scholarly journals The Power of Systematic Doubt in Historical Enquiry

1974 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 109-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Vansina
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
African History ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Common Reference ◽  
Historical Materials ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Points Of View

Many readers have probably noticed that the manuals of historical method which deal with verbal societies are primarily concerned with the sources available and the application of a critique to them. This is true for McCall's or Gabel and Bennett's works on Africa. But what is to be done with the sources once they are ready for evaluation remains vague. How does one reconstruct the past? How does one explain, or eventually interpret, history? Of the two works mentioned, only the first pays some attention to the question of “historical synthesis.’ McCall lists three possibilities: (a) that the sources support each other; (b) that they contradict each other; and (c) that they have no common reference or meeting point. This last situation is the most common in African history and indicates merely that not enough is known and that eventually new data could lead to new interpretative situations-either (a) or (b). The manual stresses that sources should be classified by discipline so that comparison of sources yields either confirmation or contradiction, with obvious and known data reinforcing the validity of the result. Once this is achieved it would seem that the job is finished, except for the warning that historical reconstruction requires a certain type of mind: imaginative yet disciplined.Yet the job is not finished. By comparing we have only established the degree of validity of reported events or situations. We have only verified how the observation, to borrow a term from the scientific experimental method, is correct. The impression remains that historical research is fairly mechanical: to find sources, subject them to a critique, assemble them. Reconstruction follows, with suitable use of imagination. That is the craft. Yet anyone who works with historical materials knows that that is not the practice of the craft. Josephine Tey's novel The Daughter of Time features a police sergeant who more nearly exemplifies historical practice–he guesses, ponders, backtracks, and finds sources almost by intuition. If he had made a few more mistakes he would have been a recognizable historian at work. A recent volume, The Historian's Workshop, though impressionistic, also yields a more realistic picture. In the real world historians start out with a hunch, an idea which leads them to an interest in documents or in oral traditions. Then the data suggest what Popper calls a historical interpretation – “untestable points of view.” The practitioner feels that the interpretation is not enough. It should be doubted and controlled by reference to more data until the point is reached at which no more control is possible. Then the historian feels satisfied with the result–even though it still remains an interpretation, because there remains the selective point of view implicit in the idea that initiated the research.

scholarly journals Historians, are Archeologists Your Siblings?

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 369-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Vansina
Keyword(s):  
Good Reason ◽  
African History ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Archaeological Material ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Relative Scarcity

The historian of pre-nineteenth century Africa…cannot get far without the aid of archaeology.Nevertheless, historians have good reason to be cautious about historical generalisations by archaeologists and about their own use of archaeological material…: it would be a rash historian who totally accepted the conclusions of Garlake and Huffman with the same simple-minded trust as I myself accepted the conclusions of Summers and Robinson.In the beginning, historians of Africa put great store by archeology. Was its great time depth not one of the distinctive features of the history of Africa, a condition that cannot be put aside without seriously distorting the flavor of all its history? Did not the relative scarcity and the foreign authorship of most precolonial written records render archeological sources all the more precious? Did not history and archeology both deal with the reconstruction of human societies in the past? Was the difference between them not merely the result of a division of labor based on sources, so that historical reconstruction follows in time and flows from archeological reconstruction? Such considerations explain why the Journal of African History has regularly published regional archeological surveys in order to keep historians up to date.

Oral Traditions: Whose History

1981 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 165-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Spear
Keyword(s):  
Oral Traditions ◽  
African History ◽  
Evolutionary Patterns ◽  
Initial Report ◽  
The Past ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
One Year ◽  
Successive Generations ◽  
Tradition Orale

