Formation and features of the Golden Horde traditional historiography

The first question that comes to mind when considering the role of the corrido and oral traditions in the re-writing of literary histories is whether or not it has a place at all within a new global context. Certainly, the topic of oral traditions has surfaced with insistent frequency at literary conferences somewhat like an illiterate grandmother turning up at a cocktail party for sophisticated young writers. She may have helped build the house but she seems out of place, her presence a bit embarrassing, and the problem of where to sit her at the table an uncomfortable one. Although most are quick to recognize the foundations of national literatures in epic narratives such as El Cid or Le Chanson de Roland, the oral tradition that produced these works is often dismissed as a distant point of departure from which to hurry forth in order to examine more relevant written works. In spite of suggestive yet cumbersome terms such as “orature”, the concepts of “literature”, “history”, and “globalization” are not readily associated with oral narrative traditions. Oral compositions are too often associated with pre-history not history proper, with the assumed simplicity of low culture not the complexity of high culture or with an assumed confinement to local contexts like the fairground, coffee house, or cantina not the open, world stage. The view held by the Marques de Santillana (1398–1458) in the fifteenth century that oral compositions could only please “gente de ‘baxa y servil condicion’”, people of low and servile condition, continues to hold considerable sway even today (Mariscal 120). The view that oral narrative offers a point of departure, a prehistoric basis from which more noble, more sophisticated works could evolve is well illustrated by Domingo F. Sarmiento’s La vida de Juan Facundo: Civilizacion y Barbarie (1845). Here he reduces the rich oral tradition of the Argentine pampas to a medieval European anachronism:

En este trabajo se analizan las fórmulas de apertura de un corpus de textos pertenecientes a la narrativa de tradición oral maya tojolabal, con una doble finalidad, describir sus elementos y la obligatoriedad de los mismos y analizar su función tanto literaria como pragmática. Este trabajo contribuye a probar que la narrativa tojolabal de tradición oral es un arte verbal que los propios narradores distinguen de la oralidad cotidiana mediante estas estructuras que enmarcan el comienzo y el fin de cada relato. También veremos cómo las fórmulas de apertura son estructuras convencionales con elementos comunes con cierto margen de variación compartidas por una comunidad cultural.

Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West Jessie L. Embry, Editor. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013.In Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West, editor Jessie L. Embry has assembled eighteen authors to share their experiences working on oral history projects. Throughout the essay collection, each author comments on oral history's unique utility for the study of the American West and, in doing so, revisits some well-trod arguments. In particular, several authors focus on oral history's ability to fill gaps when textual sources are unavailable or misleading and on oral history's tradition of giving voice to people who are often ignored in mainstream historical texts. However, instead of seeming redundant, attention to the logistic, emotional, and political process of doing oral history produces an engaging narrative and provides satisfying insight into the interactive, communal process of writing oral history.Embry divides the book into three sections. The first section provides a retrospective look at careers spent working in oral history. She describes her experiences at the Redd Center for Western Studies, pointing out the fundamental importance of existing personal ties and the establishment of trust for a successful oral history project. Barbara Allen Bogart compares two oral history projects-her dissertation research into the homesteader past of Fort Rock, Oregon and a project on mining in Evanston, Wyoming-that bookend her oral history career. Laurie Mercier documents her experiences recording women's oral histories in Montana, demonstrating that much can be gleaned from studying the silences in oral history interviews.Section Two includes a series of oral history projects that fill gaps in Western historiography-telling the complex and varied stories of women and minority groups in the twentieth-century West. William Bauer, Jose Alamillo, Clay tee White, and Skott Brandon Vigil document labor in California and the Southwest. Bauer, Alamillo, and Vigil interview Native American and Flispanic farm laborers to document their continued sense of family and community in the face of alienating labor practices. White chronicles the overlooked experiences of African American workers in postwar Las Vegas. Joanne Goodwin, Sandra Mathews, John Sillito, Sarah Langsdon, Marci Farr, and Melanie Newport uncover the untold stories of women's lives in the West. Georgia Wier records the experiences of Japanese families in 1940s Colorado, adding complexity to the story of Japanese dislocation and internment during World War Two. …

