I'm not a professional historian, just someone with an MA in history, but my research focus was West Africa, where Oral Traditions are one of the most important types of source we have. A big problem in modern times is something called feedback; most people who keep oral traditions aren't isolated in their own little pockets of society, they're literate people who can and have read books about their own peoples' histories. Unfortunately, this often results in them knowingly or accidentally incorporating things they read about into their oral traditions, which makes it difficult to know what claims are consistent elements of oral traditions going back generations, and which ones may have been introduced more recently. It also reduces inconsistencies between the oral traditions as recounted by different tellers, which comes with its own issues; when we have lots of different tellings of a story with slight variations, we can cross reference them to evaluate which details are most likely to be accurate to older tellings of the story, whereas when all the versions converge due to drawing from a single more recent telling, we lose a lot of data. It's a really unfortunate situation.
In Woody Guthrie's autobiography, he makes an observation that I think is relevant here. Woody travelled widely in the US, befriending everyday people all over, before accepting jobs at radio stations in various cities as a "hillbilly singer". He became dissatisfied with the exaggerated "hillbilly" accent and speech patterns played up by the studios which he found infantilizing and left, going back to his roots. To his surprise, hillbillies he had known before had adopted the accents and speech patterns that had been promoted by radio. This change occurred within the space of less than ten years.
I'm in my seventies. When I compare memories with old pals we are sometimes shocked at how different our recall of the same events are. Your perspective on the concept of oral history seems spot on. Thanks, Doc.
I just finished a book for a family that consisted of their oral history which finally a daughter had made some sketchy notes on. Basically I had to clean up the stories and do a few interviews to get confirmations. The stories were mostly only about their deceased mother. It got crazy. In one version there was a ghost, in another version the ghost was actually a rabbit. In another story the father was driving the motorcycle and in another version it was the uncle. One story of childbirth had only a nurse available, another version had a doctor from the mainland coming in. And despite there being only one hospital on the island, the father swore there was a second hospital as well. In one version of a birth the father was there, in another he was shark fishing. One story featured some sort of aquatic sea monster, in another it was a deformed piglet. A motorboat became a sailboat but the boat having a sail didn't align to the rest of the story. The ownership of a fishing vessel changed across several stories. When exactly the mother lived on the mainland shifted several times. One version of her running away into the jungle from US troops seemed to mimic the memory of a movie more, but another sibling telling it had more inconsistencies in it. And this was just some and only between different siblings remembering having been told the story at different times. Passed along through several generations and I'd hate to see what the stories would turn into.
My point exactly! However colorful,exciting or enigmatic,inconsistencies abound in the oral tradition. Good of you to get a solid thread tied down and there the work begins😂best of luck! I wonder what she possessed that had US troops chasing after her😮wowza❤best wishes
One of my favorites so far doc. It reminded me of a time, many moons ago. I was heading to Haida Gwaii to do some paleoecological work on a coastal dome bog way up on Northern Graham Island. While waiting in Prince Rupert for the ferry with my colleague, we met a group of Germans and a group of elders from the Tsimshian. We all sat around a fire telling stories. One elder Tsimshian woman told us the story of the time when the people came here...to North America. It was a detailed story, involving generations of time passing, water levels rising and falling, fishing, whaling, hunting, and villages moving. Of course, she was describing the late Pleistocene paleoenvironment of the COASTAL PLAIN, not the interior corridor. She spoke in terms of forever, which for her is valid but of course we know that isn't the case. She had a university degree from UVIC, she did make a point of indicating this story was much older than the 14-15,000 yrs history generally agreed to within academe. I have always thought that the arrival could have been earlier along the coast. I came a cross a well prepared research paper from a UVIC Anthropology MA prospect recently in my meandering, it's from 2019 and worth a read for anyone interested... by Christopher Franklin George Hebda, Supervisory committee Dr. Quentin Mackie, Dr. Duncan McLaren. You can find it with that info.
A lot of oral traditions are passed in a rhythmic chant/song tending to pass time while working. At least here or as myths warning people not to do things.
Oral tradition texts are extremely unstable over time, as you have noted. We can easily see this in two contemporary oral traditions--folksongs and family legends. Comparing versions of folk ballads will always show changes to narratives, verses, floating lines that move across songs, changes in diction and misunderstandings of older words, even during the era of sound recordings and transcriptions by song collectors. Families often pass down ancestral tales and explanations of heirlooms that can be show false even after a mere two or three generations. This is partly because oral literature is rarely intended to be preservations of the facts of history, but rather they are designed to entertain and flatter the biases of the current audience. When an oral tradition is written down, this does not necessarily make the text more stable or reliable, especially in the pre-Gutenberg era of manual copyists who are just as likely to make errors or to change texts to suit the audience and the copyist. New Testament scholarship is a great example of this--the variants even in the canonical gospels are numerous and the subject of much academic research and analysis. Oral tradition is valuable for cultural insights, but the limits of their historical worth make them at best only hints of supplemental information in real historical research regarding events. Thanks for all your videos. They are superbly organized and delivered, no matter what the subject.
I read a paper about oral tradition in Native American tribes being used as part of the evidence of continuing tsunamis on the West Coast. Stories of floods and whales being deposited on mountains and so forth. It's pretty interesting stuff and they also found dead trees and sedimentation (is that a word) to back it up. Earthquakes and flood stories are common up and down that coast.
Here in Australia oral traditions have been used to corroborate findings on ancient climate change, sea level rise and the hunting of megafauna. Personally, I think the passing down of accurate information for millennia without the written word is a great human achievement.
I'm skeptical of the "accurate" bit. As was stated oral stories are constantly changing. It seems that many countries have started giving the oral histories of their aboriginal/native populations too much automatic credit for accuracy due to political correctness and not wanting to appear racist.
ill personally say that it can go both ways: language and writing evolves so by writing something down instead of letting it evolve with the language by saying out to one another you might avoid some corruptions; this doesn't mean that they (the myths) cant mutate in a way that distances them from the original tho, and in fact the whole telephone effect (is this a thing in the anglosphere? whisper something into a person's ear and they whisper into another and so on and the last person has heard something ridiculously different to the word the first person said) thing might corrupt the story even more than any translation and or semantic drift ever could.
Today with recordings we are collecting oral history anew. We are able to interview and record all kinds of people and learn how they lived, for example, farmers telling how they lived in the past century and providing the local history for places that have not been granted a place in the history books. Written history can be wrong as well.
I think it depends on the cultural tradition that is preserving the oral tradition. If the cultural tradition values the exact replication of the oral tradition (as with an important religious tradition), it can survive for much, much longer than 100 years. If society is passing down just-so stories and the creativity of the storyteller is valued, the stories will change quite a bit over time.
One study found that it takes only 30 years for culture to change enough that the details of oral histories shift to make the stories make sense. I question the ability of any oral tradition to maintain the original story without change.
@@jimmiejames9154 Pretty sure I'll be able to tell the family Holocaust stories accurately in 20 years.. I don't have kids, but I assume my 17yr old nephew won't fuck it up too badly. 🤷🏻♂️
"Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. And unto this, Conan, destined to bear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow. It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!" Don't know why I started thinking about that while watching this video.
I think its also important to mention that written sources can be slowlh changed as well like for example the bible and how many quotes todaybare often due to typos mistranslarions etc
This happens when the written source is rewritten, yes. But in whatever year a written (or rewritten) source comes from, it is direct testimony from that year.
One can speculate that oral traditions can have a slower rate of distortion when the culture has a slower rate of changes. tribes that have maintained their traditions without much interactions with other cultures can have a slower rate of distortion in their oral traditions than others. One example that came to mind is the case of finding a frozen mamouth in the ice very near the place where and ancetster was said to have seen in the oral tradition. Archeologists that have studied the location are on the opinion that the last time this mamouth could have been visible out of the ice was probably ten thousand years ago. So an event recorded by oral traditions has been preserved with not much distortion for millenia.
