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Save the Bacon! Primary Sources from Fieldwork

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Jan Vansina
Jan Vansina*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Madison
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If very long titles were still acceptable, the one for this note would read Save the evidence: A plea for fieldworkers to make the raw materials or primary evidence from their field work accessible to all scholars— Especially all recorded oral data.

Ever since ethnographic monographs based on fieldwork were first published, they have raised problems of credibility. In the absence of any evidence at all to test the assertions made, readers of such works have been asked to trust the scholarly authority and integrity of their writers blindly, a stance diametrically contrary to basic tenets in all sciences. It may well be that, at the outset, early practitioners of the craft believed that their observations did not differ in any way from those made by natural scientists in the field—that they needed no evidence because their observations were wholly replicable. Anyone who cared to carry out the experiment—that is, to go to observe the same people in the same field—would find exactly the same situation as described in the monograph. For this was the age of the ethnographic present. Humans were divided into races and tribes, and, just like so many species of songbirds, every human tribe had its own invariant characteristics. A people-watcher need only to enumerate them.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 36 , 2009, pp. 465 - 471
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2009

Footnotes

1 While the reappraisal of Margaret Mead by Derek Freeman about Mead's work in Samoa started the furore, Africanists tend to refer to Van Beek, Walter, “Dogon Restudied: a Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule,” Current Anthropology 32(1991), 139–67. It is evident from the discussion of his paper that some anthropologists still did not yet fully realize that human sociocultural activities can never be fully replicated because societies change all the time; see also van Beek, , “Haunting Griaule: Experiences from the Restudy of the Dogon,” HA 31(2004), 43–68.

2 Curtin, P.D., “Field Techniques for Collecting and Processing Oral Data,” JAH 9(1968), 367–85. A single proposed official repository in the United States for taped material at Indiana University did not fare very well. During my own research I created an archive of Rwandan oral data, and made it available some years later at several locations and later on microfilm at CAMP. A microfilm of various Kuba materials was also made and deposited there in the late 1970s.

3 Heintze, Beatrix, “Oral Tradition: Primary Source Only for the Collector?” HA 3(1976), 47–56.

4 Wright, Donald, Oral Traditions from the Gambia (Athens OH, 1979), two volumes designed to accompany and legitimize his monograph The Early History of Niumi (Athens OH, 1977). In the allied field of folklore, many such publications of raw material exist and many scholars have archived all their data.

5 Schumacher, Peter, Ruanda. Micro-Bibliotheca Anthropos (Posieux, 1958). Schumacher was both anthropologist and missionary.

6 Albert Trouwborst, Life on Burundi's Hills, in press, annex 2 The Smets files.

7 Fortes, Meyer, “The Ashanti Social Survey: a Preliminary Report,” Rhodes-Livingstone Journal 6(1948), 27; McCaskie, T.C., Asante Identities: History and Modernity in an African Village (Edinburgh, 2000).

8 Cordell, Dennis, “Sample Surveys: Underexploited Sources for African Social History” in Sources and Methods in African History, eds. Falola, Toyin and Jennings, Christian (Rochester, 2003), 376–92.