On Fri, Jul 5, 2019 at 10:11 PM Ocean Power oceanpower@protonmail.com wrote:
What about Australian indigenous songs that trace the path of songlines that both document collective history and folk knowledge and also rhythmically document land contours and other landmarks as a map/timeline/travel guide and often compile folkloric and secondary and primary knowledge over generations? I'm curious if you think these function in some ways as tertiary sources which, at least according to the wiki, include "travel guides, field guides, and almanacs." I'm out of my depth but enjoying the back and forth here.
Hello :) Sounds like a tertiary source to me, whatever the format. I would say instructional, historical, and cataloging stories + songs are traditional tertiary sources. As are the maintainers of legal precedent and local data records.
There are also a few independent dimensions where oral and written histories tend to differ, which are sometimes confused. Three at play here:
* *Format*: Seen (video) vs. Spoken (audio) vs. written (text). Video or audio are sometimes considered more authentic than text for a primary source. * *Verifiability*: Contemporaneously recorded in a lasting medium, vs. remembered + retransmitted through the memory of recipients * *Closeness to observation*: Primary observation / Secondary analysis / Tertiary compilation A town elder remembering the town's history is primary; when I develop my own history based on it (w/o direct experience) and tell it to you, that is secondary; if you catalog different versions of town histories in an epic song, that's tertiary (even as your performance of it is a primary source for your singing style!)
S.