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

Datos Bibliográficos

ID11801089
AutoresRichard Roberts (0000-0001-9493-0978, Stanford University, autor de correspondencia)
Año1990
Volumen17
Páginas341-349
Fecha de publicación1990-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHistory in Africa (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0361-5413 • E-ISSN: 1558-2744
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3171823
OpenAlexW2323536706
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas5
Referencias citadas15

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

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Handicraft · Meaning (existential · Oral history · Period (music · Political science · Social change · Social history (medicine · Social relation · Sociology · Transformative learning · African history and culture studies · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · History · Law · Psychology

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