Mr. Frog

Frog’s project develops a framework for modelling understandings of oral and oral-derived texts as ‘things’ in the world with sometimes complex relations to agents, forces, objects, and places. ‘Materiality’ is liberated from the tyranny of science-based epistemologies to encompass vernacular materialities that may defy empirical testing, such as the idea that a verbal text is a supernaturally empowered artefact that only one person may possess at a time; that performance gives unseen reality to past or present events of which the actors may punish a performer’s errors; or that the communication of a text as knowledge requires physical contact. Scholarship has historically taken the ‘thingness’ of oral and oral-derived texts for granted, without connecting research on the variability of oral texts to beliefs about those texts and ways people talk about them as concrete ‘things’. Frog explores the dynamics of ways people think about and understand oral texts and things in the world, from living oral traditions to academic editing and publication.