Oral history in its most basic terms is best defined as ‘the
interviewing of eyewitness participants in events of the past for the purposes
of historical reconstruction’.¹ The academic attitude towards the
potential of the practice has been rather inconsistent across time; being met
with euphoria and disdain amongst historians and societies of different
generations. Oral history has also been adopted and developed at different
times and in different ways globally, resulting in ‘oral history’ having
multiple purposes and uses internationally. This discussion will focus
primarily on changing attitudes of North American and European oral historians
due to the fact that they are the places where academic history is most firmly
established and has been most dynamic.
In order to provide an historical structure to the changing
attitudes of historians towards oral history this discussion will be primarily
based around Thomson’s historical narrative, the ‘Four paradigm Transformations
in Oral History’. The narrative roughly divides the modern progression of oral
history into four periods of development; ‘Oral History and People's History’, ‘Post-Positivist
Approaches to Memory and Subjectivity’, ‘The Subjectivity of Oral History
Relationships’ and ‘The Digital Revolution in Oral History’.² However Thomson does admit that there is a considerable
amount of overlap between these developments and that such transformations are
generally not met with the universal acceptance of historians.³ This narrative will also include other periods and
perspectives such as the initially hostile academic attitude towards oral
history during the nineteenth-century.
Oral accounts were the most common source of knowledge for
ancient scholars like Herodotus, which is why Thompson expresses the notion
that, ‘Oral history is as old as history itself.’⁴ However during the
nineteenth-century, at a time when history was establishing itself as a
distinct academic subject, written sources became the source for history due to the attitude of scholars like Ranke
who deemed them as the most reliable evidence for recreating the past. However
oral sources had not been eradicated in scholarship; during the 1920s and 1930s
anthropologists and sociologists continued to collect oral material as evidence
for their publications.⁵ Several realised that there was potential in utilising oral history,
with sociologists like Couch compiling oral testimonies from the ‘Federal
Writers Project’ into his 1939 publication These
Are our Lives.⁶
Thompson states that oral
history was rediscovered as a method of history in 1948 by Nevin of Columbia
University who founded the ‘Oral History Association’. Nevin and others used
interviews in order to collect the memories of significant American
personalities like retired politicians who had not written autobiographies, so
essentially it was seen as a means of filling gaps in the history of American
elites. However things like Columbia’s ‘great man’ project received public
recognition from numerous politicians who wanted to create biographies and from
multiple nationwide institutions willing to fund such projects. The shift
towards being viewed as a means of widening the horizons of histories of
societies, identities and minorities was to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s.⁷
Attitudes towards the whole historical approach were changing
in the 1960s and 1970s, with the scientific method in decline and the recent ascent
of ‘history from below’ which was created by New Left social historians.⁸ Paul Thompson was one such socialist and he helped introduce
the oral history method to ‘history from below’.⁹ Thompson became an unintentional practitioner of oral history during his
research for The Edwardians which
sought to understand what Edwardian society’s view was to the change going on
around it. Thompson found that while
historical documentation of government documents, statistics and
autobiographies provided the perspective of society’s elites, there was a lack
of documentation offering the perspective of ordinary people. He therefore
conducted interviews with survivors of the period who came from all regions and
social backgrounds in order to represent a more complete account of how
Edwardian society had perceived the change that was going on around it.¹⁰ Thompson
saw there was tremendous potential in the method, encouraging others to use
interviewing projects to attain evidence, ‘Oral historians can think now as if
they themselves were publishers; imagine what evidence is needed, seek it out
and capture it.’¹¹ Historians were beginning to realise that
their evidence did not necessarily have to be written.