Not long ago, an interesting debate was published in the journal Druzhba narodov, which in our view merits broad scholarly discussion. Two conflicting views on the relationship between our historical tradition and current changes were presented in G. Lisichkin's "Tsar Boris and the Fall of the Soviet 'Golden Horde' " (1996, no. 10) and A. Yanov's "Russian Liberals Against Russian History" (1997, no. 1). According to the first author, the legacy of Russian history, the centuries of Tatarism and Orthodox stagnation, clearly conflict with the tasks of liberalizing the country. In the opinion of the second, there are two tendencies in Russian history, the deepest and most powerful of which is the tendency toward a liberal evolution of society, uniting Russia and Western countries. Yanov is convinced, for example, that a typical manifestation of this tendency is the intrinsically free relationship of boyars serving the grand prince, reinforced by their right of "departure" to serve another prince. In Yanov's view, this situation imposed restraint on the development of the autocracy, and did not allow the prince to become a despot on pain of the collective "departure" of all the boyars and the loss of his armed forces. The preservation of this tradition was the foundation for the development in Russia (in the fifteenth and the fmt half of the sixteenth centuries) of tendencies that were progressive even compared with general European trends. Ivan the Terrible needed a particular kind of "revolution," the introduction of his oprichnina, to establish the autocracy. Yanov considers the inability to rely on this fertile liberal tendency, which goes far back in Russian history, a testimony to the weakness of the one-sided reforms being implemented mainly by economists who do not know our history and are not prepared to apply it to the changes they would like to make.

OHQ vol. 116, no. 1  Puget Sound Indians by offering the Nisqually a sense of justice. In Framing Chief Leschi: Narratives and the Politics of Historical Justice, historian Lisa Blee examines the 2004 Historical Court in order to gain insight “into the way in which different cultures and political interests construct history, build a relationship between the past, present, and future, and put memories to work” (p. 11). As the title of her book suggests, Blee is interested in the different ways Indians and non-Indians have framed Leschi’s story over time, a project she takes on thematically rather than chronologically. The first chapter explores the ways settler colonialism — aided by liberal ideology — enabled Americans to justify the dispossession of Indian lands and the disappearance of Native peoples in the south Puget Sound region. Chapter two examines the malleability of law, specifically how the 1857 and 2004 courts sought to balance their legitimacy with their need to answer salient political and legal questions, including how to treat enemy combatants. In the next two chapters, Blee focuses on how Nisqually peoples have viewed and memorialized Leschi. In chapter three,she analyzes the changing way Native storytellers have presented Leschi’s life and accomplishments over time. The following chapter tackles Native storytelling from a different angle, focusing on how the Nisqually have looked to Leschi as an important symbol during moments of tribal crisis. The last two chapters discuss the format of the Historical Court; chapter five addresses the significance of judicial performance, namely how and why the retrial took place, while the final chapter considers the problems that the Historical Court did not or could not address, including the unsolved and unpunished murder of Quiemuth — Leschi’s brother. Framing Chief Leschi does not set out to provide readers with a single account of Leschi’s life, trial, and exoneration; instead, it seeks to untangle and contextualize a multitude of stories about the Nisqually leader and the people — past and present — affected by him. Drawing on textual sources as well as oral histories and interviews,Blee provides a nuanced look at historical memory and the search for historical justice. The Historical Court, she concludes, offered an important forum for validating alterative accounts of the past,allowing Natives to navigate within existing colonial structures to achieve a sense of justice.But,Blee warns,the trial’s form and testimony also reveal the tensions and contradictions of historical justice, and how Natives are continually affected by the legacies of colonialism. Readers interested in the study of historical memory,oral traditions, colonialism,justice,law,andAmerican Indians will find the book a valuable case study. Wendi Lindquist Seattle, Washington LEWIS AND CLARK AMONG THE NEZ PERCE: STRANGERS IN THE LAND OF THE NIMIIPUU by Allen V. Pinkham and Steven R. Evans foreword by Frederick E. Hoxie University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2013. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 332 pages. $29.95 cloth. In his article “Oral Tradition and History,” published American Anthropologist in 1915, the famous anthropologist Robert Lowie wrote,“I cannot attach to oral traditions any historical value under any circumstances whatsoever” (p. 598). Fortunately, many scholars would not say that anymore. JanVansina’s book Oral Tradition as History (first published in the late 1950s,then re-written in 1985) played a key role in the upward valuation of oral tradition as a historical source. Vansina tried to elucidate a “text” within contemporary performances of past events and argued that to ignore the historical value of such sources is as reductionist as their uncritical acceptance. In oral Reviews  tradition,he sees an authentic dialogue of past and present. The acceptance of oral tradition especially among underrepresented voices has been long overdue, and Lewis and Clark Among the Nez Perce: Strangers in the Land of the Nimiipuu is vital to readers’understanding of history — its contacts, cadences, and rhythms. Much has been written about the Nimiipuu people and their encounters with Lewis and Clark and other European influences. For the first time in an academic press setting is the opportunity for readers to share,in equal parts, traditional forms of historical reporting and a companion with reference and reverence to traditions, accounts, and customs. Pinkham...

