While it has multiple meanings, “story” commonly invokes the idea of a fictional narrative. In academia, or more specifically in the field of history, the term story invokes similar ideas. However, instead of stories being dubbed fictional, academia has categorized stories as sources that scholars need to take extra precautions with when using them. In order for these stories to be used properly, they must be situated within the proper context, and by no means can they be the primary source of evidence, only supplementary. Until recently, they have never been the topic of academic conversation, let alone research.
Oral storytelling or oral history narratives, memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, and journals are all examples of stories used in academia. And they are all used to support arguments, theories, and ideas based on other, more concrete evidence—such as photographs, newspaper articles, recordings, transcriptions, and more. Although, all of the examples I listed aren’t all that different from each other if we truly examine how they are used. When used as primary sources, the time, place, the creator of the source, and intent, all play an important role in how these sources are interpreted. Yet, I argue one set of evidence has a more negative stigma than the others.
One set is taken more seriously while another isn’t. “I used speeches and government documents to support my argument” is held to a higher standard compared to “I used oral history narratives and memoirs.” Scholars say that this is because stories have unreliable narrators whose truth is clouded by emotions, memories, and trauma. However, can’t the same thing be said about the other sources, in which the unreliable creators of those sources can’t be trusted either? History is plagued with unreliable creators. What makes these more personal stories more unreliable than other evidence? Where is that dividing line and who draws it? The only difference I observe is who is telling these stories.
History is defined as the examination of the past. Each historian can have a different interpretation of what happened, even when presented with the same evidence. In fact, these disagreements and discussions are encouraged in not just history, but all throughout academia. So how can a field that values differing opinions hold such a stigma against stories?
In recent years, there has been a push to make history and academia more inclusive—a push to bring global majority voices to the forefront as centers of study in order to understand the past from their point of view. However, I believe that if we truly want to bring minorities to the forefront, then we must also change the current mindset of academia to include more of their personal stories as subjects of research, rather than supplemental to it.
Story-Telling as a Form of Representation
In Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book, Provincializing Europe, he addresses the concern that modern day history and academia are measured on a European scale. One example of this can be the hallmark of civilization. Many world history programs teach that civilizations occurred when communities shifted away from hunter-gatherers to agriculture. While this transition started in the Fertile Valley of the Middle East, it was also seen mainly throughout Europe. However, defining civilization as such does a disservice to other communities.
Many Native American communities adopted a hybrid method of hunting-gathering and agriculture. Yet despite their advancement in engineering, medicine, math, astrology, and more, they have been considered uncivilized and inferior because they did not fit in this specific Eurocentric mold, among other things. This is just one example of how academia on a European scale is harmful to marginalized communities, something that many researchers are trying to break away from but there’s still a lot of room for improvement.
When talking about inclusivity in academia, we must break out of this Eurocentric mold because the current mindset is still exclusionary. What photographs, books, documents, and recordings have in common is that they are physical forms of storytelling. They were physical from the moment of inception, the moment the photo was taken, the moment the speech was broadcasted on TV. Stories, however, have time to stew in the narrators’ minds before they become physical. If primary sources’ worth is measured by whether or not they were written, carved, or documented, not only is academia assuming that writing something down makes it inherently more reliable, but it is also willfully ignoring cultures that do not have these methodologies, placing a lower value on their history simply because they are formatted a different way.
There are many reasons why certain groups may not have these methods. For one, some communities don’t have the tradition of physical documentation. According to Arizona State University, communities such as Vedic South Asians, indigenous Australians, Central Asian tribes, and West African kingdoms have a long-standing tradition of oral storytelling, of passing down spoken history from generation to generation. Therefore, they have little-to-no need to document their stories.
When we look at current research, there is actually a hole in studies concerning these regions, and I truly believe it isn’t a coincidence. In this example, you can already see the domino effect taking place—since their stories are not “valid” sources to be topics of research, that means the research being conducted in these communities is not validated, which then discourages scholars from focusing on these regions. This slippery slope is why stories need to be taken more seriously in academia.
