Before there were books, there were storytellers. Before there were archives, there was memory.
For centuries, knowledge was transmitted through stories, songs, proverbs, praise poetry, genealogies and ritual practices. These traditions functioned as intellectual archives through which communities recorded history, reflected upon morality, transmitted practical wisdom and interpreted human experience.
The Institute approaches oral traditions not as curiosities or relics of a premodern world but as sophisticated systems of knowledge.
A proverb may contain a political philosophy. A song may preserve a social history. A genealogy may sustain centuries of collective memory. A folktale may reveal an entire moral universe.
The study of oral literature therefore occupies a central place within the Institute because it allows us to recover intellectual traditions that would otherwise remain invisible within conventional archives.