International Oral History Association(published twice a year)
Volume 11:2, June 2003
From the Editors
We are now in the aftermath of the invasion and war on Iraq, media-constructed throughout in unprecedented ways, with ever-shifting rhetorical justifications . We can't help but wonder whether and how oral history will play a role in documenting and remembering the destruction of human lives, cultural communities, not to mention unique cultural records of the ancient past? In the midst of the devastation, can oral history help provide a more democratic, complex and deeper understanding of this 21st -century imperial enterprise? We wonder about the situation of our Iraqi oral history colleagues who made initial contact with IOHA last year? What can IOHA as an international organization do?
In the West, embedded journalists, photographers, and other eye-witnesses are beginning to reflect in public, sometimes critically, but always with an outsider perspective. We catch globalized TV glimpses of outraged Iraqi citizens, shouting their plight to the cameras and, they hope, to the world. Each has a devastating story to tell. How would world opinion change if we were to hear these counter-stories everyday in the media?
Globalization and Memory, the theme for Rome 2004, could not be more appropriate and timely. The question to all of us is how can we help to ensure that this war and occupation not fall into historical amnesia, that the stories not be silenced, that through the eyes and experiences of Iraqi citizens the world comes to understand what this enterprise is really all about?
from the 'counter-coalition'
Joanna Bornat and Rina BenmayorCo-editors IOHA newsletter
From the President
Globalization is increasingly a buzz word. It lures the linguists to debate meanings, it spurs academics to offer conflicting definitions, it evokes images of a world without borders - a world in which news and communications zap quickly from one side of the globe to the other, in which individual and national economies are devoured by multinational enterprises, and in which a single superpower could emerge. The buzz word becomes a menacing term. The menace is heightened in a context in which three nations - the USA, UK and Australia - can self-righteously and against international opinion invade another country, Iraq. The cynical nature of the menace is also heightened, for me, when my government is willing to create refugees but is unwilling to offer them sanctuary.
Globalization is more than a word. It is a phenomenon which requires the attention of our international community of oral historians. We, after all, have our origins in the desire to represent diversity, to break silences, to allow people to speak, to be inclusive. We have a political intent as well as research and intellectual objectives. It is consequently very timely that the organiser of the next IOHA Conference (Rome 2004), Alessandro Portelli suggested - and IOHA readily accepted - that 'Memory and Globalization' should be the theme for the conference (www.ioha.fgv.br). It will provide a focus for exchange among oral historians about very present and pressing issues. It will offer a core to a conference which also invites papers and participation about other themes and issues in current oral history scholarship and practice. Details about the call for papers are available elsewhere on the IOHA website.
It is also timely that the next issue of Words and Silences, the IOHA journal, due to be published by the middle of this year under the editorship of Gerardo Necoechea and Lluis Ubeda, focuses on oral history and politics. The contributions highlight how, in some instances, oral history projects have clear political intent and are believed to play their small part in empowerment. Other contributions illustrate the significant ways in which oral history research challenges existing interpretations and understandings. For details on submitting to forthcoming issues of Words and Silences, go to Put it in Writing, at the end of this newsletter.
Preparations for the conference, the forthcoming next issue of Words and Silences, the content and regularity of this newsletter are indicative of the ways in which IOHA is building on the solid foundations created by previous councils. Other activities underway include the revision of the IOHA Constitution, moves to establish a scholarship fund to assist attendance at the biennial conferences for oral historians who would otherwise be unable to attend, and work towards a membership drive. On the latter, I encourage you to join IOHA if you are not already members. There are direct benefits to members - reduced registration fees at the conferences, inclusion on IOHA mailing lists, receipt of copies of Words and Silences - but it is perhaps the intangible or less direct benefits which I would promote. These include the support your financial contributions give to the survival and expansion of the work of IOHA and the possibility that we can develop assistance programs for oral historians whose financial circumstances limit their ability to participate in international forums.
In anticipation of receiving diverse paper proposals for the 2004 IOHA Conference in Rome.
Janis Wilton jwilton@pobox.une.edu.auIOHA President
The World of Words
Future Conferences and Meetings
FROM ALL QUARTERS.
4-7 September, 2003. Oral History Association of Australia National Conference, Guildford Western Australia
'From All Quarters' signifies inclusivity, encompassing delegates and presenters fro all geographical areas; presentations covering all topics with an oral history component; delegates at all levels of expertise and experience. Papers and workshops will range over the whole field of oral history theory and practice.
Examples might include:
For more information contact:
Margaret Hamilton, 10 Regelia Turn, Ellen Brook, WA 6069, tel/fax (08) 9296 9306, email guy12mar@ellenbrook.net, or Jan McCahon, 14 Letsom Way, Langford WA 6147, tel (08) 9470 4026, fax (08) 9470 4802, email emailjan@iprimus.com.au.
CREATING COMMUNITIES: CULTURES, NEIGHBORHOODS, INSTITUTIONS.
8-12 October, 2003, Oral History Association Annual Meeting, Bethesda, Maryland, Washington DC, USA.
The Oral History Association's 2003 annual meeting will be held October 8-12, 2003 at the Hyatt Regency, Bethesda, Maryland. The meeting theme is 'Creating Communities: Cultures, Neighborhoods, Institutions.' The conference will be held in the Washington, D.C. area, a place where people of many different races and ethnic backgrounds live and work. We invite presenters to take up the challenge of how oral history can illuminate the ways people weave the cultural mosaic of our society by creating communities in diverse settings and locales.
Paper topics will deal with the diversity of community life, the social, political and economic forces that impact the creation and continuity of community, and the forms in which individuals have created communities. What is the lasting influence of the community to its members? How have communities changed to protect cultural identity while bringing inclusion and diversity to the history of community building? Through what means have individuals constituted communities through informal networks as well as within and through formal institutions? How have these communities mobilized to affect the worlds around them? Finally, as oral history practitioners, how do we reflect the meaning in oral history and give it back to the communities that partner in such projects?
Oral History practitioners from a wide variety of disciplines and settings will come together to think about "community" in its largest sense: about grass-roots history that gives voice to and empowers communities; folklore and folklife projects that preserve, protect and enhance cultural continuity; explorations of racial and ethnic communities that consider both internal formation and engagement with American polity and society; political and diplomatic history that locates its subjects within communities; labor and business studies that trace the communities constructed within and without these arenas; and oral history of the military that considers the social life of this institution.
Participants will include academic and community scholars working in a variety of institutional and community programs: museums, historical societies, archives and libraries, community groups, teachers, media/technology professionals, and independent consultants. The program also includes representation in the arenas of film, drama, radio, television, exhibits, and electronic technology.
Roger Horowitz, OHA Program Chair, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE, 302-658-2400, ext. 244, rh@UDel.Edu.
INHABITING MULTIPLE WORLDS: AUTO/BIOGRAPHY IN AN (ANTI)GLOBAL AGE.
15-16 June, 2003, Fourth International Auto/Biography Association Conference, Chinese University of Hong Kong.
What implications are there for life-writing in an age that is at once increasingly global and anti-global? In which locality, nationality, race, ethnicity and creed are becoming less important in some places and yet strongly resurgent in others?
Many contemporary auto/biographers write of inhabiting multiple worlds, of living between different cultures, languages, ideologies, discourses, localities, domains, or dimensions of experience. Their narratives are often intersected by multiple allegiances, to here and there, past and present, actual and imagined, traditional and modern, centre and periphery, descent and consent. What does this signify? That living in multicultural societies and with rapid intercontinental travel, global media, education and communications, individuals are tending less and less to configure their identities simply within the confines of nation, locality, gender, ethnicity, or race? At the same time, there are signs that identity seems to be enacted by some writers as resistance to such things as linguistic and cultural homogenisation, immigration, multiculturalism, secularisation and economic transnationalism. Are we seeing the end of "identity politics" or its transformation? The beginning of "global culture" or the beginning of its end? We welcome any topics or suggestions for panels that seem relevant to the overall theme. The following are a few suggestions:
Closing date for abstracts: 15 September 2003. Abstracts: should be about 200 words and include a 3 or 4 line bio. Send to: Tracy Liang, Department of English, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong or email to tracyl@cuhk.edu.hk. A conference website will be constructed at www.cuhk.edu.hk/eng.