Additionally, many communities might’ve kept physical records, but they weren’t preserved. This is specifically true when looking at more humid areas where paper, wood, and other natural products will decay faster unless stored properly, such as in Southeast Asia. The reason why we have so little knowledge of pre-modern Southeast Asian history is not from the lack of effort, but rather the lack of sources. For example, the discovery of Đông Sơn drums helped support arguments of a Bronze Age occurring in Southeast Asia. In fact, the most valuable part of these drums are the inscriptions on them that helped create an image of what life was like during the Đông Sơn era, something that was only abstract before their discoveries.
Due to the environmental nature of the region, there are only a few drums that have notable academic value, with the rest being eroded away to the point they no longer have inscriptions. Similarly, there is evidence of rice, preserved under very specific conditions, that helped historians conclude the agriculture of rice in this pre-modern era. If it weren’t for the wet and humid environment, there’s no telling what would’ve been preserved and been able to be used in current research.
Therefore by valuing physical sources, you are inherently valuing societies in dryer and cooler climates, where historical artifacts have a better chance of preservation. Similarly, many groups only have oral stories to pass down, despite originally having physical documentation. This is most prevalent in immigrant and refugee groups, where they had to leave almost all physical belongings behind. Their only way to make a mark in academia is through their lived experience that, in most cases, can only be told through oral storytelling and to deny that is to deny their identity.
The idea of denying the credibility of stories is Eurocentric. Until recently, academia has been focused on studying the Western world, including their methodology. So if the majority of Europe documented things in writing because that was the tradition of the Catholic Church, or if their environment was better suited for preserving paper and works, it makes sense why this is the baseline of studies and research. However, as we shift away from European studies, we must make a more active effort to provincialize Europe. In creating credibility in stories and oral storytelling, we take one step further in including global majority voices and stories in academia.
What We Can Learn From Stories
Bringing stories to the forefront of academia isn’t just about validating global majority communities’ histories; it also opens a door to new fields of research targeted at otherwise excluded groups. Specifically, I’m going to focus on refugee studies—a field I’m most knowledgeable in.
Refugee studies focus on the trauma, memories, and trauma of memories, of refugees. This means it hinges on personal stories. Speaking from experience, this is most commonly found in the Vietnamese American communities through oral history stories and memoirs. Yen Le Espiritu, a leading figure in refugee studies, states in her book Body Counts, “The messiness, contingency, and precarious nature of refugee life means that refugees… are beset by contradictions… their stories, actions, and inactions—simultaneously trouble and affirm regimes of power.” Here, Espiritu states that there is something to be learned from the contradictions stories can have, in this case, the regimes of power.
Instead of merely understanding Vietnamese Americans as victims of war, another blip in the immigration history of US history—players in the larger game of American studies, so to speak—refugee studies actually acknowledges and highlights issues of race, violence, trauma, and memories. To systematically marginalized communities in America, these issues aren’t what makes them different, but it is integral to who they are and their identity. Acknowledging their stories on these topics will acknowledge their identity.
Vietnamese Americans aren’t the only communities that can benefit from having their stories acknowledged in academia, as other refugee communities also have oral stories to tell. Using stories as centers of research can also lead to the rise of new studies on communities. An example is African Americans during the Abolition Era in the United States. While there were many scholars, politicians, and abolitionists writing about the issues of slavery, such as the renowned Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the majority of them were white and therefore inherently wrote from an outsider’s perspective. However, when freed slaves started to share their stories—a prime example being Frederick Douglass’ autobiography—the struggles of African Americans were no longer another book on the shelf—another impersonal story—but instead became a tangible experience. As one of the most photographed men in history, Douglass understood the importance of representation and his legacy remains today.
Frederick Douglass’ autobiography is not only a staple book read across schools in America, but it is also prevalent in the field of African American studies. African American studies continued what Douglass and other freed slaves started by highlighting and understanding the importance of their stories. What was initially an examination of slavery and slaves by abolitionists transformed into a field where African Americans could find their voices through their own stories and the stories of others. Examining storytelling as centers of research opens up a whole new field of studies exclusive to global majority groups.