I enjoy learning about it, though it's usually hard to make much sense of it without input from other sources- written accounts from before, during & after a said event, or archaeology. I know many historians have had a culture in the US of completely ignoring & disregarding Native oral history, though, & just making up their own theories in complete opposition or disregard of it, but you also have so many people who have no idea what they are talking about touting non-historical stories from these people or modern urban legends as Native oral history- usually the class the tribes call Pretendians, who want to make a point of claiming their Native heritage without giving up or challenging their own culture, or religious beliefs (ie, Christian religious extremists make a tribe & start literal telling people that whatever nation they claim to be came from across the Atlantic Ocean & descended from the Jews, or some dumb shit, like that.)
I just finished editing together a book of oral histories for a family, just about their deceased mother. When you wrote, "& just making up their own theories in complete opposition..." it reminded me of the initial work of trying to walk this weird tightrope of being true to the material but trying to also put it in some proper context or at least something sensical. It created real dilemmas. Of course I was trying to treat the history with, probably more respect than native american history has been treated, but it was really problematic nonetheless. There was a sea creature at one point that I'm pretty sure I figured out was a whale but, do I write as whale, or keep sea creature. And even smaller stuff like one repair that was done was referred to as "a long screw thing," which I'm pretty sure was a prop shaft of a boat, but again, it became a question of do I insert myself and my idea into it and change it to prop shaft or leave everyone up in the air as to what it could be. Anyway...kind of two different things there I know but that bit brought back a lot hair pulling memories of that project.
@@TheGahta a very short example is when you remember your shopping list as a number instead of the items. So, instead of remembering I need x, y and z you just remember you need 3 items. Once you remember the number 3 - the items come to mind. It is a strategy for memory retention using visualisation of familiar spatial environments. The druids would use standing stones as a visual representation of the lore / stories, etc to help them retain the information. It’s one of those things that if you do it everyday it becomes second nature. If you don’t, you lose it.
The art of memory encoding was documented from the ancient roman and greeks (roman method etc) up until the church put an end to it with the execution of Bruno, as the encoding techniques were considered ungodly. Even written documenta are subject to interpretation as the reader lives in another time from the writer so may mis interpret the writings. Sanskrit seems to be subject to this as there are multiple commentaries of the vedas down through the ages with very different conclusions. Even eye witness accounts are not comsidered accurate as they can be biased by those experiencing. Napoleon wrote his memoirs and placed his accomplishments far grander than other accounts as did Alexander (and his questionable success in india)
My grandfather was a great storyteller and a repository of terrible dad jokes. He often taught me lessons about right and wrong by telling my about things that he experienced. I wish that I wrote those stories down before he passed. He experienced the great depression as a boy. Grew up on a farm. He attended a small school and went to church with Japanese families who also had farm's in the area. During WW2 he joined the Navy and all of the Japanese people that he knew were put into an internment camp. I remembered my grandfather telling me about these moments but most of the details are gone. Oral history is very important IMO and once it's gone it's impossible to recover.
You know what is truly embarrassing in life = accusing others of something which *YOU* fail to articulate....... Let that sink in and marinate a bit. 🤨
My understand from what I have read, is that Oral History is usually in accurate but at the same time an invaluable source of factual information about the past.
Love your videos as always Professor! Was hoping in a later video if you could please share your thoughts on the origins of martial arts and combat sports. For me being a practitioner of MMA and also a lover of ancient history, I’m deeply interested! Often times I see people saying India is where the oldest martial arts started, but wouldn’t it actually be Greece with boxing, wrestling, and pankration? Are there any depictions or evidence of martial arts dating back to Sumeria or older? Thank you again for all your videos!
I feel like that may depend on your idea of what a martial art is. Is it a martial art if there are a set sequence of moves that have to be mastered, or is it a martial art only if it's originally intended for self defense instead of being a somewhat violent game/ spectacle.
I understand the game of telephone being risky when studying oral tradition, but linguistics can aid in establishing a rough timeline. Phrases used in an oral poem might be the only place such sayings exist or even remnant words. In such instances it hints at the language used when the oral poem was composed. You'll find this in a lot of ancient texts that had been an oral tradition centuries prior. Usually sprinkled here and there (usually as analogies that would only make sesne to those in the time period it was written). But in some instances such as the Song Of Deborah it could be much more substantial.
My mother wrote down the family history passed to her from her grandmother and mother. I used it alongside official paper records from family history info online. Guess what. Even over 3 generations there were inconsistencies. An older friend remembered seeing a photo of her and her older sister who had died in childhood. On obtaining the death certificate of the little girl we discovered that she had died, of pneumonia, before my friend was born. Memories are unreliable. They can also be implanted. Experiments in Australia years ago proved this. But the onforeseen negative effects on the mental wellbeing of the decieved subjects has meant they were discontinued.
Yes. It is not necessarily a matter of "embellishments" occurring with the subsequent relating as much as the way our brains process and store information. Think a computer whose CPU according to its' software stores information and retrieves it. When a person hears - or reads - something their brains can "condense" that information. Then upon it being retrieved facets of information might be lost compared to the original form. So the problem with oral histories is that "loss" of information owing to how each individual's brain retains what it is exposed to. It may not as alluded to be purposeful. It is simply how our brains work.
Cultures with oral traditions seem to have ways to ensure that the major beats of their important stories are passed down. Rhyme schemes, rhythms of words, and story structures aid the storytellers in remembering. Some (all?) of them have professional storytellers who are the walking encyclopedias of their lore. Every once in a while, we hear or read about discoveries that demonstrate the accuracy of a story or legend. A memorable natural disaster turned into a narrative that's passed down through the generations and then evidence turns up. Or the location of something mysterious or lost. Yet, other times, there are so many additions and accretions that it's impossible to find the original event(s) that gave rise to the stories.
I'm not big on oral history. It can change a lot as it is handed down. Have you heard of a game where people get in a circle? One person will whisper something in the ear of the person next to them. When it makes its way around the circle to the person that originally started it, what that person originally said and what they got back are very different.. Now just do this through multiple generations.
Thanks for your scientific information. I wonder what you might think of The Walking People: a Native American Oral History by Paula Underwood. There is also an educational series of books that go with. I have read the history on an eponymous podcast with my name added. Miriam Moore reads
Is it Also the case with vedic and avestan recitation which have strictly preserved, they focused on very strict and accurate recitation , so do you think that even in this case hymns and verses also changed not rapidly but in a slow manner for a long time ????
Stories with a phase from oral tradition will use chronological markers, such as, "In the days of King so and so." They often use mnemonic tags for characters; "Bright eyed Athene; fleet-footed Achilles; Gilgamesh the Great King." Another quality of oral societies that Prof Miano ought to have mentioned is how much better developed people's memories are. The stories that people hear and pass on are taken seriously and they definitely are not like a game of _"Broken Telephone"_ as the video illustrates.
With all due respect , the Zunnies is just one of many oral tradition that proved to be so correct that astrophysics was stunned by what they knew for thousands of years .
I have a question, aren't some cultural oral traditions a little more reliable than others? I was under the impression that some cultures (particularly those without writing systems) developed relatively robust methods to make sure the story changes as little as possible. Generally things that are difficult to change without it sounding wrong - rhyme and meter and so on. Little "checksums" that kind of bounds the divergence of the story over generations. Of course it's still not as unchanging as a written document, and linguistic drift is of course possible as well, but I was under the impression that SOME traditions are considered extremely reliable compared to other ones because of the presence of storytelling strategies meant to keep the stories from changing the way a regular "my grandma told me..." oral tradition wouldn't.
