The Oral History Reader

Robert Perks, Alistair Thomson, Robert Perks, Alistair Thomson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317371311
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

The Oral History Reader, now in its third edition, is a comprehensive, international anthology combining major, 'classic' articles with cutting-edge pieces on the theory, method and use of oral history. Twenty-seven new chapters introduce the most significant developments in oral history in the last decade to bring this invaluable text up to date, with new pieces on emotions and the senses, on crisis oral history, current thinking around traumatic memory, the impact of digital mobile technologies, and how oral history is being used in public contexts, with more international examples to draw in work from North and South America, Britain and Europe, Australasia, Asia and Africa.

Arranged in five thematic sections, each with an introduction by the editors to contextualise the selection and review relevant literature, articles in this collection draw upon diverse oral history experiences to examine issues including:

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• Key debates in the development of oral history over the past seventy years

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• First hand reflections on interview practice, and issues posed by the interview relationship

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• The nature of memory and its significance in oral history

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• The practical and ethical issues surrounding the interpretation, presentation and public use of oral testimonies

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• how oral history projects contribute to the study of the past and involve the wider community.

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• The challenges and contributions of oral history projects committed to advocacy and empowerment

With a revised and updated bibliography and useful contacts list, as well as a dedicated online resources page, this third edition of The Oral History Reader is the perfect tool for those encountering oral history for the first time, as well as for seasoned practitioners.

PART I

Critical developments

Introduction

A history of oral history

THIS FIRST SECTION OF THE READER outlines developments in the history of oral history up to 2015. It does not attempt to survey the national or regional histories of oral history, which are readily available in other publications.¹ Although the points of genesis and patterns of development for oral history have varied from one country to another, some shared social and intellectual forces have shaped contemporary approaches to oral history and influenced oral historians around the world. The readings selected for this section illustrate and explore these critical developments.

This introduction contextualises those readings within a survey of four ‘paradigm’² shifts in oral history theory and practice: the post-war renaissance of memory as a source for ‘people’s history’; the development, from the late 1970s, of ‘post-positivist’ approaches to memory and subjectivity; a transformation in perceptions about the role of the oral historian as interviewer and analyst from the late 1980s; and the digital revolution that began in the late 1990s. Attempts at historical periodisation such as this are fraught with danger, as Ron Grele notes in a thoughtful critique of an earlier version of this model of paradigm changes in oral history. Grele is right, of course, that ‘the details . . . have to be flushed out to understand some of the contradictions held in tension within these four periods’.³ It is also important, as Joan Sangster argues in her chapter in this section, to avoid a ‘Whig’ history that charts a neat linear story of progress. The development of oral history, as illuminated by the writings extracted here, was complex and messy, yet there are clear patterns, and the notion of paradigm transformations asserts that oral history has not simply evolved, but rather has experienced profound and at times revolutionary changes in understandings and practice.

Threaded through discussion of these paradigm shifts, this introduction also reflects upon several important developments that have impacted upon oral history and, in turn, been significantly influenced by oral historians: the growing significance of political and legal practices in which human rights are at stake and for which personal testimony is a central resource; the increasing interdisciplinarity of approaches to interviewing and the interpretation of memory; the proliferation from the 1980s of studies concerned with the relationship between history and memory; and the evolving internationalism of oral history. We also note how some of the significant recent intellectual ‘turns’ in the humanities and social sciences have influenced oral historians, including the increased interest in emotions and the sensory world, in the emplaced and embodied nature of experience and narrative, and an expanding concern about the traumatic impact of human and natural catastrophe and with the relationship between trauma and memory.

The first paradigm transformation – and the genesis of contemporary oral history – was the post-World War II renaissance in the use of memory as a source for historical research. Paul Thompson, among others, charts the prehistory of the modern oral history movement, explaining that historians from ancient times relied upon eyewitness accounts of significant events, until the nineteenth-century development of an academic history discipline led to the primacy of archival research and documentary sources, and a marginalisation of oral evidence. A revival of oral history after World War II was underpinned by the invention and take-up of the portable tape recorder, though as Thompson, Grele and others argue, that revival was ‘the culmination of a historiographical past rather than a technical moment’.⁴ The portable tape recorder made a difference – not least because now a recording of an interview could be preserved in an archive as a primary source for future researchers to check and use – but it was not the motor for change, which rather lay in changes in the subjects, methodologies and politics of historical research.