As well as widening the
horizons of historical research Thompson feels that oral history does have
significant social possibilities:
‘It
provides a more realistic and fair reconstruction of the past, a challenge to
the established account. In so doing, oral history has radical implications for
the social message of history as a whole.’¹²
It is true that while oral history has had only a limited
amount of success in shaping mainstream national politics, it has served as a
useful means for advocates to conduct projects centred on communities and
marginalised groups as a means of empowering them.¹³ The enthusiastic historical activism that emerged during the
1960s and 1970s was not only as a result of changing attitudes but also due to
the widespread availability of the tape-recorder which enabled more academics
and non-academics to conduct their own oral history projects.¹⁴ The Modern
Women’s Movement realised that the majority of feelings, thoughts and experiences
of women in the past were kept private which meant they were unrecorded and
thus silenced. By recording and publishing women’s memories documents have been
created which can be used by feminist historians to challenge male dominated historical
narratives by providing the women’s perspective.¹⁵ Sangster states
that this was indeed the feminist agenda for the 1960s, ‘As feminists, we hoped
to use oral history to empower women by creating revised history ‘for women’,
emerging from the actual lived experience of women.’¹⁶
Roberts for example was able to create a historical narrative of working-class
women’s from oral testimonies of three Lancashire communities in order to
account for their past experiences and views. Her study came to the conclusion
that women were generally the dominant domestic figure due to their control
over things like the family budget and due to women focusing on the needs of
their families they had, ‘a very low level of self-awareness.’¹⁷ The
attitude that oral history should be used for public, social and political
discourses is still one that is followed, particularly in countries where new
public memories and histories are encouraged like in post-Apartheid South
Africa and the former Eastern Bloc nations.¹⁸ Histories based on the testimonies of
people within communities have also proved very accommodating to oral history
projects. Projects such as these became quite popular in the 1970s and 1980s as
a means of accounting for the relationship between the past and present within
communities which had undergone significant social transformations. The Durham Strong Words Collective is an
example of this, which contains an array of testimonies from different
generations of a former mining town which try to distinguish what it was like
in the past compared to the present.¹⁹ This kind of approach is again not
only exclusive to communities above the Brandt line but also to places like the
village of Ijzim in Palestine, where historian Ze’ev used Israeli army
documents to find out what happened to the village in the 1948 war, accompanied
by testimonies from the surviving villagers themselves in order to understand
their inner logic during a time of crisis.²⁰ The essential attitude that emerged
at this time amongst historians and members of the public was that oral history
can help any group find a voice in history.
Oral sources were soon accused by various historians of being
unreliable because the facts within them could be faulty due to factors like
the narrator’s subjectivity and memory.²¹ Some criticisms have been effectively
neutralised; Thompson points out that nearly all sources are imbued with some
level of subjectivity due to the fact their authors are people which is why he
concludes that, ‘neither oral nor written evidence can be said to be generally
superior: it depends on the context.’²² However other criticisms have been
justifiable and have usually come from oral historians. Frisch in his analysis
of Terkel’s Hard Times notes how so
many reviews of it seem to get the impression that these individual testimonies
are not retrospective memories but the past ‘like it was’. Frisch was
frustrated at such uncritical responses to oral history, stating that so many people, ‘have responded
so intuitively to recent work within oral history that they have not generally
stopped to think about what it is, on levels beyond the obvious, that makes it
worth pursuing.’²³It is criticisms such as these that led to
the change in attitude towards the purpose of studying oral history.
Several historians felt that while oral history had become
popular with the wider public it was not gaining the respect of the academic
community due to its lack of theoretical basis.²⁴ There were numerous historians in
the 1970s and 1980s who proposed ways of critically analysing their oral
materials as a means of creating theories about oral history in order to make
it a distinctive method of history. Ideas from historians such as these began
to change the attitude towards the purpose of oral history, especially after
the conference of oral historians at the University of Essex in 1979 in which
new theories reached the attention of academic communities on both sides of the
Atlantic.²⁵
The study of memory and subjectivity and how each shapes the
sources became essential features of oral history’s new theoretical approach.
Portelli understood that such approaches harnessed oral history’s best and most
distinctive features, ‘The
first thing that makes oral history different, therefore, is that it tells us
less about events than about their meanings.’⁶⁷ Passerini in her study of Turin’s
working-class under fascism, realised that silences can tell historians so much
about the subjectivity of those remembering. The answers she received from
interviewees tended to of little historical relevance due to their reticence
about the period between 1925 and 1941; however the recollection of the decline
of fascism is clearer suggesting that they picked memories selectively for
their testimonies. Passerini interprets that, ‘this self-censorship is evidence
of a scar, a violent annihilation of many years in human lives, a profound
wound in daily experience.’²⁷ It is evident that when testimonies
hide information this can be used as evidence to show how such topics were
perceived by the informant.
There have also been theories constructed as to how dominant
public memories have impacted on societies’ sense of the past, even on the
private eyewitness memories.²⁸ Thomson in his study of the memories
of surviving Anzacs realised that private memories were actually quite hard to
maintain without being influenced by the dominant public memories, stating
that, ‘the apparent private process of composing safe memories is in fact very
public.’²⁹ He found that testimonies like that of Fred Farrell
constructed their narratives about why they enlisted around selective memories
which accommodated retrospective views, which in his case was the popular
socialist memory of the war. For instance he clearly recollects and stresses
the political reasons for enlisting; that he was a naive, patriot, who refused
to listen to people who said he should not fight a European war for the
national elites. His narrative marginalises other non-political motivations
such as that he was a young boy who wanted adventure away from the tedium of
farm life.³⁰ Thomson says the purpose of this kind of approach is not
just about attaining historical evidence but also, ‘to understand the
subjective meanings of these events for participants, at the time and over the
years.’³¹ Oral historians felt it was important to try to understand
their narrator’s ideologies and background because such things could help the
historian understand why they had constructed their testimonies in the way they
did, as Sangster puts it, ‘Cultural values shape our very ordering and
prioritising of events, indeed our notions of what is myth, fact and fiction.’³²
The increasing tendency for academic subjects to adopt
inter-disciplinary approaches in the 1980s encouraged more sophisticated
theorising within oral history.³³ Post-structuralist writing about the
power of language and representation excited some oral historians who saw it as
a possible way of deconstructing texts to see the real meaning behind them. Etter-Lewis
says examining language is useful as it is ‘the invisible force that shapes
oral texts and gives meanings to historical events.’³⁴ Portelli finds from experience certain linguistic features
do tend to suggest certain things, such as dialect being a sign of personal
involvement by the informant, while formal language is usually a sign of
estrangement from an issue.³⁵ The use of theories has resulted in
a backlash from people who want oral history to serve some kind of public
utility like the Popular Memory Group who felt that left-wing academics who
spend too much time theorising are left isolated from public opinion and
therefore unable to write histories which will help build socialist popular
memories.³⁶ However other oral historians with wider-social objectives
do realise that theories do have their place as long as they do not distract
from the main purpose. Sangster believes that linguistic theories can enhance
historians’ understanding of oral sources but feels that, ‘Without a firm
grounding of oral narrative in their material and social context, and a probing
analysis of the relation between the two, insights on narrative form and on
representation may remain unconnected to any useful critique of oppression and
inequality.’³⁷
‘Oral sources tell us not just what people did, but what they
wanted to do, what they believed they were doing and what they think they did.’
The attitude of these theorists was that while oral sources may not be reliable
sources of reality there will always be subjective truths within memories that
can be detected and analysed for the purpose of understanding the reason for
the content of an interviewee’s testimony, which other sources struggle to do
due to the distance between the historian and the author of their source.³⁸
A different criticism emerged in the 1980s that the
subjectivity of the interviewer was actually having an impact on constructing
oral sources.³⁹ However several historians had already acknowledged this as
a consequence of the interviewing and interpretative process. Grele stated in
the 1970s that, ‘oral history interviews are constructed, for better or for
worse, by the active intervention of the historian. They are a collective creation
and inevitably carry within themselves, pre-existent historical ordering,
selection and interpretation.’⁴⁰
A historian will usually construct a contextualised
perspective of the subject they want to interview the informant about from
prior research which will also be used as part of the historical narrative they
will write. This can give their perspective of the subject direction which not
only affects their overall interpretation but also the informants and questions
they choose to construct their oral source with.⁴¹ Friedhander recognised that in the
process of creating a ‘critical dialogue’ of the subject with his informant
that he was actively participating in the construction of the narrative, ‘Kord
and I were continually shaping and reshaping historical concepts to fit the
emerging pattern of Local 229, attacking the history from various angles.’