IABA conferences: This conference is the fourth in a series that began at Peking University in 1999. Others have been held at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 2000 and at La Trobe University in Melbourne in 2002. Further conferences are planned for the University of Mainz in Germany in 2006 and Hawaii or Michigan in 2008.
For further information contact: David Parker, Department of English, English Language Teaching Unit, Room 338 Fung King Hey Building, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin NT, Hong Kong. Tel: (852) 2609 7001/7006; Fax: (852) 2603 5270; Website: www.cuhk.edu.hk/eng/
INTERPRETING NARRATIVES.
24-27 March 2004, Fifth European Social Science History Conference, Oral History and Life Stories Network, Berlin.
The European Social Science History Conference has been held biannually since 1996. The Oral History and Life Stories network has met at the last three conferences, gathering over forty participants each time. With the International Oral History Association conference now meeting most often outside Europe (Rio in 1998, Turkey in 2000, South Africa in 2002, Rome in 2004, Australia in 2006) the Network has become the major regular international forum for European oral history and life story researchers.
For the Berlin conference on 24-27 March 2004 we invite proposals both for papers and for round table discussions.
We wish to encourage reflection and discussions on the ways we listen to, read, interpret and present narratives (from oral history, life stories, or other biographical narratives). We invite contributions addressing methodological issues (including the use of mixed sources or methods, different forms of presentation, ethics, and archiving data) and forms of interpretation (including working with narrative analysis, and the use of sound of the voice or video in oral history).
We would welcome such proposals especially in relation to the following fields:
Please send your proposals to :
Paul Thompson (paulth@icstudies.ac.uk); Daniela Koleva (daniela@sclg.uni-sofia.bg) and Selma Leydesdorff (leydesdorff@pscw.uva.nl).
The conference deadline for sending your abstract is 1 April 2003.
Once your paper is accepted, you will need to make a preliminary registration through the conference website http://www.iisg.nl/esshc - on which more general conference information is also available.
Oral History on Display: Presenting testimonies through museums, virtual displays, multi-media and publication.
12-13 June 2004, Annual Conference of the Oral History Society, Bournemouth, UK.
History may be everything that's behind us, but oral history is currently everywhere around and in front of us, as TV and radio listings and museum, heritage and community arts publicity will readily testify. Oral history seems to have come of age in the public's consciousness, with personal testimony being increasingly recognised as a valuable element of contemporary historical interpretation, and an incomparable educational source and artistic resource.
Whilst the interview itself represents the most 'pure' display of oral history, it is the secondary presentation, usually involving interpretation as some level, which is the objective of many oral history projects. But using, or re-using, oral testimony in this way raises practical, technical and ethical issues. Oral History on Display sets out to investigate the challenges, opportunities and implications of putting oral history on display in the wide range of situations in which it occurs including museums, archives, libraries and galleries, both real and virtual, television and radio, print and electronic publication, performance and artwork, landscape and the built environment, schools and community outreach activities.
The following questions provide a starting point for exploring these issues:
We invite proposals for papers and presentations, both formal and informal, from museum, archive and library practitioners, community groups, media presenters and producers, technical practitioners and individuals which seek to explore these issues and to discuss the philosophy and practice of oral history in the context of display. We also welcome case studies which demonstrate the role of oral history in display and interpretation, or which explore the technical implications of exhibiting oral testimony in both the real and virtual environments. We also invite proposals for contributions to the associated trade/technical exhibition, poster display and demonstration of virtual exhibitions.
The closing date for paper and poster proposals (500 - 750 words) is 31 December 2003.
For further information about the conference please contact Frances Cambrook by email: fcambrook@bmth.ac.uk
MEMORY AND GLOBALIZATION.
23-26 June 2004, XIIIth International Oral History Conference, Rome, Italy.
Proposals are invited from around the world for contributions to the XIIIth International Oral History Conference hosted by the International Oral History Association in collaboration with the City of Rome. Proposals may be for a conference paper, a workshop session or a thematic panel. Only papers with a clear focus on oral history will be taken into consideration. Papers will also be evaluated according to their methodological and theoretical significance.
The specific theme for the conference is 'Memory and Globalization'. Proposals are also invited which address ongoing oral history issues and practices.
Conference sub-themes:
If you are interested, please send us a single-page proposal including an outline of your paper and the following details: name (with your family name in capital letters), affiliation, postal address, email address, phone and fax numbers.
Proposals (and subsequently papers) must be written in English or Spanish. If possible abstracts in the other language should be provided. At the conference there will be simultaneous translation in English, Spanish and Italian for the plenary sessions. Efforts will be made to provide informal consecutive summary translation during workshop sessions.
EXTENDED DEADLINE FOR PAPER PROPOSALS: 31 August 2003
The Conference Committee will confirm acceptance or rejection of your proposal by September 31, 2003. The final paper of no more than 15 double-spaced pages, must reach the conference organisers before December 15, 2003, for publication in the Conference Proceedings.
SEND PROPOSALS TO:
email: info@ioha2004.itfax: 1-39-06-44249216. Attention: Alessandro Portelli
Regular mail: IOHA 2004 Organising Committee, C/- Professor Alessandro Portelli
Piazza Campitelli 7, 00100 Rome, ITALY
Enquiries can be directed to the IOHA 2004 Organising Committee (email: info@ioha2004.it ) or to
Africa: Philippe Denis (denis@nu.ac.za)
Asia: Gunhan Danisman (danisman@boun.edu.tr)
Europe: Alessandro Portelli (alessandro.portelli@uniroma1.it)
Latin America: Marieta de Moraes Ferreira (marieta@fgv.br)
North America: Rina Benmayor (rina_benmayor@csumb.edu)
Oceania: Janis Wilton (jwilton@pobox.une.edu.au)
TIME AND MEMORY: The International Society for the Study of Time announces its Twelfth Triennial Conference.
July 25-31, 2004. Clare College, Cambridge, UK.
The International Society for the Study of Time (ISST) encourages the interdisciplinary study of time in all its aspects. The unique character of intellectual exchange at ISST Conferences is vested in cross-disciplinary discussions spurred by participants from around the world and representing many different areas of specialization. The Society seeks always to hold its conferences in a location of memorable beauty and resonance. The 2004 Conference at Cambridge University will be based within the Old Court of Clare College.
The theme of the Society's twelfth conference is 'Time and Memory'. Memory plays an important role in fields across the disciplinary spectrum as well as several strands of contemporary life and culture. In the face of rapid change in the cosmological, ecological, geopolitical, technological, cultural and individual landscapes, the topic of memory takes on special urgency. New understandings of memory emerge in fields ranging from neuroscience and evolutionary biology to geology and cosmology. Technological forms of memory raise pressing social and political issues, amid shifts in our collective means and modes of memory. Competing accounts of history and personal identity foreground the role of narrative in shaping human memory.
Conference participants must be ISST members. For membership information and application procedures, visit our website or contact Dr. Dr. Thomas Weissert, Executive Secretary, P.O. Box 436, Wynnewood, PA 19096, USA. Membership includes subscriptions to the ISST house organ Time's News, the ISST newsletter, and the journal, KronoScope: Journal for the Study of Time.
CONSTRUCTING URBAN MEMORIES: the role of oral testimony.
27-30 October 2004. 7th European Urban History Association Conference, Athens Piraeus, Greece.
Oral testimony is one of the most valuable but challenging sources for the study of urban history in the 20th and 21st centuries. It allows us to access knowledge and experience that is both unavailable to historians of earlier periods, inaccessible through contemporary documentary sources. It can offer insights and perspectives that enhance and sometimes force us to re-examine 'official' histories, and own approaches to urban historical research. And it enables us to understand something of the nature of memory - of how people construct their own versions of the urban experience, and try to 'make sense' of the past.
The collection of oral testimony involves more than simply putting a microphone in front of someone and inviting them to 'talk.' Analysis of the testimony itself needs to be informed by an understanding of the class, gender and cultural factors that may distort or liberate individual 'voices' during the interview process.
