Narrating our pasts: The social construction of oral history

ELIZABETH TONKIN, Narrating our pasts: The social construction of oral history. (Cambridge studies in oral and literate culture, 22.) Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xiv, 171. [Pb reprint, 1995; $16.95.]

Tonkin treats a complex and timely set of ideas when she studies the relationships between oracy and literacy, oral narrative performance and written texts, memory and history and society. To discuss these areas of scholarly debate, she employs a multidisciplinary, sometimes contentious variety of studies and assertions. Her efforts mostly succeed in promoting her claims for the necessity of blurring past distinctions and categories in the study of oral history, and for taking a much more performative/interactive view of its construction in a living context.

Among the many problems confronting researchers who attempt to acquire information from oral sources, there are ongoing questions regarding the character el informants and the circumstances in which oral discourse -whether it be ‘ancient’ tradition or eye-witness testimony- is recorded. In the course of investigations covering the broad range of problems in colleting and interpreting oral sources, Jan Vansina, David Henige and others increased awareness el the importance of these considerations, providing guidance which, combined with practical field experience, has allowed many researchers to avoid the most obvious pitfalls. Nevertheless, there has been a general tendency to stress textual interpretation at the expense of social circumstances influencing testimony, thus giving short shrift to a crucial element in determining the relative value of our sources. The social anthropologist Elizabeth Tonkin has issued an appropriate wake—up call in devoting this entire volume to questions concerning social influences on the substance of oral discourse.
As indicated by the lack of geographical reference in the title, this study is directed at a general audience, though the representative case studies are from West Africa. The author`s own field research was in the small Kru-speaking community of Jlao (a.k.a.Sasstown) which lies on Liberia`s central coast. For other examples she draws heavily on Karin Barber`s studies of Yoruba oral genres from Benin and south-western Nigeria.
Original textual reproduction of African sources is minimal, with six lines in the introductory Jlao case study, and a half-dozen passages of a few lines each in the section on ‘authors and authorizations’ (ch. ii).
Stressing the informants’ personal involvement in performing oral representations of ‘pastness, a term she prefers as being more exact than ‘history’, Professor Tonkin examines the relationships between narrative structures and the characteristics of tellers and audiences. It is evident early on that the author does not differentiate between discourse derived from living memory and what many, following Jan Vansina, think of as oral tradition, though she does not explain her position vis-á-vis Vansina until ch.v. A persistent problem one has in following Tonkin’s arguments throughout the book is that in a study intended to address issues pertaining to oral performance in general, her examples are selected, not from a world-wide pool, but from two West African cultures which -among many hundreds -with distinct cultural characteristics and widely variant social dynamics-cannot be regarded as representative, even of one part of that vast continent. The introduction promises sources from Europe and America as well (p. 5), and in the course of the discussions they turn out to be brief references to such things as Conrad`s Heart of Darkness, Pepys’s Diaries, Mormonism, The Breton lai of Eliduc as translated by John Fowles in The Ebony Tower, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and F. W. D. Deakin’s account of his experiences with World War Two guerilla fighters in Yugoslavia. Each of these provide interesting examples in discussions of questions which must be considered in our efforts to avoid deluding ourselves about what we think we find in oral sources. e.g.. ‘What responses do certain statements evoke?’
Taking into account Tonkin’s expertise in reducing the process of personal testimony to its essential parts in order to examine the structure and function of oral narrative, her attempt to straddle such vast cultural differences with the sources she has chosen nevertheless does not seem very practical. For West Africa alone, her personal exploration of Jlae oral testimony and the “examples from Karin Barber’s penetrating analysis of Yoruba texts do not provide the broad-ranging perspective that would provide the strongest support for some of the conclusions reached in this book. Even the most relevant Liberian studies are not exploited. An example of the conventions of discourse engaging Tonkin’s interest is her discussion of performance structure and genre (ch. iii), where she considers classifications as ‘indigenous ones by participants, not researchers’, suggesting that ‘genre as she treats it could also be called ‘patterned expectancy’. The idea is that the teller issues certain clues to an informed audience indicating how the discourse is to be interpreted. This is certainly worth taking into account, but when Tonkin notes how easily a Liberian Kpelle listener can be cued to expect what is coming, it is surprising that she makes no mention here or anywhere else in this book, of Ruth Stones’s engaging and important study of Kpelle performer-audience participation in Dried millet breaking time, words and song in the Woi epic of the Kpelle (Bloomington, l988).