The literature of classical rabbinic Judaism is usually said to have been “redacted” from around 300 CE until about 700 CE in the Palestinian and Mesopotamian centers of rabbinic settlement. Rabbinic literature itself assumes that the traditions that stand behind the written texts were transmitted orally for at least several generations (and in some views, centuries) prior to the compilation of the written manuscripts that are known from the Middle Ages. The formulaic and stylistic traits of the rabbinic writings also suggest a firm basis in orally transmitted material in at least two senses. First, the strong mnemonic traits of the medieval manuscripts suggest that the documents preserved by them were formulated by people for whom oral textual performance was a common experience. Secondly, the written texts as we have them seem to have emerged in a milieu in which written versions of texts were shaped by prior orally-managed material, even as written texts then shaped the outlines of further oral performances based upon them as mnemonic aids. To sum up, oral tradition in the context of rabbinic studies is the complex of legal, theological, and exegetical material transmitted by rabbinic sages of antiquity in the context of oral-performative instruction and preserved in a host of manuscript exemplars that reflect in varying degrees the presence of oral-traditional stylistic traits. The most important recent work in rabbinic oral traditional studies concerns the relationship of the surviving manuscript materials to their primary oral-traditional milieu, either in the original formation of the earliest rabbinic oral traditions in the first centuries CE or in the consolidation of the extant texts in the transition from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. A comprehensive discussion of the history of ancient rabbinic oral tradition, and particularly, the ideological formulation of oral tradition as part of an oral revelation to Moses parallel to the Torah, has recently been offered by Martin S. Jaffee (2001). Important studies of the ways in which rabbinic compilations of biblical exegesis reflect and, in some senses, create an oral traditional milieu include Fraade (1991) and Nelson (1999). A fresh look at ways in which the oral transmission of the Mishnah, regarded as the

Not long ago, an interesting debate was published in the journal Druzhba narodov, which in our view merits broad scholarly discussion. Two conflicting views on the relationship between our historical tradition and current changes were presented in G. Lisichkin's "Tsar Boris and the Fall of the Soviet ‘Golden Horde’ " (1996, no. 10) and A. Yanov's "Russian Liberals Against Russian History" (1997, no. 1). According to the first author, the legacy of Russian history, the centuries of Tatarism and Orthodox stagnation, clearly conflict with the tasks of liberalizing the country. In the opinion of the second, there are two tendencies in Russian history, the deepest and most powerful of which is the tendency toward a liberal evolution of society, uniting Russia and Western countries. Yanov is convinced, for example, that a typical manifestation of this tendency is the intrinsically free relationship of boyars serving the grand prince, reinforced by their right of "departure" to serve another prince. In Yanov's view, this situation imposed restraint on the development of the autocracy, and did not allow the prince to become a despot on pain of the collective "departure" of all the boyars and the loss of his armed forces. The preservation of this tradition was the foundation for the development in Russia (in the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries) of tendencies that were progressive even compared with general European trends.

