What Do Historians Think of Oral History? | Myths Highlights 

I'm not a professional historian, just someone with an MA in history, but my research focus was West Africa, where Oral Traditions are one of the most important types of source we have. A big problem in modern times is something called feedback; most people who keep oral traditions aren't isolated in their own little pockets of society, they're literate people who can and have read books about their own peoples' histories. Unfortunately, this often results in them knowingly or accidentally incorporating things they read about into their oral traditions, which makes it difficult to know what claims are consistent elements of oral traditions going back generations, and which ones may have been introduced more recently. It also reduces inconsistencies between the oral traditions as recounted by different tellers, which comes with its own issues; when we have lots of different tellings of a story with slight variations, we can cross reference them to evaluate which details are most likely to be accurate to older tellings of the story, whereas when all the versions converge due to drawing from a single more recent telling, we lose a lot of data. It's a really unfortunate situation.

I'm in my seventies. When I compare memories with old pals we are sometimes shocked at how different our recall of the same events are. Your perspective on the concept of oral history seems spot on. Thanks, Doc.

I just finished a book for a family that consisted of their oral history which finally a daughter had made some sketchy notes on. Basically I had to clean up the stories and do a few interviews to get confirmations. The stories were mostly only about their deceased mother. It got crazy. In one version there was a ghost, in another version the ghost was actually a rabbit. In another story the father was driving the motorcycle and in another version it was the uncle. One story of childbirth had only a nurse available, another version had a doctor from the mainland coming in. And despite there being only one hospital on the island, the father swore there was a second hospital as well. In one version of a birth the father was there, in another he was shark fishing. One story featured some sort of aquatic sea monster, in another it was a deformed piglet. A motorboat became a sailboat but the boat having a sail didn't align to the rest of the story. The ownership of a fishing vessel changed across several stories. When exactly the mother lived on the mainland shifted several times. One version of her running away into the jungle from US troops seemed to mimic the memory of a movie more, but another sibling telling it had more inconsistencies in it. And this was just some and only between different siblings remembering having been told the story at different times. Passed along through several generations and I'd hate to see what the stories would turn into.

One of my favorites so far doc. It reminded me of a time, many moons ago. I was heading to Haida Gwaii to do some paleoecological work on a coastal dome bog way up on Northern Graham Island. While waiting in Prince Rupert for the ferry with my colleague, we met a group of Germans and a group of elders from the Tsimshian. We all sat around a fire telling stories. One elder Tsimshian woman told us the story of the time when the people came here...to North America. It was a detailed story, involving generations of time passing, water levels rising and falling, fishing, whaling, hunting, and villages moving. Of course, she was describing the late Pleistocene paleoenvironment of the COASTAL PLAIN, not the interior corridor. She spoke in terms of forever, which for her is valid but of course we know that isn't the case. She had a university degree from UVIC, she did make a point of indicating this story was much older than the 14-15,000 yrs history generally agreed to within academe. I have always thought that the arrival could have been earlier along the coast. I came a cross a well prepared research paper from a UVIC Anthropology MA prospect recently in my meandering, it's from 2019 and worth a read for anyone interested... by Christopher Franklin George Hebda, Supervisory committee Dr. Quentin Mackie, Dr. Duncan McLaren. You can find it with that info.

Jesus fell in the river becomes Jesus walked on water. He poked somebody in the eye becomes he healed the blind.

A lot of oral traditions are passed in a rhythmic chant/song tending to pass time while working. At least here or as myths warning people not to do things.

Keep up the great work, Dr Miano 👏

Today with recordings we are collecting oral history anew. We are able to interview and record all kinds of people and learn how they lived, for example, farmers telling how they lived in the past century and providing the local history for places that have not been granted a place in the history books. Written history can be wrong as well.

Oral tradition texts are extremely unstable over time, as you have noted. We can easily see this in two contemporary oral traditions--folksongs and family legends. Comparing versions of folk ballads will always show changes to narratives, verses, floating lines that move across songs, changes in diction and misunderstandings of older words, even during the era of sound recordings and transcriptions by song collectors. Families often pass down ancestral tales and explanations of heirlooms that can be show false even after a mere two or three generations. This is partly because oral literature is rarely intended to be preservations of the facts of history, but rather they are designed to entertain and flatter the biases of the current audience. When an oral tradition is written down, this does not necessarily make the text more stable or reliable, especially in the pre-Gutenberg era of manual copyists who are just as likely to make errors or to change texts to suit the audience and the copyist. New Testament scholarship is a great example of this--the variants even in the canonical gospels are numerous and the subject of much academic research and analysis. Oral tradition is valuable for cultural insights, but the limits of their historical worth make them at best only hints of supplemental information in real historical research regarding events. Thanks for all your videos. They are superbly organized and delivered, no matter what the subject.

