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Reversible Social Processes, Historical Memory, and the Production of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Richard Roberts
Richard Roberts*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Extract

In my research on gender relations and household dynamics in the handicraft textile industry of the western Sudan, I have been frustrated by the silences in the oral record concerning changes during the early colonial period. Whereas I have been able to reconstruct the social history of the precolonial era, including the changes induced by increased use of slave labor, my informants have been silent on what I would consider equally significant changes in the early colonial period.

Using colonial sources, I have been able to reconstruct the broad contours of the period following the end of slavery, which hint at profound changes in the nature of the textile industry, gender relations, and household dynamics. These would, I anticipated on the basis of my previous fieldwork, be exactly the kind of transformative social change which would be recalled in the oral record. They ought to have become a central part of the social construction of the meaning of historical processes. But, as far as I have been able to determine, this has not been the case. Detail on gender relations and the productive processes appear again in my informants' accounts for the period just before and after World War II, drawn from personal experience. This paradox—apparently richer evidence in the oral record for an earlier era than for a chronologically closer one—has implications for both fieldwork strategies and for social history.

Type
Silences in Fieldwork
Information
History in Africa , Volume 17 , January 1990 , pp. 341 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1990

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References

Notes

1. Even if historians are now so much more conscious about how the past is invented, they are less certain about how the meanings of the past are generated. For suggestive leads, see Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar; Chanock, Martin, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experince in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar; Scott, James, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985)Google Scholar; Sara Berry, “Hegemony on a Shoestring: Some Unintended Consequences of Colonial Rule for Access to Resources in African Agriculture,” paper presented at the African Studies Association, 1988.

2. What follows is derived from Roberts, Richard, “Women's Work and Women's Wealth: Household Social Relations in the Maraka Textile Industry of the Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (1984), 229–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. For more detail see Richard Roberts and Klein, Martin, “The Banamba Slave Exodus of 1905 and the Decline of Slavery in the Western Sudan,” JAH, 21 (1980), 375–94Google Scholar; Roberts, Richard, “The End of Slavery in the French Soudan, 1905-1914” in Miers, Suzanne and Roberts, Richard, eds., The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1988), 282–307.Google Scholar

4. Where cognitive anthropologoy may provide some leads is in linking actions to systems of cognition and thought. See, for example, Janet W. D. Dougherty and Charles M. Keller, “Taskonomy: A Practical Approach to Knowledge Structures,” and Gatewood, John B., “Actions Speak Louder than Words,” both in Doughtery, Janet W.D., ed., Directions in Cognitive Anthropology (Urbana, 1985).Google Scholar See as well Tyler, Stephen A., ed., Cognitive Anthropology: Readings (New York, 1969).Google Scholar

5. Scott, , Weapons of the Weak, 178.Google Scholar

6. Of course there were enough variations among what my informants recounted to identify points of conflict and to develop a historical account of changes within the handicraft textile industry.

7. Escott, Paul D., Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives (Chapel Hill, 1979), 7–8.Google Scholar See also Blassingame, John W., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge, 1972).Google Scholar

8. Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition (Chicago, 1965)Google Scholar; Henige, David, The Chronology of Oral Tradition: Quest for a Chimera (Oxford, 1974).Google Scholar

9. Irwin, Paul, Liptako Speaks: History From Oral Tradition in Africa (Princeton, 1981), 20.Google Scholar

10. Cohen, David, “Reconstructing a Conflict in Bunafu: Seeking Evidence Outside the Narrative Tradition” in Miller, Joseph C., ed., The African Past Speaks: Essays in Oral Tradition and History (Folkestone, 1980).Google Scholar See also Cohen, David W., “From Pirn's Doorway” in Zunz, Olivier, ed., Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History (Chapel Hill, 1985)Google Scholar, and Cohen, David William and Atieno-Odhiambo, E. S., Siaya: the Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape (London, 1989).Google Scholar

11. Mishler, Eliott, Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative (Cambridge, MA), 117–18.Google Scholar