Quilting Voices

Spirit and Word: Prophecy and Tradition in Ancient Israel, by Sigmund Mowinckel. Edited by K. C. Hanson. Fortress Classics in Biblical Studies. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2002. Pp. xiv + 174. $16.00. work of Sigmund Mowinckel (1884-1965) has stimulated and enriched biblical scholarship since 1930s, with his last publication (Religion and Cult) appearing in English translation in 1981. Now Fortress Press has republished Mowinckel's difficult-to-find Prophecy and Tradition: Prophetic Books in Light of Study of Growth and History of Tradition (Oslo, 1946). This book, long out of print, plus two additional essays, The 'Spirit' and 'Word' in Pre-exilic Reforming (JBL 53 [1934]: 199-227) and ch. 11 from Mowinckel's Psalmensttidien, vol. 3 (Oslo, 1922), have been combined by editor K. C. Hanson into a new volume entitled Spirit and Word: Prophecy and Tradition in Ancient Israel. Dr. Hanson provides a helpful editor's foreword that situates Mowinckel in currents of European biblical scholarship. He expands author's original notes with concise references to newer literature and also provides book with bibliographies not only of Mowinckel's publications in English but also of assessments of his work, including select bibliographies on tradition history and prophecy. reader will greatly appreciate that Dr. Hanson has improved difficult, at times turgid, prose of Mowinckel's original English. This new publication contains three parts: (1) Relationship of Methods (cbs. 1-2); (2) Tradition History and Study of Prophets (chs. 3-9); (3) Prophetic Experience (chs. 10-11). discussion of methods in part 1 lays out in detail Mowinckel's case for importance of oral tradition and its relationship to written tradition in OT. author defines method he liked to call (for him this meant both form criticism and tradition history), demonstrates how the traditio-historical approach to investigate Old Testament has long been fruitful, and presents what he thinks are its specific tasks. Following Gunkel and Gressmann, Mowinckel recognizes limits of source criticism, with its focus on OT as literature, and wants to move beyond schematization oflitcrary [source] criticism to new problems and further results (p. 6). Mowinckel also understands himself to huild on works of other Scandinavian scholars who argued for importance of oral tradition (e.g., Nyberg and Birkeland), but he distances himself from Engnell's view that literary criticism is bankrupt and inadequate. For Mowinckel, tradition criticism and literary criticism answered mostly different questions but can and must be used together. Biblical scholars are, of course, familiar enough with textbook descriptions of how interpretive methods developed in twentieth century, but it is surely worth effort, and stimulating as well, to revisit way Mowinckel, very much in school of Gunkel and Gressrnann, presents case for studying oral forms and traditions as a path to dynamic meaning of Scripture. In part 2 Mowinckel demonstrates how traditio-historical method applies to prophetic material. Like Gunkel, he begins by identifying individual units or sayings within complexes of traditions and then moves on to question of how units have been arranged in tradition, defending Gunkel and Gressmann against charge that their analyses never reach a synthesis of whole. …

Despite the increased attention to the Dogon by anthropologists and ethnologists, there are
\nmany “white spots” in the history and ethnography of this people. For example, not so long
\nago it was believed that they speak six languages; then their number grew steadily, and now
\nlinguists number already thirty Dogon languages, conditionally united in the family of Dogon
\nlanguages of the macro-family of Niger-Congo; it is possible that there are even more of them.
\nThe history of migrations on the Bandiagara Highlands and the adjoining plains also remains
\npoorly understood. All existing hypotheses, one way or another, based on oral traditions (often
\nwithout specifying the informant and/or source). Only to a small extent are they based on
\narchaeological data. In addition to the “common Dogon” historical tradition, which states that
\nthis people came to the Plateau around the turn of the 16th century, there are historical legends
\nof individual villages, their neighbourhoods and even families. They can be very different
\nfrom the ‘general’ version. From this point of view, two oral histories of the village of Endé are
\nof great interest. Based on the analysis of these legends, it is possible to draw with all possible
\ncaution a preliminary conclusion that the Dogon country was populated in two stages: the
\nfirst one falling between the 10th and the 13th centuries, and the second between the 15th and
\nthe 19th centuries. In all examined villages exists the same model of relations between the local
\npopulation and the aliens: the new group usurps political and military power and gives the old
\npopulation its clan name, but itself adopts its language and culture. Such relations designed to
\nprevent possible conflicts. The article based on an analysis of the Dogon oral history collected
\nduring field research between 2015–2018.

