International Oral History Association(published twice a year)
Volume 13:1, 2005
From the Editors
This issue of the IOHA newsletter reflects major changes that occurred at the recent meeting in Rome, where elections brought new members to the council and new editors for the newsletter. We assume editorial responsibility with the advantage of following after Rina Benmayor and Joanna Bornat, who labored so diligently over the past several years to develop a workable format for this essential form of communication. If we cannot fill their shoes, we can at least fill the template they created for our electronic newsletter, and for which we express our deep gratitude.
Like our predecessors, we depend entirely on IOHA members for text and illustrations. We seek reports from oral history projects and archives all over the world, along with notices of future meetings and new publications. We also want to know what type of information you are seeking. Please let us know if the newsletter is filling your needs, or how it might be improved.
The newsletter is published twice each year, in January and June. Deadlines for submission are October 15 and April 15. We send the call for contributions via email, and make the newsletter available both via email and on the IOHA's web site. To make this possible, we need accurate addresses from all members. Please remember to notify us if you change your email address.
[Outgoing IOHA Council at work in Rome.]
Over the past decade, IOHA has worked to become a truly international organization. It has held meetings in Sweden, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, and Italy. The next will be held in Sydney, Australia, in July 2006. Each reminds us that while we conduct research about very different places and issues, we share a common methodology. We are unified in our desire to record and preserve people's opinions and reflections. Through this newsletter, IOHA members can keep track of what is happening elsewhere, in places where we have met, and in places where we have yet to meet. We all stand to benefit from such shared information, and we are counting on you to provide it.
Don Ritchie (English text) - oralhistorians@comcast.net
Pilar Domínguez (Spanish text)- pdprats@dch.ulpgc.es
Co-editors, IOHA News
From the President
Gathering from all corners of the globe, high on one of its famous seven hills, we came to Rome, told our stories on terra centuries-old, discussed our affairs amid the palatial and historic camere of the Campidoglio, drank wine overlooking the Foro Romano, gazed out at the Roman landscape over pranzo, feasted in Renaissance courtyards, were regaled with music, and came away with a magnificent memory of the XIIth International Oral History Association conference. We went, we saw-thankfully, we did not conquer anyone! But thanks to Alessandro Portelli, Luigi Stanziani, and an amazingly kind and tireless crew of students and staff, we celebrated one of the largest IOHA gatherings ever, with well over 500 oral historians from five continents. Brava, IOHA! Grazie, Sandro!
The meeting in Rome set several benchmarks. It placed oral history and memory as social action in the foreground of an increasingly globalized and conflictive world. The theme of Memory and Globalization was beautifully framed by Carlo Ginzburg in the opening plenary, and by Estela Carloto in the closing, who gave moving testament to reclaiming memory in Argentina. In between, the conference participants explored the social, political and aesthetic impact of memory on cities, among workers, in education, in families and across generations, in folklore and oral traditions, in gender and sexuality, in health and healing, in history and social movements, in culture and tourism, in migrations, in community activism, music, technology, narrative, and in methodology. It was one of the richest compendia of presentations in IOHA's history.
Another benchmark was set in that this was the first meeting outside Africa to include a significant, though still small, group of African oral historians, many of whom joined IOHA at the 2002 meeting in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Their presence in Rome was due in no small measure to the proactive efforts of the previous IOHA Council. Thanks to the outstanding efforts of Calinda Lee and Funso Afolayan, co-chairs of the Scholarships Committee, and Sandro Portelli, conference coordinator, IOHA was able to raise several thousand Euros to bring presenters from developing countries who otherwise would have been unable to attend an international conference. A third benchmark is that the Rome conference has provided impetus and resources to launch the first Italian Oral History Association! In this way, IOHA leaves something tangible behind as it moves on to other venues.
The Rome conference also posed several challenges for the future, which the new Council will address over the next two years. As IOHA 2006 moves to Australia, we will be working to expand fundraising and scholarships to support continuity of representation from parts of the world where oral history is less established or resourced as a field or area of work. I will be working closely with the conference organizers to enhance bilingual and multilingual communication at conferences, in small panels as well as in plenaries, is another strong focus of concern. With the continued support of Marieta de Moraes Ferreira, the Fundaçat Getulio Vargas which hosts our website, and Sueni Hguchi, our webmaster, we are working to redesign the IOHA website to make it more dynamic and useful, including streamed sound, enhanced resource links, and oral history projects and scholarship. Generating new membership stands as an ongoing challenge. We hope that the increased participation in Rome will lead to new membership in IOHA, and we will be developing stronger outreach to potential members. And finally, we will be examining the Constitution and By-Laws, in an effort to clarify and streamline procedures and operating practices.
In meeting these goals, we will owe much to the strong leadership and accomplishments of former President, Janis Wilton (2002-04) and the previous Council. The Association's journal, Words and Silences/Palabras y Silencios and the online newsletter, IOHA News/Boletín de la IOHA, are flourishing. An online site for Council meetings twice yearly was established; a scholarship fund was initiated, and we now have a printed brochure and a permanent repository for the Association's records. The new Council hopes to give continuity to these and many other achievements.
The new Council is comprised of representatives from Africa, Asia, Latin American, North America, the Caribbean, Oceania and Western Europe.
[The new IOHA Council. Front row, from left to right/Primera fila de izquierda a derecha: Eriko Yamamoto (Japan), Paula Hamilton (Australia), Janis Wilton (Past President, Australia), Rina Benmayor, President (United States), Parita Mukta (England), and Pilar Domínguez (Spain). Back row/fila de atrás: Aviston Downes (Barbados), Gerardo Necoechea (México), Don Ritchie (United States), Antonio Montenegro (Brazil), Sean Field (South Africa), Funso Afolyayan (Nigeria), and Günhan Danisman (Turkey).]
In Council, we are dividing responsibilities as follows:
2006 Conference Committee: Janis Wilton (Australia), Paula Hamilton (Australia)
Conference Support Committee: Günhan Danisman (Turkey), Antonio Montenegro (Brazil), Pilar Domínguez (Spain); Parita Mukta (UK)
Words and Silences/Palabras y Silencios: Gerardo Necoechea, editor (Mexico)
IOHA News/Boletín: Don Ritchie, English editor (US); Pilar Domínguez, Spanish editor (Spain)
Website: Aviston Downes (Barbados), Funso Afolayan (Nigeria), Eriko Yamomoto (Japan)
Fundraising and Scholarships: Sean Field (South Africa), Funso Afolayan (Nigeria), Antonio Montenegro (Brazil)
Membership: Aviston Downes (Barbados), Eriko Yamomoto (Japan)
In addition, Anna Greene (New Zealand), who served as Executive Secretary in 2000-02, has very generously agreed to actively maintain the archival records of the Association. Similarly, Almut Leh, Henriette Schlessinger, and the Institüt für Geschichte und Biographie, will continue serving generously as ex-officio Treasurer, Membership Secretary, and supporting institution, respectively. We are indebted to their steadfast support of IOHA.
Planning is well underway for the 2006 conference, July 12-16 at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, with the enticing theme of Dancing With Memory: Oral History and its Audiences. Co-organizers and co-sponsoring institutions are Janis Wilton (University of New England, Armidale), Paula Hamilton (University of Technology, Sydney), and Rosemary Block (New South Wales Historical Society and the Australian Oral History Association). The conference will also extend over four days to enable greater exposure to presentations. The Call for Papers is now circulating and a conference website link is soon to be posted at www.ioha.fgv.br. For the first time, the conference will include master classes taught by our leading scholars, special interest gatherings, and special plenaries marking IOHA's 10th anniversary as a formal association! We will launch IOHA's oral history by honoring the life work and contributions of so many path-breaking oral historians and IOHA founders, including Paul Thompson, Ron Grele, Luisa Passerini, Alessandro Portelli, Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato, Merecedes Vilanova, Marieta de Moraes Ferreira and others. The Sydney conference will be unique in this respect!
In closing, I look forward to working energetically for IOHA over the next two years and hope that I may be able to contribute meaningfully to the Association's evolution and reach. It's an honor to serve you and I thank you for your support and trust.
Rina Benmayor
IOHA President
Rina_Benmayor@csumb.edu
The World of Words
Future Conferences and Meetings
USING THE WAR: CHANGING MEMORIES OF WORLD WAR TWO: July 1-3, 2005, Oral History Society with King's College, London, UK
This international oral history conference marks the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Presenters and speakers from across Europe, Latin and North America, and the Far East will seek to address the war's consequences and legacy in the memories of participants and for successive generations.
The conference will be organised with two major themes that reflect the ways in which World War Two continues in many countries to play a part in historical consciousness and everyday life. The themes are: "Remembering, Forgetting and Silence" and "Using Memories of the War". The war is remembered through dominant discourses, through intergenerational communication, by individuals, and through the media, and the process is supported through therapeutic interventions that acknowledge its deep psychological imprint. Keynote speakers include: Paula Hamilton (Australia), Andreas Kruse (Germany) and Sandro Portelli (Italy).
Located on London's South Bank, the conference will offer a lively programme that will take advantage of the cultural and historical local environment. For registration details contact: Belinda Waterman, email: Belinda@essex.ac.uk
Joanna Bornat J.Bornat@open.ac.uk
ORAL HISTORY IN CANADA CONFERENCE: August 18-20, 2005, University of Winnipeg, Canada
The Department of History and the Chair in German-Canadian Studies at the University of Winnipeg invite proposals for a conference on the practice of oral history in Canada. This conference seeks to bring practitioners from various fields together to assess the state of oral history in Canada and the directions it may take in the future. Now is an important time for such an assessment for several reasons: Technology: Recording and archiving technology has been in a challenging transition from analog to digital for more than a decade. Method: Video oral history has made a few forays but seems to be marginalized despite affordable equipment. Theory: Despite its long-lasting research into complex issues of memory, the new debates about collective memory and commemoration seem to bypass and ignore this work. This seems to be true for the two fields of oral history and oral tradition collecting as well.
We invite students, independent researchers and professional academics to propose panels and individual papers on the above and other issues pertinent to the theory and practice of oral history. Rather than focus only on Canadian topics, we encourage presentations on topics from around the world. Topics to be explored may include, but are not restricted to: Oral history and oral tradition; activism and archiving; aboriginal oral history and tradition; narrative and story-telling; memory, remembering, commemoration; gender, class, ethnicity/race, etc.; migration, transnationalism, transculturalism, diasporic experiences; interviewing people of different ages; interviewer-interviewee relationships; interviewing techniques.
Proposals must include the following information: Name, institutional affiliation and department, contact information, degrees (start with the most recent and specify the discipline); recent positions and those relevant to oral history (starting with the most recent one); recent publications and those relevant to oral history; title of the presentation and panel; a 100-150 word abstract in English; a one-page curriculum vitae. Papers of 15-20 pages (double-spaced without footnotes or bibliography) will be posted online (password-protected) several weeks before the conference. Deadline for the papers is 1 July 2005. Presenters will have 20 minutes to present their papers. Funding is sought for assisting participants in their travel expenses. For general information about the University of Winnipeg, the Department of History or the Chair in German Canadian Studies, please consult our website (www.uwinnipeg.ca).
Please send proposals by December 31, 2004 to: Oral History Conference, Linda Gladstone, Dept. of History University of Winnipeg, 515 Portage Avenue, Winnipeg, MB, Canada R3B 2E9. For information about the conference, contact Nolan Reilly, ph. (204) 786-9012, email: n.reilly@uwinnipeg.ca; or Alexander Freund, ph. (204) 786-9009, e-mail: a.freund@uwinnipeg.ca
ORAL AND VISUAL SOURCES: HISTORIC RESEARCH AND PEDAGOGIC RENEWAL, September 7-9, 2005, IruZa/Pamplona, Spain
A history conference is being organized by the Institute of Economic and Social History Gerónimo de Uztariz, the Icaria Federation (Fedicaria), the Seminar of Oral Sources (Complutence University), and the Geography and History Department (Public University of Navarra), in IruZa/Pamplona, Spain, September 7-9, 2005. The conference intends to encourage the meeting and dialogue within a double intersection: that of historic research with critic pedagogy, and that of the use of oral and visual sources, both linked with the History and Oral Sources Conferences regularly celebrated in Ávila since 1981.
The Conference will be structured in three thematic lines:
- Research and methodology of oral sources.
- Sources and archives for oral history: problems and state of affairs.
- Critic education of memory: pedagogic and didactic renewal of social sciences.
The conference format includes plenary sessions, and additional time to carry out different workshops. Papers and workshop proposals should not exceed of 1000 words, and may be submitted in any of the official languages of the Spanish State. Name of the author(s) and presentation title should be also added, as well as an indication of the section where the paper should be included.
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS:
By September 30, 2004: Papers and workshops proposals.
By May 8, 2005: Receipt of papers
SEND PROPOSALS TO:
Santiago Leoné: santileone@yahoo.es or
Gemma Piérola: gemma.pierola@unavarra.es
ARCHIVES SPEAK: WHO LISTENS? IASA Conference, September 11-15, 2005, Barcelona, Spain
Digital technology and the increasing demand for audiovisual material in support of learning, structured or personalized, have encouraged archives to increase their promotional activities and raise their public profile accordingly. But how much do we know about our audiences, their expectations and intentions? What are the obligations, legal and moral, particularly with respect to the creators of the content we collect, which constrain our interactions with these audiences? What is the impact on the traditional set of skills expected of an audiovisual archivist? IASA seeks proposals for papers, of not more than twenty minutes duration, that address one or more of the following sub-themes that can be associated with the new emphasis on disseminating archival content:
- User demands in the era of digitization
- Archives and collaborative ventures
- User expectations and user perspectives of archives
- Preservation vs. Dissemination
- The Digital Divide-serving users outside the digital domain
- Promotional strategies for archives
- Moral and legal obligations for the archive and their users
- New technologies and models for dissemination Digital demands-the changing profile of archives
- The community and the archive
- Archives as custodians of social memory.
In addition, the program committee is keen to receive proposals for papers that feature recent experiences of promotional activities and that draw comprehensively on different types of audiovisual recordings (i.e. oral history and language, environmental sounds and actuality as well as recordings of music and literature). The committee seeks proposals that include visual content as well as audio.
Proposals must be accompanied by an abstract of not more than 150 words. The deadline for this first call for papers is January 31, 2005. Contributors will be notified during March of the program committee's decision. Please send your proposal along with your name and address to:
Shubha Chaudhuri: shubha@ernet.in or shubhac@yahoo.com
VOICES OF DISSENT, VOICES OF HOPE: November 2-6, 2005, Oral History Association Annual Meeting, Providence, Rhode Island, US
The Oral History Association invites proposals for papers and presentations for its 2005 annual meeting to be held November 2-6 at the Providence Marriott, Providence, Rhode Island. In keeping with the historic role of the city of Providence in welcoming religious dissenters, the meeting will focus special attention on oral history work with persons who have sought freedom of expression, freedom from coercion, and freedom of conscience. Presentations may deal with religious freedom and the ways people have resisted oppression based on religious identity; or have dissented from the coercive intentions of powerful figures and institutions, religious and secular. Stories of political protestors, labor organizers, and reformers advocating various causes will also be an important part of the meeting.
Please submit five copies of your proposal. For full sessions, submit a title, a session abstract of not more than two pages, and a one-page vita or resume for each participant. For individual proposals, submit a one-page abstract and a one-page vita or resume of the presenter. Each submission must be accompanied by a cover sheet, which can be printed from the OHA. Web site: http://www.dickinson.edu/oha .
Proposals should be sent by January 15, 2005, to Madelyn Campbell, Oral History Association, Dickinson College P. O. Box 1773 Carlisle, PA 17013. Telephone: (717) 245-1036; Fax: (717) 245-1046. Other questions may be directed to the Program Cochairs Pamela Dean (pamela_dean@umit.maine.edu) and David Stricklin (dstricklin@lyon.edu).
Speaking Memory: Oral History, Oral Culture and Italians in America: American Italian Historical Association, November 3-6, 2005, Los Angeles, California, US
This conference will focus on research in the fields of oral history, local history, ethnography, and oral tradition, as they pertain to Italians in America. Its proposed themes are: 1) Oral history research and Italians in America: methodologies and applications; 2) Ethnography, oral tradition, and its sites: academia, community, public sector; 3) Italians in Southern California: local history, institutions, organizations, community life, special projects, etc.; 4) Any topic in the area of Italian/American studies
As plenary speaker, Alessandro Portelli of the UniversitBB La Sapienza, Rome, will address the issue: "What Makes Oral History Different?" The conference will also feature an oral history research workshop by the UCLA Oral History Program; sound and visual archives presentation by the Italian Oral History Institute and the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archives; receptions, concerts, exhibitions, traditional Italian frame drum and dance workshops; and historic and cultural tours of Italian Los Angeles.
For more information see http://www.iohi.org/NEW/index.html. Please send your name, affiliation, and a one-page paper proposal to: "AIHA in LA 2005" Conference Chair: Luisa Del Giudice, Director, IOHI Italian Oral History Institute, P.O. Box 241553, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1553 USA; Tel: (310) 474-1698, Fax: (310) 474-3188; luisadg@humnet.ucla.edu.
NARRATING MEMORY: Oral History and Life Stories Network, Sixth European Social Science History Conference, 22-25 March 2006, Amsterdam, Netherlands
The biannual European Social Science History Conference will be held in Amsterdam in 2006. Since 1998, the Oral History and Life Stories Network has met at each conference, and interest in it has been steadily rising. Some seventy participants gathered at the most recent network sessions. With the International Oral History Association conference often meeting outside Europe, the Network has become a regular international forum for European oral history and life story researchers.
We invite proposals for the Amsterdam conference, both for individual papers and for entire sessions. Sessions can take various formats: panels, roundtable discussions, and presentations in other media followed by discussion. We wish to encourage reflection and discussions on the ways in which memory works and is used; on how we communicate, listen to, and interpret narrated memories; and on the interplay of public narratives and private narrations. We invite contributions discussing conceptual and methodological issues related to memory, employing different concepts of memory based on oral sources. We would welcome proposals addressing the following issues: repressed memory and memory of repression; memory and testimony: claiming the right to memory; communicating memories: how group memories structure personal accounts; constructing the body: public image versus private memory; and constructing the self: memory, subjectivity, and identity.
Please send your proposals to both Nanci Adler (N.Adler@niod.nl) and Daniela Koleva (daniela@sclg.uni-sofia.bg). Upon submission, you also must pre-register on the conference website http://www.iisg.nl/esshc where more general conference information is available. The deadline for sending abstract is 30 April 2005.
The Network Committee advising on the 2006 ESSHC includes:
Nanci Adler N.Adler@niod.nl Network Co-Chair
Timothy Ashplant T.G.Ashplant@livjm.ac.uk
Joanna Bornat j.bornat@open.ac.uk
Gerhard Botz gerhard.botz@univie.ac.at
Ela Hornung michaela.hornung@univie.ac.at,
Daniela Koleva daniela@sclg.uni-sofia.bg Network Co-Chair
Selma Leydesdorff leydesdorff@pscw.uva.nl
Hugo Manson h.manson@abdn.ac.uk,
Graham Smith Graham.Smith@sheffield.ac.uk
Penny Summerfield penny.summerfield@man.ac.uk
DANCING WITH MEMORY: ORAL HISTORY AND ITS AUDIENCES: XIVth International Oral History Conference, July 12-16, 2006, Sydney, Australia
Papers are invited from around the world for contributions to the XIVth International Oral History Conference hosted by the International Oral History Association in collaboration with the Oral History Association of Australia, State Library of New South Wales, University of Technology Sydney, and University of New England. Proposals may be for a conference paper, a thematic panel or a workshop session. Offers to convene a Special Interest Group Session are also sought. Proposals will be evaluated according to their oral history focus, relevance to the conference theme and sub-themes, methodological and theoretical significance, and sound scholarship.
Much of the research and reflective work in this field over the years has focused on those who carry out oral histories and the process of interviewing itself. But what has been the effect of telling stories largely through the sound medium over the last 40 years? As we move to a new age of digital storytelling which strengthens the visual elements, it seems timely to ask: who listens and how? Oral history is one of the ways in which people share memories and how people hear and respond to them is partly shaped by the contexts of their telling and listening.
The conference theme invites presentations that investigate that ‘dance with memory’ which occurs between the speaker and the listener, and between the performer or product and their audiences. We therefore encourage people who have worked with oral history in a wide range of environments such as museums, heritage agencies, academic institutions, law courts, radio and television, performing arts, community projects all of which express a relationship to the past through a particular cultural medium.
The conference theme also invites reflective analysis of the ways in which, through past and current projects, ‘dancing with memory’ involves both pleasure and pain - for the subject, the interviewer and the audience - and the ways in which awareness of particular audiences shapes the focus and conceptual framework of individual projects. We encourage proposals which explore indigenous lives, and we envisage that some sessions will focus specifically on comparative indigenous perspectives and experiences. Conference sub-themes offer an opportunity to tease out some of these issues as well as to extend discussion to include ongoing concerns within oral history scholarship and practice. Sub-themes:
- archiving memory -methodological sessions which focus on interviews as evidence of the past for future researchers; reuse of interviews; electronic media and access; publishing oral history in written texts
- fire and water - environmental issues, natural heritage, disasters
- healing memories - oral history in health work, aged care, disability.
- island stories - island nations and nations of islands; their stories and connections; sea passages and borders.
- memory and community - where oral history has been central to the recreation of community in particular locations or used to document disappeared or lost communities.
- memory and trauma - in cases involving human rights, justice or restitution where oral history has been utilized as testimony, surviving war, surviving terrorism
- places and buildings - lost places, localities, heritage issues and debates
- pleasures of memory - where the focus is on oral history as a sensuous engagement with the voice; relationship to seeing (still and moving image), touch (material culture and museums), performance (theatre and music) ; emotion and experience.
