Oral tradition , or oral lore , is a form of human communication in which knowledge, art, ideas and culture are received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another. The information is mentally recorded by oral repositories , sometimes termed "walking libraries", who are usually also performers.
It is the most widespread medium of human communication. Religions such as Buddhism , Hinduism , Catholicism , [ 7 ] and Jainism have used oral tradition, in parallel to writing, to transmit their canonical scriptures , rituals , hymns and mythologies.
Oral tradition is memories, knowledge, and expression held in common by a group over many generations: it is the long preservation of immediate or contemporaneous testimony. It speaks to people according to their understanding, unveiling itself in accordance with their aptitudes.
As an academic discipline , oral tradition refers both to objects and methods of study. According to John Foley, oral tradition has been an ancient human tradition found in "all corners of the world". The Judeo-Christian Bible reveals its oral traditional roots; medieval European manuscripts are penned by performing scribes; geometric vases from archaic Greece mirror Homer's oral style. Indeed, if these final decades of the millennium have taught us anything, it must be that oral tradition never was the other we accused it of being; it never was the primitive, preliminary technology of communication we thought it to be.
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Rather, if the whole truth is told, oral tradition stands out as the single most dominant communicative technology of our species as both a historical fact and, in many areas still, a contemporary reality. Before the introduction of text , oral tradition remained the only means of communication in order to establish societies as well as its institutions.