However instead of saying this was a problem he states that, ‘The elaboration
of a number of hypotheses gave a critical focus to his effort to recall.’⁴² However in other cases it can lead to distortion, for
example Sangster realised that a male trade union official she was interviewing
was exaggerating his role in the promoting of women’s rights within the union.
Sangster felt that he made these claims because he knew that she was a feminist
and was therefore trying to create a narrative he thought she would like.⁴³ The real change in attitude here is not that the practice
needs to be reformed but that it must be recognised as an inevitable part of
the practice. Yow believes that historians should always try to analyse the
participation of both interviewer and interviewee in order to see how much each
of them shapes the process.⁴⁴
The worldwide use of computers and the internet has changed
the way people behave, work and communicate. Such things also offer the
possibility of change towards how oral history can be used. Historians have
been critical of the dominance of transcripts in oral history, with audio and
visual recordings of interviews rarely being stored in archives which removes
things worth analysing such as volume, tone and physical gestures.⁴⁵ Frisch feels that the ease at which digital videos and audio
recordings can be made, stored and accessed will allow them to usurp
transcripts.⁴⁶ Some have questioned the possibilities offered up by the
digital revolution, Grele feels that access to such material will not be equal
but will be controlled by the corporations who own the rights to them.⁴⁷ Others have considered the moral implications that anybody
can use an oral source without the narrators being aware of it, which may make
it easier to distort.⁴⁸ Nonetheless Facebook, Youtube and Wikipedia
are all new mediums which have changed the ways in which identities are
constructed, knowledge is learnt and people communicate, which Thomson feels is
worth attention in order to see what other changes it brings in people’s
consciousness and worldview.⁴⁹ Grele thinks however that this
digital revolution should serve primarily as a subsection of a study into globalization
which is also having a profound impact on the world and leads to greater
possibilities in oral histories that construct a more global perspective.⁵⁰ It is certain however that as society changes the
possibilities for topics for oral historians to analyse expands.
The attitude historians have had towards oral history has
fluctuated due to their changing desires for a more distinctive academic
practice and one that reaches out to non-academic authors and audiences. Oral
history was recovered as an historical method because, ‘It can be used to
change the focus of history itself and open up new areas of inquiry.’⁵¹ Documents cannot account for all information which in why
oral sources are sometimes necessary to fill the gaps or to build a history for
topics that lack a documented one. This information does not have to be
evidence of real facts but it can expose facts about the consciousness of
eyewitnesses which is especially important for historians who want to find out
what the past meant to people. Since the 1960s oral history has been able to
reach the public either by allowing people to build up a narrative of the past
in their own words or by being of use in public representations of the past.
Other historians are determined to critically analyse these memories to see why
a narrators structure their testimonies as they do. Oral historians have also
had to acknowledge their own role in constructing these sources which is
perceived as a virtue and fault of the method. Contemporary oral historians are
realising the enhanced possibility of being able to analyse the audio-visual
sources thanks to the digital revolution which is also changing the way in
which future memories will recall the present.
The attitude of oral historians has been that the subjectivity within
their sources should be embraced which had previously resulted in it being
shunned. Oral sources are resources of subjectivity which account for the human
perspective in history and its processes.
Endnotes
1. R. Grele, 'Directions for Oral
History in the United States', in Oral
History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. Dunaway, D.K., and Baum, W.K.,
(2nd edn, 1996), p.63
2. A. Thomson, ‘Four Paradigm
Transformations in Oral History’, The
Oral History Review, 34 (California, 2006), p.50
3. A. Thomson, 'Response', The Oral History Review, 34 (California,
2007), p.125
4. P. Thompson, The Voice of the Past (2nd edn, Oxford, 1988), p.22
5. J. Tosh, The Pursuit of History (3rd edn, London, 1999), p.173
6. Thompson, Voice, pp.50-59
7. Ibid., p.59
8. Tosh, Pursuit, p.193
9. R. Perks and A. Thomson (ed.) The Oral History Reader (London, 1998),
p.1
10. P. Thompson, The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (London, 1975),
XIV-XV
11. Thompson, Voices, p.5
12. Ibid., p.6
13. Thomson, ‘Transformations’, p.50
14. Thomson, ‘Response’, p.125
15. G. Dawson, and R. Johnson, 'Popular
memory: Theory, politics, method', in The
Oral History Reader, ed. Perks, R., and Thomson, A., (London, 1998), p.77
16. J. Sangster, ‘Telling our stories:
feminist debates and the use of oral history’, in The Oral History Reader, ed. Perks, R., and Thomson, A., (London,
1998), p.92.
