| Indigenous oral tradition in southern Latin America: library’s effort to save sounds and stories from silence (2007) | |||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||
| Indigenous cultures of Latin America form the ethnic and cultural structure on which a great part of the continent is based. Their traits add hundreds of customs, traditions and varied cultural heritage to the cultural diversity that can be found in the Americas. The different independent nations that today populate this region, have been continuously discriminated, forgotten and excluded from any possibility within the ambit of development, through their history. Although they show some signs of improvement, thanks to keep on struggling and continue to claim for their rights day after day, they regret the severe losses, among which can be highlighted, according to its importance, the loss of their original languages. Since a vast majority of them are societies that do not know the writing –what means that historically they did not use written systems- the loss of their language represents the destruction of their means of oral transmission, and, therefore, the disappearance of their knowledge, stories, codes and literatures. Libraries can play a very important role in the partial recovery of such languages and the associated knowledge. However, though there are services that have obtained very interesting results, LIS proposals specifically designed for aboriginal communities in Latin America are few. The author’s work can be placed those ones. His research was carried out in the NE part of Argentina, between 2001 and 2006, and included the development of sound collections in small libraries that were created inside the schools. Those collections not only recovered communitarian oral tradition, but also put it in contact with a set of activities at the schools. The recorded material and some of its written transcriptions allowed to rescue a fragment of the cultural heritage of the community and used it later through different services. Among the contents recovered, maybe the most important ones were those related to the communities’ history and the personal stories of each of its members, their genealogies and the way in which the group behaves towards national and regional events. In this line, history was connected with geography and language in a natural way. Many of the materials were later digitalized for them to be used in future activities. However, this was only possible in those places where informational literacy had been previously developed and there were the necessary electronic jeans. This paper shows a brief summary of the author’s ideas and experiences, and a detailed statement of the use of history, oral tradition and sound collections in indigenous libraries. It also presents similar or related experiences in other parts of Latin America. | |||||||||||
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