Save the Bacon! Primary Sources from Fieldwork

I

If very long titles were still acceptable, the one for this note would read SAVE THE EVIDENCE: A PLEA FOR FIELDWORKERS TO MAKE THE RAW MATERIALS OR PRIMARY EVIDENCE FROM THEIR FIELD WORK ACCESSIBLE TO ALL SCHOLARS—ESPECIALLY ALL RECORDED ORAL DATA.

Ever since ethnographic monographs based on fieldwork were first published, they have raised problems of credibility. In the absence of any evidence at all to test the assertions made, readers of such works have been asked to trust the scholarly authority and integrity of their writers blindly, a stance diametrically contrary to basic tenets in all sciences. It may well be that, at the outset, early practitioners of the craft believed that their observations did not differ in any way from those made by natural scientists in the field—that they needed no evidence because their observations were wholly replicable. Anyone who cared to carry out the experiment—that is, to go to observe the same people in the same field—would find exactly the same situation as described in the monograph. For this was the age of the ethnographic present. Humans were divided into races and tribes, and, just like so many species of songbirds, every human tribe had its own invariant characteristics. A people-watcher need only to enumerate them.

Of course such views were wholly mistaken, but even anthropologists took a long time to become fully aware of both the transient character of their observations and the fallibility of observers. This explains why restudies such as that of Marcel Griaule's ethnographies about the Dogon people of Mali became such causes célèbres in the 1980s and 1990s.¹ Such experiences have strongly confirmed that one needs at least access to the original raw notes in order to assess any monograph based on fieldwork properly. Indeed, whenever possible, interested scholars should later revisit the site of the original fieldwork , and ideally even talk again to the very same people who had informed the original anthropologist.

When the first academic historians imitated anthropologists and took to the field to gather oral traditions or oral history, many of them did not realize at first that they could not just keep a record of their primary evidence to themselves, just as anthropologists had done for so long, and hope to be taken at their word. As Philip Curtin put it in 1968, these fieldworkers had to create archives as well as to use archives. He went on to propose standards for collecting and processing oral data, including advice about preservation of the primary evidence in a publicly accessible repository.² His stance also inspired the requirement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that a transcription and translation of a significant portion of the primary material used had to accompany doctoral dissertations based on oral tradition. Yet in spite of such pleas—or the practice of many oral history programs outside of African Studies that insisted on proper archiving—most Africanists continued neither to record their primary data for posterity (on microfilm at the time) nor to make them accessible to others. Hence in 1976 Beatrice Heintze had to plead the case for access to primary sources all over again.³ Since then some historians, such a Donald Wright, have scrupulously heeded the call for access, but unfortunately many others have not and that brings us to this note.⁴

Once again then let me repeat that recourse to scholarly authority is no longer sufficient to accept any argument based on inaccessible oral data. As long as the primary evidence on which it is based is not available for checking, no historical writing of whatever kind, is acceptable, and no scholar has to take such a piece of history writing into account. So if an author must create a repository in order to provide access to the primary data, she or he should do so. There is no longer any excuse to avoid doing so when data bases can be placed on appropriate websites, and those historians who work with oral traditions or oral history can make their corpus available...