Welcome to the Community-Driven Archives (CDA) Initiative blog! We continue this semester’s CDA blog with a submission from Myra Khan, our amazing student archivist who is currently a senior at Arizona State University (ASU) studying Sustainability with a minor in Political Science and Transborder Studies. Myra’s post is a wonderful reflection on the oral traditions of communities and how this form of storytelling is sometimes seen in a negative light even though it is the ancient tradition of these communities. Please enjoy Myra’s post below.
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Within the academic field of archival preservation, the term “materials” almost always refers to that which can be physically held and interacted with. History is derived from books, documents, photographs, anything which is tangible. However, there is an often overlooked form of historical knowledge transfer which occurs intangibly: oral tradition.
Oral tradition, often thought of as verbal storytelling, takes many forms from folk singing to poetry to lecturing, all based solely on non-written conversation and memory. Oral tradition is similar to the oral histories archives like our holdings in our collections, though without needing to be recorded. Additionally, oral traditions encompass countless generations and pieces of knowledge, not simply that which is relevant to the individual’s personal history, as is the case with oral histories.
While often associated with indigenous American communities who have entire ceremonies dedicated to the transfer of knowledge, stories, and traditions, many societies across the world relied on oral tradition historically, such as the ancient Vedic South Asians, indigenous Australians, West African kingdoms, Central Asian tribes, and others.
Within the different cultures, oral historians were usually greatly educated and respected individuals. As the custodians of each individual culture’s history and practices for future generations and foreigners alike, oral tradition was often considered both a socio-political duty but a religious and cultural one as well. In ancient Mande society, for example, the griots (or jeli) were considered to hold spiritual power in the words that they spoke, as they were the links between different people.
The Muslim world, in particular, has had a strong culture of oral tradition. Within the religion of Islam, Hadith, or the teachings of Prophet Muhammad (SAW) that are not the direct word of Allah, were overwhelmingly recorded by and transmitted through lineages of oral historians before being written down. The Quran itself was also initially preserved by the Prophet (SAW) orally before it was transcribed several years after the entire revelation had been completed.
However, many Western-educated scholars deem oral tradition as a faulty and unreliable way to transmit history, as the historians are supposedly unobjective, likely to forget or misremember crucial points, or otherwise inadequate, often comparing the practice to the game of Telephone. During the period of colonization, many Europeans used these arguments along with the idea that the lack of written records indicated the “savageness” of non-Western societies in an attempt to justify their imperialist efforts. This condescension towards non-Western oral tradition, primarily in African societies, also resulted in the erasure and/or rewriting of regional histories by the colonizers in their own written word.1
Since oral tradition requires no organized repository nor preservation materials beyond one’s own mind, some communities have turned (or returned) to preserving their own histories through this system where one or more storytellers are the links between generations. For communities that lack resources to create formal archives and mistrust institutional archives, oral tradition is a robust way to preserve their histories in a way where the community members have the power to say what is preserved as well as how, as is our own mission through creating community-driven archives.
Thank you, Myra, as always, we appreciate you and your contributions to the CDA blog.
Contact me, Jessica Salow, with feedback at Jessica.Salow@asu.edu as I would love to hear from you your thoughts regarding the work we here at ASU are doing in community archiving around Arizona. We also want your feedback on what you would like to see from us in future blog posts. And if you would like regular updates from the CDA team please follow our CDA Facebook page or the CDA Instagram page to keep abreast of the virtual events we do monthly. We have some amazing events coming up in February 2021 so please check out our social media pages for more information. And please visit our website and our connect page for more information regarding the work we are doing around community-driven archives at ASU Library and with our community partners in Arizona.
See you soon!
References
1 Abdi, Ali. A. (2007). Oral Societies and Colonial Experiences: Sub-Saharan Africa and the de-facto Power of the Written Word. International Education, Vol. 37, Issue 1. https://trace.tennessee.edu/internationaleducation/vol37/iss1/3