Post by Dark Cloud on Jun 30, 2010 7:18:41 GMT -6
This is from an Atlantic site:
www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/06/advice-from-the-pros/58886/
It has to do with primary sources, and thought it might be worth considering when confronted with the LBH. Mr. Wittenberg might have further insight. I boldfaced something not addressed enough here.
" 1) All oral histories are "memory" -- retrospective accounts, in contrast with documents like wills or memos that were produced when events were actually taking place. Over time, people forget and revise, as when many Holocaust survivors began to retell their stories to match up with the narrative of Schindler's List. It is not dishonesty -- it just makes oral histories a particular type of document, which we need to note has been produced AFTER the event.
In the case of the slave narratives, we would also want to do the math -- many of the subjects who were still around to be interviewed in the 20th century were very young when they were slaves. How "accurate" are your memories of childhood? How "accurate" will they be when you are 80? What assumptions do kids make that adults don't, and vice versa?
2) All oral histories are "co-produced" -- by the interviewer and interviewee. As your commenter notes, this means that we have to account for differences in background and power between interviewer and interviewee. At a recent conference, I talked to an oral historian who is employed by a big investment firm to record the stories of the CEO, founder, and other employees. When we hear the oral histories he produces, won't we want to note that he was paid by his interviewee?
This is particularly fraught for black-white interviews. In the 1930s and 1940s, when opinion polling was first used, polling firms like Gallup spent a lot of time figuring out how best to get "honest" answers from black interview subjects. Some early pollsters found that it helped to send black interviewers to talk to black subjects; and, during World War II, government pollsters found that it helped to tell the black interviewees that the government was running the poll. (In the Roosevelt years, black Americans placed a lot of trust in the government, certainly trusting it more than many other institutions).
When we use the WPA narratives as history, then, we might want to start by doing a few things:
- Flag them for our readers as WPA narratives, and attempt to explain how they were collected and recorded;
- Put them in a historical context. What was the income of that older black woman, or a woman like her, at the time that interview was taken? What do we know about the sort of people who were taking the oral histories?
- And try to find contemporary documents that corroborate or disprove the stories they tell. That is, take them as ONE type of document that combines with many others to form a narrative, or make an argument.
The point is not to recap your commenter, but to say that historians approach ALL objects, interviews, accounts, documents, stories...as imperfect and incomplete -- *but then also use them*. As imperfect as they are, this evidence is all we have if we want to reconstruct the past. There is no "god's word" out there -- it's all full of holes and biases and problems. Being a historian means exposing the problems, and then dealing with them in as open a way as you can. There is no secondary source without a primary source; there is no history without the process of "situating" and "contextualizing" -- that is, taking a source figuring out what it can tell us.
In other words, when we say "Primary documents are useful, but like all sources, limited. They are helpful and useful, but not God's word," we mean more than that -- we mean that *history* is a constant and open process of figuring out how documents are useful and limited. This "conclusion"/"assumption" is always changing.
I'm sure you know all this (especially as an autobiographer!), but I thought it might help to hear it from someone who deals with it every day."
www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/06/advice-from-the-pros/58886/
It has to do with primary sources, and thought it might be worth considering when confronted with the LBH. Mr. Wittenberg might have further insight. I boldfaced something not addressed enough here.
" 1) All oral histories are "memory" -- retrospective accounts, in contrast with documents like wills or memos that were produced when events were actually taking place. Over time, people forget and revise, as when many Holocaust survivors began to retell their stories to match up with the narrative of Schindler's List. It is not dishonesty -- it just makes oral histories a particular type of document, which we need to note has been produced AFTER the event.
In the case of the slave narratives, we would also want to do the math -- many of the subjects who were still around to be interviewed in the 20th century were very young when they were slaves. How "accurate" are your memories of childhood? How "accurate" will they be when you are 80? What assumptions do kids make that adults don't, and vice versa?
2) All oral histories are "co-produced" -- by the interviewer and interviewee. As your commenter notes, this means that we have to account for differences in background and power between interviewer and interviewee. At a recent conference, I talked to an oral historian who is employed by a big investment firm to record the stories of the CEO, founder, and other employees. When we hear the oral histories he produces, won't we want to note that he was paid by his interviewee?
This is particularly fraught for black-white interviews. In the 1930s and 1940s, when opinion polling was first used, polling firms like Gallup spent a lot of time figuring out how best to get "honest" answers from black interview subjects. Some early pollsters found that it helped to send black interviewers to talk to black subjects; and, during World War II, government pollsters found that it helped to tell the black interviewees that the government was running the poll. (In the Roosevelt years, black Americans placed a lot of trust in the government, certainly trusting it more than many other institutions).
When we use the WPA narratives as history, then, we might want to start by doing a few things:
- Flag them for our readers as WPA narratives, and attempt to explain how they were collected and recorded;
- Put them in a historical context. What was the income of that older black woman, or a woman like her, at the time that interview was taken? What do we know about the sort of people who were taking the oral histories?
- And try to find contemporary documents that corroborate or disprove the stories they tell. That is, take them as ONE type of document that combines with many others to form a narrative, or make an argument.
The point is not to recap your commenter, but to say that historians approach ALL objects, interviews, accounts, documents, stories...as imperfect and incomplete -- *but then also use them*. As imperfect as they are, this evidence is all we have if we want to reconstruct the past. There is no "god's word" out there -- it's all full of holes and biases and problems. Being a historian means exposing the problems, and then dealing with them in as open a way as you can. There is no secondary source without a primary source; there is no history without the process of "situating" and "contextualizing" -- that is, taking a source figuring out what it can tell us.
In other words, when we say "Primary documents are useful, but like all sources, limited. They are helpful and useful, but not God's word," we mean more than that -- we mean that *history* is a constant and open process of figuring out how documents are useful and limited. This "conclusion"/"assumption" is always changing.
I'm sure you know all this (especially as an autobiographer!), but I thought it might help to hear it from someone who deals with it every day."
