In de cursus Oral history and memory culture maken onze cursisten in een aantal modules stapsgewijs kennis met oral history als bron en methode. Als eindopdracht nemen zij zelf een interview af. Over deze ervaring schrijven ze een kort essay.
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Whose story is this? Questioning co-creation of oral history narratives
Jelena Beočanin
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Department of History
beocanin@eshcc.eur.nl
Ten years ago, I listened to American anthropologist Alisse Waterston introduce her book titled My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century.[1] While the title reveals the relationship between the researcher and the subject is that of a father and a daughter, it was author’s struggle to vocalise certain experiences of her father that highlighted the intimacy of her research process. As a first year anthropology student I was already familiar with canonical conundrums of qualitative research and interviewing- the epistemological implications of the emic and etic, interactive, and co-creative nature of interviewing methodologies. Yet, Waterston’s proximity to her subject made me feel uneasy.
While the idea of an ‘intimate ethnography’ was novel to me and hence easily imprinted on my hungry and impressionable mind, I now find myself reflecting on why this piece of work has stayed with me until today. Through exploration of her father’s journey across continents and many personas he adopted along the way, the researcher became deeply enmeshed in her father’s memories and experiences. Towards the end of her presentation Waterston became confronted with the question of ‘whose story is this?’ The proximity and intimacy as epistemological points of departure may have erased clear boundaries of who is telling the story.
The question above became a place of reflection when engaging with in-depth, ethnographic, or oral history interviews. I became concerned with the idea and limits of co-creation of stories and questions of authorship in oral history interviews, on occasion discussed by Alessandro Portelli as ‘who speaks in oral history?’[2]. The question becomes even more pronounced when establishing certain proximity or a relationship with the subject of narration. In my interviewing experience, after sharing the transcript of the interview with the narrator, who was also a close friend, I was confronted with narrator’s worry upon seeing her exact words written down, foregrounding the vulnerable position of the narrator in an interview. Ultimately, the narrator felt out of control of her own narrative, and I have returned to another version of the above question: where are the boundaries of co-creation in oral history interviews?
At the moment of the interview, my friend is thirty years old. She is a Chinese American who has been living in Rotterdam for about three years completing her master’s degree and working as a freelance artist, helping staff at an acupuncture health center and a remote bookkeeper. The interview focused on memories from narrator’s childhood, adolescent, and early adult years in the U.S. which were formative to her becoming an artist.
While she is a confident storyteller who enjoys entertaining while narrating, I would like to turn to signals of vulnerability present as elements of performance.[3] During the interview, gestures were mostly absent. Yet, when recalling some of her teenage consumerist cravings or silly request for her parents, the narrator’s voice would get thin, high-pitched, and playful.[4] When reflecting on her late teens or early adult age, she would mimic as if she was mocking her younger self. This distance the narrator may have from her adolescent self is enacted through performance and has become a contested point of our interaction. Going back to her art classes in high school, she contemplated about ideas of originality and creativity in a way that does not correspond to her current beliefs. Upon seeing the interview transcript, she writes to me ‘I want it to be clear that now I don’t agree with or want to perpetuate the Western ideas of upholding creativity.’[5] Soon, other segments of the interview became subject of her worry and wish to edit.
Regardless of the particularities of the situation or the nature of relationship between the interviewer and the narrator, this example raises the question of control over the narrative during but also after the interview, the limits, and gains of extensive or intimate knowledge of the narrator, questions of conduct post-interview and effects of narrators’ exposure to interview transcripts. More importantly, these elements support or limit the co-creation of a narrative during an interview.
It has been long recognized that interviews are a special kind of conversation where interviewer and narrator’s biographies come together. Both of the biographies become points of inquiry during the interview: narrator’s biography explicitly as the purpose of the interview, and interviewer’s more implicitly through narrator’s perceived image of the interviewer, their aims, motivations and wishes.[6] However, once this first step of co-creation during the interview is complete, what are the next steps? Is there a designated window within which the narrator is in control of their narrative? This certainly did not seem right to me as I have come to realize how intimidating it can be to have one’s thoughts and words recorded to become (oral) history. Seeking for a solution I have decided to recognize the narrator’s worries as commentary to the text without editing the original transcript further subscribing to the idea of oral history as never complete process. However, this same step ultimately expanded the space and timeline for co-creation, requiring the researcher to further ponder on nature of qualitative research, interviewing and oral history.
Bibliography
Abrams, Lynn. Oral History Theory. London: Routledge, 2010. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203849033.
Perks, Robert, and Alistair Thomson, eds. The Oral History Reader. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2015. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315671833.
Waterston, Alisse. My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century. New York: Routledge, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203798744.
[1] Alisse Waterston, My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century (New York: Routledge, 2013), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203798744.
[2] Alessandro Portelli, “What makes Oral History different,” in The Oral History Reader, 3rd ed, edited by Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (London: Routledge, 2015), 40.
[3] Lynn Abrams, “Performance” in Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010), 130-152. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203849033.
[4] Anne Karpf suggest voice, as produced by the body, should be considered as an element of the performance of an oral history. See Abrams, “Performance”, 137.
[5] In personal communication with the author.
[6] Canada’s History, “Alessandro Portelli- Speaking of Oral History,” YouTube, April 28, 2016, 0:55-1:13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEToq3T_LZQ