Lately I've been using the apples & oranges argument a lot. In this case historical reliability is the apple, who gets to study whom is the orange. I don't see what prevents oral historians from criticizing written history, or for that matter why you find yourself on the side of written history except that it's more nerdy. I don't see how your point of view stands when oral tradition corrects something history was mistaken about.
@@joqqeman The problem being if the local party officials and their superiors and their superiors and their superiors, etc. want to "know" that agricultural output increased by 20% over the previous year because of top-down policy changes. Except you are interviewing farmers where production decreased by 10 percent. Everyone gets creative with how questions are asked and answered unless they want to spend the next decade in a Gulag chopping down big trees with a dull axe.
As with all things what is the nature of the recording + how does that compare to what is established as fact + what if any evidence might corroborate your recorded history. So as I noted in the comment below being written down does not automatically make it accurate as much as in that form it helps to eliminate errors of relating such that oral histories are subject to. A book printed 500 years ago can still be fiction - or it can be accurate. What it says however remains consistent because it was written down.
@@varyolla435 How can you find the facts for something written 4,000 years ago if, as is often the case, this is the only information we have. My question was not intended as a criticism of this channel. It is one of the best I know on RUclips.
@@PanglossDr How does one find corroborative evidence = via continued research of course. Here is an example. Herodotus wrote long ago describing ancient Egyptian ships. Then some years back marine-archeologists diving in the vicinity of what used to be the harbor of ancient Alexandria = discovered a sunken craft which mimicked exactly the description given by Herodotus long ago. So things are not always "1-offs" and you can sometimes find corroborating accounts from others + or archeological evidence which validates what was written long ago by ancient historians et al. If things make sense based upon the totality of what is known and recorded that usually means you are on the right track.
The vedas and Upanishads ( 1500-500BCE ) are orally preserved. According to Sanskrit scholar Michael witzel the vedas are like an ancient tape recording which dates back to 1500 BCE . Every word , syllable, sentence and the exact way to recite is properly preserved. If you listen to someone ( legit ) reciting the vedas , it would sound exactly the same 3000 years ago .
@@WorldofAntiquity I think Witzel was specifically talking about the Rig Veda and early Upanishads. Here is a quote from his article, from Wikipedia, " Right from the beginning, in Ṛgvedic times, elaborate steps were taken to insure the exact reproduction of the words of the ancient poets. As a result, the Ṛgveda still has the exact same wording in such distant regions as Kashmir, Kerala and Orissa, and even the long-extinct musical accents have been preserved. Vedic transmission is thus superior to that of the Hebrew or Greek Bible, or the Greek, Latin and Chinese classics. We can actually regard present-day Ṛgveda recitation as a tape recording of what was composed and recited some 3000 years ago. In addition, unlike the constantly reformulated Epics and Purāṇas, the Vedic texts contain contemporary materials. They can serve as snapshots of the political and cultural situation of the particular period and area in which they were composed. […] as they are contemporary, and faithfully preserved, these texts are equivalent to inscriptions. […] they are immediate and unchanged evidence, a sort of oral history ― and sometimes autobiography ― of the period, frequently fixed and ‘taped’ immediately after the event by poetic formulation. These aspects of the Vedas have never been sufficiently stressed - […]” (WITZEL 1995a:91).
Hearing the term “Oral History” makes me feel conflicted. I want it to be so much more, but to me, an oral history just feels like a somewhat historical (or someone’s interpretation of), yet mostly entertaining form of information, sprinkled with a smattering of hope for accuracy.😬 I just can’t help but think of the Telephone Game from my pre-school days. Albeit, on a much grander scale, over a vast amount of time… it’s still the Telephone Game.🥴
Yes. Another appellation is the party game _"Chinese whispers."_ What matters is that orally related information as it is passed between individuals over a period of time invariably can change. The change is not necessarily intentional as much as simply the way our brains process information. The person's brain in retaining that information can "condense it" resulting in facets being lost and/or altered upon relating it back. Moral: consider police questioning eyewitnesses. You can have multiple people who all saw the same event = yet their stories might vary in certain details because of the way their brains processed what they saw. Hence not all oral histories are necessarily incorrect as some facets of truth can remain. One still must endeavor however to corroborate via other evidence where possible given above + to consider the plausibility of the story itself based upon knowns. Somethings are simply so fantastical in their nature as to be implausible on their surface making them readily identifiable as _"myths."_
One might view oral histories not unlike = Wikipedia. They represent a good place to start as far as looking for answers. Yet like the online equivalent in so much as anyone can input information = you must verify what you see - especially in cases of extraordinary claims. Moral of the story: to use a Cold War metaphor = _"trust - but verify."_ Oral histories can help you in ascertaining what you see. Yet people being fallible means that corroborative evidence should be sought. Sometimes such histories can be quite accurate - sometimes not. As an example Herodotus - _"the Father of History"_ - related a lot for us. Yet some of what he wrote was clearly mythological while some has been validated by subsequent evidence. Herodotus related = what he was told - aka oral histories. Always try where possible to corroborate and consider the nature of the sources and what is being claimed as to does it add up or not. That is the only way to separate _"the chaff from the wheat."_ Enjoy your day folks.
Ah...... = no. If that were so then every idiotic claim would be accepted as supposed fact prima facie until someone wasted the time and effort to show otherwise. Some claims are self-evidently wrong reflecting logical fallacies and/or a lack of corroborating evidence. If some imbecile claims the Moon is made of cheese NASA need not waste billions of dollars sending a team there to disprove the claim. It therefore falls to the claimant to prove their claim - via action and/or evidence. Oral history is no different. If it appears as likely mythological in nature given what we know then that is what it is until corroborating evidence is forthcoming to show otherwise.
I don't like how oral histories are taken as a gospel when it comes to Native American history... it is all we have due to the lack of writing, but some native groups shouldn't be so dismissive about genetic and archeological science.
I’ve heard many instances of people getting these genetic ancestry tests and the results do not match up with the family lore about their origins. I’ve been told forever that our family is from the Basque region of Spain, even from a particular village (Roncevalls) but then I took an Ancestry DNA test that showed 0% Basque heritage. Instead we are 95% from County Mayo Ireland and 5% Wales. Also most claims of Native American heritage (based on family stories) are not accurate by genetic testing.
I would offer a simple caveat to what you noted. Those "ancestry tests" in truth are limited = by the databases they have. In other words difficult to ascertain genetic history of a person if the database you have only has limited data available for a given geographic area.
I don't think written sources are necessarily more valuable than oral sources. All history is interpreted by the person writing it. That person has a worldview, biases, etc. The only way we could ever know exactly what happened would be video evidence.
You miss the point then. While interpretation of evidence can be subjective as you say = it still boils down to what level of accuracy is said evidence to be considered. Thus oral histories are intrinsically subject to "variance" as stories get passed between multiple people over long spans of times. Sometimes you can end up with something far removed from the original version. Written histories however are just that = written. So you can try to quibble over meaning if you wish. Yet the words and hence what is being related remains the same as when it was written down = giving you more credence as far as accuracy of what is being said.
Things in language like etymology and phonics are dated and much more useful than tradition. Language has a canon and many cultures of the past are named after the languages they spoke
What about Islamic oral tradition which is controlled, every person in the chain of narration is named and each person narrates it to diferent people till it gets written down. Here is an example from Sahih al Bukhari Book 16, Hadith 1 Amr ibn Awn reported: Khalid narrated to us from Yunus, from Al-Hasan, from Abu Bakrah, who said: We were with Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) when the sun eclipsed. Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) stood up dragging his cloak till he entered the Mosque. He led us in a two-rak`at prayer till the sun (eclipse) had cleared. Then the Prophet (ﷺ) said, "The sun and the moon do not eclipse because of someone's death. So whenever you see these eclipses pray and invoke (Allah) till the eclipse is over." So in this narration the author gets told by an individual by the named Amr ibn Awn who claims have heard it from Khalid who in turn heard from Yunus who heard from Hasan who heard it from Abu bakrah who was the eyewitness
I have to take issue with your statements that events can’t be dated. My circle has very rich oral traditions and can easily say (for example) the last exercise of the “tradition” occurred last Friday night after 2 glasses of wine….