Reviewed by: So they understand Cultural issues in oral history by William Schneider Brian Doyle So they understand: Cultural issues in oral history. by William Schneider. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2002. Pp. 198. ISBN 0874215501. $22.95. In So they understand: Cultural issues in oral history, William Schneider explores how stories can be recorded and preserved so that their meaning is understood by future generations. Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (3–18), presents the problem: how to capture the fluidity of oral traditions via fixed recordings. In order for stories to be understood, interviewers must strive to preserve their context as well as individual performances. S describes his experience as an oral historian working with native Alaskan communities in Ch. 2, ‘A career full of stories’ (19–36), and outlines the various forms of oral tradition in Ch. 3, ‘What’s in a story’ (37–52). Ch. 4, ‘Sorting out oral tradition and oral history’ (53–67), defines oral history in relation to personal narratives and oral tradition and discusses ‘the authoring function’, the potentially adverse influence of interviewer selection and interpretation. In Ch. 5, ‘Personal narratives: Shared one to another’ (71–80), S elaborates on the nature of personal narratives—shared experiences that enhance our understanding of a larger story. Expanding the definition of oral history, Ch. 6, ‘Gathering to tell stories: The neglected genre of oral history’ (81–94), explores recordings of public forums, hearings, and elders conferences. Ch. 7, ‘In search of the story: Interviewers and their narrators’ (95–108), presents three examples of oral history projects, exploring the ways that interviewers relate to narrators and creatively engage their material. Continuing on this theme, Ch. 8, ‘Life histories: The constructed genre’ (109–22), discusses the nature of oral biographies and the interviewer’s challenge of providing context without obscuring the narrator’s voice. The final four chapters shift the focus to broader issues raised by stories. Ch. 9, ‘The whole truth and nothing but the truth’ (125–35), explores internal and external tests of validity. In Ch. 10, ‘Issues of representation’ (137–47), S describes the use of context statements and audiovisual materials. Ch. 11, ‘Intellectual property rights and the public: Unfinished business’ (149–60), explores the use of release [End Page 636] forms, the potentially competing needs of different interest groups, and the benefits and challenges of electronic access to oral histories. Finally, Ch. 12, ‘The public record’ (161–67), concludes with a discussion of the ‘production of history’—that is, the active collection and presentation of information for historical intelligibility. S observes that oral histories held by archival repositories are rarely used by the communities from which they originated and suggests that it is in the retelling, the performance, of stories that people connect with their meaning. Therefore, the challenge for curators of oral history is to bring stories into the public sphere where they may continue to inform and stimulate discussion. S’s book does not explicitly address questions regarding appraisal (i.e. how the historical significance of a text is evaluated), which would seem to be an area ripe for analysis vis-à-vis cultural diversity. Nonetheless, So they understand. . . is an engaging and thought-provoking work that will be of particular interest to discourse analysts, linguistic anthropologists, and researchers concerned with archival theory and practice. Brian Doyle Northeastern Illinois University Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America

Islamization and native religion in the golden Horde. Baba Tükles and conversion to islam in historical and epic tradition. By Devin DeWeese. (Hermeneutics: Studies in the History of Religions.) pp. xvii, 638. University Park, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. US $85.00 (cloth), US $25.50 (paperback) - Volume 7 Issue 1

Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islamin Historical and Epic Tradition. By Devin DeWeese. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. xvi, 638 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Hard bound. - Volume 56 Issue 2

