TEXTS

In many oral tradition societies, those that have not belonged to hegemonic written history, time is experienced in a way that is nearly inverse to our own. Seasonal cycles, rains and droughts, periods of cold and heat constitute days and months, while ancestral narratives occupy the place of years. During one of my conversations with Maiyle from the Hamar community, I asked how his people measured time. After consulting his mother, Gabo, he explained that time is understood through observation of moonlight and animal behavior.

Months and years depend on the position of the moon in relation to the rainy season. Animals, she explained, read the moon before humans do, and people learn from that reading. Time is not abstracted into units but embodied through relation.

Ritual practices sustain cyclical continuity and communal coherence. The past returns through repetition. Elders transmit knowledge across generations. Time is inhabited cyclically, preserving forms of life established by ancestors as orientation. This present, however, is not static. Oral societies do change, often through adaptive rather than accumulative processes. What is at stake today is how these forms of knowledge are increasingly shaped by dominant ideologies that operate from within everyday structures.

As the anthropologist Jack Goody argued, writing is not merely a tool of communication but a technology that reorganizes memory and transforms how societies relate to time. This distinction matters. Non literate oral societies differ fundamentally from non schooled populations living within literate systems. In the latter, daily life remains structured by institutions, calendars, and symbolic orders dependent on writing.

Modernity, through a teleological lens, labeled oral societies as primitive or tribal, situating them at an imagined lower stage of development. This binary view is historically inaccurate and politically charged. Until the mid twentieth century, much of humanity lived without literacy, schooling, or currency. What differed was not capacity, but degree of incorporation into administrative and historical systems.

In oral societies, knowledge transmission is communal and embodied. It does not generate a fixed archive, but it sustains reflection through interpretation and repetition. In literate societies, writing introduces a different temporal order. It fixes memory, keeps unresolved problems in circulation, and projects analysis into both the past and the future. Writing does not simply record experience; it produces horizons of expectation and reorganizes social life.

Research in anthropology and cognitive science has shown that literacy reshapes not only thought, but perception and bodily experience. Lambros Malafouris has demonstrated that cognition is distributed across body, tools, and environment. Thinking, writing, and learning form a single performative system. From a neuroscientific perspective, Stanislas Dehaene has shown that literacy reorganizes the brain through culturally induced neuroplasticity. Writing, in this sense, configures brains, bodies, and societies.

These differences become visible in educational practices. Oral societies learn through movement and conversation in open spaces. Literate societies privilege silence, enclosure, and abstraction. In conversations with Maiyle, this contrast became clear. He described the difficulty of sitting still and staring at unknown forms in school, having learned instead through the stories of the elders.

Education disciplines the body. It shapes posture, attention, voice, and movement. Over time, it produces different forms of subjectivity. I have observed this difference in the gaze of Suri and Hamar adolescents. Those who attended school often display a more introspective orientation, a self somewhat distanced from collective belonging.

History shows that the incorporation of these communities into dominant regimes of knowledge rarely aimed for emancipation. More often, it sought assimilation, erasing languages and relationships with the land. These communities were inscribed in external histories structured by desires that were not their own.

Every society produces its excess. Ours, under the sign of progress, is structured through exploitation, technological dependence, and the erosion of community life. Progress functions as an infinitely deferred promise, imposing an accelerated time that sacrifices the present in the name of efficiency.

In oral societies, the remnant takes a different form. Superstition emerges as a means to maintain balance through ritual repetition. In the Omo Valley, practices such as mingi persist among the Hamar, Banna, Karo, and Arbore despite legal prohibition. External coercion has repeatedly failed. Without symbolic transformation, belief persists and practice retreats into invisibility.

Here, the Aymara thinker Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui offers a crucial conceptual tool. She describes the ch'ixi as the coexistence of different forms of knowledge that remain in tension rather than merging into a single system. As she writes: “Different cultural worlds can coexist without merging, without one dissolving into the other”.

Transformation, in this sense, does not require erasure, but resymbolization. Instead of abolishing the ritual from the outside, its meaning can be transformed from within. Concrete examples demonstrate this possibility. In Senegal, the Tostan program combined literacy in local languages with collective reflection, leading communities to abandon harmful practices. In Ethiopia, activists like Lale Labuko and Gida Sura worked with elders to reduce mingi practices and care for affected children. The research of Binayew Tamrat and Haimanot Alemayehu shows that meaningful change emerges only when communities act as agents rather than objects of intervention.

Rivera Cusicanqui, S. (2010). Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores (1st ed.). Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón. pp. 60–70.

Health, child protection, integration. These terms often conceal ideological engines that shape educational policy. This text does not argue for or against literacy. It examines how literacy is introduced, with what intentions, and under what symbolic frameworks.

Ambivalence is inevitable. Writing can emancipate and dominate. Every step forward brings both gain and loss. As anthropologist David Graeber observed: “People take what comes from above and reinvent it in ways its authors never could have anticipated”.

However, philosopher Slavoj Žižek warns that partial integration is often absorbed by technofeudal capitalism. Writing can become a brake, or it can become the train itself.

Writing is never innocent. It carries sedimented meanings and introduces linearity, accumulation, and archival fixation. In recent decades, villages in the Omo Valley have been transformed by schools, missions, markets, and the spectacle economy. Preserving culture cannot be passive. It must be an act of resistance.

True resistance lies not in preserving culture for the gaze of others, but in preserving it for those who inhabit it.

Graeber, D. (2019). Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Barcelona: Virus Editorial. p. 150.