Love this highlight. Thanks Dr. Miano for providing nuane in a place that usually lacks it!

Wow thanks this video has been very deep and enlightening about a subject i didn't never stop to think about Thanks for your videos man

Happy holidays Dr Miano. ❤

I read a paper about oral tradition in Native American tribes being used as part of the evidence of continuing tsunamis on the West Coast. Stories of floods and whales being deposited on mountains and so forth. It's pretty interesting stuff and they also found dead trees and sedimentation (is that a word) to back it up. Earthquakes and flood stories are common up and down that coast.

I think its also important to mention that written sources can be slowlh changed as well like for example the bible and how many quotes todaybare often due to typos mistranslarions etc

ill personally say that it can go both ways: language and writing evolves so by writing something down instead of letting it evolve with the language by saying out to one another you might avoid some corruptions; this doesn't mean that they (the myths) cant mutate in a way that distances them from the original tho, and in fact the whole telephone effect (is this a thing in the anglosphere? whisper something into a person's ear and they whisper into another and so on and the last person has heard something ridiculously different to the word the first person said) thing might corrupt the story even more than any translation and or semantic drift ever could.

I enjoy learning about it, though it's usually hard to make much sense of it without input from other sources- written accounts from before, during & after a said event, or archaeology. I know many historians have had a culture in the US of completely ignoring & disregarding Native oral history, though, & just making up their own theories in complete opposition or disregard of it, but you also have so many people who have no idea what they are talking about touting non-historical stories from these people or modern urban legends as Native oral history- usually the class the tribes call Pretendians, who want to make a point of claiming their Native heritage without giving up or challenging their own culture, or religious beliefs (ie, Christian religious extremists make a tribe & start literal telling people that whatever nation they claim to be came from across the Atlantic Ocean & descended from the Jews, or some dumb shit, like that.)

Well spoken.

I'm glad historians are finally catching up, and seem to be starting the process of cleaning your own prejudiced lenses.

"Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. And unto this, Conan, destined to bear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow. It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!" Don't know why I started thinking about that while watching this video.

Some historians stated that oral tradition can't survive past 100 years.

This comment is for the algorithm. Isn't it frustrating that every time you watch one of WoA vids YT starts recommending Hancock and friends.

The art of memory encoding was documented from the ancient roman and greeks (roman method etc) up until the church put an end to it with the execution of Bruno, as the encoding techniques were considered ungodly. Even written documenta are subject to interpretation as the reader lives in another time from the writer so may mis interpret the writings. Sanskrit seems to be subject to this as there are multiple commentaries of the vedas down through the ages with very different conclusions. Even eye witness accounts are not comsidered accurate as they can be biased by those experiencing. Napoleon wrote his memoirs and placed his accomplishments far grander than other accounts as did Alexander (and his questionable success in india)

One can speculate that oral traditions can have a slower rate of distortion when the culture has a slower rate of changes. tribes that have maintained their traditions without much interactions with other cultures can have a slower rate of distortion in their oral traditions than others. One example that came to mind is the case of finding a frozen mamouth in the ice very near the place where and ancetster was said to have seen in the oral tradition. Archeologists that have studied the location are on the opinion that the last time this mamouth could have been visible out of the ice was probably ten thousand years ago. So an event recorded by oral traditions has been preserved with not much distortion for millenia.

Great video.

When history is deliberately written down incorrectly, whispered secrets may be truth's only hope.

Now might be a good time to mention ‘memory palaces’ and how our ancestors used this method to remember huge amounts of information.

Thanks for your scientific information. I wonder what you might think of The Walking People: a Native American Oral History by Paula Underwood. There is also an educational series of books that go with. I have read the history on an eponymous podcast with my name added. Miriam Moore reads

Thank you.

My grandfather was a great storyteller and a repository of terrible dad jokes. He often taught me lessons about right and wrong by telling my about things that he experienced. I wish that I wrote those stories down before he passed. He experienced the great depression as a boy. Grew up on a farm. He attended a small school and went to church with Japanese families who also had farm's in the area. During WW2 he joined the Navy and all of the Japanese people that he knew were put into an internment camp. I remembered my grandfather telling me about these moments but most of the details are gone. Oral history is very important IMO and once it's gone it's impossible to recover.