- political pasts - government agencies and corporate memory, politics, politicians
- remembering the land - particularly where oral history has been central to land claims or ownership of particular sites, and where oral history is used to map spatial histories
- sharing/passing on beliefs - religious traditions, oral traditions,
- stories in translation - diasporas, cross-cultural dialogue
- talking to ourselves - history of oral history, oral history as an international movement, 10th anniversary of IOHA
- teaching and learning - where the audience is cross generational and oral history makes an intervention in passing on cultural heritage either through formal schooling or informal family or community traditions.
If you are interested, please send us a single page proposal including an outline of your paper and the following details:
Proposals (and subsequent papers) must be written in English or Spanish. Presenters will be required to send their final paper in English or Spanish, with a summary in the other language. We strongly recommend that translations are done by professional translators. If none are available please notify the Association at ioha@uts.edu.au. Papers should, as much as possible, allow the conference audiences to hear the voices of narrators.
* NOTE: Individual papers - these will be grouped by the conference organizers into panels or workshops with papers which have a similar focus
Thematic panels - proposals for a thematic panel should contain no more than four presenters, preferably representing different countries
Workshops - workshop proposals should identify an issue or focus for a workshop, propose a structure and workshop leader/s.
Performances - segments (of no more than 30 minutes) from oral history based performances
Special Interest Groups - There will be network sessions for Special Interest Groups to meet, establish contacts, share resources and ideas. Conveners will be required to organize each Special Interest Group. Suggestions and offers are invited.
Master classes - There will also be some oral history master classes or workshops available before the conference and led by internationally recognized oral history scholars and practitioners.
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: 30 MAY 2005
Other deadlines:
By 30 September 2005: acceptance or rejection of proposals
By 28 February 2006: receipt of papers for publication on conference CD-Rom
SEND PROPOSALS TO:
Email: IOHA@uts.edu.au
Mail: Paula Hamilton, Faculty of Humanities, University of Technology Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway NSW 2007, Australia.
ENQUIRIES TO:
Africa: Sean Field - sean@humanities.uct.ac.za
Asia: Gunhan Danisman - mailto:danisman@boun.edu.tr
Europe: Pilar Dominguez - pdprats@dch.ulpgc.es (Spanish); Parita Mukta - p.mukta@warwick.ac.uk (English)
Latin America: Antonio Montenegro - mailto:fsa@christa.unh.edu
Oceania: Paula Hamilton - IOHA@uts.edu.au
SCHOLARSHIPS
The International Oral History Association has a Scholarships Fund to provide financial assistance to attend the conference. Guidelines are available on the IOHA website (http://www.ioha.fgv.br). To be eligible for a scholarship you must have a paper or other proposal accepted for the program.
Face to Face
Conference and Association reports
IOHA IN ROME, June 2004
The XIII International Oral History Conference on "Memory and Globalization", held in Rome from June 23-26 was attended by almost 600 participants from 41 countries. It was organized by the City of Rome through the Mayor’s Advisor for Historical Memory, Alessandro Portelli. Support also came from the Province administration, the Jewish Community, the Transport Authority, the State Sound Archive, the Italian Encyclopedia Institute, the Contemporary History Library, the Circolo Gianni Bosio, and the University of Rome 3. Special thanks are due to the student volunteers: 20 from the school of international relations in the University of Rome 3, and 5 from the English Department of the University of Rome 1 "La Sapienza".
With the help of excellent weather, participants were able to enjoy the beauty of venues in the very heart of Rome. A number of sessions, including the opening and the closing of the conference, were held in the historical Capitol Hill. Other workshops were located in Renaissance and Baroque buildings in the neighborhood. Lunches on the Capitol Terrace offered an extraordinary view of the city, and the final conference dinner, hosted by the Province Administration, gave participants the opportunity to hear music from the oral tradition of Rome, its province and its region. Visits to museums, a tour of the ex-Jewish ghetto, and a visit to the ex-Nazi prison of Via Tasso and the site of the Fosse Ardeatine massacre completed the program. It is to be hoped that the inevitable problems that arise from running 14 simultaneous workshops and accommodating several hundred participants were somewhat offset by the surroundings, the weather, the food, and the music.
The opening session was introduced by the Deputy Mayor Maria Pia Garavaglia, who pointed out the importance of the number of women attending the event. Cultural Officer Gianni Borgna connected the conference to some of Rome’s cultural sites of memory, especially in cinema. Carlo Ginzburg’s opening lecture discussed the functions of memory from Plato’s dialogues to modern times, and offered the concept of memory as "pharmakon" - both a medicine and a poison.
[IOHA members at the Roman Forum on the way to the conference on Capitol Hill. Below, members gathered at a reception.]
Over the following two days, the conference war articulated in concurring workshops dealing with: Archives; Arts; Cities (3 sessions); Education (2 sessions); Elites; Experiential authority; History and Power; Families and generations; Film (2 sessions of showings); Gender (5 sessions); Health (2 sessions); Historia oral y Procesos regionales en el Sur del Brasil; Italian diaspora (3 sessions); Italian Women’s Autobiography; Jewish Diaspora; Land and Memory in Brazil; Life Styles (2 sessions); Local Activists in a Global Context; Local\Regional\Global Relationships (3 sessions); Memory (3 sessions); Memory of Memory; Methodology (5 sessions); Migrations (5 sessions); Movements (2 sessions); Music (2 sessions); Palestine; Politics (2 sessions); Reconjuring the muse: memory through the machine; Religion (3 sessions); Repression (2 sessions); Resources and Environment (2 sessions); Rural Workers and Society (2 sessions); Saberes de las mujeres; Telling to Live (2 sessions); Theater (2 performances); Traveling Identities; War (3 sessions); Women from East to West; and Workers (4 sessions). In the closing session, Estela Carloto, of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Argentina) spoke of many ways in which memory was part of the efforts of the families of the disaparecidos to identify children to had been taken from their mothers after they were arrested and before they were killed, and then given to military families to adopt and raise as their own.
It is impossible to have an exact record of registered attendees, participants, presenters and simple visitors: not all those who paid registration actually attended, a number of people registered on the spot, and many (especially teachers, students from Rome and other parts of Italy) just dropped in to listen to workshops. However, a set of “ballpark” figures may be drawn from the list of presenters whose papers had been accepted before the conference, plus some last-minute additions. A breakdown by countries gives us the following list: Argentina 15; Australia 8; Austria 5; Bosnia 1; Brazil 74; Canada 4; Denmark 2; Estonia 1; Finland 6; France, 4; Gambiia 1; Germany 6; Greece 3; Holland 6; Hong Kong 1; Hungary 3; Ireland 1; Israel 3; Italy 21; Japan 3; Macedonia 1; Mexico 15; Mongolia 1; Morocco 1; New Zealand 3; Nigeria 4; Palestine1; Philippines 3; Poland 2; Russia 2; Sierra Leone 1; South Africa 6; Spain 3; Sweden 2; Switzerland 5; Turkey 8; United Kingdom 19; United States 86; Ukraine 2; Uruguay 3; Zimbabwe1.
[A powerful concluding plenary session featured Estela Carloto (Argentina), Michael Jusu (Gambia) Janis Wilton (Australia), and Gerhard Botz (Austria). Conference photos by Don Ritchie and Rina Benmayor.