Historians rarely pause to reflect on the history and theory of our own discipline, but it is a salutary exercise, particularly when the discipline is as young as African history. Twenty years ago a majority of African peoples emerged from colonial domination and acquired their independence. In that same year their history was also symbolically liberated from domination by the activities of Europeans in Africa through the inauguration of the Journal of African History. And one year later the new African history was given what was to become one of its dominant methodologies with the publication of Jan Vansina's De la tradition Orale.African history was to be the history of Africans, a history that had begun well before the European ‘discovery’ of Africa. The problem was sources. Western historiography was firmly based on written sources which could be arranged in sequence and analyzed to trace incremental changes and establish cause and effect relationships in evolutionary patterns of change. Unlike written documents which were recorded in the past and passed down unchanged into the present, oral traditions had to be remembered and retold through successive generations to reach the present. Their accuracy was thus subject to lapses in memory and falsification in the long chains of transmission from the initial report of the event in the past to the tradition told in the present. To overcome these problems Vansina established an elaborate and meticulous methodology by which traditions should be collected and transcribed, their chains of transmission traced and variants compared, and obvious biases and falsifications stripped off to produce primary documents suitable for writing history within the western genre.

Community-Based Approaches to African History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter R. Schmidt ◽  
Kathryn Weedman Arthur
Keyword(s):  
Oral Traditions ◽  
African History ◽  
Community Based ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material History ◽  
Other World ◽  
Historical Sites ◽  
Community Projects

Several trends in the historical scholarship of Africa require recognition and remediation. The first is a quickly shrinking interest in African history of the past two millennia, with a shift in emphasis to early hominins and to the modern period. The precolonial history of Africa, once a subject of considerable excitement for historians, historical linguists, and archaeologists, is fading from interest. The high cost of interdisciplinary research is one reason, but a deeper, more alarming cause is the rapid erasure of oral traditions by globalization, disease, and demographic changes. Archaeologists and heritage experts are faced with a need to find innovative means to investigate and recover historical information. One proven path is partnerships with communities that want to initiate research to document, recuperate, and preserve their histories. Community approaches in other world regions have shown important research results. Adapting some of the philosophy and methods of other experiments as well as innovating their own approaches, archaeologists and heritage managers in Africa are increasingly involved in community projects that hold out significant hope that the quickly disappearing oral and material history of Africa can be preserved and studied into the future. Two case studies—one from the Haya people of Tanzania and the other from the Boreda Gamo of Ethiopia—illustrate that long-term and trusting partnerships with local groups lead to important historical observations and interpretations. Such collaborations also lead to thorough documentation and preservation of historical sites and information that otherwise would be lost to posterity. Moreover, they account for the ability of local groups to initiate and to conduct their own research while recognizing local control over heritage and history.

Anecdotes as Historical Evidence for the Principate

1980 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Saller
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
African History ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Narratives

Historians' judgements about the evidential value of anecdotes have oscillated over the past decades. In the early part of this century authors of German textbooks on historical method warned students against using anecdotes on the grounds that their form was not fixed and their contents fluctuated since the narrators exercised their imaginations to improve stories with each telling. J. Vansina, an anthropologist studying the value of oral traditions for reconstructing African history, concluded in his more recent work that the anecdote is among the least reliable types of oral tradition. Nevertheless, recent scholarly works on Roman imperial history have utilized anecdotes for the sorts of social, economic, and administrative details which the available political narratives ignore. No systematic analysis has been undertaken to justify this use. I shall attempt to fill the gap by asking three basic questions: in what social contexts were anecdotes generated and transmitted; what changes in content were likely to occur during transmission; and what are the implications for the use of anecdotes as historical evidence?

scholarly journals Freshest Advices on What To Do With the Historical Method in Philosophy When Using It to Study a Little Bit of Philosophy That Has Been Lost to History

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-118
Author(s):  
Bennett Gilbert ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Original Work ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Moral Imperative ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