The Good Doctor is confusing Oral Tradition and Story (Myth) Telling. Oral Traditions are fairly easy to pass on from one generation to the other unbroken simply because they're centred on doing something. Like making a special food or how to gather a particular berry or root (and how to prepare it for consumption), and how to conduct a particular hunt. Story (Myth) Telling were more for entrainment and passing on particular styles of speaking, ways of conducting oneself, and beliefs in the Gods.
@@WorldofAntiquity Shouldn't there be a distinction between the types of Oral Traditions, because from your video it's confusing. For example, with a hunter/gatherer group, the Oral Traditions of passing on important food gathering techniques are not the same as the Oral Traditions of the Gods. The former demonstrated practically with less chance of the tradition being altered, the latter demonstrated sacredly with Gods created teach the dangers of a new sin?
What is lost so much in this age of political correctness is that skepticism is healthy. When reviewing any historical source, skepticism is necessary. This is even more appropriate when reviewing oral sources. It is not racist to be skeptical of an account by an indigenous person. However, in this age of political correctness, you are likely to be called racist for being skeptical.
There's a big difference between being skeptical and being a denialist when it comes to oral histories from other cultures. The last few hundred years have been dominated by denialists who use that power to suppress culture and history (esp. in regards to Indigenous North America). Also being skeptical means asking valid questions and listening to more information, which is something so-called "skeptics" rarely do. They just say "is that really true?" and move on.
I am skeptical of anyone who repeatedly gaps and whines about political correctness and being called racist. They always have a political ax to grind and are not thinking for themselves.
@@minimumriffage7520 if someone is a denialist, they don't pick and choose what they deny, they deny all alternate and new information, including the written word. The thing with oral histories is it is almost impossible to know when the eyewitness account of the event occurred. In history, we need to know that starting point. Yes a lot of cultures have a 'great flood' story in their individual cultures, but that isn't evidence of a worldwide flood, because we don't know when in the individual cultures the flood occurred. The 'great flood' of one culture could have happened thousands of years before or after another culture and the size of the flood may also have differed. Due diligence is needed for all sources, including oral histories. They shouldn't be taken as gospel just because it comes from 'indigenous peoples'. The ancient Greeks and Romans were indigenous to their areas too. The ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians were indigenous to their areas. Any historian worth his weight should be viewing any 'new' source as 'is this true?' and then doing the due diligence to find corroborating evidence. That is how research is played out.
@@carlmally6292 always? Maybe the people who constantly call people racist have political axes to grind. As a historian, I'm after the truth, or as close to the truth as we can get. That means corroborating evidence. If there is no corroborating evidence, then it's not a credible source. Being from an indigenous culture doesn't automatically make it a credible source. Indigenous peoples can be wrong or embellish too. Even though the Indigenous Australians have a giant earth-shaping snake called the Rainbow Serpent, doesn't mean a giant earth-shaping snake actually existed. Spoiler alert, it didn't.
*A request:* A young new Archeology/Anthropology student(graduate?) has a fairly popular RUclips channel... *MiniMinuteMan* His newest video.. he mentions he'd like to do more collabs... Maybe a wise professor like yourself could have a talk with him???? Thanks!!!
What about Islamic oral tradition which is controlled, every person in the chain of nareation is named and each person narrates it to diferent people do the chain splits out in several lines. Here is an example from Sahih al Bukhari Book 16, Hadith 1 Amr ibn Awn reported: Khalid narrated to us from Yunus, from Al-Hasan, from Abu Bakrah, who said: We were with Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) when the sun eclipsed. Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) stood up dragging his cloak till he entered the Mosque. He led us in a two-rak`at prayer till the sun (eclipse) had cleared. Then the Prophet (ﷺ) said, "The sun and the moon do not eclipse because of someone's death. So whenever you see these eclipses pray and invoke (Allah) till the eclipse is over." So in this narration the author gets told by an individual by the named Amr sibn Awn who claims have heard it from Khalid who in turn heard from Yunus who heard from Hasan who heard it from Al bakra who was the eyewitness And so this is one chain of narration where the author documents what he heard from the narrator, muslim since the death of the prophet had schools for studying and memorising what the prophet and his followers said and did, they wrote it down and even memorised it, they had a controlled oral tradition were students spent their life memorizing the sayings of the prophet and his followers just like muslims memorize the Quran today. So in the chain of narration the actual eyewitness says "we were with the messenger" meaning that there were other eyewitnesses not just him, so did they narrate this to their student in similar chain of narration, turns out they did, many of them Here is just one of them Sunan an-Nasa'i Book 16, Hadith 32 Muhammad ibn Bashar told us, he said: Muadh ibn Hisham told us, he said: My father told me, on the authority of Qatada, on the authority of Al-Hasan, on the authority of Al-Nu’man ibn Bashir The Prophet (ﷺ) came rushing out to the masjid one day when the sun eclipsed, and he prayed until the eclipse ended, then he said: "The people of Jahilliyyah used to say that eclipses of the sun and the moon only happened when some great man on earth died. But eclipses of the sun and the moon do not happen for the death or birth of anyone. Rather they are two of the creations of Allah (SWT) and Allah (SWT) causes to happen in His creation what He wills. Whichever of them becomes eclipsed, pray until it is over or Allah (SWT) causes something to happen." Here there is some context and it is diferent drom the previous one but the core events are intact.
I'm not a professional historian, just someone with an MA in history, but my research focus was West Africa, where Oral Traditions are one of the most important types of source we have. A big problem in modern times is something called feedback; most people who keep oral traditions aren't isolated in their own little pockets of society, they're literate people who can and have read books about their own peoples' histories. Unfortunately, this often results in them knowingly or accidentally incorporating things they read about into their oral traditions, which makes it difficult to know what claims are consistent elements of oral traditions going back generations, and which ones may have been introduced more recently. It also reduces inconsistencies between the oral traditions as recounted by different tellers, which comes with its own issues; when we have lots of different tellings of a story with slight variations, we can cross reference them to evaluate which details are most likely to be accurate to older tellings of the story, whereas when all the versions converge due to drawing from a single more recent telling, we lose a lot of data. It's a really unfortunate situation.
Worthless MA and opinion
In Woody Guthrie's autobiography, he makes an observation that I think is relevant here. Woody travelled widely in the US, befriending everyday people all over, before accepting jobs at radio stations in various cities as a "hillbilly singer". He became dissatisfied with the exaggerated "hillbilly" accent and speech patterns played up by the studios which he found infantilizing and left, going back to his roots. To his surprise, hillbillies he had known before had adopted the accents and speech patterns that had been promoted by radio. This change occurred within the space of less than ten years.
As researchers, we should be skeptical of any source we review, including oral sources. Skepticism in academia is not only healthy, it's necessary.
I'm in my seventies. When I compare memories with old pals we are sometimes shocked at how different our recall of the same events are. Your perspective on the concept of oral history seems spot on. Thanks, Doc.
I just finished a book for a family that consisted of their oral history which finally a daughter had made some sketchy notes on. Basically I had to clean up the stories and do a few interviews to get confirmations. The stories were mostly only about their deceased mother. It got crazy.
In one version there was a ghost, in another version the ghost was actually a rabbit.
In another story the father was driving the motorcycle and in another version it was the uncle.
