Oral Traditions as Survival Strategies

The lifeways of hunter-gatherer groups may be considered to be precarious.  These highly mobile groups of foragers and hunters lived close to the earth and resource scarcity was often a recurring theme in their lives.  In response to scarcity, these groups needed the ability to deal with short and long-term recource fluctuations.

Foraging and hunting has been the economic pattern of hominids (modern humans and their bipedal ancestros) for almost three million years until the Neolithic Revolution which began the domestication of plants and animals, shifting groups economies to a more sedentary and agricultural lifestyle.  Over this span of several million years these hunting and foraging groups must have developed and maintained strategies that allowed their sociocultural systems to survive cycles of resource scarcity (Minc  1986:40) both short and long term.

During times of scarcity, behaviors and alternatives that had maintained group survival and reproduction in the past would result in the formation of adaptive knowledge that would provide a survival strategy.  This knowledge or information would be maintained within societies because it would be a, "prerequisite to decision making at a given moment in time" (Minc 1986:41).  This information, crucial to the survival and reproduction of the group would be retained in some form that could be culturally conveyed through time (Minc 1986:41).

One way this transmission occurs is through the oral tradition of the society.  Michell Sugiyama (2001) speaks to the universality of themes within folklore worldwide.  This universality would indicate that folklore is an adaptive means of treating adaptive problems.  It is Sugiyama's contention that this universality, "lends support to the hypothesis that storytelling originally emerged as a means of storing and transmitting certain types of fitness-related inforomation" (Sugiyama 2001:242).  Amyth, according to Sugiyama, may seem an impossible tale with talking animals and imaginary beings yet they contain accuracy in their descriptions of geography and plants as well as knowledge of where animals are located and how to kill and process them (Sugiyama 2001:239).

The universality of folklore is mainly at the "macro" level, dealing with issues common to all cultures such as survival and reproduction.  Variation would occur at the "micro" level where individual cultures deal with adaptive problems unique to their particular habitation areas or lifeways (Sugiyama 2001:243).

The environment is a major factor in the structuring and organizing of societies.  Intimate knowledge of the environment that continued social reproduction would be important to maintain and transmit.  Oral traditions are references to what was done in the past.  They are the repositories of past events and their outcomes and are able to provide information in formulating survival strategies to meet current conditions.

I submit oral tradition provides the information necessary in decision-making that results in adaptive survival strategies in how to deal with environmental variability and is one way of surviving resource scarcities.

Minc, Leah D.
    1986 Scarcity and survival: The role of oral tradition in mediating subsistencew crises. Journal of
       Anthropological Archaeology 5:39-113.

Sugiyama, Michelle Scalise
    2001 Narrative theory and function: Why evolution matters. Philosophy and Literature 25(2):233-250.