A major session of the 7th European Urban History Conference Athens will be devoted to oral histories of the city, and the organisers invite paper proposals on issues such as:
Proposals from younger scholars are particularly welcome, and for doctoral candidates there is a limited number of bursaries available to cover the registration fee for the conference. If you wish to present a paper please send a 1 page proposal to the session organisers, Professor Richard Rodger and Cynthia Brown, East Midlands Oral History Archive, Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK by 1 October 2003. E-mail address: emoha@le.ac.uk
For further details of the Conference see
http://www.le.ac.uk/ur/conf.html#october and
http://www.le.ac.uk/urbanhist/urbanconf/athens.html
Face to Face
Conference and Association reports
BRAZIL
"Memory and its multiple faces: territories and scenarios of remembrances" was the title of the Fourth Research Seminar organized by the Centro de Memoria (Remembrance Documentary Center) of UNICAMP (University of Campinas - São Paulo - Brazil) between 12-14 March 2003.
Over three nine specially invited experts from Portugal, France and Brazil and one hundred and fifty researchers from all over the country gathered in Campinas to discuss key issue in two major round tables. The first round table focused on the act of remembering as a form of understanding the challenges of present time as well as a way to elaborate future prospects. The second discussed connections between memory, social cultural identities and globalization processes.
Besides these two important major discussion forums, one hundred and fifty researchers were divided into eighteen workgroups with memory as one of a bipolar thematic (memory and education, memory and culture, memory and health). During their thirty-six sessions four or five research papers were presented and discussed and a great volume of information and methodological clues were exchanged and debated.
Another objective of this seminar was to show that research based on people's remembrances not only supports good academic work in many disciplines but also enables excellent production in various artistic fields.
Thus, during the seminar, a Street Theatre group presented a work called 'Portrait at the Window', based on research developed in a small interior Brazilian town. Another group which studies the origins of Rural Samba in the region of Campinas sang sambas for the audience once performed by slaves during the festivities that took place in the coffee plantations of our region. They also sang some traditional urban sambas that nowadays inspire the compositions of new young sambistas, both from the University and from the Afro-Brazilian local community.
A group of first grade teachers working with children from poor communities in the outskirts of São Paulo came to present their experience of reintegrating 'at risk students' through the singing and dancing of folk music. These teachers had investigated and re-created the music and dance of north and northeast Brazilian communities, where the great majority of their pupils' families originated, in order to enhance the importance of their cultural memories and thus help them to feel at home in school.
Thus, through academic debate, good music, dance and theatre we have reaffirmed the importance of oral history in the understanding of our past, in better living our present time and improving our future.
Olga Rodrigues de Moraes von SimsonDirector Centro de Memoria / UNICAMP
simson@uol.com.br
CUBA/USA
CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THE USES OF ORAL HISTORY BETWEEN EL CENTRO PABLO DE LA TORRIENTE BRAU IN HAVANA AND THE COMMUNITY STUDIES CENTER AT DICKINSON COLLEGE IN HAVANA, CUBA
Interested in the work of oral historians and the connections between memoir, biography, and oral history, the Centro Pablo de la Torriente Brau, recently invited Susan Rose, Professor of Sociology and Community Studies to present the work of the Community Studies Center at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Rose presented what Dickinson students and faculty are doing in the area of oral history, video documentary work, and community studies. Of particular interest was Dickinson's Global Mosaic that focuses on a comparative study of trans-Atlantic migration to the nearby mutli-ethnic town of Steelton, Pennsylvania and to Comodoro Rivadavia in Patagonia, Argentina.
Interested in the experiences of various immigrant groups (Italian, Bulgarians, Croatians, Spanish) who came to work in the steel mill or oil fields, students have had the opportunity to interview people in both locales about immigration, family life, work experiences, and labor-ethnic relations.
Some of the results of this work include a bi-lingual documentary in Spanish and English produced by students. The documentary highlights the oral histories of narrators who had grown up and worked in the oil fields. For more information see (www.dickinson.edu/departments/amos.html) and click on the Patagonia and Steelton sites.
Dickinson's Mosaic is an interdisciplinary program that engages some 25 students and 3 faculty from various disciplines in intensive fieldwork in communities both close to campus and far away. Students take all 4 of their courses during the semester as part of this College-Community collaboration. One of the most exciting and productive parts of the Mosaic is the interaction between faculty, students, and community members - and the dialogue and cooperation among faculty from the humanities and social sciences. This coming fall (2003), the Mosaic will return to Adams County Mosaic to continue their collaborative work with Mexican migrant workers and their families. An added dimsension this time will involve students conducting migration, work and family oral histories with people in the originating home towns of many of the migrant workers in Michoacán, Mexico.
THE MEMORY PROGRAM
The Centro Pablo de la Torriente Brau is an independent non-profit cultural institutions, created under the auspices of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC). Since 1996, the Memory Program has promoted Cuban studies through the use of oral history and testimonio, a genre with a strong tradition in Cuba.
The Memory Program documents, analyzes and disseminates through memoir, testimonio, oral history, and video history, various aspects of the Cuban history and society. It foster sa deeper understanding of the island's past and present history. It's Archive of the Word, includes recordings and transcripts of testimonios, collected by the Program researchers. The Program also negotiates the publication of books and essays and sponsors testimonio and oral history seminars, workshops, competitions and other events. It promotes exchanges between young artists and specialists. It coordinates exchanges with other Cuban institutions, as well as with academic research centers in other countries, in order to link Cuban oral historians and testimonio scholars with international projects and organizations.
The Memory Program has three lines of research. The first focuses on Cuba itself, and is called "Echoes of the Republic." Through oral testimony, this project sheds light on Cuban cultural, social, and historical life from the turn of the century to 1959. The second, titled "Creativity through Voice" develops oral research on Cuban intellectual life and work. The third line, "The Voices that Surround Us," focuses on Cuba from 1959 to the present, on the search for a deeper vision on contemporary issues for present reflection and future analysis.
Every year, the Centro sponsors the Premio Memoria, the Memory Award, an international open-theme competition of testimonial and oral history projects. The award supports five scholarships each year enabling scholars to spend six months on a particular research project. The Program also offers technological support needed to carry out the research. The Program has a publication series, Ediciones La Memoria del Centro Pablo, and co-publishes with other presses as well.
The Program has sponsored numerous national and international conferences and colloquia on testimonial literature and oral history research methods. In early 2003, the Centro invited Madelyn Campbell, Executive Secretary of the Oral History Association, and Bruce Stave, oral historian and professor at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, to dialogue with winners of the Memory Award about oral history research in Cuba and the United States.
Victor Casáus, Director of the Centro Pablo and Madelyn Campbell, Executive Secretary of the Oral History Association (third from left) in Havana
In April, Professors Susan Rose and Steve Brouwer, from Dickinson College, were invited by the Center to share their experiences linking student research and social action through oral history and video documentary. Several video projects produced by Dickinson students were screened and debated. Sociologists, journalists, documentary producers, oral historians, testimonial writers and Memory Award winners shared their various research experiences with the American guests.
The Centro Pablo hopes to continue these exchanges to contribute to a better mutual understanding of oral history and testimonio as effective tools for capturing the collective memory of communities and countries.
For more information on the Memory Program of the Centro Pablo, please write Victor Casaus, centropablo@cubarte.cult.cu
JAPAN
Following the publication of the Japanese translation of The Voice of the Past in June 2002 its UK author, Paul Thompson visited Japan for two weeks in March 2003, as a visiting professor of Keio University invited by Professor Takao Matsumura, a social historian. In Japan, there is a tradition whereby oral history, and contemporary anthropologists and sociologists have used oral research and life history methods for some time but little exchange has occurred with international oral historians until recently. In November 2002, there was an international symposium on oral history held at the Institute of Policy Studies, focusing on the oral history of politicians and bureaucrats. Paul Thompson's visit was, therefore, an opportunity for a wide range of Japanese oral historians to reconsider the development of oral history.