The majority of participants came from North America, Latin America, and Europe. The effort to reach other participants from Asia and Africa was only partially successful, in spite of the financial support offered by the IOHA. Some of the problems also came from the obstacles that African and some Asian participants found in obtaining visas to travel to Europe for the conference. Clearly, the drive to a more global role for oral history is only in its first, tentative stage.
Alessandro Portelli
a.portelli@comune.roma.it
A New Member’s Review of the XIIIth International Oral History Conference, Rome
The International Oral History Association biannual conference was an important opportunity for me, a budding academic on my first conference, to share and learn from others about current projects, new techniques and research developments. My presentation, "Oral History: a credible witness for global organisations", was delivered "incident free," although I felt a bit of a fraud discussing my work collating the 50 year history of Outward Bound Australia, while surrounded by historical figures dating many centuries. I was encouraged by a colleague who reminded me that collecting our history has to start somewhere-the important part is that we do.
A highlight of the conference for me was the connections and relationships I could establish with international academic colleagues. With the conference attracting over 400 delegates from more than 40 nations, all working on extremely diversely interesting topics, I could discover tips from experts first hand and note new trends in technology that are currently being explored. There were so many fascinating speakers to choose from-the hardest task was determining how one could logistically attend as many as possible, but a quick round-up of highlights for me were: Albert Lichtblau, from Austria, who spoke about capturing an audio visual history, Antonio Montenegro, from Brazil spoke about imperialism or the cultural movement in all cultures, Richard Hill and Brigette Bönisch-Brednich shared their work on reconciliation in New Zealand and how the two parties “talk past each other”-not fully understanding each other. Diana Mulinari and Nora Rathzel of Sweden spoke of women of 1968 called "inside /outside," discussing how one’s identity can be negotiated.
Donald Ritchie (US) was very interesting-especially to meet him after I had researched his work extensively for my own project. Kate Moore’s (Finland) "Laughter-take it seriously", was an insightful look at her current research into the connection between laughter and memory. "Project Jukebo" (http://uaf-db.uaf.edu/Jukebox/PJWeb/pjhome.htm), by William Schneider, was a discerning example of capturing a community, while using various technologies to do so. He said, "In the end, we can define oral history as the genre of discourse that morality and writing ‘talk to each other’ about the past", which is worth considering. Alistair Thompson (UK) examined different source material available to a researcher (e.g. letters and journals) and how each call for a different type of understanding.
Anna Green’s (NZ) presentation on collective memory and the move in life narratives towards social history and away from the individual was important to me and the community history I am currently involved with. Paula Hamilton (Australia), tried to frighten potential visitors to the 2006 Sydney conference with a presentation entitled, "Shark! Oral History and Fear" (actually, I think she was promoting Australia by using reverse psychology). Rina Benmayor, our incoming president, gave a visual display of life stories through digital storytelling. Digital storytelling workshops are an integral part of my current research, as is online archiving and so both Sherna Berger Gluck’s (US) example of the virtual oral /aural history archive (http://salticid.nmc.csulb.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/OralAural.woa/wa/collection?pt=109&ww=956&wh=585) and Michael Frisch’s presentation, "Putting the Oral Back in Oral History" using qualitative analysis programs like his software program. Interclipper Professional (www.interclipper.com), were of great interest.
Besides the academic value of the conference, I gained a greater understanding of the organisation itself and am proud to be a newer member of the association. I only hope we in Australia can begin to compare to the generosity and kindness of our host city Rome and the tireless work of Alessandro Portelli (and his dedicated staff) when we meet again in Sydney, in 2006.
Helen Klaebe
Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia
h.klaebe@qut.edu.au
BRAZIL
Communication and Memory Discussed the Intercom Congress
The XXVII Brazilian Conference of Communication Science took place on September 2004, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, organized around the themes of Communication, Events and Memory. The Conference meets annually, sponsored and coordinated by Intercom (Brazilian Society of Interdisciplinary Studies), founded in São Paulo in 1977. Intercom forms part of a chain of scientific societies organized around the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science (SPBC), and also forms part of the international networks of communication sciences as associated organization to the Latin American Association of Communication Researchers (ALAIC), the International Association for Mass Communication Research (IAMCR), and the International Federation of Mass Communication Associations (IFCA). This year the Intercom Conference addressed issues related to memory, orality, social networks, representation and narratives, reaffirming the proximity among them, and also stimulating the exchange between the fields of Communication and History.
At the opening lecture, Professor Andréas Huyssen spoke to more then 3000 participants regarding the theme Resistance and Memory: A Case of Public Forgetfulness. Professor Huyssen, who teaches “Culture and Politics of Memory” at Columbia University, highlighted the contemporary tendencies in the study of memory, and the effects of media on culture.
The interaction between Communication and Memory was particularly expressed in various papers, and in a series of discussions carried out along the 20 Research Groups, as those of Audiovisual Communication, Communication for the Citizens, Photography, Communication and Culture, Folk Communication, Theories of Communication, Public Relations and Organizational Communication, Cartoon, Radio and Sound Media. The issues regarding Memory and Construction of History also marked the award presentations, the symposiums and seminars, as well as the Free Theme Sessions, the VII Brazil-France Colloquium on Communication Sciences, the Portocom Meeting (Information Network on Communication of the Portuguese Language Countries), and the XIV Endocom (Information Meeting on Communication Sciences), which were carried out within the Conference.
Twice a year, Intercom publishes the Brazilian Communication Sciences Magazine, and hosts a Web site at http://intercom.locaweb.com.br/,where further information on its activities, and also information on the XXVII Conference can be found.
Ivany Câmara Neiva
University of Brasília
ivay@ucb.br
Mini-Course: Oral History: An Interdisciplinary View
From the last decades of the last century, scholars from different disciplines -History, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Literature, in addition to areas of health, and others- have undertook efforts in the sense of perfecting Oral History methodology as a privileged way for the collection of narratives, life histories, and stories from different social actors as constitutive sources of History. The record of memories from the past in present times, is constituted into valuable archives for the understanding of many aspects of individual and collective life. There was a real boom of Oral History in Brazil starting in the decade of 1990, partly explained by the end of the military dictatorship, and by the growing identification of Oral History with those exploited and excluded from History, as well as with the different ethnic minorities, the women, the poor, etc.
The launch of the Brazilian Oral History Association (ABHO), and its affiliation to the International Oral History Association (IOHA), was also a factor of great importance for the consolidation of Oral History as a production of varied knowledge resulting from the multiple fields of learning.
PROGRAM:
- Oral narrative methodology: background, life stories, and storytelling.
- Oral history and memory.
- Image, symbols and myths.
- Work and sensitive memory: a research experience.
Professor in charge: Doctor Maria Aparecida de Moraes Silva:
maria_moraes@terra.com.br
September-November 2004 ppg/ Social Sciences/ UFSCAR
São Carlos Federal University /São Paulo/Brazil
GERMANY
A Report on the European Social Science History Conference, Humboldt University, Berlin, March 2004
Berlin was the venue for the Fifth European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC), held in March 2004. Sponsored by the International Institute of Social History (IISH), based in the Netherlands, the ESSHC is a biannual event whose stated aim is to bring together "scholars interested in explaining historical phenomena using the methods of the social sciences."
