M?MOIRE ET APPRENTISSAGE DANS LES SOCI?T?S AVEC ET SANS ?CRITURE ? LA TRANSMISSION DU BAGRE*

Jack Goody, Memory and Learning in Oral and Literate Culture : The Repro duction of the Bagre.?In an earlier account of the way in which a long African myth, known as the Bagre, was transmitted, emphasis was placed upon exact verbatim recall. Further versions, collected over a period of twenty years, bring out the considerable variation, especially in that part of the utterance which is more speculative and more narrative in character; the part that recounts the series of related rituals remains fairly constant. This variability of content in a standardised oral form raises questions about the reproduction of myths and the relationship between structures of recall and "deep structures" of anthropological analysis. It is argued that verbatim recall, exact memorisation, though often viewed as characteristic of oral cultures, is in fact relatively rare, being found much more frequently when, with the advent of writing systems, a spatial factor is added to language. The paper discusses some of the implications of this view for the study of oral literature, for cross-cultural psychology and for education. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.95 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 06:08:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms