Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 156
An archive cannot tell the whole history
Authority audience occasion performance and provenance determine what organizational history can do
Premise
Organizational memory is not simply information stored for later retrieval. In Mande griot practice, history is performed through relationships among the jeli, audience, occasion, patronage, genealogy, music, and present need. A performer may preserve narratives while also praising, counseling, mediating, and reshaping how a community interprets its past. Memory and social action occur in the same event.
Simon Adewale Ebine formalized oral narrative and performance as a communication system in a 2019 study of Manding examples. Jan Jansen’s fieldwork among Kela bards emphasized diplomacy, while Thomas Hale documented wider diversity among griots and griottes. These scholars describe dimensions of inherited practices; they did not invent the cultural institution or establish one uniform West African role.
What the model is: Griot Oral Narrative and Performance as a Communication System in Knowledge →
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryCodes & Communication Systems
- DomainOrganization & Structure
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Codes & Communication Systems
Articulates signs and conventions through which information or meaning can be represented, recorded or transmitted. Interpretation depends on the relevant language, practices, users and context, not on a sign looking self-evident.