There were three formal meetings. First, Paul Thompson gave a lecture on 'The Potentials of Oral History and its Relevance in Japan' at Keio University. In the talk, he discussed the interdisciplinary aspects of oral history, the importance of both quantitative and qualitative materials, understanding mythical aspects, and sharing of oral evidence by founding archives. Following Paul's lecture, the audience discussed problems researching memories of World War Two. Documents on war atrocities caused by the Japanese Imperial Army were destroyed when the war ended so that historians have to prove the facts with little written evidence. The historians who want to support victims' claims are concerned about using or accepting changing subjective memories as evidence. Unfortunately unreliable memories about facts, such as testimonies from comfort women for the Japanese Army, have been cited by those who try to deny the responsibility of the Japanese Army, to show the unreliability of victims' memories. Positivistic historians are concerned about the possibility that revisionist historians could use perpetrators' testimonies to provide alternative versions of history. Japanese historians are in general still trying to ascertain facts from listening to people's accounts of their experiences. Thus, for the Japanese, developing ways to listen to war memories during Japan's Imperial War is critical for developing an oral history of Japan's recent past.
Paul Thompson also gave talks at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and the National Museum of Ethnology. The former university has recently founded its Oral Archive, collecting oral testimonies from Asian countries. Paul discussed ways of archiving and emphasized the importance of indexing for users. In the Trans-border Conflict Seminar at the Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku), the relation between gender migration and interview methods was discussed, These two meetings were attended by oral history practitioners from different disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, women's history, and representation studies. It was clear that among Japanese sociologists and anthropologists oral history research methods are already flourishing.
Some community oral historians and individual researchers also met Paul Thompson. Among them were members of Nihon Kikigaki Gakkai (Japan Listening and Writing Association) and women's oral historians. The former group, supported by the Hokkaido Local Council, has trained interviewers and organized life story essay competitions, publishing the winners' interviews in book form. Women historians who have conducted oral research in communities had their meeting and Paul Thompson listened to their long-term research on women's community lives and war memories. These oral historians, who are not based at universities but have worked for many years in the field of oral history, were especially encouraged by presenting their achievements to an international oral historian.
I cannot say that Paul Thompson was able to meet all Japanese oral historians during his visit. However, it can be said that his visit inspired many oral historians in Japan. Since his visit there has been increasing activity in the field, including local oral historians, individual oral historians, oral historians who were trained abroad, and oral historians in various academic disciplines. I hear that projects by individual researchers are starting on various topics.
Stimulated by Paul Thompson's visit, oral history networks in Japan must now be considered, and I hope that such networks will include both university and community oral historians, working on various topics, without hierarchical constraints. If such democratic support networks are established it will not be too long before Japanese oral historians can be present at international oral history conferences.
Junko Sakaij-sakai@fb3.so-net.ne.jp
International symposium held in Tokyo
Oral historians from London, New York and several other British and North American cities flew to Tokyo to participate in an international symposium, held on 8 - 9 November 2002, on a variety of issues concerning elite and institutional oral history projects, the first such conference held in Japan. Titled 'Oral History in the 21st Century', the meeting was organized by the Graduate Research Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), a state-funded graduate school, where the Project for Oral History and Policy Enrichment (POPE) is being undertaken.
In the opening session, ' Oral History of Public Figures', Professor James Sterling Young, Director of the US Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia, and Dr. Michael Kandiah, Director of the Witness Seminars at ICBH, the University of London, shared with the mostly Japanese audience their experiences at the respective projects. Professor Jun Iio of GRIPS, a political scientist, outlined history of elite oral archives in the modern Japanese society, pointing out its weak tradition of memoirs-writing caused by unique mind-set of Japanese officials. The presentations were followed by a lively discussion and Q&A session.
The tripartite comparison of oral history in these different cultures continued on the second day, particularly in the session where the two leading institutions in the U.S. and Britain were represented. Dr. Ronald J. Grele, former Director of Columbia University's Oral History Research Office, talked about the history of Columbia's OHRO, widely regarded as a pioneer of the contemporary oral history method, and of its recent projects including the large-scale, post-Sept. 11 interviews. Oral History Curator at the British Library's National Sound Archive, Dr. Robert Perks power point-briefed the four decades since the introduction of modern oral history in the UK, and discussed some of the important factors recently added to the field, including the internet and digital data storage.
Joining Messrs. Grele and Perks, GRIPS Prof. Takashi Ito, a historian of modern and contemporary Japan, offered a comprehensive picture of past achievement and future aspirations of the country's veteran oral historians, including himself. Accumulating more interview records of key decision makers of Japan's recent past to create a substantial oral history archive for the future generations is his prime target, Ito said, adding that his concerns include possible legal loopholes that must be straighten out as soon as possible to safeguard the records.
Three retired diplomats from Japan, the US and Britain took part in the 'Diplomatic Oral History' session. Mr. Charles Stuart Kennedy and Mr. Malcolm McBain, Directors respectively of the American and British Diplomatic Oral History Projects, spoke how they had come to start endeavors to talk with their ex-colleagues, and stressed the unique value of such oral records that will supplement diplomatic documents. Agreeing to the value in general of the diplomatic oral history activities based on his own experience of participating as an interviewee in the GRIPS project, Mr. Takakazu Kuriyama, former Vice Foreign Minister and Japan's envoy to Washington, also stressed the importance of striking the balance between the degree of disclosure and confidentiality which diplomacy inevitably keeps. He invited active discussion on the issue among the panelists and suggested that some sort of guideline has to be worked out among the people concerned in diplomatic oral history including the Foreign Ministry officials.
Concluding the two-day symposium, Professor Takashi Mikuriya, the leader of the GRIPS project, expressed appreciation to the panelists from overseas as well as inside Japan, and to the total of 200-strong members of the audience. The participants on the floor included not only scholars and researchers of public policy studies and diplomacy, but also social historians, journalists as well as oral history practitioners in women's issues and other social causes, Mikuriya acknowledged and appreciated.
Panelists from overseas also included two political scientists doing research on contemporary Japanese government and decision-making process: Ass. Prof. Jennifer A. Amyx of University of Pennsylvania and Ass. Prof. Yves Tiberghien of University of British Columbia.
Yasushi Yugey-yuge@grips.ac.jp
SOUTH AFRICA
The emergence of regional oral history associations in the Republic of South Africa
During the past few months two regional oral history associations have been formed in South Africa, mainly as a result of the recent IOHA conference in Pietermaritzburg.
It all began with a special meeting of all the South African delegates to the IOHA conference on 25 June 2002 in Pietermaritzburg. The participants mandated the Sinomlando Project of the University of Natal to initiate a process which would lead to the establishment of a national oral history association. A number of contact persons from other regions were elected to serve on an organizing committee. This committee was tasked with reaching its objective within a year.
At the same meeting the consensus was that we should opt for building regional bodies first, and only later engage in the process of establishing a national body.
The first to be formed, in October 2002, was the Free State Oral History Association at Bloemfontein. (the Free State is one of the nine provinces of South Africa). I was fortunate in having been present at its first meeting. This association is made up of the Free State Archives Repository, the Military Museum, lecturers in history from the two local universities (the University of the Free Sate and Vista University), the Free State Museum, members of an NGO involved in various oral history projects in Bloemfontein's African township, as well as members of the provincial department of Arts and Culture. Most of the participants were local, based in the city of Bloemfontein. The National Archivist, Mr Graham Dominy, was the guest of honour at the launch of the association. A steering committee was elected to look into the matter of the constitution, under the chairmanship of Mr Derek du Bruyn, head archivist at the Free State Archives.
In the KwaZulu-Natal province, a different route has been followed. After several meetings with stakeholders within the province (museums, archive repositories, radio and TV personnel, academics) a steering committee was formed to look into the establishment of a KwaZulu-Natal Oral History Association (KZNOHA) . Mr Pieter Nel of the Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository, Mr Sibusiso Ngcoya, director of the KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Archives and Professor Philippe Denis (of the University of Natal, and also a member of the IOHA Council) steered the process. A meeting was planned to take place in Pietermaritzburg on 30 April during which all the oral history practitioners of the province who have been contacted so far will ratify the proposed constitution.
