Telling Tales: Memory, Culture, and the Hudhud Chants

This paper explores the strategies used by the Ifugao people of the\ud Philippines to remember and recite their epic hudhud chants. The hudhud\ud have been recited almost unchanged since the 7th century, and represent\ud the most successful oral tradition of a largely nonliterate society. To\ud explain the success of the hudhud’s transmission from one generation to\ud the next, I apply Rubin’s (1995) model of memory in oral traditions to the\ud text of the chant. This model posits three different types of memory cues\ud present in oral traditions which aid in their memorability: thematic,\ud imagistic, and poetic/sound cues. An analysis of the text of the hudhud\ud shows all three types of cues to be at work in the chant, thus lending more\ud strength to Rubin’s model. As this model is firmly based in the thought\ud traditions of a Western, literate society, however, it seems insufficient to\ud describe the phenomenon of hudhud recitation. Instead, the collective\ud process of reciting the chant seems to be the main factor that enables\ud future generations learn the text, and helps chanters to recall the epic as it\ud unfolds. I apply a distributed model of cognition to the collective process\ud of chant recitation in order to explain the phenomenon of hudhud recall in\ud its own cultural terms