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For Oral Tradition (But Not Against Braudel)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Jan Vansina
Jan Vansina*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
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One wonders what Fernand Braudel and the school of the Annales have done to become a kind of Trojan Horse for the wholesale condemnation of the historical value of oral tradition. Yet they are the banner raised by W.G. Clarence-Smith in a recent article in his journal to preach jihad against its historical value. Clarence-Smith claims that the historiographical revolution effected by Annales has resulted in the definitive exclusion of oral traditions from the halls of Clio. Oral traditions are at best ambiguous “signs” about the past and are very much of the present. They lack absolute chronology and they are selective, so away with them. If they be worthy of attention at all, let anthropologists and sociologists be concerned, save in a few rare instances where a historian wants to check on some European printed source. And even then, caveat emptor. Significantly, the article is not just the expression of the views of one person; rather it is symptomatic of much of the criticism which has been leveled at oral tradition, mostly by fasionable anthropologists. And it brings this criticism to its logical conclusion.

But first a word about Braudel, the Annales, and oral tradition in general. The Annales School was founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch before World War II. Fernand Braudel is its most distinguished exponent. His major theoretical pronouncements can be found in his Ecrits sur l'histoire, a collection of articles reprinted and published in 1969. This and his two major historical works should be read by those who want to know more about his views and ways of dealing with history. The basic tenets that members of the Annales School hold is that the history of events is but the spray of past developments; other time depths tell us more about the waves of the past. There is the time of the conjoncture, the trend, and the even longer time periods -- sometimes many centuries long -- the longue durée or long term. Successful history writing does not liminate the study of events, but analyzes them against the movement of these longer and deeper-running trends.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 5 , 1978 , pp. 351 - 356
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1978

References

NOTES

1. “For Braudel: A Note on the ‘Ecole des Annales' and the Historiography of Africa,” History in Africa, 4(1977), pp. 275–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the latest and fullest account of the Annales school see Stoianivich, Traian, French Historical Method: the ‘Annales’ Paradigm (Ithaca, 1976).Google Scholar

2. Braudel, Fernand, Ecrits sur l'histoire (Paris, 1969).Google Scholar

3. Idem, La Méditerranée et le monde Méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (2d ed., Paris, 1966); idem, Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme (Paris, 1967). Clarence-Smith relies on translations of Braudel's work wherever possible, but one aspect of hypercriticism would be to ask whether translations are always reliable.

4. Braudel, , Ecrits, pp. 5–7.Google Scholar

5. Bloch, Marc, La société féodale (2 vols.: Paris, 1940).Google Scholar

6. See Vansina, Jan, The Children of Woot: a Kuba History (Madison, 1978).Google Scholar

7. Foucault, Marcel, L'archéologie du savoir (Paris, 1969).Google Scholar

8. Clarence-Smith, , “For Braudel,” p. 277.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., p. 278.

10. Ibid. For Clarence-Smith oral sources is clearly a synonym for oral traditions.