One story of childbirth had only a nurse available, another version had a doctor from the mainland coming in. And despite there being only one hospital on the island, the father swore there was a second hospital as well.
In one version of a birth the father was there, in another he was shark fishing.
One story featured some sort of aquatic sea monster, in another it was a deformed piglet.
A motorboat became a sailboat but the boat having a sail didn't align to the rest of the story.
The ownership of a fishing vessel changed across several stories.
When exactly the mother lived on the mainland shifted several times.
One version of her running away into the jungle from US troops seemed to mimic the memory of a movie more, but another sibling telling it had more inconsistencies in it.
And this was just some and only between different siblings remembering having been told the story at different times. Passed along through several generations and I'd hate to see what the stories would turn into.
My point exactly! However colorful,exciting or enigmatic,inconsistencies abound in the oral tradition. Good of you to get a solid thread tied down and there the work begins😂best of luck! I wonder what she possessed that had US troops chasing after her😮wowza❤best wishes
One of my favorites so far doc. It reminded me of a time, many moons ago. I was heading to Haida Gwaii to do some paleoecological work on a coastal dome bog way up on Northern Graham Island. While waiting in Prince Rupert for the ferry with my colleague, we met a group of Germans and a group of elders from the Tsimshian. We all sat around a fire telling stories. One elder Tsimshian woman told us the story of the time when the people came here...to North America. It was a detailed story, involving generations of time passing, water levels rising and falling, fishing, whaling, hunting, and villages moving. Of course, she was describing the late Pleistocene paleoenvironment of the COASTAL PLAIN, not the interior corridor. She spoke in terms of forever, which for her is valid but of course we know that isn't the case. She had a university degree from UVIC, she did make a point of indicating this story was much older than the 14-15,000 yrs history generally agreed to within academe. I have always thought that the arrival could have been earlier along the coast. I came a cross a well prepared research paper from a UVIC Anthropology MA prospect recently in my meandering, it's from 2019 and worth a read for anyone interested... by Christopher Franklin George Hebda, Supervisory committee Dr. Quentin Mackie, Dr. Duncan McLaren. You can find it with that info.
Thank you for sharing!
Keep up the great work, Dr Miano 👏
Love this highlight. Thanks Dr. Miano for providing nuane in a place that usually lacks it!
Happy holidays Dr Miano. ❤
A lot of oral traditions are passed in a rhythmic chant/song tending to pass time while working. At least here or as myths warning people not to do things.
Oral tradition texts are extremely unstable over time, as you have noted. We can easily see this in two contemporary oral traditions--folksongs and family legends. Comparing versions of folk ballads will always show changes to narratives, verses, floating lines that move across songs, changes in diction and misunderstandings of older words, even during the era of sound recordings and transcriptions by song collectors. Families often pass down ancestral tales and explanations of heirlooms that can be show false even after a mere two or three generations. This is partly because oral literature is rarely intended to be preservations of the facts of history, but rather they are designed to entertain and flatter the biases of the current audience. When an oral tradition is written down, this does not necessarily make the text more stable or reliable, especially in the pre-Gutenberg era of manual copyists who are just as likely to make errors or to change texts to suit the audience and the copyist. New Testament scholarship is a great example of this--the variants even in the canonical gospels are numerous and the subject of much academic research and analysis. Oral tradition is valuable for cultural insights, but the limits of their historical worth make them at best only hints of supplemental information in real historical research regarding events. Thanks for all your videos. They are superbly organized and delivered, no matter what the subject.
I read a paper about oral tradition in Native American tribes being used as part of the evidence of continuing tsunamis on the West Coast. Stories of floods and whales being deposited on mountains and so forth.
It's pretty interesting stuff and they also found dead trees and sedimentation (is that a word) to back it up. Earthquakes and flood stories are common up and down that coast.
Here in Australia oral traditions have been used to corroborate findings on ancient climate change, sea level rise and the hunting of megafauna. Personally, I think the passing down of accurate information for millennia without the written word is a great human achievement.
I'm skeptical of the "accurate" bit. As was stated oral stories are constantly changing. It seems that many countries have started giving the oral histories of their aboriginal/native populations too much automatic credit for accuracy due to political correctness and not wanting to appear racist.
Oral histories do not corroborate anything.
They can, however, be used as a starting point to look for evidence that does.
@@tophers3756 The key word is "corroborate".
Tis.
Agreed
Wow thanks this video has been very deep and enlightening about a subject i didn't never stop to think about
Thanks for your videos man
ill personally say that it can go both ways: language and writing evolves so by writing something down instead of letting it evolve with the language by saying out to one another you might avoid some corruptions; this doesn't mean that they (the myths) cant mutate in a way that distances them from the original tho, and in fact the whole telephone effect (is this a thing in the anglosphere? whisper something into a person's ear and they whisper into another and so on and the last person has heard something ridiculously different to the word the first person said) thing might corrupt the story even more than any translation and or semantic drift ever could.
Today with recordings we are collecting oral history anew. We are able to interview and record all kinds of people and learn how they lived, for example, farmers telling how they lived in the past century and providing the local history for places that have not been granted a place in the history books. Written history can be wrong as well.
Some historians stated that oral tradition can't survive past 100 years.
I know stories that were told to my grandmother by my grandfather's grandfather in the early 1900's.
I think it depends on the cultural tradition that is preserving the oral tradition. If the cultural tradition values the exact replication of the oral tradition (as with an important religious tradition), it can survive for much, much longer than 100 years. If society is passing down just-so stories and the creativity of the storyteller is valued, the stories will change quite a bit over time.
One study found that it takes only 30 years for culture to change enough that the details of oral histories shift to make the stories make sense. I question the ability of any oral tradition to maintain the original story without change.
@@jimmiejames9154 Pretty sure I'll be able to tell the family Holocaust stories accurately in 20 years.. I don't have kids, but I assume my 17yr old nephew won't fuck it up too badly. 🤷🏻♂️
Oral tradition is the claim.
The question then becomes, "Is there evidence to support that claim?"
This comment is for the algorithm. Isn't it frustrating that every time you watch one of WoA vids YT starts recommending Hancock and friends.
When history is deliberately written down incorrectly, whispered secrets may be truth's only hope.
Jesus fell in the river becomes Jesus walked on water.
He poked somebody in the eye becomes he healed the blind.
He stole some neighbor's wine becomes he turned water into wine
lol he fell in the river, but then stood up very fast to play it cool and avoid enbarrassement = walked on water
"Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. And unto this, Conan, destined to bear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow. It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!"
Don't know why I started thinking about that while watching this video.
For a minute there I thought you might be quoting the introduction to a Graham Hancock book
Well spoken.
I think its also important to mention that written sources can be slowlh changed as well like for example the bible and how many quotes todaybare often due to typos mistranslarions etc
This happens when the written source is rewritten, yes. But in whatever year a written (or rewritten) source comes from, it is direct testimony from that year.
One can speculate that oral traditions can have a slower rate of distortion when the culture has a slower rate of changes. tribes that have maintained their traditions without much interactions with other cultures can have a slower rate of distortion in their oral traditions than others. One example that came to mind is the case of finding a frozen mamouth in the ice very near the place where and ancetster was said to have seen in the oral tradition. Archeologists that have studied the location are on the opinion that the last time this mamouth could have been visible out of the ice was probably ten thousand years ago. So an event recorded by oral traditions has been preserved with not much distortion for millenia.
I enjoy learning about it, though it's usually hard to make much sense of it without input from other sources- written accounts from before, during & after a said event, or archaeology.
