What the Stranger Brings: The Social Dynamics of Fieldwork

1990 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 335-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Lance
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Northern Ghana ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
African History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Oral Evidence

A major feature of research in African history is the reliance of African historians on oral statements for much of their evidence. Vansina's pathbreaking explorations of African oral traditions and testimonies established criteria for the collection of oral evidence and ushered in the contemporary era of scholarship in African history. Although the publication ofOral Traditionsanctioned the use of oral data, it also prompted considerable reflection about the nature, strengths, and weaknesses of oral evidence. For the most part this scholarly examination of African oral traditions and testimonies has focused on their value as sources. What has not been fully addressed are the social and cultural dynamics of the research process itself: how the interaction between a foreign fieldworker and an indigenous informant involves not only the production of knowledge but the management of asymmetrical power relationships as well. Rarely do researcher and informant interact as equal partners. During the process of fieldwork, sometimes the researcher is favored, sometimes the informant. This brief paper is a reflection on the ways the attitudes of an African people about knowledge, power, and outsiders influence the kind of oral evidence the researcher collects.For much of the past two years I resided in a village in northern Ghana where I was conducting fieldwork among the Mamprusi people. I was seeking information which would embellish and provide an indigenous texture to the archival sources I had collected earlier as part of my efforts to reconstruct the social history of Mampurugu during the colonial period. It soon became apparent, however, that my quest for an indigenous expression of, and perspective on, historical process was mired in a complex host of conflicts and assumptions. As a white stranger in the Mamprusis' midst asking as many questions as I could about the Mamprusi past, I received answers which reflected not only the degree to which I had successfully or unsuccessfully established cordial and trusting relationships with my Mamprusi informants, but also Mamprusi attitudes about historical knowledge and their anxieties in regard to possible consequences if such knowledge were revealed to non-Mamprusi.

The Social Dynamics of Dedication

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christy Constantakopoulou
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Annual Basis ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

This chapter provides a methodological discussion on how to use the evidence included in the Delian inventories in order to write the social history of the dedicants. The inventories were produced by the Delian hieropoioi and recorded on an annual basis the dedications kept in the Delian treasuries. The chapter focuses particularly on dedications which are attached to named individuals and communities. It then discusses the material according to the parameters of gender, individual versus community dedications, elite dedicants, and distance of travel. Using the inventories we are able to reconstruct who came to the Delian sanctuary to dedicate objects.

The Conquest That Never Was: Ghana and the Almoravids, 1076. II. The Local Oral Sources

1983 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 53-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Conrad ◽  
Humphrey J. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Time Scale ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Positive Identification ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Oral Evidence ◽  
Remote Past ◽  
Written Sources

“The land took the name of the wells, the wells that had no bottom.”In Part I of this paper we examined the external written sources and found no unambiguous evidence that an Almoravid conquest of ancient Ghana ever occurred. The local oral evidence reviewed in this part of our study supports our earlier hypothesis, in that we find nothing in the traditions to indicate any conquest of the eleventh-century sahelian state known to Arab geographers as “Ghana.” Instead, the oral traditions emphasize drought as having had much to do with the eventual disintegration of the Soninke state known locally as “Wagadu.”An immediate problem involved in sifting the oral sources for evidence of an Almoravid conquest is that a positive identification between the Wagadu of oral tradition and the Ghana of written sources has never been established. Early observers like Tautain (1887) entertained no doubts in this regard, and recently Meillassoux seems to have accepted a connection, if not an identification, between Ghana and Wagadu when he notes that “les Wago, dont le nom a donné Wagadu, sont les plus clairement associés à l'histoire du Ghana.” However, much continues to be written on the subject, and the question remains a thorny one. On the lips of griots (traditional bards) and other local informants, Wagadu is a timeless concept, so a reliable temporal connection between people and events in the oral sources on one hand and Ghana at the time of the Almoravids on the other, is particularly elusive. Indeed, any link between the traditions discussed here and a specific date like 1076 must be regarded as very tenuous, as must any association of legendary events with Islamic dates. In western Sudanic tradition influenced by Islam, the hijra (A.D. 622) is both prestigious and convenient, a date with which virtually any event in the remote past can be associated, though such a claim may have nothing to do with any useful time scale.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Historiography: Methods and Sources

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Spear
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Theoretical Foundation ◽  
Environmental Modeling ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
African History ◽  
New Techniques ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range

The difficulties of exploring African history, especially for earlier periods, have spurred the development of a wide range of methodologies and approaches, such that Wyatt McGaffey once termed it “the decathlon of the social sciences.” Historians have long utilized archaeology, ethnography, historical linguistics, and oral traditions, but are only beginning to explore the possibilities of genetics or many of the new techniques used by archaeology and other sciences. And as digital sources—from historical documents and statistics to cartographic, climatic, demographic, and environmental modeling—proliferate, so do the problems in using them. The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Historiography: Methods and Sources discusses these sources and methods, and examines how these developments have influenced the scholarship that historians produce. Such methods continue to evolve, demanding that historians develop basic understandings of them. Thus, the Encyclopedia builds a theoretical foundation for the field, expanding the ways that Africa can be studied, and recovering the histories of the continent that often appear outside of the documentary record.