The paper explores the question of the relationship between the practice of original philosophical inquiry and the study of the history of philosophy. It is written from my point of view as someone starting a research project in the history of philosophy that calls this issue into question, in order to review my starting positions. I argue: first, that any philosopher is sufficiently embedded in culture that her practice is necessarily historical; second, that original work is in fact in part a reconstruction by reinterpretation of the past and that therefore it bears some relation to historiographic techniques for the restoration of damaged objects and texts; and third that the special oddities of the relations of present and past do not fail to ensnare the philosopher, who must restore the past but freely break from it. I describe this relationship as proleptic. Finally, I argue that this is a moral imperative in writing philosophy, derived from the imperative to be honest.

scholarly journals Deleuze’s History of Philosophy as Creativity

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 250-257
Author(s):  
A . A. Sanzhenakov
Keyword(s):  
Negative Attitude ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ordinary Sense ◽  
Specific Nature ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Past ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
History Of

The article is devoted to the attempt to reveal the specific nature of Deleuze’s work on the history of philosophy. For this purpose the author analyzes the historical method of Deleuze from two angles. First, he explores the Deleuzean point of view on the history of philosophy. Second, he presents commentators’ account on the work of Deleuze on the history of philosophy. It is shown that, in the opinion of the French philosopher, the history of philosophy in the ordinary sense is a repressive discipline which needs to be overcome. On the other hand, it is shown that the Deleuzean negative attitude towards the history of philosophy and some philosophers of the past arises from his anti-Platonism and an attempt to build an alternative line of metaphysics. In general, the history, according to Deleuze, should not aim to preserve the past (to be a doxography), but, on the contrary, should provide the conditions for creativity.

History of Tour de France from the Geographical Point of View

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 255-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimír Bačík ◽  
Michal Klobučník
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
The Past ◽  
Advanced Technologies ◽  
The World ◽  
Spatial Dimensions ◽  
Tour De France ◽  
Wide Circle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Expert Community ◽  
Geographical Point

Abstract The Tour de France, a three week bicycle race has a unique place in the world of sports. The 100th edition of the event took place in 2013. In the past of 110 years of its history, people noticed unique stories and duels in particular periods, celebrities that became legends that the world of sports will never forget. Also many places where the races unfolded made history in the Tour de France. In this article we tried to point out the spatial context of this event using advanced technologies for distribution of historical facts over the Internet. The Introduction briefly displays the attendance of a particular stage based on a regional point of view. The main topic deals with selected historical aspects of difficult ascents which every year decide the winner of Tour de France, and also attract fans from all over the world. In the final stage of the research, the distribution of results on the website available to a wide circle of fans of this sports event played a very significant part (www.tdfrance.eu). Using advanced methods and procedures we have tried to capture the historical and spatial dimensions of Tour de France in its general form and thus offering a new view of this unique sports event not only to the expert community, but for the general public as well.

COMBINING ORAL TRADITIONS AND BAYESIAN CHRONOLOGICAL MODELING TO UNDERSTAND VILLAGE DEVELOPMENT IN THE GULF OF PAPUA (PAPUA NEW GUINEA)

Radiocarbon ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Chris Urwin ◽  
Quan Hua ◽  
Henry Arifeae
Keyword(s):  
Papua New Guinea ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Spatial History ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gulf Of Papua ◽  
The Village

ABSTRACT When European colonists arrived in the late 19th century, large villages dotted the coastline of the Gulf of Papua (southern Papua New Guinea). These central places sustained long-distance exchange and decade-spanning ceremonial cycles. Besides ethnohistoric records, little is known of the villages’ antiquity, spatiality, or development. Here we combine oral traditional and 14C chronological evidence to investigate the spatial history of two ancestral village sites in Orokolo Bay: Popo and Mirimua Mapoe. A Bayesian model composed of 35 14C assays from seven excavations, alongside the oral traditional accounts, demonstrates that people lived at Popo from 765–575 cal BP until 220–40 cal BP, at which time they moved southwards to Mirimua Mapoe. The village of Popo spanned ca. 34 ha and was composed of various estates, each occupied by a different tribe. Through time, the inhabitants of Popo transformed (e.g., expanded, contracted, and shifted) the village to manage social and ceremonial priorities, long-distance exchange opportunities and changing marine environments. Ours is a crucial case study of how oral traditional ways of understanding the past interrelate with the information generated by Bayesian 14C analyses. We conclude by reflecting on the limitations, strengths, and uncertainties inherent to these forms of chronological knowledge.

