- Published in: Times, Places, Passages. Ethnological Approaches in the New Millenium. 7th SIEF Conference, Budapest, April 23-28, 2001. Selected Papers. Ed. Paladi-Kovacs A. Budpest, 2003, pp. 447-452.
Ethnological researches as well as researches in other fields of the humanities are based on facts. Common sources of facts in ethnological practice are the objects of traditional life and culture and the written sources created during field researches by the ethnologist when putting down his interviews with the witnesses and his impressions from observations, informal conversations, participation in various kinds of celebrations and settings. Scholarly results in the humanities and thus in ethnology, too, depend on the use of reliable sources as well as on the methods of deriving information from these sources. Here we deal only with the problems of examining the written sources of ethnological knowledge. Working on a topic the ethnologist usually analyses the field research sources. As a matter of fact these are based mainly on the quantitative dimensions of the collected data and only to a certain extent on the cognitive value of the information contained. This means that they are of great importance in the ethnologist's research work but do not vouch for the completeness and many-sidedness of the knowledge about the problem examined.
Recently, trying to present more truly and in a more lively way the phenomena and processes that are subjects of ethnological researches, scholars have increasingly been looking for non-traditional and varied sources. In this respect research practice has already proved that the use of personal records (letters, diaries, memoirs, interviews, inquiries, etc.) as sources of ethnological knowledge gives great opportunities and can even supply the missing links in the knowledge of traditional life and culture. However, personal records are a special challenge to the ethnologist because, as a whole and separately, they have some specific features. The latter, i.e. the specifics of the information personal records contain should be taken into consideration since they determine the methods for their critical analysis.
In general sources of information do not provide the ethnologist with ready-made and so to say 'pure' pieces of evidence; the recorded facts are in the rough. They become scholarly pieces of evidence after being checked, proved and set free from subjective and possibly other remnants. That is why a significant prerequisite for the successful critical analysis of the ethnological sources is the scholar's theoretical knowledge of their origin, nature and character and of the methods to obtain - as far as possible - full and objective information from them.
The ethnological sources of different origin and character, reflecting a given reality which is the subject of a concrete ethnological study, have quite different cognitive value as information. That is why the approach to them has its specific features. Field research records and personal records have some features in common such as the presence of subjectivity in the information they contain. The field research records are products of the joint creative work of the ethnologist and of the people who give him the needed information. This information is recorded directly. Nevertheless it depends, on the one hand on the ethnologist's interests and interviewing skills and on the other hand on his attending ability as a listener. That means the ethnologist influences the creation of his source encouraging the bearer of the ethnological knowledge, i. e. the witness to a process of remembering. He stimulates his 'live source' to reflect the events of past traditional life and to adapt them with a view to the present. Meanwhile he selects the questions to be asked and the information to be recorded according to his knowledge and from the standpoint of his professional interests. A similar phenomenon is observed in the case of personal records where two flows of information exist: firstly, figuratively speaking, inferior information about everyday life and secondly, interior information about the author of the source since his image is reflected in it.
In contrast to the field research records, personal ones are more subjective; there the author's personal attitude to the structures of traditional life and culture described is stronger. So, personal records reflect the author's thinking of the ethnological pieces of evidence and his personal views much better than the very inferior pieces of evidence. Their information is directed mainly towards the personality of the author of the source; it is based on his personal impressions of reality - traditional life, so the facts are reflected and interpreted through his points of view.
Another specific feature of personal records is the relation existing between the recipient of information and the record's author or the so-called "reverse connection"[1]. This means that in creating the record, its author usually reckons with the influence what he is writing will have on the recipient (the recipient's eventual thoughts, emotions, etc.) and thus the latter becomes a co-author of the record.
