Oral History Off the Record

Toward an Ethnography of Practice

A. Sheftel, S. Zembrzycki, A. Sheftel, S. Zembrzycki, A. Sheftel, S. Zembrzycki

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137339652
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

Because oral history interviews are personal interactions between human beings, they rarely conform to a methodological ideal. These reflections from oral historians provide honest and rigorous analyses of actual oral history practice that address the complexities of a human-centered methodology.

P A R T I

Reflections on a Lifetime of Listening

Henry Greenspan

The four authors of the three opening chapters—Sherna Berger Gluck, coauthors Julie Cruikshank and Tatiana Argounova-Low, and Joan Sangster—have been our teachers for many years. And what they most centrally have taught us about, in these chapters as elsewhere, is power: especially, the power (and suppression) of women; the complexity of power in researcher-narrator relationships; the power of different approaches in oral history itself (including ones that they developed) both to inspire and constrain oral history practice; and the “powers-that-be,” far beyond oral history practice, that may do their own inspiring or constraining. For all of the authors, as they reflect on lifetimes of practice, these threads are interwoven.

Philip Gourevitch notes that “power largely consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality.”¹ The chapters in this section are founded in the authors’ commitments to people narrating their own realities: feminists (especially Gluck), activists (all of the authors), Aboriginal peoples (Cruikshank and Argounova-Low), and working-class women both inside and outside of the Canadian labor movement (Sangster). Many (but not all) of those interviewed have themselves been involved in political struggles. That is, they have also been concerned with power. It is, therefore, not surprising that all of the authors recall initially approaching their narrators as allies, if not full partners, in struggle. And thus they imagined that they could overcome the distance that conventionally separated scholars from those whom they interviewed and publicized while creating new forms of collaboration.

As is now well-known, actualizing such aspirations became complicated. While collaborative ideals were realized, or at least approximated, in some instances, they were sorely challenged in others. Genuinely sharing power—or “sharing authority” as it came to be called—raised its own ethical and political questions. Explication of such dilemmas is especially detailed in Gluck’s chapter. Beyond questions about who controls publication, or the often-gray line between honest scholarship and potentially hurtful revelation, Gluck focuses on the political consequences of making known what she has learned “off the record.” To what extent could others use revelations opportunistically—to discredit political goals shared by researcher and interviewee? To what extent might publication put people in real danger? As these questions suggest, Gluck is keenly aware of the power of the researcher and its accompanying dilemmas. At the same time, as she emphasizes, narrators are anything but helpless. Indeed, she describes a range of ways in which it is usually “the narrator’s terms and conditions that will govern the process.” The more one enters into the social and cultural worlds of narrators—rather than simply trying to extract an interview from them—the more likely it becomes that narrators’ terms begin to matter. Of course, there are no guarantees. But when one allows oneself to see things through the eyes, and within the lives, of one’s participants, oral history practice becomes increasingly embedded in ethnography.

In a fascinating juxtaposition, Cruikshank and Argounova-Low also describe how much “speakers’ insistence on speaking on their own terms” can challenge researchers’ initial expectations. Reflecting on her 40 years of work with Aboriginal peoples in the Yukon, and Aboriginal women in particular, Cruikshank recalls having anticipated particular stories about the experience of colonialism and struggles against it. Instead, her narrators framed their individual life stories within traditional “folk” sagas of coherence and change, involving both the human and transhuman worlds, and it was these narratives that they wanted to transmit. Perhaps most essentially, both Cruikshank and Argonouva-Low learned how traditional stories served both to frame memories of resistance to colonialism even while their recreation—and especially their intergenerational retelling—were themselves part of resistance.

Questions about the place of “life story” interviewing run through all of the chapters in this section. The issue becomes particularly relevant in work with those who do not “naturally” think about their experiences in individual life-story terms: for example, the Palestinian activists with whom Gluck has worked or the Arctic peoples whom Cruikshank and Argounova-Low have engaged. Joan Sangster raises complementary questions, recalling that for many years she “avoided writing about a single life history.” She was concerned that focusing on individual biography would distract from a history that was structured collectively, especially by class and gender. At the same time, stories retold by individuals could reveal dimensions lost in collective analyses, particularly about the development of agency and counternarratives. As for the other authors in this section, finding the right balance between individual and collective experience, analysis of subjectivity and societal structure, becomes a continuously evolving process. Indeed, contending with difficult balances, and the different contributions of different approaches, is the theme of Sangster’s chapter more generally. She suggests, for example, that practitioners discussed critical questions about the ethical and methodological limits of “sharing authority” from the beginning. The vagaries of memory, the ethics and politics of public revelation, and the complexity of power balances and imbalances with interviewees were all part of these conversations. It was only that they became more “on the record,” and popular, later. Sangster suggests a pattern with which, I think, all of the authors in this section would concur. Retelling one’s professional “life story” (which is, after all, what reflecting on “a lifetime of listening” entails) rarely follows a linear, “onward and upward” pattern. There are, rather, spirals, revisions, and returns, as theory and practice not only inform each other (so we like to imagine!) but are themselves vehicles of memory—personal and guild. Immersed in new projects, and contending with new questions, one returns to old projects and old questions. Just as for our “interviewees,” recounting a career facilitates hearing one’s own story in a range of new, often unexpected, ways.

