Oral History Theory

Lynn Abrams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138905382
• eBook ISBN: 9781317277989
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Oral history is increasingly acknowledged as a key tool for anyone studying the history of the recent past, and Oral History Theory provides a comprehensive, systematic and accessible overview of this important field. Combining the study of theories drawn from disciplines ranging from linguistics to psychoanalysis with the observations of practitioners and including extensive examples of oral history practice from around the world, this book constitutes the first integrated discussion of oral history theory.

Structured around key themes such as the peculiarities of oral history, the study of the self, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, memory, narrative, performance, power and trauma, each chapter provides a clear and user-friendly explanation of the various theoretical approaches, illustrating these with examples from the rich field of published oral history and making suggestions for the practicing oral historian. This second edition includes a new chapter on trauma and ethics, a preface discussing new developments in the field and updated glossary and further reading sections.

Supplemented by a new companion website (www.routledge.com/cw/abrams) containing a comprehensive range of case studies, audio material and further resources, this book will be invaluable to experienced and novice oral historians, professionals, and students who are new to the discipline.

1 Introduction

Turning practice into theory

Introduction

Oral history is a practice, a method of research. It is the act of recording the speech of people with something interesting to say and then analysing their memories of the past. But like any historical practice its theoretical aspects need to be considered.

As a research practice, oral history is engulfed by issues which make it controversial, exciting and endlessly promising. These are well spelt out by the oral historian Alessandro Portelli who starts one of his studies by noting that he is trying to:

convey the sense offluidity, of unfinishedness, of an inexhaustible work in progress, which is inherent to the fascination and frustration of oral history–floating as it does in time between the present and an ever-changing past, oscillating in the dialogue between the narrator and the interviewer, and melting and coalescing in the no-man’s land from orality to writing and back.¹

Portelli points to the poetic in oral history, to its permeability, its ability to cross disciplinary boundaries, and also to its ephemeral nature. He sums up what makes this method of finding out about the past so alluring and challenging for the historian.

This book proceeds on the assumption that in oral history research, practice and theory – doing and interpreting – are entwined. Conducting an interview is a practical means of obtaining information about the past. But in the process of eliciting and analysing the material, one is confronted by the oral history interview as an event of communication which demands that we find ways of comprehending not just what is said, but also how it is said, why it is said and what it means. Oral history practice then demands that one thinks about theory; indeed it is the practice, the doing of oral history, that leads to theoretical innovation. In this book we approach the oral history interview as a means of accessing not just information but also signification, interpretation and meaning.

This chapter will introduce the book in a number of ways. It will clarify some of the key terminology in the field, place oral history methodology within the wider field of personal-testimony research used by historians, sketch out the history of oral history as it relates to the turn to theory and outline some of the practical considerations encountered by all oral historians.

What is oral history?

Oral history is a catch-all term applied to two things. It refers to the process of conducting and recording interviews with people in order to elicit information from them about the past. But an oral history is also the product of that interview, the narrative account of past events. It is then both a research methodology (a means of conducting an investigation) and the result of the research process; in other words, it is both the act of recording and the record that is produced. Many other terms may also be used interchangeably with oral history, such as personal-testimony research and life-story research, and these will be used in this book. But historians seem to be most comfortable with ‘oral history’ as an umbrella term that incorporates both the practice and the output.

Such has been the success of oral history that it is now a tried and tested research practice, embedded not only in historical research but also in a wide range of disciplines including ethnology, anthropology, sociology, health-care studies and psychology. Oral history has also been employed outside the academic world as an evidential tool in the legal environment (in war-crimes trials for instance), by medical practitioners and those working in the caring professions. It is also a popular research tool deployed in community and educational projects, practised by young and old, volunteers and paid researchers, and is to be found in use in most countries of the world. Oral history has become a crossover methodology, an octopus with tentacles reaching into a wide range of disciplinary, practice-led and community enterprises. It is used by academics, by governments and during regime change – as in the officially sanctioned Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the collapse of apartheid in South Africa. But it is also used in social work, community enterprises and volunteer-led local-heritage projects. It is thus widespread and highly adaptable, being practical, political or historical in aim.

This success has had a number of consequences. The meaning of the term ‘oral history’ has been diluted so that almost any interview conducted with an individual may be labelled ‘oral history’, and historians can now no longer lay claim to oral history methodology as distinctive to their profession. It is important here though to make the distinction between oral history and other forms of data collection using the interview process. Qualitative research which may collect data via an interview can be a close cousin of oral history but may not have the distinctive character of specifically engaging with the past. Likewise, participant observation methods, where the researcher joins people in a social activity and which may incorporate interviews as an element of the research practice, are not always focused on the act of remembering the past.

