Narrating our Pasts
Narrating our Pasts
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USDThis study looks at how oral histories are constructed and how they should be interpreted, and argues for a deeper understanding of their oral and social characteristics. Oral accounts of past events are also guides to the future, as well as being social activities in which tellers claim authority to speak to particular audiences. Like written history and literature, orality has its shaping genres and aesthetic conventions and, likewise, has to be interpreted through them. The argument is illustrated through a wide range of examples of memory, narration and oral tradition, including many from Europe and the Americas, and with a particular focus on oral histories from the Jlao Kru of Liberia, with whom Elizabeth Tonkin has carried out extensive research. Tonkin also draws on and integrates the insights of a range of other disciplines, such as literary criticism, linguistics, history, psychology, and communication and cultural studies.
- Tonkin offers a new alternative theory and methodology of oral history
- Extremely well received in hardback, now available in paperback
- 'A timely book. It brings together matters of current interest in recent works on memory, ethnohistory and orality.' Sociological Review 1994
Reviews & endorsements
"Tonkin provides a lucid discussion of how oral history is constructed....the strengths of the book are many....numerous illustrative examples from predominantly oral cultures in Africa as well as from industrialized Europe and America....perhaps the most significant feature of the book is its unified approach." Anthropological Linguistics
"...this is a very thoughtful and delightful work, carefully argued, the fruit of wide reading and sustained thought....It is also a delight to read." Anthropos
"...provocative, yet offered in an uncommonly unpretentious and engaging fashion. Her work is a welcome addition to the declining number of full-scale interpretations of oral historiography, by whatever name, and, although addressed primarily to anthropologists, it is worth historians' close attention as well." David Henige, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Product details
No date availableAdobe eBook Reader
9781316041567
0 pages
0kg
9 b/w illus. 3 maps
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on orthography
- Introduction
- 1. Jlao: an introductory case study
- 2. The teller of the tale: authors and their authorisations
- 3. Structuring an account: the work of genre
- 4. Temporality: narrators and their times
- 5. Subjective or objective
- 6. Memory makes us, we make memory
- 7. Truthfulness, history and identity
- Notes
- Bibliography.
