Balancing Written History with Oral Tradition

Balancing Written History with Oral Tradition PDF

Author: Hassimi Oumarou Maiga

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-09-10

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1135227020

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By balancing written history with the African oral tradition, this book conceptualizes the integrations among diverse peoples of Africa and specifically among the Songhoy people. Drawing from a number of academic disciplines and original research that documents the oral and literate traditions of the Songhoy people, Hassimi Oumarou Maiga offers a unique interpretation of indigenous Songhoy-African perspectives on African history, culture and education from antiquity to the present day and from continental Africa to the worldwide African Diaspora. In explaining the cosmology, philosophy, values and process of indigenous, non-Muslim education, this book also corrects and balances the perception of the Songhoy as a wholly Muslim society. The legacy of the Songhoy Empire, Maiga argues, is as a model of African integration through its administrative and political organization, which remains relevant even today. This book is an essential addition for scholars and students of African history.

Balancing Written History with Oral Tradition

Balancing Written History with Oral Tradition PDF

Author: Hassimi Oumarou Maiga

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-08-17

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 9780203872055

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By balancing written history with the African oral tradition, this book conceptualizes the integrations among diverse peoples of Africa and specifically among the Songhoy people. Drawing from a number of academic disciplines and original research that documents the oral and literate traditions of the Songhoy people, Hassimi Oumarou Maiga offers a unique interpretation of indigenous Songhoy-African perspectives on African history, culture and education from antiquity to the present day and from continental Africa to the worldwide African Diaspora. In explaining the cosmology, philosophy, values and process of indigenous, non-Muslim education, this book also corrects and balances the perception of the Songhoy as a wholly Muslim society. The legacy of the Songhoy Empire, Maiga argues, is as a model of African integration through its administrative and political organization, which remains relevant even today. This book is an essential addition for scholars and students of African history.

Balancing Written History with Oral Traditions

Balancing Written History with Oral Traditions PDF

Author: Hassimi Oumarou Maiga

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-09-10

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1135227039

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This book offers a unique interpretation of Africa’s legacy to the world and the worldwide African Diaspora through bringing to light the sociocultural contributions of the Songhoy people and the cosmopolitan empire they established in West Africa.

Oral Tradition as History

Oral Tradition as History PDF

Author: Jan M. Vansina

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 1985-09-06

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0299102130

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Jan Vansina’s 1961 book, Oral Tradition, was hailed internationally as a pioneering work in the field of ethno-history. Originally published in French, it was translated into English, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and Hungarian. Reviewers were unanimous in their praise of Vansina’s success in subjecting oral traditions to intense functional analysis. Now, Vansina—with the benefit of two decades of additional thought and research—has revised his original work substantially, completely rewriting some sections and adding much new material. The result is an essentially new work, indispensable to all students and scholars of history, anthropology, folklore, and ethno-history who are concerned with the transmission and potential uses of oral material. “Those embarking on the challenging adventure of historical fieldwork with an oral community will find the book a valuable companion, filled with good practical advice. Those who already have collected bodies of oral material, or who strive to interpret and analyze that collected by others, will be forced to subject their own methodological approaches to a critical reexamination in the light of Vansina’s thoughtful and provocative insights. . . . For the second time in a quarter of a century, we are profoundly in the debt of Jan Vansina.”—Research in African Literatures “Oral Traditions as History is an essential addition to the basic literature of African history.”—American Historical Review

Oral Tradition

Oral Tradition PDF

Author: Robert Loring Allen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-08

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 135150133X

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Oral traditions are historical sources of a special nature. Their special nature derives from the fact that they are ""unwritten"" sources couched in a form suitable for oral transmission, and that their preservation depends on the powers of memory of successive generations of human beings. In many parts of the world inhabited by peoples without writing, oral tradition forms the main available source for a reconstruction of the past. Do the special characteristics of oral traditions u ""unwritten"" information dependent on the memory of successive generations u invalidate them as sources of historical data? If not, are there means for testing their reliability? Professor Vansina shows in Oral Tradition that with knowledge of the language and of the society, the anthropologist and historian can extract or deduce the historical content of oral testimonies. Based on the author's many years of fieldwork in Africa, this definitive work explores the possibility of reconstructing the history of non-literate peoples from their oral traditions, surveys existing literature, offers a typology of oral traditions, and evaluates methods of collection and interpretation. On first publication, Daniel McCall in the American Anthropologist called Oral Tradition "" a tour de force. Indeed this may well be the most significant work written on the relation of oral tradition to history in thirty yearsafor any field worker who intends to collect oral traditions, this work is indispensable.

