Page 127 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

102 Editors

rely only on written documents from record rooms, museums and of-
ficial archives as the only authentic sources for writing history, but
now find substance in popular oral narratives, collective memory, com-
mon sense, shared representations, mentalities (Ariès 1988: 167–90;
Hinchman and Hinchman 1997: 7–50). They recognize these oral
testimonies as valid sources for constructing people’s past history
and identifying their present identity (Carr 1986). If the memory—
mental, oral or written—is the ‘raw material of history’, the fish-tank
for historians to draw from’ (Le Goff 1988: 10–11) then, ‘In most of
cultures without script, and in many sectors of our own society, the
accumulation of records in memory partakes of every day life’ (Goody
1977: 3–5).
Anthropologists point to the fact that among populations without
script the significant role of collective memory consists in giving a seem-
ingly historical foundation to the existence of the ethnic community.
Memory tends to equate myth and history, while narrating the story
of the origins, the ‘mythic charter’ of tradition (Malinovsky cited in Le
Goff 1988: 112–13). Anthropologists also stress the fact that, contrary
to what is generally believed, in societies without script, memory is
not a word-for-word transmission. It operates with variations and
mnemonic procedures happen to be rare. A word-for-word repetition
is even rarely perceived as necessary (Goody 1977); this mnemonic
technique would apparently be a practice related to writing, while
societies without script grant more freedom to memory:
In these societies, the operational modality of the collective memory
seems to be ‘a generative reconstruction’ and not a mechanical
memorizing. In Goody’s (1977: 34) opinion, ‘the support of the
rememorisation is not to be found at the superficial level where the
word for word operates, neither at the level of those deep structures
that many mythologists unearth.... ’ It seems on the contrary that
the important role is played by the narrative dimension and other
factual structures. (Le Goff 1988: 114)

While historians are confronted with epistemological queries re-
garding the way they should process these sources and relate to them
(Canary and Kozicki 1978; White 1987), human collectives are busy
shaping their identities with the wealth of symbolic forms that they have
been carrying for generations (Ricœur 1983; Singer 1997). Narratives
transmitted by word of mouth are one of the means of passing on