Elizabeth Tonkin
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3585908 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Elizabeth Tonkin |
| NOMBRES | Elizabeth |
| APELLIDO | Tonkin |
| FIRMA | TONKIN E |
| AFILIACIONES | Queen's University Belfast |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 66 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 396 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 65 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1971 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2021 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
History and the myth of realism
An oral account of past events comes from a teller. Since people who tell a tale to others wish to be listened to, their accounts must claim to be authoritative, accounts that they have a right to give, besides offering a possible explanation of what really happened. There will be culturally accepted means of asserting these rights, and having their words accepted. It is easy to see that speakers may use their social status to validate their utte…
Being There
This chapter considers emotions and imagination as partly constitutive both of 'being there' and of 'writing up'. It discusses the limits of co-presence for the anthropological enterprise and begins with some ethnographic cases. The chapter argues that ‘being there’ is an activity including interactive encounters with mutual emotional evaluation and response. The confidence of Damasio and other neurologists that human brains activate what Euro-Am…
Oral Tradition and Historical Methodology
Oral traditions are historical sources of a special nature. Their special nature derives from the fact that they are &s;unwritten&s; sources couched in a form suitable for oral transmission, and that their preservation depends on the powers of memory of successive generations of human beings. Ethnologists who have attempted to study the past of peoples without writing have been faced with the problem of how much worth to attach to oral tradition.…
The Interpretation of History
Interpretation is a choice between several possible hypotheses, and the good historian is the one who chooses the hypothesis that is most likely to be true. In practice it can never have more than a likelihood of truth, because the past has gone for good and all, and the possibility of first-hand observation of past events is forever excluded. The layman is too often inclined to entertain a completely false idea as to the powers of the historian,…
Tradition as a Chain of Testimonies
This chapter focuses on the special nature of oral tradition. It is differentiated from other kinds of historical source by being a chain of testimonies. The chapter deals with the three problems: the relation between each testimony and the tradition as a whole, the methods of transmission, and the kind of distortions that may arise in the course of transmission. Verbality is a quality which the testimonies belonging to an oral tradition share wi…
The Evaluation of Testimonies
The value of a testimony is always a relative matter, depending upon the extent to which the account it gives of a historical event, or a series of historical events, is reliable or not. The value of the testimonies of the informants in the chain of transmission, one must make sure that each has had the opportunity of hearing the testimony of the preceding link in the chain which he is supposed to have repeated. Comparison of testimonies will est…
The Testimony as a Mirage of Reality
Testimony is no more than a mirage of the reality it describes. The initial informant in an oral tradition gives, either consciously or unconsciously, a distorted account of what has really happened, and places his own interpretation on what he has seen. This chapter analyses three factors: distortions made in defence of private interests, distortions made under the influence of cultural values, and distortions due to the individual psychology of…
Historical Knowledge
This chapter explores the typology of traditional sources and the characteristics of each type and explains the characteristics of oral tradition in general and discusses the scientific disciplines which the historian can use as an auxiliary aid to enable him to go beyond the limitations inherent in oral traditions. These scientific disciplines have their own bias and their own limitations, but they are of a very different order from those of ora…
Understanding the Testimony
This chapter discusses the three topics: historical content of a testimony, its structure, and its meaning. Knowledge of both the literal meaning and the purport of the text of a testimony make it possible to arrive at an accurate understanding of its overall meaning. The most important distinction to be established among the various types of oral tradition is that between testimonies which do, whether intentionally or unintentionally, produce a …
Oral Tradition
Oral traditions are historical sources of a special nature. Their special nature derives from the fact that they are ""unwritten"" sources couched in a form suitable for oral transmission, and that their preservation depends on the powers of memory of successive generations of human beings. In many parts of the world inhabited by peoples without writing, oral tradition forms the main available source for a reconstruction of the past. Do the speci…
History and Ethnicity
History and Ethnicity
A Saucy Town? Regional Histories Of Conflict, Collusion, And Commerce In The Making Of A Southeastern Liberian Polity
Liberia was settled during the nineteenth century by freed blacks, mainly from America, whose power was broken by a coup in 1980. Sharing languages and cultures with their neighbours in today's western Ivory Coast, the peoples of the region helped to shape the Liberian state. This chapter outlines the making of a polity, Sasstown, in Grand Kru County, southeastern Liberia, a region with common linguistic and cultural affinities, and common coasta…
