Read the passage below carefully:
While modern digital archiving initiatives have sought to preserve West African oral performance traditions through audio-visual digitization, scholars argue that such technological interventions fundamentally alter the nature of oral epics. In performance, these epics are dynamic, living artifacts continuously recontextualized by griots to reflect contemporary community dynamics and audience feedback. Digitization, by contrast, freezes a singular performance into a static text, stripping the epic of its vital improvisational flexibility and socio-communal responsiveness. Furthermore, digital repositories often decouple the oral narrative from its non-verbal performative elements—such as acoustic space, kinetic gestures, and ritualistic pauses—which are essential to its cultural meaning. Consequently, rather than merely archiving traditions, digital preservation runs the risk of reifying a fluid oral practice into a fixed, disembodied museum object. Therefore, digital archives should be viewed as supplementary documentation rather than substitutes for the living, performative contexts that sustain oral epics.
Statement: The central argument of the passage is that digital archiving, despite preserving oral epics, risks ossifying fluid performance traditions into static artifacts detached from their living cultural contexts.
Answer: Answer