I know many historians have had a culture in the US of completely ignoring & disregarding Native oral history, though, & just making up their own theories in complete opposition or disregard of it, but you also have so many people who have no idea what they are talking about touting non-historical stories from these people or modern urban legends as Native oral history- usually the class the tribes call Pretendians, who want to make a point of claiming their Native heritage without giving up or challenging their own culture, or religious beliefs (ie, Christian religious extremists make a tribe & start literal telling people that whatever nation they claim to be came from across the Atlantic Ocean & descended from the Jews, or some dumb shit, like that.)
I just finished editing together a book of oral histories for a family, just about their deceased mother. When you wrote, "& just making up their own theories in complete opposition..." it reminded me of the initial work of trying to walk this weird tightrope of being true to the material but trying to also put it in some proper context or at least something sensical. It created real dilemmas. Of course I was trying to treat the history with, probably more respect than native american history has been treated, but it was really problematic nonetheless. There was a sea creature at one point that I'm pretty sure I figured out was a whale but, do I write as whale, or keep sea creature. And even smaller stuff like one repair that was done was referred to as "a long screw thing," which I'm pretty sure was a prop shaft of a boat, but again, it became a question of do I insert myself and my idea into it and change it to prop shaft or leave everyone up in the air as to what it could be.
Anyway...kind of two different things there I know but that bit brought back a lot hair pulling memories of that project.
Now might be a good time to mention ‘memory palaces’ and how our ancestors used this method to remember huge amounts of information.
Elaborate please
@@TheGahta how about you use google
@@TheGahta a very short example is when you remember your shopping list as a number instead of the items. So, instead of remembering I need x, y and z you just remember you need 3 items. Once you remember the number 3 - the items come to mind.
It is a strategy for memory retention using visualisation of familiar spatial environments.
The druids would use standing stones as a visual representation of the lore / stories, etc to help them retain the information.
It’s one of those things that if you do it everyday it becomes second nature. If you don’t, you lose it.
@@armandom28 you love being snappy when no one involved you huh 🤣
@@simondalton3726 thanks 👌
The art of memory encoding was documented from the ancient roman and greeks (roman method etc) up until the church put an end to it with the execution of Bruno, as the encoding techniques were considered ungodly. Even written documenta are subject to interpretation as the reader lives in another time from the writer so may mis interpret the writings. Sanskrit seems to be subject to this as there are multiple commentaries of the vedas down through the ages with very different conclusions. Even eye witness accounts are not comsidered accurate as they can be biased by those experiencing. Napoleon wrote his memoirs and placed his accomplishments far grander than other accounts as did Alexander (and his questionable success in india)
My grandfather was a great storyteller and a repository of terrible dad jokes. He often taught me lessons about right and wrong by telling my about things that he experienced. I wish that I wrote those stories down before he passed. He experienced the great depression as a boy. Grew up on a farm. He attended a small school and went to church with Japanese families who also had farm's in the area. During WW2 he joined the Navy and all of the Japanese people that he knew were put into an internment camp. I remembered my grandfather telling me about these moments but most of the details are gone. Oral history is very important IMO and once it's gone it's impossible to recover.
I'm glad historians are finally catching up, and seem to be starting the process of cleaning your own prejudiced lenses.
This has been going on for a hundred years.
You know what is truly embarrassing in life = accusing others of something which *YOU* fail to articulate....... Let that sink in and marinate a bit. 🤨
My understand from what I have read, is that Oral History is usually in accurate but at the same time an invaluable source of factual information about the past.
Love your videos as always Professor!
Was hoping in a later video if you could please share your thoughts on the origins of martial arts and combat sports. For me being a practitioner of MMA and also a lover of ancient history, I’m deeply interested!
Often times I see people saying India is where the oldest martial arts started, but wouldn’t it actually be Greece with boxing, wrestling, and pankration? Are there any depictions or evidence of martial arts dating back to Sumeria or older?
Thank you again for all your videos!
I feel like that may depend on your idea of what a martial art is. Is it a martial art if there are a set sequence of moves that have to be mastered, or is it a martial art only if it's originally intended for self defense instead of being a somewhat violent game/ spectacle.
@@MrChristianDT I suppose in the context of my initial post, I would be looking at combat sports specifically.
I understand the game of telephone being risky when studying oral tradition, but linguistics can aid in establishing a rough timeline. Phrases used in an oral poem might be the only place such sayings exist or even remnant words. In such instances it hints at the language used when the oral poem was composed. You'll find this in a lot of ancient texts that had been an oral tradition centuries prior. Usually sprinkled here and there (usually as analogies that would only make sesne to those in the time period it was written). But in some instances such as the Song Of Deborah it could be much more substantial.
My mother wrote down the family history passed to her from her grandmother and mother. I used it alongside official paper records from family history info online. Guess what. Even over 3 generations there were inconsistencies.
An older friend remembered seeing a photo of her and her older sister who had died in childhood. On obtaining the death certificate of the little girl we discovered that she had died, of pneumonia, before my friend was born.
Memories are unreliable.
They can also be implanted. Experiments in Australia years ago proved this. But the onforeseen negative effects on the mental wellbeing of the decieved subjects has meant they were discontinued.
Yes. It is not necessarily a matter of "embellishments" occurring with the subsequent relating as much as the way our brains process and store information. Think a computer whose CPU according to its' software stores information and retrieves it. When a person hears - or reads - something their brains can "condense" that information. Then upon it being retrieved facets of information might be lost compared to the original form.
So the problem with oral histories is that "loss" of information owing to how each individual's brain retains what it is exposed to. It may not as alluded to be purposeful. It is simply how our brains work.
Cultures with oral traditions seem to have ways to ensure that the major beats of their important stories are passed down. Rhyme schemes, rhythms of words, and story structures aid the storytellers in remembering. Some (all?) of them have professional storytellers who are the walking encyclopedias of their lore.
Every once in a while, we hear or read about discoveries that demonstrate the accuracy of a story or legend. A memorable natural disaster turned into a narrative that's passed down through the generations and then evidence turns up. Or the location of something mysterious or lost.
Yet, other times, there are so many additions and accretions that it's impossible to find the original event(s) that gave rise to the stories.
What about cultures that don't have a written language? Also, are you aware of the progress in understanding the quipu?
Hugh Grant can tell you how damaging oral traditions can be.
Great video.
Thank you.
I'm not big on oral history. It can change a lot as it is handed down. Have you heard of a game where people get in a circle? One person will whisper something in the ear of the person next to them. When it makes its way around the circle to the person that originally started it, what that person originally said and what they got back are very different.. Now just do this through multiple generations.
Thanks for your scientific information. I wonder what you might think of The Walking People: a Native American Oral History by Paula Underwood. There is also an educational series of books that go with. I have read the history on an eponymous podcast with my name added. Miriam Moore reads
Is it Also the case with vedic and avestan recitation which have strictly preserved, they focused on very strict and accurate recitation ,
so do you think that even in this case hymns and verses also changed not rapidly but in a slow manner for a long time ????
The more strict they were, the better the info would be preserved. But keep in mind that there was more than one Vedic recension.
A hypothesis is a grounded and justifiable assumption ready to be evaluated
Stories with a phase from oral tradition will use chronological markers, such as,
"In the days of King so and so."
They often use mnemonic tags for characters;
"Bright eyed Athene; fleet-footed Achilles; Gilgamesh the Great King."
Another quality of oral societies that Prof Miano ought to have mentioned is how much better developed people's memories are.
The stories that people hear and pass on are taken seriously and they definitely are not like a game of _"Broken Telephone"_ as the video illustrates.
30 years of working with oral history and I have a Forrest Gump philosophy. It's like a box of chocolates...
With all due respect , the Zunnies is just one of many oral tradition that proved to be so correct that astrophysics was stunned by what they knew for thousands of years .
Where’d you read that?