Writing Up Imaginatively
Fieldwork involves imagination, social encounters and a recognition of feelings, emotions, in observer and observed. As with ‘ the field’ itself, emotions and encounters are dynamically temporal, whether they are observed, or felt by the investigator, or described by interlocutors. If we want to develop anthropological work on emotions and their significance, we must be aware of the layers of interpretation that mediate between a fieldwork event …
Is charity a gift? Northern Irish supporters of Christian missions overseas
In Northern Ireland, as elsewhere in the British Isles, mainline church denominations support their own mission societies. A small study of their attitudes and objectives was conducted with society officials, and with leading supporters in different denominations. Working in solidarity with others in their congregation, supporters were often more interested in helping to relieve suffering than to learn about the cultures and politics of the ‘miss…
Consulting Ku Jlople
Historical comparison of oracles in west Africa, mainly during the nineteenth century, shows how divination practices may alter. In the cases explored here, reputation, range of users, economic growth, and political influence interacted as these oracles developed; some at sites with internal and overseas trade access became complex, large-scale operations. But by about 1900, colonialists felt threatened by their secular and their spiritual power …
Storylines
Elliot G. Mishler. Storylines: Craftartists' Narratives of Identity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. 180 pp. ISBN 0-674-8397-0, $29.95
Once Upon a Kingdom
1. A Kingdom and Its Discontents Historical and cultural relations Mythological relations History and the folk imagination 2. The Hunter Who Became an Oba: Heroism and Social History Heroism among the western Igbo OjiuduOs story Hunter, hero, and society Historical claims 3. Male Manque: Divinity, Authority, and the Individual OEhiO and the divine king OkoojiiOs story OChiO and the king in every man The Oba in the story 4. The Old Woman on the Ou…
Autonomous Judges
Judicial ordeals subject accused persons to fire, poison etc. and mark or kill those whom they divine as guilty, while the innocent are unscathed. They presume a person-directed universe, may share features with non-divinatory processes and can be used politically, but they are trusted as autonomous, unlike fallible human judgments. African examples are comparable in form and often in context to those of medieval Europe. The article focuses on sa…
Narrating Our Pasts
Memory and Social Transmission
Living HistoryLiving with Africa.Jan Vansina
Narrating Our Past
Christianity and Politics in Doe's Liberia
Journal Article Christianity and Politics in Doe's Liberia Get access Christianity and Politics in Doe's Liberia, by Paul Gifford. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, Victoria, 1993. £37.50 hardback. xvi + 349 pp. ISBN 0 5211 420429 6 ELIZABETH TONKIN ELIZABETH TONKIN The Queen's University of Belfast Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 93, Issue 372, July 1994, Pages 451–4…
Under the Kapok Tree
Out of Context
Oral Tradition
Oral traditions are historical sources of a special nature. Their special nature derives from the fact that they are ""unwritten"" sources couched in a form suitable for oral transmission, and that their preservation depends on the powers of memory of successive generations of human beings. In many parts of the world inhabited by peoples without writing, oral tradition forms the main available source for a reconstruction of the past. Do the speci…
Narrating our Pasts
This study looks at how oral histories are constructed and how they should be interpreted, and argues for a deeper understanding of their oral and social characteristics. Oral accounts of past events are also guides to the future, as well as being social activities in which tellers claim authority to speak to particular audiences. Like written history and literature, orality has its shaping genres and aesthetic conventions and, likewise, has to b…
Narrating Our Past
Native American Discourse
Masks and Powers
Fantasy and Symbol
Initiation. Ritual Drama and Secret Knowledge across the World
Investigating Oral Tradition
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 modifi…
From Slaves to Palm Kernels
Jealousy Names, Civilised Names
This article describes the naming practices of a west African community with a long tradition of migration, formerly overseas. Two major systems co-exist, enabling an individual's specifically ethnic and 'civilised' identities to be distinguished. Personal names classify the individual as a species, as Levi-Strauss has pointed out. Nevertheless, Kru naming does more. Names are signs, and here the sign may also carry a message-an explicit rebuke o…
Autonomous Judges
Judicial ordeals subject accused persons to fire, poison etc. and mark or kill those whom they divine as guilty, while the innocent are unscathed. They presume a person-directed universe, may share features with non-divinatory processes and can be used politically, but they are trusted as autonomous, unlike fallible human judgments. African examples are comparable in form and often in context to those of medieval Europe. The article focuses on sa…
Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea (1602)
The Boundaries of History in Oral Performance
What do African tellers of history tell it for? What do they mean by history and how differently is the past transmitted in different communities? Professional academic historians use oral data like documentary data, for their own ends. They work in a different medium--written language--and they offer back a new story to the original donors. They do not always pay attention to the ways in which these consumers produced their own versions and perp…
Once Upon a Kingdom