Screen Text and Institutional Context:Indigenous Film Production and Academic Research Institutions Karrmen Crey (bio) Introduction NAVAJO TALKING PICTURE (Arlene Bowman 1986) and Cry Rock (Banchi Hanuse 2010) are documentaries exhibiting striking thematic similarities: both are made by Indigenous women emerging from university contexts who seek closer contact with their Indigenous cultural heritage. The filmmakers' relationships with their grandmothers manifest a cultural disconnect: while their grandmothers are fluent in their traditional languages, neither filmmaker is a speaker. The gap in language proficiency gestures to a cultural and social rupture that has taken place in the interceding generation. The generational ruptures experienced by Indigenous peoples under colonialism are well-known: efforts to eradicate traditional social organization through reservation/reserve systems and residential/boarding schools—among other legal, institutional, and physical methods—were designed to destroy Indigenous peoples' cultures and assimilate them into colonial settler society. As a part of this process, boarding school and residential school systems were created and separated Indigenous children from their families and communities, forcing children to adopt colonial settler values and cultural practices. These schools sought to eradicate Indigenous languages in particular, often using corporeal punishment to prevent students from speaking their traditional languages.1 As a result, a generation suffered massive cultural and social disruption that is represented by generational differences in Indigenous language speakers. This crux is the central motif for both films, through which they investigate the applications of the cinematic apparatus for connecting Indigenous people to their communities and cultural heritage. Their methods for engaging and representing these topics are, however, very different, drawing from frameworks for undertaking Indigenous research that emerged from distinct historical periods and national contexts. Bowman produced Navajo Talking Picture in the early 1980s through the University of California, Los Angeles film production program in association with [End Page 61] the American Indian Studies Center (AISC); Cry Rock was deeply informed by Hanuse's experience in the First Nations Studies Program (FNSP)2 at the University of British Columbia in the mid-2000s, and her experience in media-based project development at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). For Navajo Talking Picture, the reinvention of film-based anthropology that began in the 1960s intersected with developments in Indigenous studies during the same era to engender a research environment in which it was understood that Indigenous people are best equipped to undertake research on Indigenous people and topics, a frame of reference that the film examines and complicates via Bowman's interactions with her grandmother, Ann Biah. Made twenty years later, Cry Rock engages with debates in Indigenous studies about the relationship between oral narrative traditions and the media used to record them, questioning the impact that recording technologies have on oral narratives and their survival. By doing so, the film intervenes in assumptions that the cinematic apparatus can function as an extension of oral traditions, a discourse promoted by the NFB, raising the possibility that recording technologies actually hasten their erosion. Cry Rock ultimately explores oral narratives as a mode of understanding that is intrinsically tied to specific geographical places and relies on a direct relationship between storyteller and listener, which media technologies cannot replicate. Bringing together Navajo Talking Picture and Cry Rock is in part a means by which to argue that analyses of the thematic similarities between media texts should be attentive to institutional contexts that Indigenous media practitioners navigate in their work, an approach that draws on precedent studies of minority media by Chon Noriega (2000) and Jun Okada (2015). Their work on Chicano cinema and Asian American film and video, respectively, has sought to understand minority cinemas not as pre-given, identity-based categories, but as areas of production debated and shaped through various social forces, including state policy, political movements, developments in media technologies, and institutional funding structures and policies. At stake are the terms through which minority media are conceptualized, as Noriega argues, as identity-based cinematic "genres": "What must be repressed in such a move is the fact that one is doing a form of genre analysis that effectively reduces institutional analysis and social history to a textual effect; that is, these social phenomena exist only as signs circulating within...

Only recently has the reputation of the fifth century presbyter and historian, Paulus Orosius, begun to recover from his many detractors in modem scholarship. Beginning with Gibbon, up until today, many scholars have emphasized Orosius' Christian assumptions and apologetic intentions in his historical work, and dismissed or downplayed its historical content. While a few scholars have attempted to reaffirm that Orosius was operating in the Classical historiographical tradition, Orosius' interpretation of history, which was heavily informed by his Christian beliefs, tends to mark Orosius as beginning a new Christian historiographical tradition. To better understand how Orosius saw the practice of history, and whether he represented a break from the Classical historiographical tradition, this paper examines how he viewed causation. In this thesis, the explanations from Orosius' historical work Seven Books of History against the Pagans are grouped into categories and analyzed. The result of this analysis shows that Orosius used both divine causes to explain events as well as more traditional secular ones. The examination of both his divine and secular explanations paint the picture of a historian who was attempting to write history in the Classical tradition, and whose methodology does not stray far from his pagan predecessors. This conclusion undermines the attempts of some scholars to view Orosius' work as a theological endeavor, as opposed to an historical one, as well as breaks down any binary distinction between Orosius as a new kind of Christian historian or one following in the historiographical tradition that had come before.