Narrating our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture)
by Elizabeth Tonkin
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This 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 show more 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. show lessTags
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Elizabeth Tonkin is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Queen's University of Belfast. She has written extensively on oral history and social aspects of language, as well as on the anthropology of the Kru people of Liberia.
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Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1992
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- 19
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- Languages
- English
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- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
