We spend our years as a tale that is told: Oral historical narrative in a South African chiefdom (Social history of Africa) by Isabel Hofmeyr
We spend our years as a tale that is told: Oral historical narrative in a South African chiefdom (Social history of Africa) by Isabel Hofmeyr
Softcover
ISBN: 9781868142163
Wits University Press: 30 September 1993
Condition: Good - very good. This book is in very good condition. The wraps have some very slight/limited signs of wear and a slight curl to the corners and the bookblock is slightly dusty. The book’s pages have very slight tanning on the first page edges but are overall clean, intact and the spine remains in perfect undamaged condition. This book has been well maintained and looked after thus far.
+Taking its title from the Book of Psalms, this book investigates three related areas: oral storytelling, literacy and historical narrative. The author takes gender to be the decisive division in the storytelling genre, whereby men tend to tell "true" historical stories while women specialize in fictional narratives. With originality and humor, Isabel Hofmeyr examines how the male and female genres interact and plots the changes that have occurred in the oral history tradition.
Part One sets out to reconstruct, through interviews and ethnographic material, the form that an active storytelling tradition may have taken in Valtyn, a chiefdom in the Transvaal close to Potgietersrus. Part Two presents a series of case studies examining such influences as literacy purveyed by missions and the impact of literate bureaucracies, both of which changed historical storytelling. It also looks at forced removals which account for the virtual disappearance of male historical storytelling today while female storytelling continues. Parts Three and Four use a set of stories relating to the seige of the cave of Gwasa in the northern Transvaal by the Boers in 1854 to examine orality and literacy in context.
The work is the first sustained investigation within southern African studies of the wider context of oral storytelling from which oral historical narrative derives its techniques and styles, the impact of historical change on a particular chiefdom and its institutions, and the technique of oral history itself.
This highly original study deals with both literary and historical methods, with the role of gender in storytelling and of oral narratives in a range of communities.
*This book brings together questions to do with oral history and narrative which have in the past often been kept apart. In doing so, it draws on a complex set of approaches from historical, anthropological and literary scholarship to throw new light on oral historical narrative, illustrating this with special reference to events and storytelling in a Northern Transvaal chiefdom. It looks to four major aspects: the events referred to by the informants, the present-day context in which these narratives occur, the conventions and forms which enable narration and an intervening period of changes and development for both the conditions and craft of telling and the meaning and form of the story itself.
