Collaborative Oral History in a Correctional Setting: Promise and Pitfalls

This article examines the challenges of collaborative oral historyresearch. Collaborative oral history—sometimes called"reciprocal ethnography"—involves the process of engagingour interviewees in the analysis of the interviews we generateand/or the creation of any products drawn from those interviews.The article contrasts the author's earlier experience on anoral history/photographic book with a more recent collaborationon an oral history and performance project in a correctionalinstitution. The author focuses on the difficulties of "sharingauthority" in collaborative research within a correctional setting,raising issues about the promise and pitfalls of collaborativeoral history research more generally.     

Cultural memory, gender and age: young Latvian women's narrative memories of war-time Europe, 1944–1947

This paper examines the war-time experiences of dislocation and loss, as well as the transition to independent adulthood, of 25 Latvian women who came to Britain as European Volunteer Workers after the end of the Second World War. Despite the recent work in cultural history exploring memories of wartime dislocation and the growing use of oral narratives in this exploration, relatively little is known about the 1944 migration from the Baltic States to the UK or about the particular experiences of young women in this movement. This paper begins to address this forgotten history through interviews with now-elderly women living in Britain in the context of recent debates about cultural memory and forgetting.     

Re-imagining the kitchen as a site of memory

Extending the focus of previous geographical research on public spaces of remembering, this paper demonstrates the ways in which memory work also takes place in private domestic spaces. The paper draws on a combination of life history and ethnographic research undertaken in Northern England, examining kitchens as a specific lieu de mémoire, showing how they serve as places where valued items are displayed and material artefacts are curated as part of the construction and reproduction of personal memories and familial identities. Using ethnographic and visual evidence from two case study households, the paper demonstrates the role of material artefacts in curating the past and materialising memory. Additionally, life history interviews with older women reveal narratives of everyday cooking practices which seemingly contradict popular discourses of the past, questioning conventional ideas about the distorted nature of nostalgia. In combination, our data represent complex narratives in which the past can be seen as infusing the present, and where present-day concerns are revealed as actively shaping public discourses which favour a return to an idealised past, which may have little bearing on people’s actual lived experience.     

Oral History and Public Memories

How does oral history, based as it is on individual memory,affect beliefs about the history of a whole community? Is oralhistory compelling enough to influence an interpretation ofa community's history when powerful groups insist on a differentinterpretation? Hamilton and Shopes have chosen a collectionof articles that present a range of perspectives, a diversityof problems, and a variety of specific sites in which to testanswers to these questions. Oral history interviews often turnup surprises, and this book is full of surprises. In the first section, David Neufield begins his article, "ParksCanada, the Commemoration of Canada, and the Northern AboriginalOral     

“Killing time” in rural Ireland,c.1881–2013

This article explores the way in which episodes that took place during the “long” land war of 1879–1909 have been remembered or forgotten in Craughwell, Co. Galway, between 1881 and 2013. By exploring those episodes and individuals that are remembered locally in monuments, published oral histories and in oral histories conducted by the author, this article explores the complex patterns of remembering in rural Irish communities. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of this study for how we interpret oral histories, and on how a culture of remembering and not remembering might have affected twentieth-century Irish society.     

MPs on the Subject of STEMM: What Can Oral History Tell Us?*

A growing collection of archived oral history interviews with former MPs offers historians new opportunities to study the influences that have directed MPs’ routes into elected office and their behaviour in the house of commons. This article draws on evidence in the interviews to consider the extent to which an MP's background in science, technology, engineering, maths, and medicine (so-called STEMM subjects) has contributed to his or her activity as a parliamentarian. When concerns are raised about the House's capacity to effectively debate and scrutinise legislation concerning STEMM matters, those concerns are often accompanied by calls for more MPs with a STEMM background. Listening to these oral history interviews to hear what individual MPs say about their connections with STEMM – whether before, during, or after their time in the Commons – provides an insight into the relevance of having a STEMM background as an MP and offers explanations as to why MPs with a STEMM background are in a minority in the House. As such, this examination of historical material contributes to the ongoing debate about the role of STEMM experts in parliament while demonstrating the value of consulting archived oral history interviews when researching 20th-century parliamentary history.     