The timing and pattern of this oral history renaissance, and the tension between a documentary impulse and a political commitment to people’s history, differed markedly around the world. For example, one of the first organised oral history projects was initiated by Allan Nevins at Columbia University in New York in 1948, and his interest in archival recordings with white male elites was representative of the documentary impulse of early oral history activity in the United States.⁵ In Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, oral history pioneers were more interested in recording the experiences of so-called ‘ordinary’ working people and had initial links with folklore studies;⁶ George Ewart Evans, for example, determined to ‘ask the fellows who cut the hay’.⁷ The lived experience of working-class, women’s or black history was undocumented or ill-recorded, and oral history was an essential source for the people’s history ‘from below’ fostered by politically committed social historians in Britain and around the world from the 1960s onwards. Our first two readings evoke the excitement and political commitment of the first, pioneer generation of oral historians.

Alex Haley’s best-selling books Autobiography of Malcolm X (first published in 1965) and Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) encouraged black Americans to explore their past and helped to popularise oral history and family history in the United States.⁸ Our first extract is from a talk that Haley gave to an early meeting of the United States Oral History Association, published in the very first issue of the Association’s journal, Oral History Review, in 1973. Haley describes the transmission of memories within his African American family, and the oral traditions that are preserved in precise detail and retold by the griot or historical storyteller of a West African tribal community. Critics have expressed grave concerns about the accuracy of the evidence that Haley used to link his African and American ancestors.⁹ The griot may well have presented the family connections that Haley wanted to hear, and in tracing his American family history Haley probably embellished the oral tradition and overstepped the boundary ‘where fictional line diverged from factual basis’.¹⁰ Haley’s work offered ample ammunition for critics of memory as an historical source, and the debates it generated exemplify the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction, personal memory and oral tradition, and oral history and journalism. Despite these concerns, we have retained Haley’s talk in this third edition of the reader because it evokes for oral history newcomers the passion and commitment of early oral historians as they set out to uncover and record forgotten histories, and because Haley’s writing reminds us that oral history recording taps into a vast, rich reservoir of oral traditions¹¹ sustained through family,¹² community and national memories.

Paul Thompson, a social historian at the University of Essex, played a leading role in the creation of the British Oral History Society in 1973 and the subsequent development of an international oral history movement from the end of that decade. His book The Voice of the Past: Oral History became a standard textbook for oral historians around the world when it was first published in 1978.¹³ As a socialist, Thompson was committed to a history that drew upon the words and experiences of working-class people, and he was influenced by ‘new left’ thinking that widened that commitment to a range of marginalised and oppressed social groups. Yet Thompson also sought to defend oral history against critics who claimed that memory was an unreliable historical source, and determined to prove the legitimacy and value of the approach. In the extract from The Voice of the Past that we use here, Thompson explains how oral history has transformed both the content of history – ‘by shifting the focus and opening new areas of enquiry, by challenging some of the assumptions and accepted judgements of historians, by bringing recognition to substantial groups of people who had been ignored’ – and the processes of writing history, breaking ‘through the barriers between the chroniclers and their audience; between the educational institution and the outside world’. For many oral historians, recording experiences that have been ignored in history, and involving people in exploring and making their own histories, continue to be primary justifications for the use of oral history.¹⁴ And in most countries, oral history has developed powerful roots outside higher education, in schools, community projects and reminiscence work, and in advocacy projects and community development work that we explore in the final section of this reader.¹⁵

The second paradigm shift in oral history was, in part, a response to positivist critics – for the most part, traditional documentary historians of a conservative political persuasion – who feared the politics of people’s history and who targeted the ‘unreliability’ of memory as its weakness.¹⁶ At the core of criticisms of oral history in the early 1970s was the assertion that memory was distorted by physical deterioration and nostalgia in old age, by the personal bias of both interviewer and interviewee, and by the influence of collective and retrospective versions of the past. For example, the Australian historian Patrick O’Farrell wrote in 1979 that oral history was moving into ‘the world of image, selective memory, later overlays and utter subjectivity . . . And where will it lead us? Not into history, but into myth’.¹⁷ Goaded by such taunts, early oral historians developed handbook guidelines to assess the reliability of oral memory (while shrewdly reminding the traditionalists that documentary sources – many of which were created as records of spoken events – were no less selective and biased). From social psychology and anthropology, they showed how to determine the bias and fabulation of memory, the significance of retrospection and the effects of the interviewer upon remembering. From sociology, they adopted methods of representative sampling, and from documentary history they brought rules for checking the reliability and internal consistency of their sources. These guidelines provided useful signposts for reading memories and for combining them with other historical sources to find out what happened in the past.¹⁸

