Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History

ISBN-13: 9780521484633 / Angielski / Miękka / 1995 / 192 str.

Elizabeth Tonkin

Opis

In this book, Elizabeth Tonkin, an anthropologist, uses an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the construction and interpretation of oral histories. She argues for a deeper understanding of their oral and social characteristics. Oral accounts of past events are 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. Tonkin illustrates her argument from 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.

Recenzje

'This is a timely book. It brings together matters of current interest in recent works on memory, ethnohistory and orality, and it attempts to synthesise a fruitful approach to a complex body of material … [It] is suggestive, thought-provoking and never dull. It points throughout towards novel avenues of thought and interesting angles on a fascinating collection of oral and literary sources. It is certainly a book which serious students of oral genres should have on their book-shelves.' The Times Literary Supplement

Spis treści

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.