“There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.”

—  Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 60

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures." by Marshall McLuhan?
Marshall McLuhan photo
Marshall McLuhan 416
Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor … 1911–1980

Related quotes

Georges Duhamel photo

“Is it possible to create a maintain a true culture, a strong and flourishing culture, through the medium of pictoral and oral apparatus?”

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French writer

Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), p. 21

Marshall McLuhan photo

“The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 74

John Miles Foley photo

“We know now that cultures are not oral or literate; rather they employ a menu or spectrum of communicative strategies, some of them associated with texts, some with voices, and some with both.”

John Miles Foley (1947–2012) American literary scholar

"What's in a Sign?", in Signs of Orality. The Oral Tradition and its Influence in the Greek and Roman World, ed. E. Anne MacKay (1999), p. 3

“Material culture including “a cult of the horse” moves from the eastern slopes of the Urals to Central Asia, but: “There is no evidence that they reached India.””

Elena Efimovna Kuzmina (1931–2013) Russian archaeologist

Elena Kuzmina, Origin of the Indo-Iranians (Brill, Leiden). quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018), p.452. Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.

Dana Gioia photo

“In oral culture, there is no separation between the poet and the poem. The author is a performer who vocalizes the words. Creation and performance are inseparably linked. Without writing, a ‘text’ has no existence outside the auditory performance”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

10
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Harold Innis photo

“It is suggested that all written works, including this one, have dangerous implications to the vitality of an oral tradition and to the health of a civilization, particularly if they thwart the interest of a people in culture, and following Aristotle, the cathartic effects of culture. "It is written but I say unto you" is a powerful directive to Western civilization.”

Harold Innis book Empire and Communications

From the 2007 Voyageur Classics edition, pp. 19-20.
Empire and Communications (1950)

John Desmond Bernal photo

“The present aristocracy of western culture, at the very moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country.”

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) British scientist

Source: The world, the flesh & the devil (1929) (1969), p. 68

Koenraad Elst photo

“But the innermost and actually religious level of Hindu culture is an individual affair. And it could not have been otherwise. Action and ritual may be community affairs, but the basis of real religion is a culture of consciousness, and consciousness is individual.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)

“Indian art has been the product of Indian culture as the Greek art has been the product of Greek culture or the Roman art has been the product of Roman culture. Indian culture, however, has been the product of two streams of thoughts and practices, one, the Folk, belonging to the oral traditions operating at the folk level, in the villages, and, the other, classical, belonging to the sophisticated literary traditions, the former is sometimes called 'Lower Tradition' and the latter 'Higher Tradition.”

Swaraj Prakash Gupta (1931–2007) Indian archaeologist and art historian

Elements of Indian Art (2002)

“In introducing the personal computer to the classroom, we shall be breaking a four-hundred year-old truce between the gregariousness and openness fostered by orality and the introspection and isolation fostered by the printed word. Orality stresses group learning, cooperation, and a sense of social responsibility… Print stresses individualized learning, competition, and personal autonomy. Over four centuries, teachers, while emphasizing print, have allowed orality its place in the classroom, and have therefore achieved a kind of pedagogical peace between these two forms of learning, so that what is valuable in each can be maximized. Now comes the computer, carrying anew the banner of private learning and individual problem-solving. Will the widespread use of computers in the classroom defeat once and for all the claims of communal speech? Will the computer raise egocentrism to the status of a virtue?”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992)

Related topics