Oral Traditions as Sources

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Belcher
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
African History ◽  
The Face ◽  
Traditional Societies ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
African Intellectuals ◽  
Oral Information ◽  
Creative Endeavor

The use of oral tradition is a distinctive and essential element in many fields of African studies. History must acknowledge it; literature sees it as the medium for much of the indigenous creative endeavor across African cultures; anthropology and its cousin disciplines rely upon oral information for their understanding of traditional societies. An appreciation of the value of the oral tradition as a source across disciplines involves two efforts: first, a survey of the reported oral tradition as available and documented in past periods, and second, a review of the principles and practices involved in the collection, analysis, and presentation of the oral tradition. The paucity of written records has been grounds for dismissal of the notion of African history—most notoriously in the case of Hegel, who in ignorance wrote off the home of the human species—and more recently a cause of pride among African intellectuals who have asserted the value of the oral tradition in the face of skepticism rooted in prejudice and too often in overt racism. An appreciation of the value of the oral tradition threads its path between extremes and occasional controversy. The era of the smartphone has made the documentation (and creation) of oral tradition almost too easy. Past generations made do in different ways. Their reports should not be dismissed, but studied; they are the available background to information collected in the modern era. Accurate collection and critical analysis are the essential tools for the understanding of oral tradition.

The Collection, Authentication, and Use of Oral Evidence in African History

Anthropos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 116 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-392
Author(s):  
Chukwuemeka Ojione Ojieh
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
African History ◽  
Reliable Source ◽  
Oral Evidence ◽  
Credible Source ◽  
Written Sources

Several works on this subject have substantially established that oral evidence is a reliable source in African historiography. But it is not sufficient for such works being Africanist responses to Eurocentric postulations that pre-literate African societies, lacking Western-written sources, had no history. Though such works have improved our knowledge of the relevance of oral tradition in the reconstruction of African history, African oral tradition has been criticized by Western scholars. To this end, the article departures from most works on African oral historiography whose attentions are on the relevance of oral evidence in African history. Rather, it provides a manual on the process of engaging in the collection, authentication, and use of such oral data as to ensure that it is a credible source for writing African history. It is argued in the article that pre-literate African history will be more credible after critically scrutinizing data derived from oral evidence.

Of Hunters, Goats and Earth-Shrines: Settlement Histories and the Politics of Oral Tradition in Northern Ghana

2000 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 193-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carola Lentz
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Northern Ghana ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Settlement History ◽  
Agricultural Society ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Working Out

The present paper deals with the settlement history of a West African agricultural society, that of the Dagara in present-day northwestern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso. In it, I shall be particularly interested in the appropriation of space, which is ritually legitimized through the acquisition of earth-shrines, and in the conflict-ridden relationships between the in-migrating Dagara and the Sisala, who were already settled in their new habitat. My primary concern, however, is not to examine the Dagara's expansion strategies or the history of interethnic conflicts as such, but their working out in disputed oral traditions. Using the example of the controversial settlement history of Nandom (see map 1), I wish to show how Africans, both today and in the colonial past, have used oral traditions in order to conduct politics. I shall discuss the methodological implications that this mutual constitution of oral traditions and political interests has for the reconstruction of settlement history and examine the possibilities of a thorough criticism of sources to detect core elements of the historical settlement process and appropriation of space as well as the presentday confrontations with history.Oral traditions have played an important role in research into African history and societies. This is because in many places it was European missionaries and colonial masters who first introduced literacy and writing, and because we have only a few written sources—sometimes none at all—for the period up to the end of the nineteenth century.

African History: the Contribution of the Social Sciences

1966 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-357
Author(s):  
Robert L. Tignor
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
African History ◽  
Linguistic Evidence ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Science Literature ◽  
Made In

In nearly all the major historical fields one can see the increasing use historians are making of methods, models, and insights from the social sciences. E. H. Carr's exhortation, that the more history becomes sociology and the more sociology becomes history the better for both, is being taken seriously. Yet there is much more that can be done to bring these fields together. Most historians have used sociological theory only to gain insight, not with great rigour. They have learned their sociology by osmosis, so to speak. They have not gone through the social science literature, but rather have soaked it up second-hand from other interpreters. Consequently their works have not had the precision they might. Concepts have been distorted because of a lack of familiarity with them. African historians, on the whole, have been reluctant to use this rich and suggestive literature. This is probably true because the greatest efforts have been made in finding new sources in this difficult field—oral tradition, linguistic evidence, and so forth. But one is hard pressed to find works by African historians which have employed the theoretical literature of the social sciences.

