Orality is the verbal art of peoples who have not developed written communication as such although the difference between the oral and the written is not as sharply marked as traditionally believed, as renown anthropologist Tim Ingold has revealed in his celebrated book Lines: a Brief History. Orality is not only the mere passing of oral information from one generation to the next as in building blocks; information is passed but a high degree of transformation and improvisation is required to a good storyteller. Oral tradition and values has generally thrived in many non-western societies like Africa, Indigenous Australia, South and North America, Siberia, Mongolia, central and south Asia, and also part of the West like the Basque country, Bosnia and even in parts of England. It can be said that orality was well spread around the world until certain technological that occurred in cultures that had developed written cultures allowed their expansion and contact with non-literate peoples.

Orality has also been described by Penny Van Toorn as an “embodied and emplaced form of knowledge” which means that in oral cultures the interrelation between mind, body and environment was crucially important for survival; hence many oral traditions feature animals and other elements in the nature like trees or weather as sentient creatures. The beauty of oral traditions can be seen in the songlines of Indigenous Australians that tell fascinating stories about the Dreaming Ancestors and how they shaped the earth as they roamed through it.

Today, it is believed that crucial knowledge about the flora and fauna has been stored in the knowledge of elders for thousands of years to the point that a number of western biologists and indigenous tribal elders work together in many places for the preservation and management of the environment. However, the relentless advance of global capitalism endangers the survival and continuity of oral cultures.