托福tpo73阅读第2篇Writing History题目解析-小站备考

Historians throughout the ages have been beset by many pitfalls in their attempts to write history. Modern historians writing the history of Africa not only face problems similar to those experienced by their colleagues writing the history of other cultures. Most medieval African societies south of the Sahara lacked an alphabet and a written language. African written languages were confined mainly to Ethiopia, to Sudan, and to the maritime cities of the east coast. Early Greek, Roman, Amharic, Fulani, and Swahili texts still survive to give us some idea of bygone days. Future collectors will almost certainly find additional records when they search for documents in North Africa and in faraway countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia. In tropical countries, however, old papers are preserved only with great difficulty, for white ants and atmospheric humidity pose serious problems even to modern archivists. Early record keepers were even less equal to their task, and much material has been lost or destroyed.

The lack of written material means that we shall never be able to read, for example, the memoirs of a king of the Luba people in the eighteenth century. Worse still, we cannot draw on administrative archives. Dull as they look, administrative files have a peculiar value denied to other written records. They are composed of documents drawn up or used in the course of an administrative or executive transaction of which they had formed a part. This does not necessarily make official memorandums, communiques, and such more reliable, for officials often enough were dishonest with their inferiors and superiors alike. But-unlike the authors of so many biographies-they hardly ever wrote in order to deceive posterity; hence, archival evidence has an unusual degree of authenticity. The lack of such material makes the historian's job hard indeed. For where there is no writing, there are large areas of human behavior that cannot be described accurately except by speculative extrapolations from literate cultures or by conjectures determined to a large extent by our own cultural preconceptions.

Some historians, therefore, try to supplement their sources with information from indigenous traditions and folklore, heroic legends, genealogical tables, and personal reminiscences. The use of oral history, however, again presents many difficulties. Historians can look at the same document again and again; so can their successors. An artifact can be preserved in a museum, and different conclusions can be arrived at by going over the same evidence again and again. But two or three people cannot interview the same informant twice; even should they do so, they will not necessarily elicit the same information, for the interviewers themselves help impose a subjective pattern on the information they obtain. Human witnesses, moreover, will remember previous interviews; their memory can never be erased like a magnetic tape in such a way that they can be questioned over and over again without changing their answers at least to some degree.

Admittedly, it is easy to underestimate the value of material elicited by oral historians who investigate preliterate societies. Professional poets and singers may faithfully record the same lay or the same genealogical table for many generations, for their memory is beyond question. Nevertheless, oral tradition is always subject to change. The Lunda people, who dwell on the Luapula River, are, for instance, very interested in their own past. But as lan Cunnison, a British anthropologist, observes, "this is not history as we know it. It is the handing on of what is already known or believed, and it does not involve the asking of questions about the past, and the search for the answer to them."

This does not mean that oral traditions are without value to historians. They enlarge their imagination, they help them pose new questions, and they tell them a great deal concerning a people's culture; they also provide a substratum of fact. They are, however, difficult to interpret, and the conventional historian's intellectual tools may often prove inadequate for the task. Oral traditions, moreover, like all other forms of evidence, always stand in need of corroboration and can never be accepted on the basis of their own authority.

托福official73阅读第2篇Writing History题目解析

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