Focusing on West Africa alone, if a broader range of performance dynamics were taken into account, many mysteries of power relationships between performers and audiences and the effects of these factors on textual elements would come into play. For example, such things as secrecy can be basic to the essence of discourse, in which case any outsider can be deceived by its intentionally arcane nature. A particularly interesting aspect of the question of social relationships between tellers and listeners is the one involving researchers and interviewees. Tonkin is of the opinion that researchers normally do not consider an interview to be an ‘oral genre’, and in certain cases this could no doubt lead to problems, as she suggests. But this is one of several places in this book where one wonders if the author’s experiences of Jlao informants and their oral life histories were always adequate or best suited to support the ambitious scope of her arguments. In this case Tonkin says ‘[Researchers] have not been taught to consider that interviews are oral genres, so it is not in these terms that they could recognize interviewing as a genre which the tellers may not feel qualified to talk in, although they have command of other genres in which they would speak differently’ (p. 54). Here it is not clear who is to have ‘taught’ the researcher about the interview as an oral genre, but if the hypothetical researcher were interviewing a jeli ngara, a master wordsmith (or ‘griot’) from the vast Maude culture zone centered in southern Mali and northern Guinea, it would almost certainly be the informant who chose his or her manner of expression, regardless of the questioner’s intentions. For example, if the interviewer requests a specific bit of information (e.g., Tell me about the ancestors’) the informant might decide to respond with ordinary conversational dialogue, with a mnemonic genealogy, a descent list of various dynasties, a legend, a praise song, a popular etymology, or an extended narrative including all of these elements. Therefore, in at least one major zone of West African oral artistry Tonkin’s advice that ‘It could be more fruitful to tap into tellers’ expertise and not to insist on their confirming [sic] to the interviewer’s genre’ (p. 54) does not take into consideration some important questions of agency in African discourse. In dealing with Maude oral specialists for example, any instruction about ‘genre’ would come from the proper source, that being the jeli. Where the performer is the product of many centuries of artistic tradition, regardless of what the researcher might ‘insist’ upon, it is the informant who runs the show.
Interesting applications of Tonkin’s analysis of structure and function in narratives about the past come with her discussions of such topics as the influences of temporality and language on narrators and listeners (‘We inhabit language and language inhabits us’), and the connexion between people’s reminiscences and their own identities and social roles. Equally important is her consideration of questions concerning the development of memory through social interaction and its function as both medium and message (‘Memory makes us, we make memory’). An example of the author’s position in the latter regard would be her argument that ‘… because social relations imply both continuity and discontinuity in time, everyone who practices them practices “history”, and their practice enters into memory which is required if the social practices are to endure and survive’ (p. 111,). Of special interest to historians will be the final chapter of this book, in which the author arrives at questions of informants’ reliability, including problems of unconscious deception and changes of local perception regarding the significance of past events (ch. vii).
In an analysis of modes of expression, Tonkin’s own are at times uneven. There are incisive, clearly expressed statements sensitively illuminating familiar problems: ‘Having to translate, one finds words and phrases recalcitrant because they are embedded in different contexts from those presupposed in one’s own language, and they segment and categorize the world in different ways’ (p. 6). While elsewhere, something less felicitous comes curiously limping: ‘iron had [sic] from much earlier had [sic] significance locally, but there was no gold, or trade route bringing gold as the basis for local power, no massive output of slaves either; this area did net build up empires through trade, with or without Europeans’ (p. 21). Frustrating for anyone interested in patterns of early movement will be: ‘He describes how a group called Pahn . . . emerging from named places, said to be in the Ivory Coast interior, meet with another group called Kwia ...’ with no identification of the ‘named places’ (p. 30). Purely stylistic matters are far less important, but use of the first person singular l2 times on one page (p. 27) and 14 on another (p. 83) seems excessive. There are three maps and four pages of photographs. The bibliography is selected and wide—ranging. There is a general index and a separate index for names of authors and informants cited.

David C. Conrad

Source:
Language in Society, Volume 28, Issue 01, January 1999, pp 107-110, Published online by Cambridge University Press 08 Sep 2000