Rethinking Oral History and Tradition

Rethinking Oral History and Tradition PDF

Author: Nepia Mahuika

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0190681683

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"For many indigenous peoples, oral history is a living intergenerational phenomenon that is crucial to the transmission of our languages, cultural knowledge, politics, and identities. Indigenous oral histories are not merely traditions, myths, chants or superstitions, but are valid historical accounts passed on vocally in various forms, forums, and practices. Rethinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous Perspective provides a specific native and tribal account of the meaning, form, politics and practice of oral history. It is a rethinking and critique of the popular and powerful ideas that now populate and define the fields of oral history and tradition, which have in the process displaced indigenous perspectives. This book, drawing on indigenous voices, explores the overlaps and differences between the studies of oral history and oral tradition, and urges scholars in both disciplines to revisit the way their fields think about orality, oral history methods, transmission, narrative, power, ethics, oral history theories and politics. Indigenous knowledge and experience holds important contributions that have the potential to expand and develop robust academic thinking in the study of both oral history and tradition.--

African Discourse in Islam, Oral Traditions, and Performance

African Discourse in Islam, Oral Traditions, and Performance PDF

Author: Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-09-13

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1135176973

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Through an engaged analysis of writers such as Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Niyi Osundare, and Tanure Ojaide and of African traditional oral poets like Omoekee Amao Ilorin and Mamman Shata Katsina, Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah develops an African indigenous discourse paradigm for interpreting and understanding literary and cultural materials. Na'Allah argues for the need for cultural diversity in critical theorizing in the twenty-first century. He highlights the critical issues facing scholars and students involved in criticism and translation of marginalized texts. By returning the African knowledge system back to its roots and placing it side by side with Western paradigms, Na'Allah has produced a text that will be required reading for scholars and students of African culture and literature. It is an important contribution to scholarship in the domain of mobility of African oral tradition, and on African literary, cultural and performance discourse.

The Thinking Past

The Thinking Past PDF

Author: Adrian Cole

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014-08-26

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 0199794626

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"This book takes an analytical approach to world history. Instead of proceeding through history descriptively, it looks at several major questions and ideas, such as the role of technology, the development of universal religions, global trade, or participatory politics. If this sounds thematic, it is. But it also progresses chronologically, analyzing these themes as they apply in certain eras. We use both primary sources in-text, and the latest scholarship as secondary source. These we use frequently in each chapter both to employ the voices of scholars where they say things better than we could, and footnote them for students' reference. We also hope to convey the sense that all this content is part of an ongoing debate amongst historians--and scholars from different disciplines. Finally we attempt to keep the text accessible by focusing on narrative elements of history, and keeping in mind that the readers are undergraduates, often with little exposure to the subject matter. However, the level of ideas remains high"--Provided by publisher.

Memory, Memorization, and Memorizers

Memory, Memorization, and Memorizers PDF

Author: Marcel Jousse

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2018-07-18

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 1532633939

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This book is about the spoken word. It is about words spoken in the first century of our era and later put down in writing as confirmation of what had been said and done. Here, Marcel Jousse answers his own fundamental question: "How did the human being, placed at the heart of the countless actions of the universe, set about to conserve within him the memory of these actions and to transmit this memory faithfully to his descendants, from generation to generation?" To all oral societies, tradition is memory, and of all oral societies, ancient Galilee, perhaps more so than any other, developed ways and means of capacitating memory to levels we no longer fathom. This book is about how Ieshua's deeds and sayings were first faithfully recorded in the memory as and when they happened, how they were then faithfully transmitted orally within and without Palestine, and how they were finally faithfully--literally--recorded anew, as oral tradition put in writing.