Historical sources and orality

Abstract

The present text systematizes the relations between the historian and his sources, seeking to elucidate theoretical and methodological issues emerging from the historical narrative. Two conceptual issues sustain the text. One refers to the building of narratives from a traditional written source, indicating the limitations of the possibilities of knowledge of cultures that don’t use written language. A second issue emerges from the multiplicity of times of the historian, from his interaction with the sources, the linearity of the written narrative also limits the possibilities of knowledge of dominated groups. The text finalizes pointing a central issue on the debate of oral history, that is, the historian as a producer of historical documentation.