Constructing a Precolonial Owan Chronology and Dating Framework

1994 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 219-249
Author(s):  
Onaiwu W. Ogbomo
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
African History ◽  
Accurate Assessment ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The Past ◽  
Relative Chronology ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Genealogical Data

Oral tradition has been recognized by historians as a vital source for historical reconstruction of non-literate societies. However, one of its “deficienc[ies] is an inability to establish and maintain an accurate assessment of the duration of the past [it] seeks to reconstruct.” As a result of its time-lessness it has been declared ahistorical. In the same vein R.A. Sargent argues that [c]hronology is the framework for the reconstruction of the past, and is vital to the correlation of evidence, assessment of data, and the analysis of historical sources. Any construction of history [which] fails to consider or employ dating and the matrix of time to examine the order and nature of events in human experience can probably be labelled ahistorical.Basically, the concern of critics of oral tradition is that, while they are veritable sources of history, the researcher “must work and rework them with an increasing sophistication and critical sense.” Because dating is very pivotal to the historian's craft, different techniques have been adopted alone or in combination to create a relative chronology. In precolonial African history, the most commonly used have been genealogical data which include dynastic generations, genealogical generations (father-to-son succession) and the age-set generation. Also systematically charted comets, solar eclipses, and droughts have been employed by historians in dating historical events, or in calculating the various generational lengths.A dynastic generation is determined by “the time elapsing between the accession of the first member of a given generation to hold office and the accession of the first representative of the next.”

scholarly journals EPISTOLARY HERITAGE OF N.I. ILMINSKY AS A SOURCE ON THE HISTORY OF EDUCATING NON-RUSSIAN PEOPLES OF EASTERN RUSSIA (in the last third of the XIX century)

2021 ◽  
pp. 126-134
Author(s):  
Alevtina N. Pavlova
Keyword(s):  
Research Problem ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
Genetic Method ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
History Of ◽  
Rich Material ◽  
Historical Comparative ◽  
Eastern Russia

The article is devoted to the analysis of epistolary sources on the history of educating non-Russian peoples of eastern Russia. The correspondence gives an opportunity to present the work of N.I. Ilminsky on education, methods of his activity, difficulties encountered along the way. The correspondence focuses on the development of Orthodox education among non-Russian peoples. The specific composition of letters is diverse. By correspondents, the sources are divided into the following groups: letters to senior statesmen, to figures of the Russian Orthodox Church, to local education figures. By the content, the correspondence is divided into groups of materials: about translation and publishing activities, about organizing the network of non-Russian schools, about training and appointment of teachers and priests, about introducing church worship in native languages. The letters significantly complement our understanding of N.I. Ilminsky’s personality and his educational activities. Currently, many scientists believe that it is necessary to conduct a deeper study and interpretation of historical events concerning educating the population of the country, including non-Russian peoples of the eastern part of Russia, taking into account their diversity. Epistolary sources provide rich material for historical reconstruction, their information potential is rich and diverse. The research methodology is based on historical methods: historical-genetic and historical-comparative. The historical-genetic method enables to trace the course of events in their chronological sequence, the dynamics of processes related to the history of educating non-Russian peoples of eastern Russia. The comparative historical method, which puts the fait accompli as the basis of all arguments and conclusions, was an important method in the historical reconstruction of educational process of the non-Russian peoples of the region under study on the basis of Orthodox education. A variety of epistolary sources made it possible to conduct a holistic historical reconstruction of the period under study in the history of education and to formulate analytical conclusions on the research problem. The author managed to analyze the collected material. The analysis performed gives the opportunity to make a conclusion about the diverse activities of N.I. Ilminsky on education.

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