Tradição oral e história oral: proximidades e fronteiras

Abstract

When working on oral history, we often come face to face with the concept of oral tradition. Concerning the testimonies we collected about the past, do they either disclose traditions orally transmitted among the communities members, or portray personal elaborations of individuals participating in events and conjunctures we tried to investigate, or both? There are authors who make a clear distinction between oral tradition and oral history. The former would include tales about the past known in a culture, while the testimony or the oral history interview would be characterized by versions that are not widely known. Nevertheless, this distinction admits that oral tradition is immutable; it does not consider that even the universally known past is continuously accumulated and dissected. Thus, there is a whole team of researchers who calls the attention to the fact that an oral tradition can only be updated at the very moment of the narration, a moment that determines, to some extent, what for and how something is narrated. The article aims at discussing proximities and borders between oral tradition and oral history.