Despite these typical features each kind of personal record has its specifics which influence in addition the qualities of the information it registers. According to the unilingual dictionaries memoirs are history written from personal knowledge. And it could be added: old experiences placed in a newer context of meaning. Yet they belong to the works created on the basis of certain emotions, but emotions disturb thinking. Usually emotions are caused by considerations of a certain conjuncture, so the turn to the past is biased. In this respect the information of the memoirs relates not only to the time when the events described occurred but also to the present or to the time when they were written. In practice, that means the remembrance of past events from traditional life happens in the context of another epoch's culture and milieu. The passing of time inevitably leads to changes in a memoirist's view of life, aesthetic attitude, etc. In this way each retrospection is a contemporary view of the past and the past seen in the light of today differs from what it really was, that is from the past reality. That is why the knowledge of the traditional way of life in the past that comes from memoirs is determined twice: once, by the historical time when the events happened and once again, by the time when the events were described. The more recent time influences the remembrance of the past, the selection of pieces of evidence and their gradation according to significance, their interpretation. Here the logical question is, what influences the memoirs more strongly: the past or the present? Perhaps it is better to answer in the words of the great German philosopher Feuerbach who says the present is a cue to the past and not vice versa[2].
The collective social memory of certain events in traditional life contributes to the discrepancy in memoirist's views in different periods of time. With the passing of time the collective image of an event starts to play a dominating role over the real happening and then this collective image is accepted as truthful. Unconsciously and mechanically transferring ready views can have a negative influence on the process of remembrance, the evaluation of events on behalf of the memoirist. In its turn this influence can be positive, too, because collective memory helps to preserve for a longer time some details of the events from everyday life - those to which the memoirist pays attention and which he otherwise would not be able to recollect.
The qualities of memoirs as ethnological sources, to a great extent, depend on the biological abilities of memory: different people have different capacity to recollect. The ageing of memory has a negative influence on the quality of remembrance because of the forgetting: either some events may be idealized or the order of the events, or of the participants may be changed. Therefore memoirs are feeble to recreate the past in its initial freshness; they are only its pale copy[3]. Let alone that sometimes the memoirist describes events as if he experienced them but in fact he did not - he tells just what is wished. All this concerns people's ability to recollect different moments of life according to their emotional, psychological or mental disposition; the selective character of the remembering, that is the ability of memory 'to throw out' some memories, especially the unpleasant ones, also plays a role. As George Sand says, man gradually starts seeing only the pleasant happenings in the past, besides time and distance wipe out the bad impressions and smooth away the difficulties until they entirely obliterate them from consciousness[4]. Since the border between recollection and fiction is imperceptible, the ethnologist cannot be sure that what was put down had really happened and in any case he needs some comparative researches.
The ethnologist can find interesting details about the everyday life and mentality of different social groups in diaries. While in memoirs there is a distance in time between the occurrence of events and their description, in diaries there is no such distance. In other words while memoirs are written at the end of men's lives, diaries are written while the events are fresh. So they reflect the first-hand impressions of events, moreover in detail, exactly and truthfully. The diary is a kind of calm conversation by its author with himself. Since in its function, the diary is mostly written for private use, its author usually does not harmonize his own way of thinking with the possible reader's taste, which is why he is frank and sincere.
Perhaps one of the most popular kinds of personal record and one most often used in ethnological researches is the diary in the form of travel notes. These are written during travels to unknown places and countries and reflect direct observations of traditional life. That is what determines their qualities as ethnological sources as well as their trustworthiness and reliability. The subjective nuance in the travel notes is given by the historical time, by the social and cultural milieu from which their author came, from his political views, religious convictions, etc. The travellers made the selection of the places, traditions or characters described according to their own interests, aptitudes and knowledge. The national specifics and habits characteristic of the nation from which the traveller originated also influenced the attitude to the countries described[5]. Even when foreigners travelled with certain instructions or missions (either commercial or diplomatic) they put down their notes individually and with a marked personal style. Travellers' evaluations of people's habits and customs depended entirely on their own taste and mentality.