This year’s conference was an energetic event with an eclectic range of topics from oral history to ethnicity and migration, culture, politics, and geography. Sessions were grouped under a number of networks, such as oral history, with typically three to four papers presented per session. By my estimation, approximately fifteen hundred people attended ESSHC 2004 across twenty-five networks in 349 sessions. Approximately nineteen sessions were dedicated to oral history. Some networks combined to present a rich cross-fertilisation of ideas such as the ethnicity and migration and oral history networks, which came together on Saturday 27 March to present a session on testimonies of migration. Three papers were offered on:
"Journeys into Inheritance; a project to record individual recollections of migration from Ireland to Australia", by Pat Ryan (Australia); "The Socialization of Refugees from the GDR", by Roland Curth (Germany); and "The collection and presentation of life stories for public use: migrants in the Netherlands," by Bibi Panhuysen (The Netherlands). Dr. Andreas Fahrmeir, chair of the session, led a brief discussion on the methodology used in the collection of oral history. He acknowledged the contribution of oral historians in collecting material that provides an historical research resource. Participants were interested in the motivation that lies behind the collection of oral history, the choice of subject matter, the selection of interviewees and the subsequent use of material.
My project was guided by a perceived need to record the experiences of post-war Irish migrants to Australia. I was also interested in the ongoing cultural affiliations of the descendants of previous generations of Irish migrants to Australia. This interest arose from my own personal experiences of migration and long-term involvement with Irish cultural associations, in particular with Irish community radio broadcasts in Australia. In addition to recording stories from the descendants of migrants of the period 1867-1916, I interviewed migrants who emigrated between 1947-1987. In all there were fifteen interviews covering themes about the decision to migrate, the journey, settlement, employment and cultural affiliation with Australia and Ireland. Migrant descendants interviewed showed me treasured personal items that made the emigrant journey with their ancestors. Post-war migrants shared with me their experiences of sea journeys, migrant hostels, new friendships, and strange and unfamiliar foods. The interviewees each received a copy of their own recording and a copy of the book of the collected stories. The recordings and book are housed in the John Oxley Collection, State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.
The next ESSHC will be held in 2006 in Amsterdam.
Pat Ryan
npryan@ticnet.com.au
JAPAN
Japan Oral History Association Holds Second Annual Meeting in Tokyo
The Japan Oral History Association, founded in 2003, held its second annual meeting on Sept. 11-12, at Rikkyo University, Tokyo. It was rich with stimulating presentations, addresses, discussions, and exchanges. Modestly started without financial or institutional backing, JOHA has witnessed the pleasing growth into a hybrid organization of sociologists, historians, anthropologists, practitioners, and journalists, which made for the success of the meeting.
Some 110 participants, including international scholars, students, and those interested in oral history, convened for intellectual stimulations, exchange of practical skills and methods, and friendly interactions. Presentations covered wide range of issues, as reflected by panel titles: "Telling Stories of Migration and Ethnicity", "Memories of War, Occupation and Hibaku (atomic-bomb radiation)","Women, Community, and Life Histories", "Religion: Oral History approach to the New Religious movement and its founders", and "Oral History focusing on Prewar Japan" (an English session). Also a practitioners’ meeting was held for discussing issues involving interview techniques, methodology, and research.
Two guest speakers from the United States, strongly committed to the development of Japanese American oral history, stimulated and expanded the scope of the meeting. Dr. Arthur A. Hansen, past president of the Oral History Association (U.S.), gave a keynote address entitled “Barbed Voices: Oral History, Resistance, and World War II.” Executive Director Tom Ikeda of Densho, Seattle, demonstrated his digital oral history archives on the website in the half-day workshop.
The JOHA’s first general meeting was held during the conference. JOHA’s constitution, board members, projected activities, and budget were approved after an in-depth discussion. The number of JOHA members nearly doubled after this second conference. Our goals include the increase of membership, offering workshops, and starting a journal, which will be the first oral history journal in Japan. The next meeting is to be held at University of Kyoto in September 2005. International scholars, as well as Japanese, are encouraged to join the organization and to participate in our next conference, as we plan to continue our practice of holding some presentations in English and possibly in other languages. Oral historians from Asia are welcome to participate. Sincere appreciation is extended to the international community of oral historians in supporting the start of JOHA in 2003.
If you can read Japanese, please visit our website at http://www.hoha.jp. For information, please contact our Executive Secretary at sakurai@L.chiba-u.ac.jp.
SOUTH AFRICA
New Oral History Associations Established
A number of oral history events have been taking place here in South Africa. The newly established Oral History Association for the Free State and Northern Cape recently held a workshop for oral history practitioners at Bloemfontein, on the 29th and 30th of July 2004. The main theme for the two-day seminar was "Doing Oral History in Africa."
An affiliate of the KwaZulu-Natal Oral History Association, the Sinomlando Oral history Project, held four one-day workshops on basic oral history methodology for teachers in the KwaZulu-Natal province, in Durban, Ladismith, Empangeni and Pietermaritzburg, from September 27 to 30, 2004. The target group was senior secondary level teachers.
The Oral History Association of South Africa was launched on the 28th of October 2004 at Pretoria at the National Archives Hall. The launch was preceded by a national conference for all practitioners of oral history in South Africa, particularly for those whose projects are funded by the Departments of Arts and Culture. Other than provincial archives personnel who were attendance, five universities that use oral history methodology extensively also sent delegates. These are the universities of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, Cape Town, Vista and UNISA. Other who sent representatives were the Oral History Association for the Free State and Northern Cape, the KwaZulu-Natal Oral History Association and other similar organizations in the country. The convener of this important occasion was Mrs. Mandy Gilder, the Deputy National Archivist.
Abraham Mohalefa Lieta
Deputy Director Sinimlando Oral History Project
LietaMA@ukzn.ac.za
From Page to Mouth
New Projects
AUSTRALIA
Golden Threads: The Chinese in Regional New South Wales, Australia, 1850-1950.
The Golden Threads project was initiated in 1997 by the Museums Committee of the New South Wales (NSW) Ministry for the Arts. Its aim was to document the ways in which the significant Chinese presence in regional and rural areas of the state during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been recorded and presented. Due to the long history of Australian racism, there was concern that memories and stories of the Chinese and their contributions to Australian life had largely disappeared from the historical record and from local memories.
The project team worked with local museums and historical societies and with Chinese-Australians. Oral history interviews played an integral role in recording the stories, as did the identification of objects, sites and people. The findings were mixed. There was a greater wealth of memories, movable heritage and identifiable sites than expected. However, not all were well documented, and many provided evidence of white Australian ethnocentrism, racism, and folklore rather than the experiences and contributions of Chinese migrants.
The results from the project include: • a traveling exhibition (on the road since early 2001 and due to end its tour in early 2005 at the Migration Museum in Adelaide, South Australia); • a website (http://amol.org.au/goldenthreads) that offers access to stories about the Chinese contribution and the processes and findings from the project; a database (People and collections) of people, sites, collections and objects; an online exhibition; and internet and other resources; • a book published in 2004 (Powerhouse Publishing:
http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/publications/index.asp). The book is structured around the themes of work, language, leisure, food, beliefs, leaving and staying. Highly illustrated, it incorporates oral history material as a key perspective on the experiences of Chinese-Australians in regional NSW.
Janis Wilton
jwilton@pobox.une.edu.au
CANADA
Local Culture on the Canadian Prairies
Researchers from the University of Alberta and the University of Winnipeg are conducting an interdisciplinary research project to find out how people in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta experienced life on the Canadian prairies in the years prior to the Second World War. The Local Culture and Diversity on the Prairies Project has been funded by the Department of Canadian Heritage. Its main goal is to collect accounts of personal experiences from individuals who lived on the prairies before 1939, particularly about daily life, local customs and traditions, social activities, and pastimes. Most of the interviews have been conducted with people of English, French, German, and Ukrainian ethnic background-the four largest ethnic groups on the prairies before 1939-although some have been done with people from other ethnic backgrounds. It is hoped that the gathered information will be useful for those who are being interviewed as well as for future researchers.