But oral history’s very success across the humanities and social sciences as well as outside academia has had the hugely beneficial effect of bringing together practitioners and theorists from a variety of perspectives. They each bring their own expertise to bear. The result is a vibrant and constantly evolving research practice that draws upon innovative findings from across the disciplinary spectrum. For this reason, this book cites examples from many of these contexts outside the history discipline. Historians who conduct and use oral history have learned to be promiscuous in their use of theoretical perspectives and borrow analytical techniques from literature and linguistics, psychology and anthropology, folklore studies and the performance arts to name a few. As Portelli so aptly says, oral history is permeable and borderless, a ‘composite genre’ which requires that we think flexibly, across and between disciplinary boundaries, in order to make the most of this rich and complex source.²

Yet there is a need for the historian to think in a distinctive way about oral history. This book is designed primarily for historians and also for researchers with their feet in other disciplines and non-academic contexts who use oral history sources; for those who may already have experience of conducting interviews but who require an introduction to the interpretive approaches to analysis. This book does not provide a ‘how to’ guide to the practical issues concerned with carrying out oral history projects or interviews; it assumes readers will refer to the many excellent print and web-based resources designed for this purpose, some of which are listed in the guide to further reading at the end of the book. However, at the heart of this book is the belief that practice and analysis cannot be separated; that the process of interviewing cannot be disaggregated from the outcome (the oral history narrative and the interpretation of that narrative).

Some clarity is needed at this point in respect of the terminology to be used in this book. ‘Oral history’ refers to both the practice of conducting interviews and all the subsequent stages of transcription and interpretation. The ‘interviewer’ will also, for the sake of variety, be referred to as the ‘researcher’; likewise, the ‘interviewee’ may also be referred to as the respondent or narrator. The ‘interview’ refers to the process of engaging a living witness in an in-depth conversation about the past. The ‘recording’ refers to the aural or aural-visual product deriving from the interview whether it be on tape or in digital format. The ‘transcript’ is the written form of the recorded interview. Definitions of the various theoretical terms are to be found in the relevant chapters and in the Glossary.

Fact-finding and theory-bagging

Oral history has changed enormously in a few decades. The international, multidisciplinary, multi-vocal, confident and mature oral history movement of the twenty-first century is a distant relative of the post-Second World War oral history field which struggled to find legitimacy within hide-bound disciplinary traditions.³ In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s in the USA, the UK and Scandinavia in particular, oral history occupied a particular and circumscribed place within scholarly research. In America two early initiatives represented the two faces of oral history in that country. In the late 1930s, the New Deal Federal Writer’s Project (FWP; a project designed to give work to unemployed artists and writers during the Depression years) began to collect the life stories of ordinary Americans. The result was a comprehensive documenting, without the aid of tape-recorders, of the everyday circumstances of thousands of Americans. It has been described as ‘one of the most massive oral history projects ever undertaken’; more than 6,000 writers were employed at its peak and more than 10,000 men and women from all walks of life were interviewed.⁴ By contrast, the post-war Columbia University oral history project was initiated in 1948 by historian Allan Nevins with the aim of documenting with the aid of tape-recorders the memoirs of those who ‘contributed significantly to society or who were close affiliates of world leaders’, what might be called the ‘great men’ approach.⁵

Britain and the Nordic countries followed a different trajectory. The rediscovery of oral history in the 1950s and 1960s, following decades during which the oral source was shunned in favour of the written record, was informed in part by the European tradition of ethnology and folklore collection which had always privileged the spoken voice as a repository of tradition, and then by the emergence of social history and historical sociology which employed oral history as a means of rescuing the voices of the labouring people.⁶ By the 1980s, oral history had become the methodology of choice (and necessity) amongst scholars of the twentieth century seeking to uncover the experiences of a number of groups who had traditionally been disregarded by conventional histories: women, gays and lesbians, minority ethnic groups and the physically and learning disabled to name the most prominent.

