Resisting written documents as the optimal material means of ensuring language circulation?

Charles Briggs (2013:292-293) consciously alludes to Walter Benjamin's 1968 piece "The Storyteller." Briggs writes, "Benjamin warns about what happens to narrative transmission when it is severed from the material practices in which both the transmission and the performance of the stories are embedded." Briggs goes on to give examples of how language "experts" engaging traditional cultures (whether anthropologists doing ethnopoetics, linguists, Bible translators or literacy personnel) thought that the mobility of language was dependent on the circulation of objects, that is written texts (read literacy primers for example). If only people would focus on objects like literacy primers of an at risk language it would best guarantee their circulation. Briggs references an article by Carr and Meeks (2013) where they recount some of their work with Yukon elders. Briggs observes that the traditional elders noticed the "erasure" that was implicit with the written text like literacy primers. Instead Briggs thinks that they preferred oral performance because it was much easier to "calibrate" how and which material links were deleted, adjusted, and embedded in real life relationships.

What I am interested in is that Briggs notices how "material" relationships (between certain people in certain places) and real life activities come into play in the transmission and circulation of "cultural texts." The person transmitting the cultural text to a new person at a new point in history, in a changing cultural situation can more easily navigate how to adjust and re-present some of the material links that have been involved in the passing on of that cultural text in the past for the new situation, and do all that in the midst of carrying on normal daily chores.

Here's the quote:

"They [the Yukon elders] rather insisted on the centrality of performance—that is imbuing discourse with mobility by the online real time creation of new indexical histories and how narratives are embedded in them. This in turn, required metapragmatic calibration (Silverstein 1993) of a very specific sort, calibrations of relationships between indexical histories and how narratives are embedded in them. Weaving displays of words and knowledge into preschool activities or tanning moose hides required calibrating how the circulation of cultural forms was woven into a succession of indexical histories, not just a single, reified proximal context. Materiality was not exhausted by a text, by spoken words, or by moose hides and blocks; it rather entailed relating these materialities to those concerned with caring for younger siblings or other features of daily life and labor. The elders privileged performance as a site not just for exhibiting narratives but for enacting models of circulation, for putting on display acts that imbue cultural forms with mobility through the collaborative creation of new indexical histories and recovering remembered histories."

Briggs, Charles L. "Contested Mobilities: On the Politics and Ethnopoetics of Circulation." Journal of Folklore Research 50, no. 1 (2013): 285–99.