Las Culturas Se Preservan Narrando

Orality constitutes the prevailing cultural system in Andean communities, where the willaq (storyteller) plays a central role in the transmission of knowledge and values. This exploratory ethnographic study, conducted in the community of Churrubamba in the southern Peruvian Andes, analyzes how orality organizes and sustains cultural preservation and the intergenerational transmission of values. Based on interviews with five key informants, including willaqs and parents, the study identified narrative patterns and the social functions of oral storytelling. Rather than assuming a dichotomy or a linear progression between orality, literacy, and electronality, the analysis examines their coexistence, overlap, and absence through the interplay of the infosphere, sociosphere, and technosphere. Within this framework, the findings show that orality reinforces cultural identity and collective memory and, when written and digital practices emerge, engages in critical dialogue with them while reconfiguring its functions without opposing them. Storytelling also takes place not only as an individual practice but within circles of the word, collective spaces where the community engages in dialogue, learns, and renews its shared memory. Although these practices are being transformed by modernization and digital media, orality remains a cornerstone of cultural and educational life in Churrubamba. The study concludes that, understood as both a cultural and pedagogical system, oral tradition requires revitalization strategies to ensure its intergenerational continuity

Cultural transmission in animals · Ethnography · Modernization theory · Narrative · Oral tradition · Orality · Storytelling · Educational Technology in Learning · Indigenous Cultures and Socio-Education · Migration, Education, Indigenous Social Dynamics