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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 What is a tribe?
- 2 Travellers in the Levant during the nineteenth century
- 3 The dynamics of territorial and power structures
- 4 Oral traditions
- 5 Tribal society and its relation to the landscape
- 6 Tribal institutions
- 7 Relations between the tribes and the state
- 8 From tribe to tribal state: three case studies
- 9 The economy of tribal societies
- 10 Ethnicity and the sense of belonging
- 11 Women in tribal societies
- 12 Religion and folklore
- 13 Back in time: historical parallels
- Notes
- References
- Index
4 - Oral traditions
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 What is a tribe?
- 2 Travellers in the Levant during the nineteenth century
- 3 The dynamics of territorial and power structures
- 4 Oral traditions
- 5 Tribal society and its relation to the landscape
- 6 Tribal institutions
- 7 Relations between the tribes and the state
- 8 From tribe to tribal state: three case studies
- 9 The economy of tribal societies
- 10 Ethnicity and the sense of belonging
- 11 Women in tribal societies
- 12 Religion and folklore
- 13 Back in time: historical parallels
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Copy, o clerk! Whatever verses are fitting –
As long as the lock of my heart, o clerk! Is open –
Word following word, as when small locusts drive and are driven
And link the plain with the ridge of each enclosing slope.
(Translated by Musil 1928a)Introduction
Oral traditions are a rich source of information, provided they are eventually written down and preserved. With the exception of (some of) the elite, people in most of the Arab world were largely illiterate until the twentieth century, and their literary traditions were oral, transmitted through storytelling, reciting or singing. Arab society has always had a plethora of vernacular traditions: poetry, epic legends, tribal histories and genealogies. Andrew Shryock (1997) explored the present-day importance of oral traditions in two tribes of Jordan, the Adwan and the Abbadi, and he found that they are (or were during the 1980s) still vital for the sense of community and the continuation of tribal loyalty, asabiyyeh.
Over time, but mostly in recent years, much of this oral heritage has been written down, sometimes by the poets and storytellers themselves, often by travellers, historiographers and anthropologists. What we know of pre-Islamic literature is limited because of its oral nature. Some of it is preserved, however, and many pre-Islamic genres persisted until the nineteenth and even twentieth century (Bailey 1991; Hoyland 2001: 211–28).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Near Eastern Tribal Societies during the Nineteenth CenturyEconomy, Society and Politics between Tent and Town, pp. 56 - 79Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2013