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Oral narration in Iranian Cultures

A conference in honour of professor Bo Utas on his 80th birthday

Dates: 7–9 June 2018

Venue: Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University, Sweden

Oral narration, one of the verbal arts intrinsic to human nature, yet it has been much less studied than written literature. Oral traditions are central to Iranian cultures, but are facing a threat of extinction even more dire than the loss of Iranian indigenous languages generally. This conference will bring together international experts to examine varied perspectives on oral narration among ethnic groups within the Iranian-speaking cultural sphere. It will encompass diverse oral narrative traditions, taking in approaches from folklore, ethnology, typology, discourse linguistics, and social anthropology.

We celebrate the jubilee of Prof. Bo Utas, who developed his deep interest in the art of oral transmission of Iranian texts during his training with the eminent Uppsala scholar H.S. Nyberg (1889-1974). Utas has pursued the problem of orality vs literacy in Iranian, finding oral literature more akin in structure to written literature than to the ad hoc spoken language (2008: 229). He compares a 'high language', written or oral, to a cultivated garden, as a "formal way of expression" (Utas 2013: 169).

Email: oral.narration@lingfil.uu.se

Last update 2018-05-17