These were important developments on both sides of the Atlantic, essentially marking the beginning of the oral history discipline we recognise today. But the early practitioners often worked on the margins of their respective academic disciplines or outside them altogether. Early oral historians were frequently famous figures. In the USA, the writer and broadcaster Studs Terkel took oral history to the masses via his radio programmes (The Studs Terkel Show ran for forty-five years from 1952 on WFMT in Chicago and interviewed countless celebrities) and books on subjects ranging from the Depression, the Second World War, working life and race relations which featured conversations with ordinary Americans.⁷ In Britain, one of the most influential oral history publications in those early years was Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, a portrait of East Anglian village life based on conversations with rural folk published in 1969. Blythe was a writer, not a historian, and he later admitted he was not at all familiar with the practice of what became known as oral history.⁸ Similarly, George Ewart Evans’s studies of English rural life, notably Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay (1956), were based on what he called ‘spoken history’; but Evans was a writer first and foremost, never a professional historian, and only later was he regarded as a founding father of British oral history.⁹

Moreover, in many countries, oral history has emerged from, and found a foothold in, disciplines and departments other than history. Indeed, the historical profession kept oral history at arm’s length for some time, not quite trusting it as a legitimate historical source. At the same time, historians were wary of its practitioners, many of whom were located outside the academy or whose political stance – often sympathetic to the left and working within social, labour history and later feminist history – made them uncomfortable bedfellows with the discipline’s gatekeepers. The combination of the political stance of oral history’s adherents and the uses to which oral history was put consigned it to a place on the edge of professional practice. In order to establish some kind of academic legitimacy at that time, oral history could be summed up in Ron Grele’s definition as ‘the interviewing of eye-witness participants in the events of the past for the purpose of historical reconstruction’.¹⁰ Oral history as ‘recovery history’, the practice of interviewing people to provide evidence about past events which could not be retrieved from conventional historical sources, usually written ones, or to uncover the hidden histories of individuals or groups which had gone unremarked upon in mainstream accounts, was the dominant trend within oral history practice in the 1970s and 1980s. Though this definition of oral history would now be regarded as somewhat limiting, the reconstructive agenda still remains a prime motivation (and a legitimate one at that) for many oral history research projects today.

Despite its narrow role, even the ‘recovery history’ mode of oral history was mistrusted by many historians and social scientists because it rested upon memory, and memory they regarded as unreliable. In an era when historical research was dominated by the document, oral history did not, in the main, produce data which could be verified and counted. It was not an objective, social-scientific methodology which could be rigorously tested. Thus cornered, pioneering oral historians went to great efforts to justify their practice to the critics. Verification of evidence obtained from oral interviews was one way of doing this, cross-checking with documentary sources in order to separate truth from fiction as well as setting the oral evidence in the wider context and checking for internal consistency in order that oral material could stand up to scrutiny. Oral historians working predominantly within a social-science framework were also concerned about the representative nature of their data, recommending the use of scientific sampling methods and making strenuous attempts to obtain a representative sample of interviewees. Respondents were given numbers to denote scientific tags, and an aura of pseudo-science pervaded much of what oral historians did.¹¹ Interestingly, Blythe’s Akenfield fell victim on both counts, criticised by non-historians for not containing sufficient ‘facts’ for readers to feel comfortable with what they were being told and even more harshly critiqued by historians from the social-science tradition for its ‘artistry’. The social historian Howard Newby, himself an expert on English rural life remarked: ‘If all oral historians were allowed such artistic licence, what then for oral history? More enjoyable, more pleasurable to read, perhaps, but certainly not history.’¹² And Paul Thompson, generally acknowledged as the father of British oral history, doubted the authenticity and reliability of the oral evidence Blythe cited, describing it as ‘less careful scholarship’, largely it seems because the author approached his material in a literary and creative fashion rather than adhering to the rules of oral history practice as they were being laid down at that time.¹³ Unless the sheen of social science was added to oral history practice, including the careful and accurate transcription of interviews and faithful representation of the spoken voice, then the method was depicted as literary and creative rather than as historical and reliable.

The infighting and criticisms of oral history’s validity and reliability, and concerns about the representativeness of interview subjects, are still to be heard today. But rather than trying to meet the critics on the same ground (by testing and validating and recruiting huge samples of respondents), oral history researchers since the 1980s have exuded much more confidence in what they do. They feel sure of the distinctive elements of their practice, acknowledging that oral history is a subjective methodology, celebrating its orality, recognising that memory stories are contingent and often fluid, and in short arguing that oral sources must be judged differently from conventional documentary materials, but that this in no way detracts from their veracity and utility.¹⁴ In the process, oral historians have become both intuit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the second edition: new directions in oral history
• 1 Introduction: turning practice into theory
• 2 The peculiarities of oral history
• 3 Self
• 4 Subjectivity and intersubjectivity
• 5 Memory
• 6 Narrative
• 7 Performance
• 8 Power and empowerment
• 9 Trauma and ethics
• Glossary of terms and concepts
• Notes
• Guide to further reading
• Index