How can the oral help the written?
If ‘history' is concerned with written cultures and anthropology with oral ones, can there be much traffic between the two? Yes. First, anthropology can help to make history less ethnocentric, less European in the case of the west.
It can do this in two ways, by bringing other societies into consideration and by leading people back to earlier ones, in both cases trying to redress the bias in favour of one's own culture. Second, it can emphasize the value of direct observational evidence to supplement the use of books. Books are the backbone of historical study, but not so for anthropology, for which the main source of knowledge is fieldwork.But apart from lessening ethnocentrism and emphasizing observations in the field, what does the study of social anthropology do for the historian? First, the societies studied by anthropologists are considered by historians primarily in terms of the impact of the west, as the receivers of colonialism. Many of them were certainly this, the subjects of the European takeover. But they had their own story, or prehistory from the standpoint of writing, a life of their own, and this too is often misunderstood by historians. They tend to neglect or misinterpret evidence from earlier times. For example, some classicists see Greece as having invented ‘democracy', whereas many earlier societies with simpler forms of organization consulted their members at frequent intervals. And even in the later, historic, period, local government in the Ancient Near East often insisted on such consultation while some Phoenician towns, including the colony at Carthage, had a yet more elaborate system involving the written vote. Neither Greece, Europe nor the Near East, however, were the only practitioners of consultation, though they did develop writing that was used for many purposes. Thales may have been the first Phoenician philosopher to leave a written record; he was certainly not the first to try and conceptualize the world in a general moral and intellectual framework; the precursors of Ogotemmeli, the Dogon sage,[356] did that.
Anthropology can contribute to world history by saving us from some of these errors into which literates are only too liable to fall.
Anthropology can therefore help to modify the inevitable tendency to attribute uniqueness to the institutions of one's own society, or to the west, not only for democracy, but also for ‘law', ‘religion', ‘monogamy' or even the ‘family', which leads to a general tendency to see those earlier societies as ‘savage', and thus to erecting the imaginary ‘evolutionary' schemas of ‘conjectural history'. Rejecting such schemas meant that the differences that did exist between ‘us' and ‘them' had then to be explained in more concrete terms, not by means of questionable developmental sequences.
Most societies had created accounts of the world in which they ‘placed' themselves in relation to their neighbours and sometimes others too. World history, then, is nothing new. All societies had some concept of how they themselves fitted into the wider picture. But earlier world histories were sometimes tied to a particular religion or even to a country, one's own. However, contemporary world history has become largely secularized in the sense that it is not linked to the superiority of one creed nor indeed to the events controlled by any supernatural power. It can no longer credit the idea of a deity with supernatural intervention either at Milvian Bridge or at Dunkirk, although, once established, religious belief of this kind may well affect the course of events; the Cross was important in urging Christian soldiers onward, as was the Crescent under Saladin. But as far as is possible the world historian must remain neutral, indeed secular, which was especially problematic under monotheism; polytheism was more permissive, as in classical Europe. But the secular story emerged only later when history had acquired some kind of long-term developmental perspective, such as that of the Three Ages of Man, which helped classify archaeological material.
Oral cultures already had some ideas about their past, even if this hardly counted as ‘history', just as they had such ideas about geographical space.
They had, for example, ‘drum histories' (histories of a kingdom beaten out on a ‘talking drum', one that imitates the pattern of speech) that offered a version of the past of a particular kingdom. In any case, a consideration of the past as the present was always acceptable to anthropologists. The history that was excluded was not the study of this past, they could do that, but a study of the written past, which required documents and libraries. So the literate European cultures were excluded from fieldwork, although even there the oral (or rather the lecto-oral), the spoken interaction in contrast to the written, became a focus of some anthropological enquiry. But primarily it was only the primitive, or simple, or ‘other' that fell into their scope.The ‘modern' was out of bounds but nevertheless this was included in works recommended for their students. Moreover the ‘simple' comprised oral not only in aboriginal societies but, surprisingly, in India and China too, although they had a substantial written tradition and their own version of ‘history'. They had writing but on the other hand they were not considered ‘modern', they were ‘oriental', dealt with not in a history faculty but in an oriental department.