Andriy Nahachewsky (andriyn@ualberta.ca) initiated the project. Based in the Ukrainian Folklore Centre at the University of Alberta, he is the principal investigator and leads the project part primarily collecting interviews with Ukrainian-Canadians. Project co-directors are Frank McMahon, Phyllis Dalley (phyllis.dalley@ualberta.ca), and Michelle Daveluy (Michelle.Daveluy@ualberta.ca) of the Faculté Saint Jean at the University of Alberta, who supervise the French interviews. Pauline Greenhill (p.greenhill@uwinnipeg.ca) at the Women’s Studies program of the University of Winnipeg directs interviewees of English heritage. Alexander Freund (a.freund@uwinnipeg.ca), chair of German-Canadian Studies at the University of Winnipeg, has charge of interviewing German-speaking immigrants and their descendants.
During three workshops, the researchers and their seven fieldworkers crafted the overall design of the project and completed the first phase of the project. During the summers of 2003 and 2004, fourteen research assistants conducted some 600 interviews. Phase two of the interviewing will continue until March 2005. The eldest interviewee was born in 1902. About 60% of the interviewees are female; 40% are male. Some 54% of the interviews were recorded using a standard interview based on a questionnaire; 40% used open-ended life stories; and about 6% used photograph explorations based on family photo albums. Researchers are also digitizing of all interviews, which will be archived at the Ukrainian Folklore Centre and made accessible via the World Wide Web.
Alexander Freund
a.freund@uwinnipeg.ca
Celebrating Our Diversity: Canada's First Oral History Museum
On October 7, 2004, the Multicultural History Society of Ontario launched Canada's first Oral History Museum. The Museum gives life to the memories of Ontario's diverse peoples through oral testimony. “Visitors enter a virtual world and hear the daily experiences of ordinary people,” said Dora Nipp, of the Multicultural History Society of Ontario.
The opening-day celebration included the launch of Telling Lives, an interactive digital history project. This year's theme is Going to School and the goal is to collect memories of people's childhood experiences. Participants tell their stories in a Video Memory Bank. Their recollections are recorded onto an interactive video console. The recorded narratives are to be housed at an international archival centre at the University of Toronto, where this unparalleled documentation will be available to scholarly researchers, artists and educators.
Pasang Thackchhoe
Pasang.thackchhoe@mhso.ca
CUBA-SPAIN
Cuban Exile in Spain: Dress Yourself With My Skin
Anthropologically, the human being has always had the capacity to choose the path whose end points out to its own fulfillment. When political, economic and social systems do not offer such a possibility, man broadens his scopes, and history starts to witness large migration flows. We live in an increasingly global world that, far from solving age-old conflicts, is responsible for creating abysmal differences. The sum of international and national problems is gradually increasing, and in the middle of all this chaos "the man" and his "memory" are immersed. "Memory" is not only an individual heritage; human dimension goes beyond the hardest “self” borders from the very moment it lives its space of sociability. The true wealth lies in the individual and collective memory of a country, and oral history is an essential resource to its transmission and preservation. This is the starting point of my research project on Cuban exile in Spain. I do not wish that forgetfulness might harm the capacity of "remembering".
The historiography on Cuban Revolution has many black holes as a result of partisan changes among confronted factions. The manipulations, due to particular interests, have left many blank spaces that contributed to harm the historic veracity of specific events. Within the country, the officialdom demands that the pens of historians are careful when writing about "untouchable myths" and "superhuman personalities". Nevertheless, it is also urgent to express a mea culpa with works done out of the island, since not all social studies carried out so far have been sufficiently objective and scientific. Behind such deficiencies is the forgotten memory of a country and its true history: harmed, unknown, and misunderstood.
Many pages on Cuban exile are yet to be written, and maybe many others need to be corrected. I do not support the discussions led, in large numbers, from Cuba and the United States. They usually turn into the classic disputes between factions historically confronted, monopolizing the desire to be the center of attention. On the other hand, little is said about Cuban immigration to other countries, Spain among them. To read about Cuban exile in the United States, to get to know it through the experiences of relatives and friends, and living myself the Cuban exile in Spain, has been enough to realize that they are different exiles, although its consequences are the same. The spatial reality where people live marks the difference; the host country makes its own conclusions on the reasons for the immigration. A conclusion that is not always right and can damage the image of the person who stands at the center of the problem: the immigrant.
With the help of oral history, I am trying to carry out a work that shows a different image of the existing one. This phenomenon does not have that unique face which has appeared so far; it has a hidden side that differs from the one that comes to public light. Shades are essential when approaching topics where the center of attention lies in the personal and collective stories of a country. The research will be written in "first person", which is not my own voice; that "me" belongs to all the people that will be participating in this work as "direct oral source". Everyday Life, Integration and Identity will be the topics to be discussed with the interviewees.
I will work on a specific sector of immigration: the one of professionals. Little is said about this group of exiled people. I do not pretend to make an excluding research since exile applies equally to everyone. The aim of my project is to show the other side of the coin; that exile is an option of change among all social classes in Cuba. The focus will be essentially directed towards young professionals. Paradoxically, the generation arising from the heart of the revolution is the one in which the "American or European dream" has penetrated the most; exile means the immediate solution to their lives. In a particular section of my research, I will analyze the role, influence and responsibility of the media towards the image they usually show of such a visible phenomenon as migrations are, in the current international scenario. At the same time, the project will be supported by colleagues living in Cuba. I am interested in showing the vision prevailing within the country regarding exiled people and the country that welcomes them. This research means a double challenge for me. A personal one, because I am dressed with the same skin as the people I will work with: I am myself an immigrant. And a professional challenge, because my own experience as an exiled person must not influence my work as an historian, since I cannot lose the bearing that shows the way to objectivity. Passion, ethics and responsibility must be essential principles that every professional should maintain.
I chose exile, but not silence. To be silent would be to nourish a feeling of guilt, because as I must admit, the true merit lies on those who remain in Cuba; to write from there, and "to do it well", is an almost heroic, quixotic task that needs a great deal of courage. Nevertheless, as a person and historian, I must take advantage of the opportunities that destiny has given me by living in exile, in order to assume the responsibility to speak out. Future generations have to know how people who left the Island, and how people who remained in Cuba lived. Exile is a reality that concerns to all Cubans, together we are victims and consequence of a specific history. The reality of those who remain in Cuba is different from the reality of those who left the country, but something links them: both are marked by pain and loss. I do not wish that oblivion harms the collective memory of a country sometimes unknown and misunderstood.
I invite the otherness to dress in the skin of immigrants, and try to experience the pain of exile. Let us try to live within respect, comprehension, and tolerance. Spain knows the meaning of exile, I only remind that stories repeat themselves, but this time in the opposite direction.
Carmen Quintero
quinteroiglesias@yahoo.com
MÉXICO
Neighbors' Concern to Rescue Their Past
In the summer of 1999 the neighbors of La Fama MontaZesa, a quarter located within the Tlalpan Delegation south of Mexico City, started a rescue project named “The Working Class Memory.” The quarter known as La Fama has its origins back in 1831 with the foundation of the former textile factory La Fama MontaZesa, which closed its doors definitively in 1998, after 167 years of service. From that moment, a great nostalgia both for the factory and for the neighborhood arose. Although the factory was closed down, the memories of former workers and their families keeps the place alive as a symbolic space, worth to be rescued through oral memories.