It has been agreed that the KZNOHA will be officially launched in September this year, as part of the various activities to mark the Heritage Month. This event is jointly organised by the Alan Paton Center (which houses oral history materials), the Pietermaritzburg Heritage Committee ( which oversees events celebrating the heritage of the city) and the Sinomlando Oral History Project at the University of Natal.
At the time of writing this article, I received information that the provincial department of Arts and Culture in the Northern Cape (another one of the nine provinces) has indicated that it would like to join the Free State Oral History Association. This will necessitate a change of name from the Free State Oral History Association (FSOHA) to one which includes the Northern Cape in the title.
All these developments were born from the meeting we held on 25 June 2002 and have been inspired by the holding of the IOHA conference here in South Africa.
M.A. LietaDeputy -Director
Sinomlando Oral History Project
School of Theology
University of Natal
Pietermaritzburg
Republic of South Africa
TURKEY
Politics of Remembering. A Workshop on Memory held at Bogaziçi University, Turkey and organized by Meltem Ahiska, 4-5 April 2003.
Meltem Ahiska and the Department of Sociology, Bogaziçi University organized a workshop on the politics of memory on the 4 and 5 April of this year. The keynote speaker was Andreas Huyssen who inaugurated the workshop by raising the issue of national memory versus diasporic memory. Setting the question in terms of the various memories one young Turk in Germany had to become familiar with in order to understand where he was, Huyssen drew attention to how diaspora means coming to terms with others' memories.
The workshop was organized in four sessions: the nation's memory; the relation between memory and power; memories of displacement and displaced memories; and belonging and memory. A total of 14 papers were presented, three of which were by scholars who had participated in the IOHA conference in Istanbul: Arzu Öztürkmen, Leyla Neyzi and Nükhet Sirman. All the papers in the workshop dealt with memories which stood uneasily alongside the nation and one of the issues that received considerable attention was whether or not focussing on diasporic memory is the only way national memory could be displaced or reduced in importance. Other issues which were brought up included the memory of material culture, the relation between archive and national memory, the difference between memory and transmission, the context of the articulation of memory and memory in the globalizing world.
Although most of the participants were Bogaziçi University members, the workshop was attended by students from a variety of universities in Istanbul and proved to be an interdisciplinary forum for discussion. The organisers plan to publish the papers as an edited volume.
Gunhan Danismandanisman@boun.edu.tr
From Page to Mouth
New Projects
FINLAND
FORESTRY PROFESSIONS IN THE CHANGING SOCIETY: AN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT 1999 - 2003
As late as in the 1950's three quarters of the Finnish men living in the countryside were involved at least for some time each year in logging or timber-floating work. The mechanization of logging, beginning in the 1950's, has considerably reduced the amount of work force in the forests. Today a few thousand harvester drivers can harvest the same volume of timber that earlier required hundreds of thousands of men and horses. Parallel developments have occurred in other forestry trades as well: the profession of logging-site cook is a thing of the past, as are those of cashier and grub master. The number of people has diminished and the jobs have changed completely within a few decades, also among the clerical staff.
But what kind of individual fates are embedded in this rapid process of change? What kind of personal experiences are connected to the learning of new jobs or the loss of jobs altogether? These questions were researched during 1999 - 2003 in an oral history project called "Forestry Professions in the Changing Society". The project was funded by Metsämiesten Säätiö Foundation. The director in charge was docent Hanna Snellman of the Department of Ethnology of the University of Helsinki. Katri Kaunisto and Leena Paaskoski from the university of Helsinki and Tiina Suopajärvi from the university Oulu are writing their Ph. D. thesis collected in this research project.
The intention of the research project was to interview one thousand forestry professionals in Finland and to get as comprehensive a picture as possible of the changes in forestry during the last five decades. The interviews aimed to find out what kind of work has been done in the forests and what kind of changes have occurred in the everyday life as well as the holidays of the people who have earned their living in the forests. The focus was not on companies and organizations but on individuals. The primary object of the collection of tradition were the subjective experiences of forestry professionals. From one thousand subjective perspectives it is possible to perceive collective experiences typical to the Finnish men and women of the forest areas.
Altogether 1.054 interviews were conducted in the project. All interviews were taped and transcribed. The material is available for researcher at the Forestry Museum, Lusto, Finland. Currently there are several research projects using this material.
For more information:
Hanna.Snellman@helsinki.fiKatri.Kaunisto@helsinki.fi
GERMANY
Rosemary McGunnigle writes with news of her research, ' A Study of Leipziger and Delitzcher Youth: Subculture, Nation, Alienation, and the Negotiation of German Identities'.
The study of xenophobia and German national identification is essential for providing an understanding of how Germans define themselves as individuals and as a nation, as well as what models can be used to explain the diverse identities of a generation of German youth.
While the questions driving my research were about history, memory, self-doubt, guilt, pride and the conflicting definitions of nation, I was introduced to the eastern German experience through the teens' telling and retelling of frustrations with educational and professional limitations, their stories of confrontations with violence, descriptions of political demonstrations, statements of belonging and rejection of others and their evident uncertainty in defining both Germanness and foreignness.
The objective of my research was to contribute to the existing analysis of German identity through the collection of narratives. In-depth interviews (mostly with teenagers who frequented youth centers) allowed me to record the Geschichte, or stories/histories, of young people, which add dimensionality to the discussion of xenophobia without losing sight of the narrators' complexity.
Most, but not all, of my narrators were non-college bound middle school students, who graduate after their tenth school year and then apply for an apprenticeship (Lehrstelle). An arguable limitation in this study is the lack of representativeness of the diversity in social class and educational attainment within the population of the city of Leipzig. Therefore, what one might interpret as the experience of eastern German youth, may be more correctly defined as the experience of the lower social classes in that region, with their distinct relationships to unemployment, frustration, xenophobia and violence. On the other hand, the overrepresentation of teens frequenting youth centers can be misinterpreted as well. The overall rejection of extreme right-wing ideology expressed by the majority of narrators may not reflect the larger society, but the ideological leanings of more socially active and integrated teens.
Historical and societal factors make German teens hesitant to define themselves as German. The difficulties in defining pride, German-ness, and foreignness lead to insecurity when confronted with "others"; such encounters beg complex questions about self-identification and belonging. This insecurity and resulting feelings of alienation place limits on teens already greatly limited by high unemployment, educational, professional and economic instability. The combination of these factors with latent xenophobia and anger could lead to increased outbursts of violence, deeper polarization within society and create further distance from an all-inclusive and unconfined negotiation of German identities.
Polarization and the violence associated with teen politicization lead some teens to apathy and contentment with remaining uninformed, strategies that are employed more or less in an attempt at self-protection. Refusing to take a position on the right/left-wing issues and replacing moral and ideological consciousness and conviction with a "that's not my thing" attitude, these teens do not engage in the exercise of democratic participation. How prepared will they be as adult citizens? Furthermore, in a region characterized by high unemployment and limited future perspectives as well as an atheistic and/or agnostic worldview, what propels those teens (who do not take an ideological position) into the future? What is their driving force? What provides the basis for their values and beliefs? On the other hand, for those active in or casually flirting with membership in subcultures or scenes in order to belong/fit in, do they "learn" that ideology is as easily changed as one's clothing?
In spite of these realities, I noted the popularity of anti-right-wing extreme teens engaging in consciousness-raising activities and educating their peers about xenophobia and "Zivilcourage" through middle school organizations and at youth centers creates. The expansion of such programs and the introduction of cross-subcultural and ideological dialogue could lead to an increasingly tolerant environment - an environment tolerant, not only of foreigners, but of varied perspectives on Germanness.
It is my opinion that, if society accepts within its institutions (i.e. public school) those teens who maintain that they are proud to be German, yet stress that this does not mean they are racist/fascist or consider themselves to be superior - if those teens are given voice - an important step in redefining Germanness will have been made.
I am currently working on an article about this research. If you have carried out similar oral history/qualitative research projects with German youth, I'd be interested in hearing from you. Please contact me at mcgunnig@dickinson.edu.
