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HISTORY & MEANING
Week 3
ORAL and WRITTEN SOURCES of EVIDENCE
Dr. Ryota Nishino and Lalita Sharma.
Edited by Dr. Sakul Kundra
FLASHBACK
• To this day, Pacific history has been taught in the
primary and secondary schools of Fiji in the oldfashioned nineteenth-century tradition of “great
man” history and distinct from imperial history.
• “Great man” history – interest in powerful men
and women in their actions and ideas.
• Usually European men from political and
military background.
• Historians tended to write histories based on
these written sources, and teachers taught
those histories to children.
INTRODUCTION
• To gain independence from European imperial nations
(usually after World War Two), many colonial peoples
utilised revolution or armed conflict. The struggle against
European colonial power was often brutal in Asia and
Africa.
• However, transitions to independence in the Pacific
Islands were comparatively peaceful.
• Oral historical traditions governed lives of Pacific Islanders
for thousands of years. They preserved cultural, familial,
societal and other important information through the
teaching and learning of this history. These histories
strengthened Islanders individually and collectively and
gave them a framework or orientation to understand their
independence from Europe as a normal status.
OBJECTIVES
YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND AND
DISCUSS:
• What the term ORAL TRADITIONS means and
how oral traditions differ from oral literature
and oral history.
• the special importance of oral traditions to
Pacific history; and
• The uses and limitations of oral traditions as
sources of historical information.
ORAL TRADITIONS & RELATED TERMS
1. Oral traditions
2. Oral literature
3. Oral history
WHAT ARE ORAL TRADITIONS?
ORAL means spoken, verbal or by word of
mouth
Other terms: native or traditional
‘TRADITION’ commonly used with custom –
phrase: “CUSTOMS AND TRADITIONS”
Traditional indigenous knowledge (TIK) must be
guarded and shared with great caution
Custom strongly implies knowledge or practice
handed down orally or by word of mouth
Oral tradition
• Oral tradition and oral lore is cultural material
and tradition transmitted orally from one
generation to another. The messages or
testimony are verbally transmitted in speech
or song and may take the form, for example,
of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants.
In this way, it is possible for a society to
transmit oral history, oral literature, oral law
and other knowledges across generations
without a writing system.
Oral Tradition
• Sociologists might also emphasize a requirement that the material is held
in common by a group of people, over several generations, and might
distinguish oral tradition from testimony or oral history. In a general sense,
"oral tradition" refers to the transmissison of cultural material through
vocal utterance, and was long held to be a key descriptor of folklore (a
criterion no longer rigidly held by all folklorists).
• As an academic discipline, it refers both to a set of objects of study and a
method by which they are studied—the method may be called variously
"oral traditional theory", "the theory of Oral-Formulaic Composition" and
the "Parry-Lord theory" (after two of its founders; see below) The study of
oral tradition is distinct from the academic discipline of oral history, which
is the recording of personal memories and histories of those who
experienced historical eras or events.
• It is also distinct from the study of orality, which can be defined as thought
and its verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy
(especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population.
MEANING OF TRADITION
• “an opinion, belief or custom handed down …from ancestors to
posterity (i.e., future generations) especially orally or by practice”
(ACOD 1987:1205) e.g., the ‘kava ceremony’.
• These ceremonies have a common structure.
• There is “traditional” protocol, i.e. a special predetermined
procedure for carrying out the ceremony which includes the
particular form of serving the yaqona to people according to rank.
This presentation is accompanied by symbols and gestures, and
special words of address in reference to the office and rank of the
participants.
• ORAL TRADITION means customs, attitudes, beliefs and practices
that have been passed down orally. It refers to the transmission
of knowledge, skills and useful information by verbal or oral
means.
WHAT IS ORAL LITERATURE?
• LITERATURE – the use of language in a
creative and artistic way; i.e., oral literature is
the creative and artistic use of language in
oral forms, especially by people who do not
have a written language.
• It is passed down through the centuries as
heroic epic, saga and folk-tale. Songs, riddles,
chants and rhymes belong to this literature.
