Table of Contents
What is the history of oral tradition?
For millennia prior to the invention of writing, which is a very recent phenomenon in the history of humankind, oral tradition served as the sole means of communication available for forming and maintaining societies and their institutions.
What was the role of oral tradition in African history?
In Africa, most folktales were passed down orally. These oral traditions were usually used to teach socially accepted behavior and values within African society.
How is oral tradition different from history?
Perhaps the most important difference between oral history and traditional history is the personal nature of the former. Oral history typically involves interviews with individuals who either tell their life stories or focus on a certain aspect of their history.
What is oral history and oral tradition?
This definition precedes the scientific method of “oral history”, i.e. gathering historical information based on targeted, active and informed interviews. Oral history is fundamentally different from that of oral tradition; oral tradition is a way of transmitting general cultural issues from one generation to another.
Where did oral history begin?
Thus, historians generally consider oral history as beginning with the work of Allan Nevins at Columbia University in the 1940s. Nevins was the first to initiate a systematic and disciplined effort to record on tape, preserve, and make available for future research recollections deemed of historical significance.
What are the importance of oral history?
Oral history helps round out the story of the past. Eyewitnesses to events contribute various viewpoints and perspectives that fill in the gaps in documented history, sometimes correcting or even contradicting the written record.
What is the importance of oral traditions?
Oral tradition is important in all societies, despite the reliance of some cultures on written records and accounts. These traditions account for the ways things are and often the way they should be, and assist people in educating the young and teaching important lessons about the past and about life.
Why are oral sources considered important in the writing of Nigerian history?
One of the reasons why oral sources are important is that though it establishes facts about the history of a people, the oral traditions are able to corroborate what the archeologists have discovered. This way, all doubts about the phenomenon is cleared once and for all.
What is the relation between history and tradition?
Before historians construct the past they themselves are already constructed by the present outcome of past developments in the world. Thus tradition is always at work in historical thinking before the past is thematized as history.
How did oral history play its role in preserving the stories from the past?
Oral history helps round out the story of the past. Oral history provides a fuller, more accurate picture of the past by augmenting the information provided by pub- lic records, statistical data, photographs, maps, letters, diaries, and other historical materials.
What is oral history and why is it important?
Oral history is a technique for generating and preserving original, historically interesting information— primary source material—from personal recollections through planned recorded interviews. This method of interviewing is used to preserve the voices, memories and perspectives of people in history.
What is the meaning of oral tradition?
Definition of oral tradition : the stories, beliefs, etc., that a group of people share by telling stories and talking to each other.
What is the purpose of oral history?
Oral history is a method of conducting historical research through recorded interviews between a narrator with personal experience of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of adding to the historical record.
What are the advantages of oral tradition?
Oral tradition helps the historian to determine historical trends and events. Through the comparison of several oral traditions, the historian can eliminate biases, inconsistencies or inaccuracies in the written records they are using, to come out with an accurate historical account of the past.
What is the most important element of oral history?
Four key elements of oral history work are preparation, interviewing, preservation, and access. Oral historians should give careful consideration to each at the start of any oral history project, regardless of whether it is comprised of one or many interviews.
How are oral traditions important and significant to any cultural identity in history?
Oral traditions form the foundation of Aboriginal societies, connecting speaker and listener in communal experience and uniting past and present in memory.”
Why is oral tradition an important historical source?
Oral tradition is usually eventually written down, but can tell us so much about the society and the people who originated them and allowed history to be kept and shared by groups who do or did not have writing.
Why is tradition important in history?
Traditions bring a sense of security. We come to rely on certain rituals and events that unify us and bring back memories of the past. The players of the event may change, but the tradition remains the same and keeps us connected to the past, in addition to building memories of the present.
Is tradition and history the same thing?
Either way, it is a repeated behavior based in your beliefs. The only way history can be transformed into a tradition is by creating and teaching in the present. It can be something that you learned as a child and no longer practice and by taking action you create tradition.
What is oral tradition and its importance?
Can Oral traditions be used to reconstruct the history of Zimbabwe?
In Zimbabwe, we have examples in the works of Aenias Chigwedere, a former Minister of Education, Arts and Culture. Oral traditions have thus been successfully employed to reconstruct the history of many post-colonial societies in Africa.
Are oral traditions reliable sources of colonial African history?
African historians have professed the value and reliability of oral traditions for the construction and reconstruction of the African peoples’ history. Thus academics of the colonial African historical consciousness need to use orature and oral traditions as a source and method for our historical renaissance.
How are historical events dated in oral traditions?
In oral traditions, events are usually dated only to the reigns of chiefs, the outbreak of epidemics or diseases, wars, famine and others. Analysis of narrative from its beginning through its subsequent episodes may expose an apparent paradox to the chronology- minded historian.
Is it time for Zimbabwe to embrace an indigenous traditional approach?
It is time for Zimbabwe to embrace an indigenous traditional oral approach to historical scholarship. Dr Tony Monda holds a PhD in Art Theory and Philosophy and a DBA (Doctorate in Business Administration) and Post-Colonial Heritage Studies. He is a writer, lecturer, musician, art critic, practising artist and corporate image consultant.