I'm not big on oral history. It can change a lot as it is handed down. Have you heard of a game where people get in a circle? One person will whisper something in the ear of the person next to them. When it makes its way around the circle to the person that originally started it, what that person originally said and what they got back are very different.. Now just do this through multiple generations.

I understand the game of telephone being risky when studying oral tradition, but linguistics can aid in establishing a rough timeline. Phrases used in an oral poem might be the only place such sayings exist or even remnant words. In such instances it hints at the language used when the oral poem was composed. You'll find this in a lot of ancient texts that had been an oral tradition centuries prior. Usually sprinkled here and there (usually as analogies that would only make sesne to those in the time period it was written). But in some instances such as the Song Of Deborah it could be much more substantial.

What about cultures that don't have a written language? Also, are you aware of the progress in understanding the quipu?

Love your videos as always Professor! Was hoping in a later video if you could please share your thoughts on the origins of martial arts and combat sports. For me being a practitioner of MMA and also a lover of ancient history, I’m deeply interested! Often times I see people saying India is where the oldest martial arts started, but wouldn’t it actually be Greece with boxing, wrestling, and pankration? Are there any depictions or evidence of martial arts dating back to Sumeria or older? Thank you again for all your videos!

My mother wrote down the family history passed to her from her grandmother and mother. I used it alongside official paper records from family history info online. Guess what. Even over 3 generations there were inconsistencies. An older friend remembered seeing a photo of her and her older sister who had died in childhood. On obtaining the death certificate of the little girl we discovered that she had died, of pneumonia, before my friend was born. Memories are unreliable. They can also be implanted. Experiments in Australia years ago proved this. But the onforeseen negative effects on the mental wellbeing of the decieved subjects has meant they were discontinued.

Is it Also the case with vedic and avestan recitation which have strictly preserved, they focused on very strict and accurate recitation , so do you think that even in this case hymns and verses also changed not rapidly but in a slow manner for a long time ????

Cultures with oral traditions seem to have ways to ensure that the major beats of their important stories are passed down. Rhyme schemes, rhythms of words, and story structures aid the storytellers in remembering. Some (all?) of them have professional storytellers who are the walking encyclopedias of their lore. Every once in a while, we hear or read about discoveries that demonstrate the accuracy of a story or legend. A memorable natural disaster turned into a narrative that's passed down through the generations and then evidence turns up. Or the location of something mysterious or lost. Yet, other times, there are so many additions and accretions that it's impossible to find the original event(s) that gave rise to the stories.

A hypothesis is a grounded and justifiable assumption ready to be evaluated

My understand from what I have read, is that Oral History is usually in accurate but at the same time an invaluable source of factual information about the past.

Here in Australia oral traditions have been used to corroborate findings on ancient climate change, sea level rise and the hunting of megafauna. Personally, I think the passing down of accurate information for millennia without the written word is a great human achievement.

I recommend you to recharch about pre islamic oral tredition . They are pretty accurate because they were in form of poem not story only .

Hugh Grant can tell you how damaging oral traditions can be.

I've heard about oral history.

Cool

Like a game of telephone changes a little bit each time possibly.

I have a question, aren't some cultural oral traditions a little more reliable than others? I was under the impression that some cultures (particularly those without writing systems) developed relatively robust methods to make sure the story changes as little as possible. Generally things that are difficult to change without it sounding wrong - rhyme and meter and so on. Little "checksums" that kind of bounds the divergence of the story over generations. Of course it's still not as unchanging as a written document, and linguistic drift is of course possible as well, but I was under the impression that SOME traditions are considered extremely reliable compared to other ones because of the presence of storytelling strategies meant to keep the stories from changing the way a regular "my grandma told me..." oral tradition wouldn't.

Hearing the term “Oral History” makes me feel conflicted. I want it to be so much more, but to me, an oral history just feels like a somewhat historical (or someone’s interpretation of), yet mostly entertaining form of information, sprinkled with a smattering of hope for accuracy.😬 I just can’t help but think of the Telephone Game from my pre-school days. Albeit, on a much grander scale, over a vast amount of time… it’s still the Telephone Game.🥴

The annals of history started with oral history.

30 years of working with oral history and I have a Forrest Gump philosophy. It's like a box of chocolates...

Really interesting. However, how do you handle the fact that what was written 4,000 years ago had perhaps been handed down orally before?