MALTA
MALTESE VOICES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
John Chircop writes:
'The Oral History Centre at the University of Malta was founded two years ago and immediately started its major oral history project: 'Maltese Voices of the Twentieth Century'. The purpose of this venture is to give 'preference to the recording of authentic oral recollections by working men and women, functional illiterates and members of minorities and subcultures, whose voices and material culture have been ignored'. In this way, the OHC has commissioned the video and audio recording of recollections of common people on those issues which have been neglected by mainstream Maltese history.
The key themes focused upon in this long-term project are:
'All interviews which deal with one or more of these areas of inquiry have proved very informative. Increasing attention, however, is being given to the recording of :
1. female recollections of childbirth experiences together with issues of sexuality and contraception. These interviews are done by a team of female oral historians most of whom are mature post-graduate students. In these recordings elderly working class women talk "openly" on such intimate and hitherto "prohibited" subjects as the use of contraceptives. Some of them painfully explain their struggles against daily "guilt feelings" and the fears induced by their puritan Catholic upbringing and the omnipresence of the Church which strictly prohibited all forms of contraception up till the nineteen-seventies.
2. The memoirs of working men who were 'teddy boys' in the nineteen fifties and sixties and who were considered "imqarbin" (troublemakers/rebels) in their own communities. Through the recollections already recorded with these characters, it is becoming clear that many of them took a prominent part in the struggle for independence. Most of them were also well known for their resistance against the Church during the religious-political disputes of the early nineteen sixties. A number of these elderly 'teds' consider the interviews they gave as 'testaments' of their victimisation by the colonial government, native elite families and the local Catholic Church. Significantly, quite a number of them want their recollections to be published and divulged during their lifetime "for the younger generations to know our stories".
'Besides, the Oral History Centre is intensifying work with a number of elderly women from the fishing communities and the peasantry. A team of oral historians is recording their reminiscences on work, leisure and on aspects of sexuality. One interesting common feature found in most of these recorded recollections was the number of passing references made on the use of indigenous medicine and their application by women: a subject which has practically been hidden for too long.
'Operating on this initial information, the OHC is planning to initiate another venture to systematically record elderly women's knowledge of herbal medicine and indigenous health practices. A handful of pilot interviews on this subject have already been done with women from the remoter rural villages on the island of Gozo.
'Although the bulk of the recorded interviews in this "Maltese Voices" project are conducted with Maltese people over the age of sixty who live in the Maltese Islands, recollections by non-Maltese individuals, who have had connections with the population or have lived intermittently in these islands, are also being recorded. These are mainly British ex-servicemen or settlers and refugees or immigrant labourers from Sicily, Greece, North Africa and the Near East. Their knowledge and perceptions of the various classes of the Maltese people and their culture are proving of immense importance to local researchers.
'In addition to this on-going work, which has produced nearly two hundred recorded interviews (all deposited in the UOM Oral History archive), the success of this project is indicated by the enthusiasm shown by researchers and the general public.
'Apart from commissioning, directing and technically assisting oral history ventures, the OHC is also responsible for the cataloguing and transcription of these recordings, when this is not done by the interviewers themselves. These operations are all time-consuming but indeed crucial.
'Another important component of our work is to bring to light, give value and preserve, family photographs, written memoirs and artefacts related to the interviews in question. Most of this material is donated by the informants - in original or copy - to the Oral History Archive. All these records are catalogued and deposited in a growing section of our archive which is also available to researchers.
'As well as these activities the Oral History Centre gives importance to the training of students and interested individuals in the theoretical and practical/technical aspects of oral history. Yearly courses are organised for undergraduates, post-graduates and the general public. Those interested in the only Oral History Centre available in the Maltese islands can browse our website: http://home.um.edu.mt/history/oralhistorycentre.pdf
For more information contact:
Dr. John Chircop
Director,
Oral History Centre
Department of History
Faculty of Arts
University of Malta
e.mail: john.chircop@um.edu.mt
Tel: 35623403084 or tel/fax: 35621892756
MEXICO
ORAL HISTORY IN CULHUACAN
Culhuacan is in east Mexico City. It used to be a town with eight separate barrios [neighborhoods], come of prehispanic origin. Each barrio has a small church dedicated to a patron saint. Culhuacan has a historical memory. Because of its historical and cultural importance, Culhuacan has kept alive it community traditions, passing knowledge and stories down from generation to generation. The people, traditions and stories, many unrecorded in books, are the focus of this recovery project.
A long process of working with the townspeople has yielded results. Working with current and ex-community leaders has enabled us to expand our network to include people who have contributed to civic, religious and political organizations. The community wants to record their memories, especially those over 60 years of age, like elders Victoriana Valverde, 102 years old, or Petra Ortega, 82, Juana Molina, 109, or Simon Rosas, 72.
The information we've gathered is diverse since interviewees remember and talk about their experiences differently. In some cases, we had trouble getting interviews since informants thought that their testimonies were not of historical importance. They expressed mistrust or disbelief, but after several attempts, we established dialogue, first as informal conversation, then introducing the tape recorder.
One incident was noteworthy. One of the people we approached turned down the idea of an interviewing, expressing anger and resentment toward those who 'ask questions' but don't leave behind any evidence of what they have gathered. Interestingly, one gentleman began to address the very topic we were interested in researching. He invited us to continue an informal conversation with him the next day. He finally introduced us to his compadres, his buddies, who expanded even more on the topic, allowing us gather direct quotes.
A significant number of residents have given us stories on diverse topics. They also have old photographic collections of weddings, town history, soccer, charrería [the Mexican cowboy tradition], and other images. We've collected testimonial accounts about the image-bearer of the Señor de Chalma, the Mexican Revolution, the National Canal, a vestige of pre-hispanic times, or pilgrimages to the Basilica of Guadalupe.
We've faced a variety of obstacles. For example, what to do when we collect diverging accounts of a single event? How to complement or compare oral data with archival evidence when politics or religion are involved? What to do when the elderly make extra efforts to share their stories but either poor memory or physical exhaustion limits their ability to tell stories? We also got comments like "You should have spoken to so-and-so, before he died. He was a hundred years old and knew a lot about things here. Others expected that whatever information we gathered, whether pertinent to our research or not, should be immediately shared with the public. Then we had to convince people and help them understand what we were doing. Constant dedication and developing trust between historian and interviewee play a key role.
Our commitment to the community caused us to constantly review our research plans, since our interviewees demanded a lot from us. But there are advantages to this because the quality of our information was better and our understanding of the context and our informants' ways of thinking increased significantly. Our analysis became richer because of it.
Our subjects struggle to gain a place and a space in history. They battle the stronger powers that control information, education and history-making. In their desire to become protagonists and share the stage, our informants speak. And, in the desire to recover the a collective oral history of Culhuacan , the historians write.
Patricia Pavón,Museo de Culhuacan
Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, México.
SOUTH AFRICA
FORCED REMOVALS FROM THE NORTHERN SUBURBS OF CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA: A community radio, oral history project in partnership with the Centre for Popular Memory, and Radio Atlantis.
The Centre for Popular Memory is a multi-disciplinary oral and visual history research unit based at the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. The Centre aims to give all South Africans a public voice through recording and popularising their stories, by conserving these stories for current and future generations and by contributing to capacity building in the form of specialised oral history skills training.
In the 1960s and 1970s many thousands of black South Africans were forcibly removed from their homes by the apartheid regime. The northern suburbs of Cape Town was one such area from where considerable numbers of people were forcibly removed, yet very little of this history had been publicly acknowledged or conserved. Many of these people were removed to Atlantis, a new town that was artificially created by the apartheid regime on the Cape West Coast about sixty kilometers from Cape Town. Today some nine years after South Africa's democratic transition, the historical legacy of this social engineering lives on. Atlantis remains an isolated and underdeveloped area, beset by problems of unemployment, poverty and crime.
