> We're getting an "accurate" depiction of their ideas in print, when in an oral culture we'd be getting ideas that may have originated with people in the distant past but have been altered (even if just by curation) in their process of making it to the present to be recited.
There's some interesting work on the "archaeology of orality" which indicates that there's much better continuity of oral traditions than Westerners may admit, in large part because we're only familiar with how our memories are trained versus how oral societies actually operate. Transmission methods are much stronger/better than we might generally think and go back further than our literary records.
> We're getting an "accurate" depiction of their ideas in print, when in an oral culture we'd be getting ideas that may have originated with people in the distant past but have been altered (even if just by curation) in their process of making it to the present to be recited.
There's some interesting work on the "archaeology of orality" which indicates that there's much better continuity of oral traditions than Westerners may admit, in large part because we're only familiar with how our memories are trained versus how oral societies actually operate. Transmission methods are much stronger/better than we might generally think and go back further than our literary records.
Here's an interesting recent article that provides a bit of flavor here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440323000997
And a popular press synopsis:
https://www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2023/august/tasmanian-aboriginal-oral-traditions-among-the-oldest-recorded-narratives