Lately I've been using the apples & oranges argument a lot. In this case historical reliability is the apple, who gets to study whom is the orange. I don't see what prevents oral historians from criticizing written history, or for that matter why you find yourself on the side of written history except that it's more nerdy. I don't see how your point of view stands when oral tradition corrects something history was mistaken about.

With all due respect , the Zunnies is just one of many oral tradition that proved to be so correct that astrophysics was stunned by what they knew for thousands of years .

Things got tricky when the survey and questionnaires were done Soviet style

One might view oral histories not unlike = Wikipedia. They represent a good place to start as far as looking for answers. Yet like the online equivalent in so much as anyone can input information = you must verify what you see - especially in cases of extraordinary claims. Moral of the story: to use a Cold War metaphor = _"trust - but verify."_ Oral histories can help you in ascertaining what you see. Yet people being fallible means that corroborative evidence should be sought. Sometimes such histories can be quite accurate - sometimes not. As an example Herodotus - _"the Father of History"_ - related a lot for us. Yet some of what he wrote was clearly mythological while some has been validated by subsequent evidence. Herodotus related = what he was told - aka oral histories. Always try where possible to corroborate and consider the nature of the sources and what is being claimed as to does it add up or not. That is the only way to separate _"the chaff from the wheat."_ Enjoy your day folks.

have people never played telephone before?

Guess. It great but ava bit of a problem. Stories change right people hang on on to the most importan things less importannt get hazy right

I’ve heard many instances of people getting these genetic ancestry tests and the results do not match up with the family lore about their origins. I’ve been told forever that our family is from the Basque region of Spain, even from a particular village (Roncevalls) but then I took an Ancestry DNA test that showed 0% Basque heritage. Instead we are 95% from County Mayo Ireland and 5% Wales. Also most claims of Native American heritage (based on family stories) are not accurate by genetic testing.

I don't think much of it... especially when it contradicts the written history.

If you still believe that Roman/Greek texts are from antiquity please explain why?

👋👋

Stories with a phase from oral tradition will use chronological markers, such as, "In the days of King so and so." They often use mnemonic tags for characters; "Bright eyed Athene; fleet-footed Achilles; Gilgamesh the Great King." Another quality of oral societies that Prof Miano ought to have mentioned is how much better developed people's memories are. The stories that people hear and pass on are taken seriously and they definitely are not like a game of _"Broken Telephone"_ as the video illustrates.

The vedas and Upanishads ( 1500-500BCE ) are orally preserved. According to Sanskrit scholar Michael witzel the vedas are like an ancient tape recording which dates back to 1500 BCE . Every word , syllable, sentence and the exact way to recite is properly preserved. If you listen to someone ( legit ) reciting the vedas , it would sound exactly the same 3000 years ago .

Oral tradition actually comes first. You can have oral tradition with no written, but you cannot have the written without the oral.

I don't think written sources are necessarily more valuable than oral sources. All history is interpreted by the person writing it. That person has a worldview, biases, etc. The only way we could ever know exactly what happened would be video evidence.

Things in language like etymology and phonics are dated and much more useful than tradition. Language has a canon and many cultures of the past are named after the languages they spoke

All history is history until enough evidence exists to prove otherwise imo.

Oral history is important, sincerely, a historian-in-training.

I have to take issue with your statements that events can’t be dated. My circle has very rich oral traditions and can easily say (for example) the last exercise of the “tradition” occurred last Friday night after 2 glasses of wine….

The Good Doctor is confusing Oral Tradition and Story (Myth) Telling. Oral Traditions are fairly easy to pass on from one generation to the other unbroken simply because they're centred on doing something. Like making a special food or how to gather a particular berry or root (and how to prepare it for consumption), and how to conduct a particular hunt. Story (Myth) Telling were more for entrainment and passing on particular styles of speaking, ways of conducting oneself, and beliefs in the Gods.

What is lost so much in this age of political correctness is that skepticism is healthy. When reviewing any historical source, skepticism is necessary. This is even more appropriate when reviewing oral sources. It is not racist to be skeptical of an account by an indigenous person. However, in this age of political correctness, you are likely to be called racist for being skeptical.

*A request:* A young new Archeology/Anthropology student(graduate?) has a fairly popular RU-vid channel... *MiniMinuteMan* His newest video.. he mentions he'd like to do more collabs... Maybe a wise professor like yourself could have a talk with him???? Thanks!!!