It was within this context that in 2002, the Centre, in partnership with the community radio station Radio Atlantis, set out to record these stories of forced removals, dislocation and relocation to Atlantis. The project received generous funding from the Media Support Programme of the Open Society Foundation for South Africa. Four unemployed residents from Atlantis, two women and two men were trained as field workers. The CPM provided comprehensive skills training in all aspects of oral history research, interviewing and computer literacy. Radio Atlantis provided their support and technical expertise with the writing, editing and production of four radio programmes, two dramas and two documentaries. Each field worker conducted and transcribed twenty in-depth oral history interviews, mostly in Afrikaans, producing over one hundred hours of recorded material. This has provided our archive at the CPM with valuable new research material on the social history of apartheid and forced removals in Cape Town.
Fieldworkers directly benefited from this project in the form of employment and income-earning opportunities. In broader terms however, they also gained valuable skills as they learnt how to plan and implement a project, learnt how to work in a team and to take the initiative in problem solving and decision-making. In the process, each field worker gained a great deal of self-confidence in their abilities and produced good quality work.
In addition to this strong focus on capacity building, the project also successfully demonstrated the synergy between oral history interviewing and dissemination of history through community radio. Radio Atlantis broadcast the four radio programmes in November, 2002, and given the positive feedback from listeners, the project succeeded in making history accessible to the community in a vibrant way. This has had the effect of stimulating further interest in history within the Atlantis and West Coast communities and so in a small way we feel that through this project we have begun to address imbalances of the past.
Felicity Swanson,fswanson@humanities.uct.ac.za
Senior Researcher,
Centre for Popular Memory,
University of Cape Town,
South Africa.
USA
ORAL HISTORY IN THE COMMUNITY
Oral history is uniquely suited to bridge the divide between the academy and the public at large, and this is particularly true at a time of burgeoning public appreciation of the power of oral history to connect individuals to the many histories - personal, family, community, regional - that they seek to understand. In recent years the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has experienced a sharp increase in demand for our training and consulting services. To meet this need, we secured a 2002 Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Innovation Award, which is designed in part "to encourage Ph.D. students to interact with the world outside the academy as part of their graduate training." The WWNFF award is augmented by an additional contribution from the North Carolina Humanities Council.
The SOHP's winning proposal, Sowing Skills, Harvesting History: Statewide Oral History Workshops Conducted by SOHP Graduate Students, calls for the presentation of three oral history workshops across North Carolina during spring 2003, each led by a pair of UNC graduate students. Each workshop provides "basic training" in oral history with the graduate students tailoring the topics to community interests and their particular area of expertise such as performance or anthropology. As projects emerge from participants in the workshops, the doctoral students will return to the communities to provide intensive consulting services.
Public response has been very enthusiastic, and each of the free, day-long workshops has been filled to capacity. The gatherings provide an additional benefit in introducing attendees to others actively pursuing or interested in similar research projects.
Joseph Mosnier,mosnier@unc.edu
Associate Director, Southern Oral History Program
CB# 9127, 408 Hamilton Hall
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-9127
919-962-5931, fax 2-4433
Archive Stories
REPUBLIC OF IRELAND
The significant impact of Irish missionary movements, of all denominations, on the creation of 'new cultural worlds' in Ireland and overseas over the last two centuries cannot be emphasized strongly enough. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries uncounted numbers of Irish men and women worked overseas as doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, priests, ministers, bible agents and religious sisters. America and Australia are just two of the areas where their influence is most immediately acknowledged. However, Irish missionaries were also to be found in significant numbers in Asia, Oceania and Africa, especially in areas colonized by the European powers. Indeed, this movement of Irish persons abroad for missionary reasons has been one of the longest-running threads in Irish history. The individual experiences of those involved in such undertakings are unique and of vital importance in any attempt to understand the significance and impact of their work. Oral history methodology is a powerful tool which can be utilized to capture and make permanent the personal insights these individuals possess. And this primary source material will be available to future researchers long after they have passed on. Hence, the establishment of the oral history archive on mission activities.
It is planned that the oral archive will form an essential part of a comprehensive multimedia mission archive, encompassing manuscript records, reference works, photographs, films and videos, to be established at Maynooth. It will pertain to the activities of lay and religious missionaries of all Christian denominations, at home and abroad, who had significant connections with Ireland. This will make available to scholars from Ireland and overseas primary source material relating to the recruitment, training and formation of missionaries and the lifestyles of people in religious orders and others involved in charitable works, at home and abroad, over a timescale of a century or more. It may also help to shed some light on the spiritual, social and other influences that led to these vocations. Other topics covered are the changing concepts of mission between and among different religious groups. Close attention is being paid to the success, failure or modification of these theories based on practical field experience.
Although the oral history project is primarily concerned with missionary activities, the interviews take the form of life histories. Thus, the content of the interviews range from early childhood through schooldays, adolescence and adulthood. Therefore, large tracts of information relating to Irish life are being recovered. By its very nature the everyday work of missionaries required interaction with different social and ethnic groups in the countries and places where they were stationed. Therefore, the interviews should also provide valuable insights into the living conditions, the social order and politics of very different cultures from many parts of the world. Thus, the archive will also assist undergraduate and postgraduate researchers from these countries particularly in the writing of national, and local history, and in the writing of church history.
The project is being undertaken by Dr. Charles Flynn who began his studies in Maynooth as a mature student in 1993 and completed his Ph.D in 2000. It is believed that this is the first Ph.D to feature oral history methodology awarded in Ireland. The thesis is based on over sixty interviews with people from his home town and their experiences are presented as a history of Dundalk (Ireland) between 1900 and 1960. In October 2002 he was granted a prestigious two-year Government of Ireland Post-Doctoral Fellowship Award to compile the Mission History Oral Archive at the Department of Modern History at the National University of Ireland Maynooth.
The preparatory stages of the undertaking have been completed and prospective interviewees contacted. This was done in December 2002 by means of an enclosure in the monthly mailshot of the Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI). All on the mailing list received a brochure (on the aims of the oral archive) and letter of invitation (for contributors). This proved highly successful and to date correspondence has been received from most parts of the country (north and south) and there has also been some response from England and America. All of this information has been placed in a database which now contains almost 150 names and is growing daily. Each respondent has been contacted and several interviews have already taken place.
The first interview was conducted in Kilkenny on the 25 November 2002 and a further nine have been completed since then. All of these varied in length and content. So far the shortest interview lasted approximately two hours and the longest is eight hours. Up on forty hours of archival material has already been recorded all of which has been copied to audio-cassette format and fully transcribed.
The content of the recordings is wonderfully varied through reminiscences of rural and city life in Ireland from the early part of the twentieth century to the difficulties posed for westerners by the Communist takeover of China. There are additional insights into interdenominational relationships between Irish Roman Catholics and citizens of differing persuasions from both perspectives and from both jurisdictions on the island. Detailed accounts of the religious, administrative, educational, medical, social, cultural and personal lives of people in countries such as Brazil, Cameroon, China, Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Nigeria, Uganda and Zambia have already been collected and there is much more yet to come.
Thus the initial phase of the research has been highly successful and the way cleared for the establishment of an oral archive of international value at an academic institution in the Republic of Ireland.
Charles Flynncharlesflynn@eircom.net
From Mouth to Page
Books
El mundo del trabajo en Renfe. Historia Oral de la Infraestructura, Pilar Folguera.(Directora), Pilar Díaz Sánchez, Domínguez Prats, José María Gago, Fundación de los Ferrocarriles Españoles, Madrid, Spain, 2003
The history of RENFE (the Spanish National Railway Network) has been widely studied in recent years. Nevertheless, the large amount of work carried out in the last two decades contrasts with a virtual absence of research into RENFE's internal organisation and the social history of its work force. Even so, mention should be made of Ferner's fine comparative study (1990) of the Spanish and British models.
The lack of documentary sources with specific references to this subject has made it necessary to resort to non-traditional sources, meaning oral sources in this case. Oral sources are particularly suited for reconstructing labour history and some of its specific aspects, such as the study of labour systems, processes, representation, attitudes and ethics, as well as the relationships between work and everyday life, between work and individual and collective identity, and between the work force and social organisation, mobilisations and protests.