1. A Kingdom and Its Discontents Historical and cultural relations Mythological relations History and the folk imagination 2. The Hunter Who Became an Oba: Heroism and Social History Heroism among the western Igbo OjiuduOs story Hunter, hero, and society Historical claims 3. Male Manque: Divinity, Authority, and the Individual OEhiO and the divine king OkoojiiOs story OChiO and the king in every man The Oba in the story 4. The Old Woman on the Ou…
Civilized Women
Steps to the redefinition of ‘oral history’
Gwyn Prins, The Hidden Hippopotamus. Reappraisal in African History: The early colonial experience in Zambia (1980), xvi+319 (African Studies Series 28, Cambridge University Press, £20.00). Joseph C. Miller (ed.), The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History (1980) xii+284 (Dawson, Folkestone and Archon, Hamden, £17.00)
Consulting Ku Jlople
Historical comparison of oracles in west Africa, mainly during the nineteenth century, shows how divination practices may alter. In the cases explored here, reputation, range of users, economic growth, and political influence interacted as these oracles developed; some at sites with internal and overseas trade access became complex, large-scale operations. But by about 1900, colonialists felt threatened by their secular and their spiritual power …
La statue du commandeur
Writing Up Imaginatively
Fieldwork involves imagination, social encounters and a recognition of feelings, emotions, in observer and observed. As with ‘ the field’ itself, emotions and encounters are dynamically temporal, whether they are observed, or felt by the investigator, or described by interlocutors. If we want to develop anthropological work on emotions and their significance, we must be aware of the layers of interpretation that mediate between a fieldwork event …
Memory and Social Transmission
Under the Kapok Tree
Historical Discourse
In this paper I consider how an African historian, Sieh Jeto, plotted his narratives. Sieh was a citizen of Jlao/Sasstown, a Kru polity in Southeastern Liberia. Jlao also author and perform other past-oriented accounts in different genres, and I have written on some of these. There is not room here to discuss all the ways in which Jlao refer to their pasts, and scene-setting is equally brief. I also confine myself to Sieh Jeto's plotting of narra…
Livres/Books
Language Use and Social Change
Journal Article Language Use and Social Change: problems of multilingualism with special reference to Eastern Africa Get access Language Use and Social Change: problems of multilingualism with special reference to Eastern Africa, edited with an introduction by W. H. Whiteley, foreword by Daryll Forde. International African Institute/OUP, 1971. 4O6pp. £3.00. ELIZABETH TONKIN ELIZABETH TONKIN Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham…
Language Systems in Africa
Livres/Books
Livres/Books
Lega Culture - Art, Initiation, and Moral Philosophy among a Central African People
Livres/Books
Livres/Books
Short notices
David P. Henige, The Chronology of Oral Tradition: Quest for a Chimera (1974), x+265 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, no price). Georges Dupeux, French Society 1789‐1870 (1976), ix+294 (Methuen, £7.50, paperback £3.90). Jürgen Schlumbohm, Freiheit ‐ Die Anfänge der bürgerlichen Emanzipationsbewegung in Deutschland im Spiegel ihres Leitwortes (ca. 1760‐ca. 1800) (1975), 299 (Schwann, Dusseldorf, 38 DM). (Freedom ‐ The beginnings of the movement for the e…
Primitive Art and Society
Perceiving Women
Ethnohistorical Studies on the Kru Coast
Parente et mariage chez les Rukuba
If This is a Man and The Truce
With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, duitful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contempible. What has survived in Levi's writing isn't ju…
Masks and Powers
Jealousy Names, Civilised Names
This article describes the naming practices of a west African community with a long tradition of migration, formerly overseas. Two major systems co-exist, enabling an individual's specifically ethnic and 'civilised' identities to be distinguished. Personal names classify the individual as a species, as Levi-Strauss has pointed out. Nevertheless, Kru naming does more. Names are signs, and here the sign may also carry a message-an explicit rebuke o…
Fantasy and Symbol
The Boundaries of History in Oral Performance
What do African tellers of history tell it for? What do they mean by history and how differently is the past transmitted in different communities? Professional academic historians use oral data like documentary data, for their own ends. They work in a different medium--written language--and they offer back a new story to the original donors. They do not always pay attention to the ways in which these consumers produced their own versions and perp…
Steps to the redefinition of ‘oral history’
Gwyn Prins, The Hidden Hippopotamus. Reappraisal in African History: The early colonial experience in Zambia (1980), xvi+319 (African Studies Series 28, Cambridge University Press, £20.00). Joseph C. Miller (ed.), The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History (1980) xii+284 (Dawson, Folkestone and Archon, Hamden, £17.00)
The Economic Anthropology of the Kru (West Africa)
Language and Social Identity
From Slaves to Palm Kernels
La divination pare les huit cordelettes chez les Mwaba-Gurma
Le sens du mal
This study, based on Chinese publications and archival materials as well as on recent fieldwork, provides an up-to-date treatment of Kazak history and culture, emphasizing the Kazaks in 20th-century China and, in particular, their status today as one of China's minority nationalities
Investigating Oral Tradition
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 modifi…
Initiation. Ritual Drama and Secret Knowledge across the World
History (40 obras) · Sociology (29 obras) · Philosophy (22 obras) · History (19 obras) · Political science (19 obras) · Philosophy (16 obras) · Art (15 obras) · Anthropology (13 obras) · Geography (11 obras) · Linguistics (11 obras)