Oral History

摘要: Oral history is a qualitative research methodology that involves the recording, transcribing, analysing and archiving of face-to-face interviews. It is used to draw out memories of the lived experiences of interviewees (hereafter ‘narrators’) who have an expressed intention to preserve their understanding of the past for future interested parties (Oral History Association 2009, 1). As an analytical method, to build an account of past events, oral history requires a critical appraisal of this dialogue. Oral history begins with the assumption that an objective account of history is not attainable (Yow 1997). Instead, scholars must interpret multiple, subjective accounts, each from the perspective of the narrator in question. A narrator’s experiences of a given issue may thus be limited in time and exposure to an issue. In addition, the sentiments of researchers and narrators, related to a given topic and to each other, function as filters, which inevitably shape both the questions asked and answers given (Grele 1998).Oral history is inherently critical in its roots and orientation. It developed out of the modernist movement of the early twentieth century, which rejected traditional approaches to understanding the natural and social worlds, and the cultural history movement, which sought to incorporate anthropological methods oriented towards chronicling cultural practices and interpretations of past events into historical analysis (Evans 1956; Thomson 2007; Abrams 2010). Thus, oral history infers that traditional academic accounts of ‘what happened’, informed by the analysis of written documents (ie ‘mainstream’history), are limited by their failure to explicitly acknowledge …