ISLAND EQUIVALENTS TO ORAL
LITERATURE
• HEROIC EPIC – Maui and Tangaroa
(Polynesia)
• Oral literature or folk literature corresponds
in the sphere of the spoken (oral) word to
literature as literature operates in the
domain of the written word. It thus forms a
generally more fundamental component of
culture, but operates in many ways as one
might expect literature to do.
Oral Literature
•
•
•
•
The Ugandan scholar Pio Zirimu introduced the term orature in an attempt to
avoid an oxymoron, but oral literature remains more common both in academic
and popular writing
Orature means something passed on through the spoken word, and because it is
based on the spoken language it comes to life only in a living community. Where
community life fades away, orality loses its function and dies. It needs people in a
living social setting
Pre-literate societies, by definition, have no written literature, but may possess
rich and varied oral traditions—such as folk epics, folklore, proverbs and
folksong—that effectively constitute an oral literature. Even when these are
collected and published by scholars such as folklorists and paremiographers, the
result is still often referred to as "oral literature".
Literate societies may continue an oral tradition - particularly within the family (for
example bedtime stories) or informal social structures. The telling of urban legends
may be considered an example of oral literature, as can jokes and also oral poetry
including slam poetry which has been a televised feature on Russell Simmons' Def
Poetry; performance poetry is a genre of poetry that consciously shuns the written
form
WHAT IS ORAL HISTORY?
• Information which comes from interviews by
historians with people who have taken part in
historical events.
• Oral history is becoming a popular means of
obtaining information about the lives of
ordinary people.
• In Africa, Asia and the Pacific, people of a
generation born during pre-literate times are
interviewed and their memories become the
basis of history.
Oral History
• Oral history is the collection and study of historical
information about individuals, families, important events,
or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or
transcriptions of planned interviews.
• These interviews are conducted with people who
participated in or observed past events and whose
memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as
an aural record for future generations.
• Oral history strives to obtain information from different
perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written
sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in
this manner and to a written work (published or
unpublished) based on such data, often preserved in
archives and large libraries
Oral History
• The term is sometimes used in a more general
sense to refer to any information about past
events that people who experienced them tell
anybody else, but professional historians
usually consider this to be oral tradition.
PACIFIC EXAMPLES ORAL TRADITIONS
• ORAL TRADITIONS INCLUDE BOTH ORAL
LITERATURE AND ORAL HISTORY. This includes:
- stories
- legends
- myths
- songs
- poems
- dances
ORATORY (PUBLIC SPEAKING)
• This is a prized tradition
• In Samoa, Fiji, Tonga and Cook Islands, no formal
ceremony could take place without the orators, e.g.,
tulafale (Samoa), matanivanua (Fiji), matapule
(Tonga) rangatira (Cook Islands and New Zealand).
• In the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, a gifted orator is
recognised as a man of renown or a big-man.
• Modern times: these people are negotiators between
insiders and foreigners, i.e., mediators between the
hosts and the visitors.
THE IMPORTANCE OF ORAL
TRADITION AS AN INSTRUMENT OF
HISTORY
• Absence of a written language makes oral
tradition the most important form of
transmission of knowledge, skills and
information.
• A good memory is a very valuable asset and
society gives respect and prestige to people
who have the role of memorising huge
chunks of information, e.g., priests.
DISADVANTAGES OF ORAL
TRADITIONS
• They can be stolen and abused by outsiders without
benefit to those who own the histories.
• Lack of linear chronology – no dates or western
historical time-frame.
• The stories may possibly change over time.
• Bias: information that threatens people in power may
be suppressed and forgotten, i.e., oral traditions may
exclude the views of people who are opposed to
those in power or the views of the poor and
powerless.
• Oral traditions may die with their possessors when
younger people refuse to learn the knowledge.
ADVANTAGES OF ORAL TRADITIONS
• Oral traditions are sources of information that Pacific
islanders possess and control in their reconstruction of the
past and the present.
• In this reconstruction, they provide another side of history
which imperial histories of the islands often ignored.
• Visitors gain the opportunity to learn more about ‘local’
perceptions.
• Visitors gain a sense of reassessing values or prejudices.
• Pacific Islanders have the opportunity to take advantage
of the lessons of their past in order to control their
present and future.
• Pacific Islanders gain power and unity from the histories.