The contents of this new book which draws heavily on oral evidence includes:
| . | Objective data on interviewees. All the data relating to the biography of an interviewee, such as age, place of birth, parents' professions, partner's profession, number of children, level of education, jobs held, physical locations throughout a professional career, current work situation, and date and place of the interview. |
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| . | Aspects of family life. This section aims at in-depth knowledge of the family environment in which the interviewee spent his or her childhood and youth, including details on early schooling and the background of the first years of the interviewee's life. The topics covered include the social and geographical provenance of the interviewee's family, parents's professions, the domestic environment, education received within the family, religious ideas, institutional education, level of studies, religious values, political ideas, neighbourhood ambience (especially if the interviewee spent his or her childhood in a house provided by RENFE), military service, and any other aspect which helps to define the early years in an interviewee's life. |
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| . | Professional career. Investigations have been carried out on each interviewee's professional career from the moment they joined the company until their retirement (if this has already taken place). The analysis also focuses on incentives for vertical or horizontal promotion, health and safety conditions at work, salaries, and a general appraisal of the company on the basis of the interviewee's personal experience. |
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| . | Social activity in RENFE. Social activity taking place within the company itself constitutes one of the characteristic features of entrepreneurial culture in Spain. Since its creation in 1941, RENFE has acted as patron for a variety of activities: adult education, professional training, an orphans' school, recreational activities, discount stores, pensions, salary advances, dwellings, the construction of railwaymen's neighbourhoods, medical assistance, health clinics and many other services whose true extent demands full analysis. |
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| . | Degree of identification with the job. All the interviewees recognise that belonging to RENFE means rather more than doing a day's work. Many of the workers regard themselves (though less so nowadays) as an integral part of the company, so that ' being a railwayman' constitutes a distinguishing feature with regard to other workers and other firms. Joining the company on the basis of family precedents, belonging to a group, joining in social activities with other RENFE workers and living in company housing are differentiating factors which lead to a high degree of identification with the employer. All these factors are analysed in this section, along with other questions suggested by the interviewees themselves in the course of the survey. |
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| . | Design of the survey. The complexity of RENFE's history between 1941 and 2000 calls for a division by periods in order to reflect the lives and experiences of people who in most cases have devoted practically all their working lives to the company. Three periods have consequently been established: 1941-1961, 1961-1981 and 1981-2000. These three phases have been determined on the basis of the technological and organisational changes that have taken place in each of the periods in question. Geographical diversity is another criterion regarded as extremely important for the design of the survey. Obviously, the possibilities of interviewing individuals all over Spain are limited. We have therefore chosen the most significant cities and network hubs on the national railway system. The list of interviewees covers most of the professional categories which existed in the early years of RENFE's history, and some of the categories which existed in the seventies and eighties. |
Journals
ORAL HISTORY - Vol 31, no 1, 2003
ARTICLES:
| . | From The Interviewer's Perspective: Interviewing Women Conscientious Objectors, Rena Feld. |
| . | Issues In Cross-Cultural Interviewing: Japanese Women In England, Susan K. Burton. |
| . | A Second Take: Revisiting Interviews With A Different Purpose, Joanna Bornat. |
| . | 'Dear Reader I Killed Him': Ethical And Emotional Issues In Researching Convicted Murderers Through The Analysis Of Interview Transcripts, Barry F Godfrey. |
| . | Sisterhood? Exploring Power Relations In The Collection Of Oral History, Yvonne McKenna. |
| . | Last Rock In The Empire: Evacuation, Identity And Myth In Gibraltar, Caroline Norrie . |
PUBLIC HISTORY
| . | Costeño Voices: Oral History On Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast, Padmini Broomfield and Cynara Davies. |
REVIEWS:
| . | The Shipbuilders: An Anthology of Scottish Shipyard Life, Martin. |
| . | Bellamy; A Fighting Union. An Oral History of the South African. |
| . | Railway and Harbour Workers' Union, Margaret Kiloh with Archie Sibeko (Zola Zembe). |
| . | The Man From the Sunrise Side, Ambrose Mungala Chalarimeri . |
| . | Speaking to Immigrants: Oral Testimony and the History of Australian Migration, A James Hammerton and Eric Richards (eds). |
| . | The Good Women of China - Hidden Voices, Xinran, translated by Esther Tyldesley; . |
| . | Thirty-three Years in the Trenches. Memoirs of a Sussex Working Man, Peter Richards, compiled by Nick Osmond. |
| . | Shards of Memory: Woven Lives in Four Generations, Parita Mukta . |
| . | NU, Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art. |
|
All the articles are abstracted on the Oral History Society website: http://www.oralhistory.org.uk |
|
HISTORIA, ANTROPOLOGÍA Y FUENTES ORALES - NÚM. 29 (2003)
Cinismo y Política
[Politics and Cynicism]
| . | The chain reaction. Jean François Billeter |
| . | The NGO market. Joan Picas Contreras |
| . | The reunification of Germany: Polemics and interpretations. Alexander von Plato |
| . | Power and resistance in Brazil's rural syndicalism. Antonio Torres Montenegro |
| . | National-Catholicism and popular religiousness (1939-1953). An analysis through photographic documentation. Emilio Luis Lara López |
| . | Utopia and expressive resources in Mihai Nadin's The Civilization of Illiteracy. Frederic Chordá |
| . | Activism for civil rights in the construction of a white woman's identitity in Georgia. Kathryn L. Nasstrom |
| . | Former French resistants and historians. Pascale Baboulet-Flourens |
| . | Ethical Problems and historical witnesses. Almut Leh |
| . | Images that talk". Photography in field research work. Joana Bahia |
|
E-mail: ahcbhafo@trivium.gh.ub.es |
|
Put it in Writing
WORDS AND SILENCES
Annual Journal in English and Spanish of the International Oral History Association
Call for Papers for 2004 Issue:
Words and Silences, the annual journal of the International Oral History Association (http://www.ioha.fgr.br), is seeking short articles for its 2004 issue. Each issue will be thematic. We are also adding a new section on practical problems concerning research, publication and conservation of oral sources.
For specific themes for the 2004 issue, please contact the editors: Gerardo Necoechea (gnecoechea.deh@deh.inah.gob.mx) and Lluis Ubeda (lubeda@mail.bcn.es)
The essays may be written in English or Spanish (or both, which would save us translation work) and should not exceed 500 words. References should be included in the text (author, title, publisher and date) and not as footnotes. Contributions should be mailed as an attachment in Word or RTF format to gnecoechea.deh@deh.inah.gob.mx
The DEADLINE for receipt of contributions is 20 DECEMBER 2003.
Please pass this request on to other oral historians.
IOHA Newsletter Guidelines and Deadlines:
Copy is preferred as Microsoft Word attachment. Footnotes included in items should be included only in parentheses and not formatted.
Images and illustrations should be scanned at 72dpi, and sent in jpg or pic formats.
Send via e-mail to both co-editors:
Joanna Bornat: j.bornat@open.ac.uk
Rina Benmayor: Rina_Benmayor@csumb.edu
Maximum Length:
· Future conferences, meetings, and other announcements - 250 words
· Conference reports - 500 words
· Archive News - 500 words
· New Projects - 1000 words
Deadlines:
· October 15 - posted to website in January.
· April 15 - posted to website in June
IOHA Membership Details
The International Oral History Association (IOHA) was formally constituted in June 1996 at the IXth International Oral History Conference in Goteborg, Sweden. The Association provides a forum for oral historians around the world, in order to foster international communication and cooperation and a better understanding of the nature and value of oral history. Benefits of membership include:
Membership is open to any individual or institution supporting the aims and objectives of the Association. The Association is governed by a Council elected at the General Meeting of the biennial international oral history conference. The President of the Association is Janis Wilton from Australia and current Council members come from Australia, Brazil, England, Germany, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Turkey and the United States.
For membership forms, go to Membership on the IOHA website. For enquiries e-mail the Association's treasurer, Almut Leh (almut.leh@fernuni-hagen.de).
Fees for two-year membership (July 2002 - June 2004)
· Individuals: 46 Euros
· Institutions: 92 Euros
· Students: 23 Euros