What Do Historians Think of Oral History? | Myths Highlights

When it comes to historical research and the reconstruction of past events, how valuable is oral tradition? Do historians accept oral history, or do they ignore it?

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[SomasAcademy]

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.

[edgarsnake]

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.

[AveragePicker]

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.

[flightographist]

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.

[Civman-yrlb]

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.

[kuklama]

Some historians stated that oral tradition can't survive past 100 years.

[garykeenan]

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.

[J_Z]

Love this highlight. Thanks Dr. Miano for providing nuane in a place that usually lacks it!

[lostboy]

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.

[Oriol-oojl]

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

[TexRenner]

When history is deliberately written down incorrectly, whispered secrets may be truth's only hope.

[AnyoneCanSee]

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.

[pcatful]

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.

[feliloki]

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.

[rharris]

I'm glad historians are finally catching up, and seem to be starting the process of cleaning your own prejudiced lenses.

[FireMao]

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.

[mysticusfreeze]

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

[Fun_With_Google_Translate]

"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.

[simondalton]

Now might be a good time to mention ‘memory palaces’ and how our ancestors used this method to remember huge amounts of information.

[Kent]

Jesus fell in the river becomes Jesus walked on water.
He poked somebody in the eye becomes he healed the blind.