Child migrants and deportees from Poland and Ukraine after the Second World War: experience and memory

This article aims to compare the biographical experiences and individual memories of child deportees and migrants from Eastern Europe. The analysis is based on a field study of over 100 biographical interviews in two local communities situated in the borderland regions which were particularly exposed to post-war displacement, resettlement and population exchange: Ukrainian Galicia and Western Poland. The author claims that although the history of these two distant communities was totally different, contemporary memory of being a refugee/deportee/forced migrant, losing one's home/homeland and watching the deportation of the previous inhabitants of one's new place of residence bear many similarities. While analysing autobiographical narratives, I attempt to find common threads and topics generated by their experiences as children, as well as explain the differences by exploring the social context of individual memory, with a special accent on post-war socialisation and the Polish and Ukrainian memory culture. The author also strives to show how and why the children's memories differ from those of their parents.     

Trajectories of Memory: Documentary Film and the Transmission of Testimony

The author argues that in the burgeoning new literature about social memory anthropologists have not yet contributed all that they might. In particular, little has been written from an anthropological point of view about memory and film. The article seeks to examine the possible roles of documentary film in memory transmission. During the twentieth century, film and video became increasingly important vehicles of memory, while the digital revolution has made video such a pervasive medium in the new century that it will become more and more vital as a source of historical evidence and reflection. While the evidence presented by visually recorded interviews certainly requires critical evaluation, there is no reason to suppose that recorded interviews are any less reliable than texts; they may in fact offer clues that a text cannot. Some of the most interesting films of memory are the work of independent filmmakers engaged in a courageous personal quest to break officially imposed silences. The article examines the potential of film to preserve memories as trace—that is, as a form of historical evidence; as event—testifying itself being a performative act which generates its own meanings and demands a dialogical engagement with/by an audience; and as trajectory—for individual memories must be transmitted in order to become social. As they are launched into the flow of collective memory, they have a chance to endure over time, multiplying available perspectives on the past. Films of memory are thus part of the struggle against the forgetting of past injustices, and ultimately have the potential to contribute to shifts in our interpretations of history.     

Method and Memory in the Midwestern "Lincoln Inquiry": Oral Testimony and Abraham Lincoln Studies, 1865 1938

This article narrates the role of oral testimony in the fieldof Abraham Lincoln studies from 1865 through the 1930s. Collectedin the form of letters, affidavits, and face-to-face interviews,this mounting body of "eyewitness evidence" dominated the discoursefor two generations and reflective, public practice culminatedin the organization of a "Lincoln Inquiry" in the Midwest duringthe 1920s and 1930s. For a time, practitioners successfullydefended themselves against increasing positivist assaults onthe credibility of oral testimony. Their interests and effortsresonate with later oral history practice and theory about method,authorship, performance, and memory, and their story highlightsthe contingency inherent in the development of oral historicalpractice in America.     

A People's History of Industrial Philadelphia: Reflections on Community Oral History Projects and the Uses of the Past

Abstract: In this article the author reflects on three community oralhistory projects he conducted in Philadelphia between 1978 and1984. Brief histories of these projects are used as an opportunityfor reflections on urban folk history, and some of the forcesand often unacknowledged "purposes" of the oral historian thatshape interviews and the history that emerges from them.     