I have a question, aren't some cultural oral traditions a little more reliable than others? I was under the impression that some cultures (particularly those without writing systems) developed relatively robust methods to make sure the story changes as little as possible. Generally things that are difficult to change without it sounding wrong - rhyme and meter and so on. Little "checksums" that kind of bounds the divergence of the story over generations.
Of course it's still not as unchanging as a written document, and linguistic drift is of course possible as well, but I was under the impression that SOME traditions are considered extremely reliable compared to other ones because of the presence of storytelling strategies meant to keep the stories from changing the way a regular "my grandma told me..." oral tradition wouldn't.
Lately I've been using the apples & oranges argument a lot. In this case historical reliability is the apple, who gets to study whom is the orange. I don't see what prevents oral historians from criticizing written history, or for that matter why you find yourself on the side of written history except that it's more nerdy. I don't see how your point of view stands when oral tradition corrects something history was mistaken about.
Historical reliability is ascertained through the historical method. See here: ruclips.net/video/GZYNL0-KHC4/видео.html
Like a game of telephone changes a little bit each time possibly.
I don't think much of it... especially when it contradicts the written history.
I've heard about oral history.
😆
I recommend you to recharch about pre islamic oral tredition . They are pretty accurate because they were in form of poem not story only .
The annals of history started with oral history.
Things got tricky when the survey and questionnaires were done Soviet style
Depends which survey by whom and for what purpose. Soviets wanted to know things for administrative purposes and keep the results secret otherwise.
Interesting reply
@@joqqeman The problem being if the local party officials and their superiors and their superiors and their superiors, etc. want to "know" that agricultural output increased by 20% over the previous year because of top-down policy changes. Except you are interviewing farmers where production decreased by 10 percent.
Everyone gets creative with how questions are asked and answered unless they want to spend the next decade in a Gulag chopping down big trees with a dull axe.
@@jackrifleman562thats stalinism, soviets had other systems too
@@joqqeman A rose by any other name.....
Really interesting.
However, how do you handle the fact that what was written 4,000 years ago had perhaps been handed down orally before?
As with all things what is the nature of the recording + how does that compare to what is established as fact + what if any evidence might corroborate your recorded history.
So as I noted in the comment below being written down does not automatically make it accurate as much as in that form it helps to eliminate errors of relating such that oral histories are subject to. A book printed 500 years ago can still be fiction - or it can be accurate. What it says however remains consistent because it was written down.
@@varyolla435 How can you find the facts for something written 4,000 years ago if, as is often the case, this is the only information we have.
My question was not intended as a criticism of this channel. It is one of the best I know on RUclips.
@@PanglossDr How does one find corroborative evidence = via continued research of course.
Here is an example. Herodotus wrote long ago describing ancient Egyptian ships. Then some years back marine-archeologists diving in the vicinity of what used to be the harbor of ancient Alexandria = discovered a sunken craft which mimicked exactly the description given by Herodotus long ago.
So things are not always "1-offs" and you can sometimes find corroborating accounts from others + or archeological evidence which validates what was written long ago by ancient historians et al. If things make sense based upon the totality of what is known and recorded that usually means you are on the right track.
The vedas and Upanishads ( 1500-500BCE ) are orally preserved.
According to Sanskrit scholar Michael witzel the vedas are like an ancient tape recording which dates back to 1500 BCE . Every word , syllable, sentence and the exact way to recite is properly preserved. If you listen to someone ( legit ) reciting the vedas , it would sound exactly the same 3000 years ago .
And yet there was more than one Vedic recension. Even today, there are two surviving recensions of the Yajurveda.
@@WorldofAntiquity I think Witzel was specifically talking about the Rig Veda and early Upanishads.
Here is a quote from his article, from Wikipedia,
" Right from the beginning, in Ṛgvedic times, elaborate steps were taken to insure the exact reproduction of the words of the ancient poets. As a result, the Ṛgveda still has the exact same wording in such distant regions as Kashmir, Kerala and Orissa, and even the long-extinct musical accents have been preserved. Vedic transmission is thus superior to that of the Hebrew or Greek Bible, or the Greek, Latin and Chinese classics. We can actually regard present-day Ṛgveda recitation as a tape recording of what was composed and recited some 3000 years ago. In addition, unlike the constantly reformulated Epics and Purāṇas, the Vedic texts contain contemporary materials. They can serve as snapshots of the political and cultural situation of the particular period and area in which they were composed. […] as they are contemporary, and faithfully preserved, these texts are equivalent to inscriptions. […] they are immediate and unchanged evidence, a sort of oral history ― and sometimes autobiography ― of the period, frequently fixed and ‘taped’ immediately after the event by poetic formulation. These aspects of the Vedas have never been sufficiently stressed - […]” (WITZEL 1995a:91).
Oral tradition actually comes first. You can have oral tradition with no written, but you cannot have the written without the oral.
You can have written without oral.
Hearing the term “Oral History” makes me feel conflicted. I want it to be so much more, but to me, an oral history just feels like a somewhat historical (or someone’s interpretation of), yet mostly entertaining form of information, sprinkled with a smattering of hope for accuracy.😬 I just can’t help but think of the Telephone Game from my pre-school days. Albeit, on a much grander scale, over a vast amount of time… it’s still the Telephone Game.🥴
Yes. Another appellation is the party game _"Chinese whispers."_ What matters is that orally related information as it is passed between individuals over a period of time invariably can change. The change is not necessarily intentional as much as simply the way our brains process information. The person's brain in retaining that information can "condense it" resulting in facets being lost and/or altered upon relating it back.
Moral: consider police questioning eyewitnesses. You can have multiple people who all saw the same event = yet their stories might vary in certain details because of the way their brains processed what they saw.
Hence not all oral histories are necessarily incorrect as some facets of truth can remain. One still must endeavor however to corroborate via other evidence where possible given above + to consider the plausibility of the story itself based upon knowns. Somethings are simply so fantastical in their nature as to be implausible on their surface making them readily identifiable as _"myths."_
One might view oral histories not unlike = Wikipedia. They represent a good place to start as far as looking for answers. Yet like the online equivalent in so much as anyone can input information = you must verify what you see - especially in cases of extraordinary claims.
Moral of the story: to use a Cold War metaphor = _"trust - but verify."_ Oral histories can help you in ascertaining what you see. Yet people being fallible means that corroborative evidence should be sought. Sometimes such histories can be quite accurate - sometimes not.
As an example Herodotus - _"the Father of History"_ - related a lot for us. Yet some of what he wrote was clearly mythological while some has been validated by subsequent evidence. Herodotus related = what he was told - aka oral histories. Always try where possible to corroborate and consider the nature of the sources and what is being claimed as to does it add up or not. That is the only way to separate _"the chaff from the wheat."_ Enjoy your day folks.
If you still believe that Roman/Greek texts are from antiquity please explain why?
All history is history until enough evidence exists to prove otherwise imo.
Ah...... = no. If that were so then every idiotic claim would be accepted as supposed fact prima facie until someone wasted the time and effort to show otherwise. Some claims are self-evidently wrong reflecting logical fallacies and/or a lack of corroborating evidence.
If some imbecile claims the Moon is made of cheese NASA need not waste billions of dollars sending a team there to disprove the claim. It therefore falls to the claimant to prove their claim - via action and/or evidence.
Oral history is no different. If it appears as likely mythological in nature given what we know then that is what it is until corroborating evidence is forthcoming to show otherwise.
Cool
I don't like how oral histories are taken as a gospel when it comes to Native American history... it is all we have due to the lack of writing, but some native groups shouldn't be so dismissive about genetic and archeological science.
Oral history is important, sincerely, a historian-in-training.
have people never played telephone before?
I’ve heard many instances of people getting these genetic ancestry tests and the results do not match up with the family lore about their origins. I’ve been told forever that our family is from the Basque region of Spain, even from a particular village (Roncevalls) but then I took an Ancestry DNA test that showed 0% Basque heritage. Instead we are 95% from County Mayo Ireland and 5% Wales. Also most claims of Native American heritage (based on family stories) are not accurate by genetic testing.
