Listening for Silences

Abstract

Talking with informants in the field lies at the methodological heart of Africanist history and anthropology. Historians and anthropologists rely on formal and informal interviews, surveys, questionnaires, and participant observation in order to generate data from Africans and to privilege an African perspective on society, culture, and change. Fieldwork serves both as a political statement empowering African voices and as a right of passage for Africanists.Vansina's (1965) careful methodological considerations for mining and interpreting the African voice in the form of oral traditions has helped give Africanist history its distinctive character. Collecting and using oral traditions has not been unproblematic, however. Considerable debate surrounds the historicity of oral traditions (for example, Wrigley 1971; Henige 1974; Prins 1979; Miller 1980; Webster 1982; Vansina 1985).In comparison, little attention has been paid to the interview as the encounter central to the production of knowledge. In hisOral Tradition, Vansina was concerned primarily with the chains of transmission of testimony and their possible distortions. Vansina recognized, but did not pursue, how the encounter between informant and researcher influenced the informant's testimony.