Analysing travel notes as sources of ethnological knowledge it should be noted that they contain some inaccurate and uncertain data. These shortcomings result from the circumstance that travellers usually did not have the opportunity to stay for a longer period of time in one place to get better acquainted with the customs depicted. The travel notes were first of all a consequence of more general and quite rough impressions of an unknown country. Sometimes the authors did not even know the language of the country and resorted to the help of not quite reliable interpreters. Another specific feature of travel notes is that it was not always the prevailing and most typical customs and habits that were described. Very often travellers' attention was attracted by rare but interesting or curious events. Some travellers trying to make their description more entertaining and intriguing tended to mark out in too much detail the exotic elements in their story[6]. Otherwise travel notes as ethnological sources contain very rich and varied information about everyday life. Many of the structures of everyday life of interest to ethnologists today did not appear in the works of local authors. The latter usually did not pay attention to some elements of past life because at that time they were well known. For travellers it was just the opposite: everything was new and interesting. This is why travellers, and especially foreigners, usually paid attention to some usual, typical happenings in the way of life at the time.
While personal records recreate life deliberately, letters are life itself. In the opinion of the Russian philosopher Hertzen, they are more than pieces of memories: "the blood of events caked on them; letters are the past itself, as it was - saved and imperishable"[7]. In other words personal letters are a direct reverberation of moments experienced, caught from the stream of life, feelings dashed down quickly on paper. For that reason they give information about the rationalization of people's spiritual being.
According to its functions, the letter is a means of communication and serves to exchange thoughts. Because of that the information letters contain is influenced to a significant extent by the 'reverse connection', that is the relation between the author of the letter and its recepient. This means that the author of the letter tries to come closer to his addressee in his thoughts - closer to his intellectual and emotional world, his way of thinking, his mentality and spiritual life - in order to create some emotional and mental contact. Having in mind his addressee's way of perceiving the content of his letter, the author decides what to tell and what not to tell and how to tell it. Thus the author makes the addressee his partner in writing the letter, in creating its information. So the letter reflects not only the author's image of the events but the addressee's, too and to be more precise the author's image of the addressee. It can be said that the addressee becomes in a way a co-author of the letter's information, not only its recipient.
This means that the letter is a source from which three flows of information issue: firstly, information about the interior pieces of evidence and the social context in which the communication is realized, secondly, information about the author and thirdly, information about the addressee. This is the way the author's communicative purposes and intentions influence the content of the letter. It is important for perceiving the text of the letter and for revealing the facts which have not been expressed in words but are present in each written communication.
Being records about a particular individual's way of thinking and behaviour or as the Goncourt brothers say, 'records about man'[8], memoirs, diaries, letters, etc. contribute to enrich the range of our knowledge and outlook about the traditions and customs of people who lived in the past and to broaden the background of the research process. The use of personal records as sources of ethnological researches gives scholars great opportunities because being a confessional genre they help them to examine the subjective side of social development as well as to study people's national psychology. However, there is a long and difficult path from the raw empirical facts to the scholarly facts - this is the path of critical analysis. Personal records should be used critically in ethnological research work exactly because of their specific features which distinguish them from field research sources and which should be taken into consideration when their data are analyzed.
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[1] K. Георгиев. За оптималното използване на изворовата информация в историко-иознавателния процес [About the most favourable use of sources' information in the historical cognitive process]. - Военно-исторически сборник [Military History Collection], (1984), № 1,187-188.
[2] Л. Фойербах. Избрание произведения в двух томах [Selected works in two volumes] Москва, (1955), T. II., 590.
[3] P. Дж. Коллингвуд. Идея истории. Автобиография [The Idea of History, Autobiography]. Москва, (1980), 443.
[4] Жорж Санд. Мопра Орас [Морга Oras]. София, (1984) 377.
[5] For example the German traveller in the Balkans noticed mainly what he ate and drank, the Englishman always paid attention to the prices but on the other hand really admired the beautiful nature of the Balkan countries. See the series "Чужди пътеписи за Балканите" [Foreign travel notes about the Balkans].
[6] M. Йонов. Чуждестранните пътеписи като исторически извори [Foreign travel notes as historical sources]. In: Личните документи като исторически извор [Personal Records as a Source of Historical Knowledge]. София, (1987), 203.
[7] Ал. Иванов. Минало и размисли [Past and Reflections]. София, (1977), 289.
[8] Едмон и Жул де Гонкур. Дневник [Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. Diary]. София, (1982), 301.
