Hello and welcome to Monday Methods.
Last weeks topic discussed a bread-and-butter aspect of history training, reading and interpreting manuscripts or other written primary sources.
Now we will look at accounts that do not take the form of writing.
In regions and eras with weak written traditions, how can oral traditions be used to provide a historical narrative?
Can oral traditions be used to gain insight into elements of society that had been left out of written accounts, for example the poorest members of society or minority groups within a society?
Are contemporary interview projects such as Texas Tech's Oral history project of the Vietnam Archive or UC Berkley's Suffragist Oral History Project having an impact on how history should be presented and what form sources should take?
Next week, we will discus charts, maps, and other graphical methods of conveying historical information.
I have a question, that at first may seem comical, but it is entirely serious. Recently in one of my graduate classes last semester, we read Lorena Oropeza’s, ¡Raza Sí! ¡Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era (University of California Press, 2005) and the author declared that she had used a rather unique method for conducting oral interviews. Since I no longer have the book (it was a loan), I will have to paraphrase. She claimed that she had followed “a feminist tradition” of conducting oral interviews that entailed, according to Oropeza, constant follow ups and progress reports with the people she was interviewing.
I was curious if this is actually an established methodology for oral interviews, and if so, how are progress reports and follow up interviews being constructed as feminist and therefore being conducted in gendered terms?
If anyone reading this owns the book, I don’t have a page number, but you can find her methodology statement in the bibliography under her list interview sources.
Also a link to book for those who are interested: http://www.amazon.com/%C2%A1Raza-S%C3%AD-%C2%A1Guerra-No-Patriotism/dp/0520241959/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1434413201&sr=8-1&keywords=raza+si+guerra+no
Years ago I took a graduate-level seminar on Asian and African Historiography for a program I ended up not pursuing. Anyway, one of the big issues in this class was that a lot of our sources for the pre-colonial histories of Sub-Saharan Africa are basically just oral traditions, and when you look at it critically, these sources really only get written down in the 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time, this was flipped around by pointing out that lots of the primary sources we rely upon for important aspects of the Ancient Near East, like most accounts of the life Alexander of Macedon, are also n-th hand retellings that were only written down hundreds of years after the events they are supposed to depict.
I'm actually conducting a seriesof oral interviews in croatia right now! I don't really know what I'm doing to be honest but I can speak the language well enough and have met many cool people - and less cool ones. Ive been gradually expanding the scope of yje quedtionaire to include more variables (profession then and now, serving in the military at the time, how religious, how much they earn, places theyvelived and so on, to help find general paterns, but the main goal are the actual interview questions! I just generally ask them everything I can from if they preceded their lives in the 70s, 80s or now/ thought it was better then to why they thing various events happened, what they think of certain figures and how curious their family (children and grand children) are. But I also interview younger people along the same lines (and ask for their parents details too) to see what people think now and how its impacted by their relations and such.