Women's International Thought in the Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Academy: Autobiographical Reflection,Oral History and Scholarly Habitus

Methodologies of textual and linguistic analysis have long held sway in Anglo-American practices of intellectual history. Such approaches tend to decouple the ideas being traced from the human subject, or scholar, producing the thought. Taking the lead from the rich theorising work done in feminist, gender, race and cultural histories, this article asks what changes in our understanding of intellectual histories of international thought when we connect the lived and bodily realities of the human subjects producing the ideas to the ideas themselves. In so doing, the article makes a case for the importance of fleshing out what the author calls ‘scholarly habitus’ and suggests the potential utility of oral history as a methodology for reconstructing ‘scholarly habitus’. The article will draw upon an oral history archive comprised of twenty interviews conducted with senior women International Relations scholars from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom to flesh out this argument. The article argues that oral history, as a medium for autobiographical practice, can reveal aspects of how gender, race and class shaped the scholarly practice and career trajectories of these women, as well as shed light on the historical dynamics of the discipline of International Relations as a whole.     

Talk Back: Sex Workers in the Maritimes

Gayle MacDonald (a sociologist) and Leslie-Ann Jeffrey (associateprofessor of history and politics) interviewed sixty sex workersin three cities in the Maritimes region of Canada: Halifax,Saint John, and Moncton, as well as some police, health, andcommunity workers and politicians. This book presents in-depthextracts of those interviews, with a commentary drawing on criticalpolitical analysis. It is not an oral history book per se. Butit skillfully blends these oral sources with a thorough critiqueof a range of good sex work literature. In common with mostother sex work oral history, the authors take an explicit andacknowledged stance that draws on the insights of sex radicalismand pro-rights feminism,     

口碑史料厘定

口碑史料是史料的四大类型之一。现代概念上的口碑史学在中国尚未真正建立起来 ,史学界对口碑史料的认识相当模糊。为纠谬补苴 ,使口碑史料与其他类型的史料彻底区别开来 ,笔者主张把口碑史料定义为 :由历史研究者亲自采访得来的、仅供自己使用的口耳相传的史料。它应包括口述回忆、口头传说和专用口语三部分。     

Displacement,memory and home(less) identities: Turkish Cypriot women’s narratives

Abstract

This study is an analysis of the narratives of Turkish Cypriot women in the north of Cyprus who were displaced during the ethnic conflict between the 1950s and 1974. We have conducted 21 interviews with Turkish Cypriot women who were living in different parts of Northern Cyprus. We used oral history, both as a method and as an epistemological stance to re-phrase the near past of Cyprus and the Cyprus issue from the perspective of gender/women’s studies. The study follows the traces of modernity, patriarchy, and nationalism in women’s narratives, about the place, home, belonging and homelessness. The narratives describe Turkish Cypriot women’s experiences of being a woman in conflict and displacement (‘göçmen olmak’ in daily talk in Turkish) making a home out of a house and undertaking daily routines for their families. The study also reveals that ethnic conflict and displacement have empowered women to a certain degree.     

Documenting Cultural and Historical Memory: Oral History in the National Park Service

"Documenting Cultural and Historical Memory: Oral History inthe National Park Service" provides an overview and assessmentof the current state of oral history projects and programs withinthe National Park Service. Oral history has long been a particularlyvaluable resource and tool for the Park Service in preservingcultural and historical memory. Its rangers, interpreters, historians,archaeologists, ethnographers, and cultural landscape specialistsuse oral history to document the history of individual parks,as well as the events and people the parks commemorate. Theyuse oral history to create interpretive exhibits, movies, andvideos and to record perspectives on major events, figures,and movements. The Service initiates and manages a large numberof unique and significant oral history projects and programs. However, too often the value of its oral history projects andcollections has been diminished because of funding shortages,poor equipment, insufficient training, inadequate preservationmeasures, or other problems.     