Such nonlinear, multileveled stories are not easy to tell, at least not with candor, complexity, and clarity. What is perhaps most impressive about the authors in this section is that they have managed to do precisely that, reconstructing careers and commitments while keeping ongoing questions “on the record.” The result is both “thick description” of professional lives, or “ethnographies of practice” as this volume is subtitled, and confirmation that the adventures and ideals, which called many of us to oral history, do not fade with time. Amid changing historical and political circumstances, and all of the other contingencies in which oral history takes form, one “goes with the flow,” as Gluck writes, while “making judgment calls continuously.” In such nuanced telling of their own stories about power, activism, and scholarship, Gluck, Cruikshank and Argounova-Low, and Sangster empower us. They remind us that these are struggles that we are in together. In challenging times, we can be especially grateful for these teachers who led the way.

Note

1. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Picador, 1998), 181.

C H A P T E R 1

From California to Kufr Nameh and Back: Reflections on 40 Years of Feminist Oral History

Sherna Berger Gluck

Forty years ago, in 1972, I set off to the San Francisco Bay area in search of an apocryphal 104-year-old suffragist. In those early days of the US feminist oral history movement, one of my goals was to collect the stories of women. Like others whose work was inextricably linked to the women’s liberation movement, I was determined to uncover our hidden history and, in the process, empower women and energize our movement.

My first interviews with Sylvie Thygeson and the renowned photographer Imogen Cunningham were evocative, moving, and thrilling experiences. Nestled between Thygeson and her 70-something-year-old daughter on a couch at the Convalescent Home where she was then residing, I listened to Thygeson’s eloquently and elegantly performed narrative. Her belief in the “great evolutionary process” evoked a very different time. Despite her skeletal and fragile appearance, she was of more than sound mind, was quite proud of her accomplishments, very capable of making decisions, and even of controlling the interview. Her demeanor was in such contrast to the other residents who were sitting passively as they listened to the bingo numbers being called.

Equally in command of her narrative, but unlike Thygeson, the pixie-ish 89-year-old Imogen Cunningham was still spry and independent. Walking through her wonderfully untamed, fragrant garden to a little cottage in the back, I was reminded of her famous self-portrait in which she is peeking from behind a tree, wearing the same kind of bandana on her head that she was wearing that day.

From these first remarkable interviews, where I was trying to capture the creativity and activism of women like Thygeson and Cunningham, to more recent years conducting interviews with women in Palestine, my thinking about the oral history process has gone through different stages. I went from being concerned about getting the names of Thygeson’s coworkers in their 1910s illegal birth control clinic, to figuring out how to get “everywoman” to understand why her story was important, to wondering if I dare reveal unpleasant information that might undermine the credibility of my narrators. The growing willingness to be more critical of our work has made me uneasy, even embarrassed, by some of the early advice I proffered.¹ In fact, what I have learned from trying to be a feminist oral historian in a conflict zone, coupled with the implications of the digital revolution, leads me to dispute some of that early advice.

From Celebration to Critical Reconsideration

Before email and social media networking, feminist activists and academics in communities and classrooms across the continent were beginning to learn about each other’s oral history projects. Just as the “new social historians” of the late 1960s had spawned a second generation of oral historians who were seeking to document the lives of diverse and ordinary Americans, feminist historians were seeking to add women’s voices. More than an extension of the new social history movement, we were inextricably linked to the women’s liberation movement and brought sensibilities from it to our work.

From the start, in the 1970s, we rejected the prescriptions for “neutrality” and “objectivity.” Our roles as advocates and participants in the women’s liberation movement were captured in our characterization of feminist research as being “by, for, and about” women. Only later would we problematize those “three little words.”²

Our initial emphasis was on developing an interpersonal relationship and a collaborative process that was more consistent with nonhierarchical feminist principles. Shulamit Reinharz, for instance, posited an ideal process under the rubric of “collaborative experiential research.”³ Despite its perfect fit with feminist principles, few of us came even close to this “new ethic of participation.” Joint construction of the interview was rare and usually succeeded only when the narrators were peers of the interviewers⁴; and collaboration in creating scholarly products derived from interviews was even more unusual.⁵

Moving beyond concern with the ideal of a nonhierarchical, collaborative relationship, many feminist oral historians began to more honestly examine the implications of the power differential between the interviewer and narrator—especially in the context of class privilege. Judith Stacey even argued that the delusion of an alliance places the “research subject at grave risk of manipulation and betrayal,” concluding that the positivist, “masculinist” research methods might pose less of a risk.⁶ Without necessarily embracing the positivist model, nevertheless, many of us began to ask if we were engaged in appropriation rather than empowerment.⁷ Who, after all, shaped the transcript and/or any other products of the interview?

Whether or not we actually managed to implement the feminist ideal of collaboration and advocacy or its later iteration as shared authority, these remained guiding principles of our work. Yet, serious implications flow from this commitment, not only for the interview itself and its resulting products, but for what we do or do not disclose about our narrators, and even their narrativ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I Reflections on a Lifetime of Listening
• Part II Encounters in Vulnerability, Familiarity, and Friendship
• Part III The Intersection of Ethics and Politics
• Part IV Considering Silence
• Afterword
• List of Contributors
• Index