Past Conferences

Orality and Literacy Conferences:
2001 - 2007

This Conference Series has spanned seven years and three continents.  In keeping with the global dimension of the principal subject matter, no cultural, chronological or historical limits are imposed. The aim is to deepen our perspectives on living oral traditions and texts variously interfacing with them, and to gain an understanding of how written texts actually functioned for the longest part of human history.  Publications arising from this Conference Series are listed in the VT Publications tab of this website.

 

2001:  Conference I:  Colonialism
University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa

Three scholars, Baudouin Decharneux (Free University of Brussels, Belgium), Jonathan A. Draper (University of Natal, South Africa), and Werner Kelber (Rice University, USA) launched this initial conference with a focus on Colonialism to bring together representatives of two different academic discourses: the study of the ancient world with a particular emphasis on the New Testament and the study of the colonial and postcolonial period in South Africa.

 

2002:  Conference II: Le Monde des Esprits/The World of the Spirits
Free University of Brussels, Belgium

Distinctly philosophical and theological in nature, this conference brought insights arising from orality-studies to such classical topoi as metaphoricity, sacrality, spirituality, transcendence, metaphysics, revelation, and referentiality . In part, the papers reflected more concrete interests in the oral, magical, talismanic operations of the word. Ranging widely, they represented the disciplines of classical studies, philosophy, theology and religious studies, anthropology, linguistics and literary criticism.

 

2003:  Conference III: Memory
Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA

In his keynote address on "Cultural Memory and Cultural Texts," Jan Assmann (University of Heidelberg) described so-called cultural texts as being carried and reproduced by society primarily via memory and ritual. The papers linked memory with issues such as mnemotechnics, Merckbilder, historiography, commemorative strategies, visual hagiographies, lieux de memoire, myth and ritual, gender and story telling, letter writing, oral tradition, Plato, the electronic media, Freud, Moses and monotheism, and many more. Multiple ways of memorial interfacing with oral and literary modes of communication were demonstrated.

 

2004:  Conference IV:  Diversity
University of Zululand, Mtunzini, South Africa

John M. Foley's (University of Missouri) keynote address on "The Natural Diversity of Oral Tradition" reflected on the vast variety of oral traditions that can easily be masked by the collective designation of Oral Tradition. The speakers illuminated Diversity by relating it to issues such as communications, migrant workers, education, tradition, prophecy, religious identity, literacy as mechanism of constraint, indigenous knowledge systems, the Internet, newspapers, and other topics.

 

2005:  Conference V:  Ritual 
University of Mons/Hainaut, Belgium

In his keynote address, Werner Kelber (Rice University) reviewed theories of ritual in Western religious and intellectual history, concluding with a discussion of rituals and the media. The papers dealt with issues such as the enactment of script or score, unscripted ritual practices, performative efficaciousness (ritual speech in early Greek culture and early Christian sermons), interfacing of oral and scribal forms of ritual, ritualized authority, and many others.

 

2006:  Conference VI: Tradition
Regis University, Denver, Colorado, USA

The sixth conference treated one of the most consequential concepts in the human and social sciences, and one of the most productive features of human activity, namely tradition. The topic was discussed from a broad variety of different disciplines, including African and Hispanic studies, biblical studies, patristics, Western and Orthodox theology, cognitive sciences, Islamic studies, psychology and anthropology.