Provides up-to-date guidance on how to approach the study of oral forms and their performances, examining both the practicalities of fieldwork and the methods by which oral texts and performances can be observed, collected and analysed.

The cross-disciplinary and integrative nature of sociolinguistics is clearly evidenced in this highly regarded, insightful volume. Baumans holistic study brings together the separate fields of folklore, anthropology, linguistics, and literary criticism as they focus on verbal art. The work represented here is a clear assembly of perspectives and methodology of these disciplines from the viewpoint of performanceartistic action and artistic event. The basic principles underlying sociolinguistics (patterned variability and context as revealed through language) provide the coherence. In addition to Baumans useful conceptual framework, four lively, informative essays by leading scholars are included that clarify, illustrate, and amplify in an effort to treat verbal art as performance.

Exploring the oral traditions of the South Pacific, this work demonstrates that oral media and native cultural forms are vital throughout the South Pacific. It appeals to scholars concerned with the relationships between verbal art, social change, gender, power, and social organization.

A history of the encounter between Europeans and the colonized people with a groundbreaking analysis of four types of Malagasy folklore: riddles, proverbs, hainteny (dialogic exchanges of traditional metaphors), and oratory.

Walter Ong pioneered the study of how orality and literacy mutually enrich each other in the evolution of human consciousness, arguing that verbal communication moves from orality to literacy and on to what he has termed the "secondary orality" of radio and television. The original essays in this volume explore the implications of Ong's work across the diverse fields of cultural history, literary theory, theology, philosophy, and anthropology. These scholars maintain that Ong's view of orality not only changes our readings of ancient and medieval texts, but that it also changes our understanding of the differing epistemologies of oral and literate cultures and of the coexistence of the oral and literate within a given culture.