Investigating Oral Tradition

Abstract

The author reviews the developing uses of oral sources in recent Africanist history, and argues that the original expectations about ‘oral tradition’ derived from contemporary structural functionalism. Changing one's model of social action therefore entails a change in the evaluation of oral data, and some of the consequences, according to different social theories, are sketched out. In particular, the perspectives of P. Bourdieu can, with modifications, permit the development of systematic ethno-historiography.