Some Reflections on the Oral Traditions of the Galinhas Country, Sierra Leone

1985 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 151-165
Author(s):  
Adam Jones
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Tape Recorder ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
African History ◽  
Oral Literature ◽  
Main Interest ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Different Parts

Whenever historians of Africa write: “According to tradition…”, they evade the crucial question of what kind of oral tradition they are referring to. The assumption that oral tradition is something more or less of the same nature throughout Africa, or indeed the world, still permeates many studies on African history; and even those who have themselves collected oral material seldom pause to consider how significant this material is or how it compares with that available in other areas.The majority of studies of oral tradition have been written by people who worked with fairly formal traditions; and those who, after reading such studies, go and work in societies where such traditions do not exist are often distressed and disappointed. There is therefore still a need for localized studies of oral tradition in different parts of Africa. As far as Sierra Leone is concerned, no work specifically devoted to the nature of oral tradition has been published, despite several valuable publications on the oral literature of the Limba and Mende. The notes that follow are intended to give a rough picture of the kind of oral material I obtained in a predominantly Mende-speaking area of Sierra Leone in 1977-78 (supplemented by a smaller number of interviews conducted in 1973-75, 1980, and 1984). My main interest was in the eighteenth and nineteenth century history of what I have called the Galinhas country, the southernmost corner of Sierra Leone.I conducted nearly all of my interviews through interpreters and did not use a tape recorder more than a very few times. This was partly because the amount of baggage I could carry on foot was limited, but also because I soon found that some informants were disturbed by the tape recorder, and because it was difficult to catch on tape the contributions of all the bystanders.

Masking Sunjata: A Hermeneutical Critique

2000 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 131-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Jansen
Keyword(s):  
Primary Schools ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
African History ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Scholarly Discussion ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
The Times

Among the rich legacy of African oral traditions, the Sunjata epic is still one of the most complex phenonema, because it undoubtedly goes back to the times of Ibn Battuta, because of the limited variety between the available text editions, and because of its present-day popularity in sub-Saharan West Africa among people of all kinds of social background. In scholarly discussion, the epic has challenged many academics since Delafosse used the Sunjata epic as evidence for his reconstruction of the Mali empire as a thirteenth-century vast centralized polity. Although his views have been criticized since then, they have become part of history lessons at primary schools in Mali, the Gambia, Senegal, and Guinea. All these countries belong to the so-called “Mande,” an area inhabited by various ethnic groups that have close similarities in language, oral tradition, and social organization.In the last decade History in Africa has given room to discuss the Sunjata epic, in particular in order to explore how data from the epic can be used as historical sources, and as what history for whom. Articles by David Conrad, Tim Geysbeek, Stephan Bühnen, Stephen Bulman, Kathryn Green, George Brooks, Ralph Austen, and myself come my mind. All these authors have treated the Sunjata epic as a text. This seems to be a logical and inevitable choice for the historian.However, this approach implies a choice that limits the range of interpretations which can be made about the Sunjata traditions as a source for African history.

Making History, Creating Gender: Some Methodological and Interpretive Questions in the Writing of Oyo Oral Traditions

1998 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 263-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oyeronke Oyewumi
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
African History ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Cash Crops ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Good Proportion ◽  
Different Parts

Of all the things that were produced in Africa during the colonial period—cash crops, states, and tribes, to name a few—history and tradition are the least acknowledged as products of the colonial situation. This does not mean that Africans did not have history before the white man came. Rather, I am making distinctions among the following: firstly, history as lived experience; secondly, history as a record of lived experience which is coded in the oral traditions; and finally, the recently constituted written history. This last category is very much tied up with European engagements with Africa and the introduction of “history writing” as a discipline and as profession. But even then, it is important to acknowledge the fact that African history, including oral traditions, were recorded as a result of the European assault.This underscores the fact that ideological interests were at work in the making of African history, as is true of all history. As such, tradition is constantly being reinvented to reflect these interests. A. I. Asiwaju, for example, in a paper examining the political motivations and manipulations of oral tradition in the constitution of Obaship in different parts of Yorubaland during the colonial period writes: “in the era of European rule, particularly British rule, when government often based most of its decisions over local claims upon the evidence of traditional history, a good proportion of the data tended to be manipulated deliberately.” This process of manipulation produced examples of what he wittily refers to as “nouveaux rois of Yorubaland.”

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