17. E. Roberts, A Woman’s Place: An Oral
History of Working-Class Women, 1890-1940 (Oxford, 1984), p.203
18. Thomson, ‘Transformation’, P.60
19. Dawson and Johnson, ‘Popular Memory’,
p.82
20. E.B. Ze'ev, ‘The Palestinian Village
of Ijzim during the 1948 War: Forming an Anthropological History Through
Villagers Accounts and Army Documents’, History
and Anthropology, 13 (2002), pp.22-25
21. A. Thomson, ‘Making the Most of
Memories: The Empirical and Subjective Value of Oral History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society,
9 (1999), p.292
22. Thompson, Voices, p.104-110
23. M. Frisch, ‘Oral history and Hard Times: a review essay’, in The Oral History Reader, ed. Perks, R.,
and Thomson, A., (London, 1998), pp.29-32
24. R. Grele, ‘Movement without aim:
methodological and theoretical problems in oral history’, in The Oral History Reader, ed. Perks, R.,
and Thomson, A., (London, 1998), pp.39
25. A. Thomson, ‘Making the Most of
Memories: The Empirical and Subjective Value of Oral History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society,
9 (1999), p.293
26. A. Portelli, ‘What make oral history
different’ in The Oral History Reader,
ed. Perks, R., and Thomson, A., (London, 1998), p.67
27. L. Passerini, 'Work ideology and
consensus under Italian fascism', in The
Oral History Reader, ed. Perks, R., and Thomson, A., (London, 1998),
pp.57-60
28. Dawson and Johnson, ‘Popular Memory’,
p.76
29. A. Thomson, 'Anzac memories: putting
popular memory theory into practice', in The
Oral History Reader, ed. Perks, R., and Thomson, A., (London, 1998),
pp.300-310.
30. Thomson, ‘Most Memories’, pp.297-301
31. Ibid., p.301
32. Sangster, ‘Telling’, p.89
33. A. Thomson, ‘Fifty Years On: An
International Perspective on Oral History’, Journal
of American History, 85 (1998), p.587
34. G. Etter-Lewis, 'Black women's life
stories: reclaiming self in narrative texts', in Women's Words: the Feminist Practice of Oral History, ed. Gluck, S., and Patai, D., (New
York,1991), p.44
35. Portelli, ‘Oral History Different’,
p.67
36. Dawson and Johnson, ‘Popular Memory’,
pp.80-81
37. Sangster, ‘Telling’, p.97
38. Portelli, ‘Oral History Different’,
pp.67-8
39. Thomson, ‘Transformations’, p.61
40. Grele, ‘Without aim’, p.43
41. Ibid., pp.40-44
42. P. Friedlander, 'Theory, method and
oral history', in The Oral History Reader,
ed. Perks, R., and Thomson, A., (London, 1998), pp.310-316
43. Sangster, ‘Telling’, p.89
44. V. Yow, '"Do I Like Them Too
Much?" Effects of the Oral History Interview on the Interviewer and
Vice-Versa', Oral History Review, 24
(California, 1997), p.79
45. Portelli, ‘Oral History Different’,
pp.64-5
46. M. Frisch, 'Towards a
Post-Documentary Sensibility: Theoretical and Political Implications of New
Information Technologies in Oral History’ in The Oral History Reader, ed. Perks, R., and Thomson, A., (2nd
edn, London, 2006), pp.102-114.
47. R. Grele, 'Commentary', The Oral History Review, 34 (California,
2007), p.123.
48. Thomson, ‘Transformations’, pp.69-70
49. A. Thomson, 'Response', The Oral History Review, 34 (California,
2007), p.127.
50. Grele, ‘Commentary’, pp.122-123
51. Thompson, Voice, p.2
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