“Told by the Victors”
Highlighting stories doesn’t just bring systematically marginalized voices to the forefront, but it can also provide a new perspective on previously established knowledge. They often say that “history is told by the victors” and one of the major contributing factors to this thinking is the fact that we only hear about the victors.
This—in part—has to do with human nature. We don’t like to hear about loss and despair. Instead, we want to hear stories about the underdogs rising to the top, stories of success that lead to a chain reaction of a series of events. However, since the “losers” of history tend to be global majority groups, this makes history inherently white-washed. Therefore, it is not enough to only listen to “winning” stories, as systematically marginalized groups that are dubbed victorious are more rare than not. Even then, the stories of victorious minorities are only perpetrated under certain conditions, specifically when they are successful under a white standard. Espiritu highlights this, stating that only certain types of Vietnamese American stories are told in academia. In this case, only the stories that achieve the American Dream are showcased, meaning the “losers” and the “leftover” refugees are left in the shadows.
Editors Note: My recommended further reading on this topic is my favorite piece to recommend: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin
When it comes to victory stories, the truth is often bent to build up the characters in the story. We want to appear as the knight in shining armor, even if we weren’t necessarily the main character. We want our stories to invoke awe, even if the reality was uneventful. Matthew Restall actually highlights this in his book, The Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Here, he breaks down the myths the Spanish perpetuated of their colonial conquest of the Americas in order to inflate their image. The white horse that conquistadors valanty ride in Spanish paintings? They couldn’t actually ride horses due to the mountainous terrain of South and Central America. Yet it was something constantly painted to truly turn them into the knight in shining armor.
The paintings of Native Americans “turning” on each other to insinuate their loyalties to the Spaniards? If we provincialize Europe, we can see how race loyalty is a European thought and that Native Americans never turned on each other because they were only loyal to their tribes and not to the larger race. These paintings are considered as valid historical sources, even though they only tell part of the story. These stories, created by the Spanish, are the ones in history textbooks today.
If we only listen to the “victors,” then we are making harmful assumptions of the “losers” in order to justify the victors’ stories. We already see this happening in Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, where he attributes the failures of Native Americans against the Spanish to “ecological inferiority.” We can apply this ideology to our previous example of horses.
One aspect of this supposed ecological inferiority was the lack of horses in the Americas. This led to the unsupported idea that 1) Spaniards were inherently superior because of their mounts and 2) Native Americans had inferior mounts although not by choice, despite instead using alpacas that were more suited for the terrain. His work remains largely contested among anthropologists. In the end, Diamond’s work demonstrates the overarching problem in highlighting only victors’ stories—that the mostly white “winners” are superior, and that the global majority groups that are typically the “losers” are inferior.
This does bring up an important question in considering what stories are valid. If we as academics can bend over backwards to justify these white stories, why can’t the same be done to global majority stories? Why are we questioning the reliability of their stories when we haven’t been doing so for white stories?
Final Thoughts
As a child of Vietnamese refugees, I cannot emphasize how important it is to me to take story-telling in academia more seriously. While my family was blessed to still have pictures and documents from their time in Vietnam, many Vietnamese Americans did not have this privilege. Instead, all they can show as evidence of their history is through their words and stories.
At the end of the day, this issue stems back to representation. If history has been European/Western-based, it makes sense why the current ideology surrounding stories stands. However, as we try to become more inclusive of minorities in the fields of academia, we also need to include their methodology of history. Highlighting their stories not only humanizes these topics but also diminishes the stigmas that are often associated with these communities by default.
While their memories can be used to supplement existing fields of academia, I believe there is an increasing need to examine stories in itself. If not for the Vietnamese American community, then for every community that had physical evidence of their past erased, left only with their memories and voices. They have been ready to share. Now it’s up to academia to be ready to listen.
Land Acknowledgement: This article was written on the ancestral lands of the Gabrielino-Tongva Nation.
