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Ideological Confrontation and the Manipulation of Oral History: a Zambesian Case1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
Extract
Ever since Malinowski formulated his concept of myths as charters, there has been a tendency among anthropologists to regard origin myths more or less as post factum constructs designed to legitimize existing privileges and positions. A classic example of this pragmatist view is Leach's study of political systems in highland Burma, in which he attempts to demonstrate that origin myths change with clocklike regularity in response to shifts in the political constellation. More recently, however, voices have been raised, particularly among historians, which insist that a society's past cannot always be manipulated at will, but that under certain conditions it has to be treated circumspectly in the way one deals with any scarce resource.
My own interpretation of this view is that accounts of the past, when they concern important aspects of a society, are often (or perhaps always) constructed in such a way that the original event is somehow preserved and recoverable. The qualification “somehow” is added on purpose to make clear that the phrase ‘oral history’ refers to such a wide range of genres and mnemonic techniques, and that the methods at our disposal to extract the original event are still so rudimentary--despite the progress made over the past dozen years or so--that for the moment one cannot do more than express belief in our ultimate capability to discover what happened in actual fact.
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- Copyright © African Studies Association 1987
Footnotes
1.
This paper was first presented at the conference on Culture and Consciousness in Southern Africa, Manchester, 23-26 September 1986.
References
Notes
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