Are stories passed down from generation to generation considered primary sources?
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Oral history, historiography of oral traditions, and historiography of traditional knowledges are a fraught area. This is in part because indigenous knowledge is currently politicised in settler societies, mainly over land rights sovereignty treaty and invasion. Oral traditions are a primary source for Western historiography (post-“Ranke” history) in some ways: there is a strong claim of archived transmission with high levels of intactness of the transmitted “text” or “document.” In other ways traditional knowledge systems assert claims to be complete and reflective works, definitive works. In this mode they are a secondary source (but obviously not a scholarly history in the Rankean sense.)
The chief element to engage with is the texts purposiveness: why it is produced recorded transmitted and honoured. Primacy isn’t necessarily a good thing: self serving diaries exist. Secondary status isn’t necessarily a good thing: many people’s competence and opinion on the past is worthless. But if you read a sufficiently broad selection of traditional knowledge documents with an awareness of their purpose and supplement them with other sources then they’d be appropriate documents for suitable questions. My tendency with cultural works of importance and meaning is to use them for culture and social organisation, and not to rely on them for happenstance conflict politics or biography. Rambo can tell us about US fantasy, but not much about Afghanistan.
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