‘The rainha is the boss!’: On Masculinities,Time and Precolonial Women of Authority in Northern Mozambique

This article focuses on the oral historical narratives about precolonial women of authority (or rainhas in Portuguese) to explore the deeper history of gendered power in northern Mozambique. History-telling is a gendered practice, and nowadays male elders are usually the ones most knowledgeable in these narratives. Moreover, telling these tales - which in interview situations involves personal interpretations and comments - the men also story gendered temporal worlds. This article looks more closely at two seemingly clashing (and incompatible) storylines that emerge in the oral history material. One tells of women's spiritual-political power in the Yaawo chieftaincies in precolonial times, while the other tells a narrative of masculinised power and woman's subordinate position in relation to male leaders. The article focus's especially on how the male narrators talk about masculinity and how different models of masculinity in turn shape the historical narratives they tell. As the author's analysis demonstrates, these models have different temporal origins; yet they intertwine in present time-space, interacting also with newer notions (e.g. the ‘new man’ of the socialist period). The article thus shows how various models of masculinity linked to different temporalities and different imaginings of the relationality between femininity and masculinity coexist and shape male gendered identities as well as the histories men tell about the past and gendered power.     

ENTANGLED MEMORY: TOWARD A THIRD WAVE IN MEMORY STUDIES

This essay takes up the call for a “third phase” in memory studies and makes theoretical and methodological suggestions for its further development. Starting from an understanding of memory that centers on memory's temporality, its relation to language, and its quality as a social action, the essay puts forward the concept of “entangled memory.” On a theoretical level, it brings to the fore the entangledness of acts of remembering. In a synchronic perspective, memory's entangledness is presented as twofold. Every act of remembering inscribes an individual in multiple social frames. This polyphony entails the simultaneous existence of concurrent interpretations of the past. In a diachronic perspective, memory is entangled in the dynamic relation between single acts of remembering and changing mnemonic patterns. Memory scholars therefore uncover boundless cross‐referential configurations. Wishing to enhance the dialogue between the theoretical and the empirical parts of memory studies, we propose four devices that serve as a heuristic in the study of memory's entanglement: chronology against time, conflict, generations, and self‐reflexivity. Current debates on European memory permit us to explore the possible benefits that the concept of entangled memory carries for memory studies.     

Bending the body for China: the uses of acrobatics in Sino-US diplomacy during the Cold War

This paper examines how acrobatics was imbued with multiple meanings through the practices of nation-state building and international diplomacy. More specifically, the author discusses why the Chinese government chose acrobatics to facilitate the Sino-US rapprochement and the implications of this cultural diplomacy for the governments as well as the acrobats. Drawing on oral history interviews and archival data, this study demonstrates how the relationship between acrobatics and the ideas of ‘Chinese revolution’ was established, strengthened, disrupted, and finally re-modified to facilitate China’s relations with the West. This historical investigation advances the literature on performing arts and politics by exposing the political logics in the North-South exchange. As important, the analysis of acrobats’ engagement with Cold War politics evades state-centric narratives and contributes to an understanding of international diplomacy from a bottom-up perspective.     

From Hope to Escape: Post‐Soviet Russian Memory and Identity

Drawing on letters written by citizens of the USSR to US Congressman James Wright following his 1987 congressional visit and Soviet television appearance as well as follow‐up interviews conducted by this author with many of the same individuals in 2002–2004, this paper will recount the memories of several Muscovites and argue that although the western collective memory of the Cold War is one of victory, the individual accounts of Russians reveals a created memory of the Soviet past which, when confronted with the dire socioeconomic conditions that exist in post‐1991 Russia, leads to a crisis of identity.     

Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History

This paper reviews critical developments in the internationalhistory of oral history and outlines four paradigmatic revolutionsin theory and practice: the postwar renaissance of memory asa source for 'people's history'; the development, from the late1970s, of 'postpositivist' approaches to memory and subjectivity;a transformation in perceptions about the role of the oral historianas interviewer and analyst from the late 1980s; and the digitalrevolution of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Threaded throughdiscussion of these paradigm shifts are reflections upon fourfactors that have impacted oral history and, in turn, been significantlyinfluenced by oral historians: the growing significance of politicaland legal practices in which personal testimony is a centralresource; the increasing interdisciplinarity of approaches tointerviewing and the interpretation of memory; the proliferationfrom the 1980s of studies concerned with the relationship betweenhistory and memory; and the evolving internationalism of oralhistory.