwide
Oral Tradition
Knowledge, history, and art transmitted through speech, song, and performance rather than writing.
Many of the world's performance traditions have been sustained through apprenticeship, memory, and repeated performance. Oral traditions are not 'pre-literate' failures to write; they are complex systems with their own methods of verification, variation, and authority.
Historians once dismissed oral sources as unreliable. Since the mid-twentieth century, oral history and the study of oral literature have become established fields, though debates continue about how to use them alongside documents.