By the late 1970s, imaginative oral historians turned these criticisms on their head and argued that the so-called unreliability of memory was also its strength, and that the subjectivity of memory provided clues not only about the meanings of historical experience, but also about the relationships between past and present, between memory and personal identity, and between individual and collective memory. Though oral historians did not shed their commitment to social history, they were embracing the wider academic turn to cultural history and making their own distinctive contributions. For example, Luisa Passerini’s study of Italian memories of interwar fascism highlighted the role of subjectivity in history – the conscious and unconscious meanings of experience as lived and remembered – and showed how the influences of public culture and ideology upon individual memory might be revealed in the silences, discrepancies and idiosyncrasies of personal testimony.¹⁹

First published in 1972, our third reading by North American oral historian Michael Frisch tackled critical responses to Studs Terkel’s monumental oral history of the Great Depression, Hard Times. Frisch argued against the attitude that oral memory was ‘history as it really was’, and asserted that memory – ‘personal and historical, individual and generational’ – should be moved to centre stage ‘as the object, not merely the method, of oral history’.

What happens to experience on the way to becoming memory? What happens to experiences on the way to becoming history? As an era of intense collective experience recedes into the past, what is the relationship of memory to historical generalisation?

Used in this way, oral history could be ‘a powerful tool for discovering, exploring, and evaluating the nature of the process of historical memory – how people make sense of their past, how they connect individual experience and its social context, how the past becomes part of the present, and how people use it to interpret their lives and the world around them’.²⁰ Memory thus became the subject as well as the source of oral history, and oral historians began to use an exhilarating array of approaches – linguistic, narrative, cultural, psychoanalytic and ethnographic – in their analysis and use of oral history interviews.²¹

Our fourth reading, first published by Alessandro Portelli in 1979, exemplifies this second, ‘post-positivist’ paradigm shift in approaches to memory and oral history. Portelli challenged the critics of ‘unreliable memory’ head-on by arguing that ‘what makes oral history different’ – orality, narrative form, subjectivity, the ‘different credibility’ of memory, and the relationship between interviewer and interviewee – should be considered as strengths rather than as weaknesses, a resource rather than a problem. Portelli’s article is a subtle exploration of ‘the peculiarities of oral history’ and an ideal introduction for newcomers to the field.²² The interpretative opportunities that Portelli outlined are explored in more depth through the detailed case studies about interpreting memories in Part III.

Though conservative historians were the most vocal critics of oral history in the 1970s, oral history was also challenged from the Left. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, some socialist historians were particularly critical of the notion that oral history methodology was necessarily radical and democratic. Luisa Passerini cautioned against the ‘facile democratisation’ and ‘complacent populism’ of oral history projects that encouraged members of oppressed groups to ‘speak for themselves’ but which did not see how memories might be influenced by dominant histories and thus require critical interpretation.²³ In his review of ‘Oral history and Hard Times’, Michael Frisch also criticised what he described as a populist ‘no history’ approach to oral history in which testimony was presented without historical interpretation. In England, the Popular Memory Group at Birmingham University noted in 1982 that the community and women’s history movements were using oral history as a resource for making more democratic and transformative histories, yet the group concluded that this radical potential was often undermined by superficial understandings of the connections in oral testimony between individual and social memory and between past and present, and by the unequal relationships between professional historians and other participants in oral history projects.²⁴

The Popular Memory Group’s short-lived but influential work was a harbinger for the ascent of memory studies as an interdisciplinary field that has grown up alongside oral history since the 1980s. In 2001, Omer Bartov offered a compelling explanation for this ascent:

The stream of ‘memory studies’ was clearly related to the pervasive cultural sense of an end of an era, both as a chronological fact and as a reflection of rapid socioeconomic transformation. The ‘rediscovery’ of Maurice Halbwach’s theories on collective memory; the publication of Pierre Nora’s massive tomes on lieux de mémoire; the growing scholarly interest in the links between history and memory, documentation and testimony; the popularity of works of fiction and films on memory; debates among psychologists over ‘deep’ and repressed memory; and, not least, the public controversies on forms and implications of official commemoration. All seemed to indicate that ‘memory’ had firmly established itself as a central historical category.²⁵

Though the work of oral historians such as Passerini and Portelli has made a significant contribution to memory studies, Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes argue that ‘recent scholarship on historical memory in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies has rarely engaged with oral history’.²⁶ Memory studies has tended to focus on collective or social memory, and is mostly located in disciplines such as cultural studies, film studies and literature that are centrally concerned with representation. By ...