I would offer a simple caveat to what you noted. Those "ancestry tests" in truth are limited = by the databases they have. In other words difficult to ascertain genetic history of a person if the database you have only has limited data available for a given geographic area.
I don't think written sources are necessarily more valuable than oral sources. All history is interpreted by the person writing it. That person has a worldview, biases, etc. The only way we could ever know exactly what happened would be video evidence.
You miss the point then. While interpretation of evidence can be subjective as you say = it still boils down to what level of accuracy is said evidence to be considered. Thus oral histories are intrinsically subject to "variance" as stories get passed between multiple people over long spans of times. Sometimes you can end up with something far removed from the original version.
Written histories however are just that = written. So you can try to quibble over meaning if you wish. Yet the words and hence what is being related remains the same as when it was written down = giving you more credence as far as accuracy of what is being said.
Things in language like etymology and phonics are dated and much more useful than tradition. Language has a canon and many cultures of the past are named after the languages they spoke
Guess. It great but ava bit of a problem. Stories change right people hang on on to the most importan things less importannt get hazy right
What about Islamic oral tradition which is controlled, every person in the chain of narration is named and each person narrates it to diferent people till it gets written down. Here is an example from Sahih al Bukhari Book 16, Hadith 1
Amr ibn Awn reported: Khalid narrated to us from Yunus, from Al-Hasan, from Abu Bakrah, who said: We were with Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) when the sun eclipsed. Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) stood up dragging his cloak till he entered the Mosque. He led us in a two-rak`at prayer till the sun (eclipse) had cleared. Then the Prophet (ﷺ) said, "The sun and the moon do not eclipse because of someone's death. So whenever you see these eclipses pray and invoke (Allah) till the eclipse is over."
So in this narration the author gets told by an individual by the named Amr ibn Awn who claims have heard it from Khalid who in turn heard from Yunus who heard from Hasan who heard it from Abu bakrah who was the eyewitness
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I have to take issue with your statements that events can’t be dated. My circle has very rich oral traditions and can easily say (for example) the last exercise of the “tradition” occurred last Friday night after 2 glasses of wine….
The Good Doctor is confusing Oral Tradition and Story (Myth) Telling.
Oral Traditions are fairly easy to pass on from one generation to the other unbroken simply because they're centred on doing something. Like making a special food or how to gather a particular berry or root (and how to prepare it for consumption), and how to conduct a particular hunt.
Story (Myth) Telling were more for entrainment and passing on particular styles of speaking, ways of conducting oneself, and beliefs in the Gods.
But we are not talking about oral traditions about how to do something. We are talking about the relating of past events.
@@WorldofAntiquity Shouldn't there be a distinction between the types of Oral Traditions, because from your video it's confusing.
For example, with a hunter/gatherer group, the Oral Traditions of passing on important food gathering techniques are not the same as the Oral Traditions of the Gods.
The former demonstrated practically with less chance of the tradition being altered, the latter demonstrated sacredly with Gods created teach the dangers of a new sin?
What is lost so much in this age of political correctness is that skepticism is healthy. When reviewing any historical source, skepticism is necessary. This is even more appropriate when reviewing oral sources. It is not racist to be skeptical of an account by an indigenous person. However, in this age of political correctness, you are likely to be called racist for being skeptical.
There's a big difference between being skeptical and being a denialist when it comes to oral histories from other cultures. The last few hundred years have been dominated by denialists who use that power to suppress culture and history (esp. in regards to Indigenous North America). Also being skeptical means asking valid questions and listening to more information, which is something so-called "skeptics" rarely do. They just say "is that really true?" and move on.
I am skeptical of anyone who repeatedly gaps and whines about political correctness and being called racist. They always have a political ax to grind and are not thinking for themselves.
@@minimumriffage7520 if someone is a denialist, they don't pick and choose what they deny, they deny all alternate and new information, including the written word. The thing with oral histories is it is almost impossible to know when the eyewitness account of the event occurred. In history, we need to know that starting point. Yes a lot of cultures have a 'great flood' story in their individual cultures, but that isn't evidence of a worldwide flood, because we don't know when in the individual cultures the flood occurred. The 'great flood' of one culture could have happened thousands of years before or after another culture and the size of the flood may also have differed. Due diligence is needed for all sources, including oral histories. They shouldn't be taken as gospel just because it comes from 'indigenous peoples'. The ancient Greeks and Romans were indigenous to their areas too. The ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians were indigenous to their areas. Any historian worth his weight should be viewing any 'new' source as 'is this true?' and then doing the due diligence to find corroborating evidence. That is how research is played out.
@@carlmally6292 always? Maybe the people who constantly call people racist have political axes to grind. As a historian, I'm after the truth, or as close to the truth as we can get. That means corroborating evidence. If there is no corroborating evidence, then it's not a credible source. Being from an indigenous culture doesn't automatically make it a credible source. Indigenous peoples can be wrong or embellish too. Even though the Indigenous Australians have a giant earth-shaping snake called the Rainbow Serpent, doesn't mean a giant earth-shaping snake actually existed. Spoiler alert, it didn't.
*A request:*
A young new Archeology/Anthropology student(graduate?) has a fairly popular RUclips channel...
*MiniMinuteMan*
His newest video.. he mentions he'd like to do more collabs...
Maybe a wise professor like yourself could have a talk with him????
Thanks!!!
We did one already: ruclips.net/user/liveFp47rhPHSyo
What about Islamic oral tradition which is controlled, every person in the chain of nareation is named and each person narrates it to diferent people do the chain splits out in several lines. Here is an example from Sahih al Bukhari Book 16, Hadith 1
Amr ibn Awn reported: Khalid narrated to us from Yunus, from Al-Hasan, from Abu Bakrah, who said: We were with Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) when the sun eclipsed. Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) stood up dragging his cloak till he entered the Mosque. He led us in a two-rak`at prayer till the sun (eclipse) had cleared. Then the Prophet (ﷺ) said, "The sun and the moon do not eclipse because of someone's death. So whenever you see these eclipses pray and invoke (Allah) till the eclipse is over."
So in this narration the author gets told by an individual by the named Amr sibn Awn who claims have heard it from Khalid who in turn heard from Yunus who heard from Hasan who heard it from Al bakra who was the eyewitness
And so this is one chain of narration where the author documents what he heard from the narrator, muslim since the death of the prophet had schools for studying and memorising what the prophet and his followers said and did, they wrote it down and even memorised it, they had a controlled oral tradition were students spent their life memorizing the sayings of the prophet and his followers just like muslims memorize the Quran today.
So in the chain of narration the actual eyewitness says "we were with the messenger" meaning that there were other eyewitnesses not just him, so did they narrate this to their student in similar chain of narration, turns out they did, many of them
Here is just one of them Sunan an-Nasa'i Book 16, Hadith 32
Muhammad ibn Bashar told us, he said: Muadh ibn Hisham told us, he said: My father told me, on the authority of Qatada, on the authority of Al-Hasan, on the authority of Al-Nu’man ibn Bashir The Prophet (ﷺ) came rushing out to the masjid one day when the sun eclipsed, and he prayed until the eclipse ended, then he said: "The people of Jahilliyyah used to say that eclipses of the sun and the moon only happened when some great man on earth died. But eclipses of the sun and the moon do not happen for the death or birth of anyone. Rather they are two of the creations of Allah (SWT) and Allah (SWT) causes to happen in His creation what He wills. Whichever of them becomes eclipsed, pray until it is over or Allah (SWT) causes something to happen."
Here there is some context and it is diferent drom the previous one but the core events are intact.