Oral History intrigues me

  Because of this class I decided that I would do a little more reading about oral history....on thing I read was The Oral Reader... here are some interesting facts I drew from the reading..

Introduction (Perks, R. & Thomson, A.)

Definitio of Oral History: "The interviewing of eye-witness participants in the events of the past for the purposes of historical reconstruction". For some practitioners however, OH has not just been about making histories, but also to empower individuals or social groups through the process of remembering and reinterpreting the past, with an emphasis on the value of process as much as historical product. (Very much what we are researching and trying to recommend).

OH can 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. (Pg 2).

Chapter 2 - The Voices of the Past (Paul Thompson)

"All history depends ultimately upon its social purpose." (Pg 21). Through history, everyday people seek to understand the upheavals and changes which they experience in their own lives such as wars, social transformations etc. Oral history however is not necessarily an instrument for change; it depends upon the spirit in which it is used.  

Oral history is limited by the number of interviews, the people interviewd, and also those who read the interviews. The group interviewed rarely fully represent the community. Stories heard are mainly those of middle-class background. Yet history should not merely comfort; it should provide a challenge, and understanding which helps towards change. A history is reuqired which leads to action: not to confirm, but to change the world (pg 27).

"The relationship between history and the community should not be one-sided in either direction: but rather a series of exchanges, a dialectic, between information and interpretation, between educationists and their localities, between classes and generations. There will be room for many kinds of oral history and it will have many different social consequences. But at bottom they are all related". "Oral history offers a challenge to the accepted myths of history, to the authoritarian judgement inherent in its tradition. It provides a means for radical transformation of the social meaning of history" (Pg 28).

Chapter 3 - Oral History and Hard Times (Michael Frisch)

Reading oral history depends, more than in most historical writing, on the deeper assumptions one has about the nature of the evidence and the form. (this goes back to our intial theme of 'truth'). (pg 31).

In Western society, where culture is so penetrated by literacy, communication, and self-consciousness as to make such notions of oral tradition of dubious application, oral history has not gone much beyond the traditional focus of historical work. Most of us therefore assumes that OH does one of two things: 1) functions as a source of historical information and insights, to be used in traditional ways in the formulaiton of historical generalizations and narratives; 2) a way of bypassing historical interpretation itself, avoiding all the attendant elitist and contextual dangers, to provide a way to communicate with the past more directly, to be presented with a purer image of direct experience. (pg 32).

OH is able to penetrate questions that most other fields cannot: what happens to experience on the way to becoming memory? what happens to experience 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?

Chapter 6 - What Makes Oral History Difference (Alessandro Portelli)

Oral history as narrative - Oral history interviews result in narratives in which the boundary between what taks place outside the narrator and what happens inside, between what concerns the individual and what concerns the group, become more elusive than in established written genres, so that personal 'truth' may conincide with shared 'imagination'. (pg 66).

Oral history is different from other tellings in that it tells us less about events than about their meaning. It tells us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did. Oral sources provide much about psychological costs of events rather than material costs. The organisation of the narrative reveals a lot about the speakers' relationships to their history. (pg 67).

It is important to note that memory is not a passive depository of facts, but an active process of creation of meanings. Changes in memory reveal the nearrators' effort to make sense of the past and to give a form to their lives, and set the interview and the narrative in their historical context. (pg 69).

The documents of OH are always the result of a relationship, of a shared project in which both the interviewer and the interviewee are involved together, if not necessarily in harmony. (pg 70).

Chapter 7 - Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method (Popular Memory Group: Richard Johnson & Graham Dawson)

There are two ways in which a sense of past is produced; throgh public representation, and private memory. With public presentation, what is presented is the dominant memory, illustrating the power and pervasiveness of historical representations, their connections with dominant instutions and the part they play in winning consent and building alliances in the processes of formal politics. However, all these representations are open to contestation. Truth is not the criteria for dominant memory, but rather representations that are most ideological , most obviously conforming to the flattened stereotypes of myth. To make a dominant memory dominant, it has sometimes been achieved by direct control such as censorship, and by a violent recasting or obliteration of whole feilds of public history. Today the more common sites are formal political debates an public media. This may make several monographs seem insignificant in comparison. Another way to see social production of memory is in everyday life through individual narratives and comparisons. This is a history under extreme pressures and privations, and is held to the level of private remembrance which is often silenced and not offered the occasion to speak. OH aims to recover these stories through popular autobiography and community-based publishing. But public representations and private memories are linked and neither can be studied alone. Private memories cannot be readily unscrambled from the efforts of dominant historical discourses. They are relational. (pg 76-78).

Popular memory is concerned with 2 sets of relations: 1) between dominant memory and oppositional form across the whole public field, 2) between public discourses in their contemporary state of play and the more privatised sense of the past which is generated within a lived culture.

Difficulties blocking popular memory from impacting on politics:

1. epistemological - historical objects of study are defined in such a way that it blocks political progress. Not seen as related or relevant to each other.
2. the problem with individual testimony , narraitve or autobiography - not representative, not objective, cannot be a basis for political decisions.
3. object of history is identified as the past - no longer relevant, must look to the future.
4. social relational difficulties - the power the oral historian has in reproducing and interpreting the story - the academic power. The researcher is recognised and rewarded rather than the individual narrator of his/her story. The narrator is left untouched and unchanged, not involved yet having given up a part of him/herself.