With that purpose in mind, they summoned some of the old workers and their families to attend meetings every Sunday afternoon, gatherings where they narrated and recorded the experiences of people. Even though this could seem new, it was something already existing in the neighborhood, where the old men transmitted their experiences to the young people to hand them down a past. This way, there is a familiar tradition in which sons inherit their fathers’ memories, something that made the meetings very entertaining. Contrary to what I thought, the elders did not have any problem relating their experiences. Quite the opposite, they answered all the questions, often with a great deal of emotion. The topics emerging from these meetings were very broad: life in the neighborhood; life in the factory; their participation in unionism; relationships between men and women; housing; sports; musicians; school; festivities; relationships with other neighborhoods; and the particular way of thinking based on Catholic religiosity.
During the Sunday gatherings the workers and their families started to bring photographs to support their stories. The participants managed to collect over 600 photographs from the families of the neighborhood, as well as some objects such as certificates, workers’ documents, old pieces of looms, cones, threads from the old days, clothing, plans of the factory and the neighborhood, notarial certificates, and religious images protected by the neighbors from the time of the Cristiada (post-revolutionary religious conflict from 1926 to 1929 between the Catholic church and the State) . This way, the memory of fathers, grandfathers and other neighbors was transformed in a sound archive of more than 100 interviews that relate the stories of being a worker. This material was kept in the neighborhood itself to make it available to the local people.
One of the main subjects that resulted from the interviews was related to housing, a problem the people thought was solved. In 1941, once a strike was sorted out, the factory had to pay a compensation for almost three years of accrued wages to the workers; since the owners did not have financial resources, they decided to pay with land properties, which the labor union used to build houses to be given out among the union members. But this endowment had a peculiarity: every family was given the possession of a lot, but not in ownership; that is, the lots could not be divided, and therefore the holders did not receive individual deeds since the distributed lots, in strict sense, were a property of the union. When the old workers died-direct consignees of the benefit-their heirs were unprotected, since there was no legal document accrediting them as owners, only the collective recognition that “they have always lived there.” This situation has generated an increasing fear that they can be evicted by private companies that consider the zone as a good investment area-for housing or commercial business-or even by government itself. This way, memory turns into one of the instruments that justify the defense of their houses, and they started to be listened by the local and public record of property authorities.
Young people had the intention to justify their political activity relating to the recovery of spaces by means of their own historic memory, whose value was kept in the memory of the elders. The need to trace a history of the neighborhood arose from the urgency to have a present that seems to forget them. The history of the neighborhood is a source of enormous pride for the people who live there, but at the same time has an immediate application in their struggles. There is no neighborhood without a history. The history of this quarter generates a legitimating frame in the struggles they are confronting towards preserving their identity symbols, as the factory, the public square, the water springs, and the streets of collective use that nowadays have a changed character and have been taken over by urban life, where these symbols lose their ancient meaning but people think are worthy of rescue and preservation.
From this perspective, the use of oral history reformulates fundamental matters of history, as it is generally understood. In first place, the inhabitants of the neighborhood look to themselves as the subject of history, in opposition with the general idea that such a subject should be the great men and events. The fact of constructing a history with a wide range of experiences, recreates the social relations that form the context of the historical events. In second place, within traditional history underlies the perspective that between past and present there is a cause-effect relation; in other words, that the present is the natural result of the past. Through individual experiences we can confirm that the present has alternatives that could have happened, and that our existence is a continuous negotiation among several options, some of which are opposite. It is necessary to admit that the present is part of a continuous unfinished process, in order not to feel oppressed by the dead weight of the past. This way, oral history turns into an awareness element of the historical situation of people.
Mário Camarena Ocampo
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, México
orom3192@correo.xoc.uam.mx
GERMANY
Documentation of the Life Stories of Former Slave Workers and Forced Laborers
In Germany and German-occupied countries during the Second World War, approximately 12 million slave workers and forced laborers were put to work. As a gesture of reconciliation, the “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” Foundation was established in Germany in 2000, to pay financial benefits to these victims of National Socialism. Its “Remembrance and Future” Fund supports projects to keep the memory of the victims of National Socialism alive for generations to come.
The ”Remembrance and Future” Fund promotes initiatives to conduct about 550 interviews with former slave workers or forced laborers. The Institute for History and Biography at the Distance University in Hagen, which has been able to collect valuable experiences in oral history in Germany, will coordinate projects supported within this program, organize the international exchange of experiences among them, and make sure that the documentation follows the same criteria and meets the required quality standards. The documentation will be made available for science and historical-political education in Germany, and also to keep alive the memory of the fate of these peoples in their own countries.
Altogether, about 550 interviews will be conducted, approximately 440 on audiotapes and 110 on videotape (analog or digital). At least one third of all interviews should be conducted with survivors who had to do heaviest forced labor in a concentration camp, ghetto or other confinement. The greatest need is to conduct interviews in Eastern Europe, and in different countries different numbers of interviews will be funded. The Fund intends to support approximately 80 interviews in Poland and in the Ukraine respectively, about 60 in Russia, and 40 each in Belarus and the Czech Republic. An additional 80 interviews with Jewish survivors, and about 60 with non-Jewish survivors, who do not live in those countries can also be supported. A quarter of these interviews should be conducted on video.
Persons who so far have had no opportunity to document their life story should be interviewed above all. Roma and Sinti survivors should be taken into particular consideration. Applicants should have experience in working with survivors and can therefore identify likely people to be interviewed. They should closely cooperate with victims’ organizations whose addresses can be found at http://www.stiftung-evz.de.
The Fund will support fees for interviewers for conducting interviews and documenting them (with a protocol, short biography and data sheet); travel expenses in each country; costs for the translation of the interviews into German and each national language; material costs for audio cassettes, video tapes, and rental charges for equipment; and fees for camera operators and technicians. The Foundation will also finance participation of at least one representative of each sub-project in planned international workshops.
Application must be filed by 10 December 2004: at Institut für Geschichte und Biographie
der FernUniversität Hagen, Liebigstr 11, D-58511 Lüdenscheid, Deutschland. Applicants can also contact Almut Leh, Alexander von Plato, or Christoph Thonfeld, at dok.zwangsarbeit@fernuni-hagen.de
SPAIN
Word Archive: Launch of an Oral Archives for the Study of Present Time History
The Seminar of Oral Sources (SFO) has among its aims to recover the “collective memory” of present time history (Second Republic, Civil War, Franco Regime, Transition, etc.) in Spain. For this purpose, six research projects have been carried out, accumulating a collection of 159 interviews recorded in magnetic format for a total of 165 audiocassettes, which contain historic information, and the personal experiences of those who have been protagonists of our recent history.
This Archives is based on interviews that belong to a series of projects initiated under the direction of one of the former founders and first president of the Seminar of Oral Sources, María del Carmen García-Nieto París. They are an integral part of the postgraduate courses taught by her, consisting of a theoretical section regarding oral sources methodology, and a practical area, where the students had to carry out an interview and a common presentation, concluding with an article.
They are historic documents that the SFO wants to preserve and organize into its own archive, to donate them later to the General Direction of Archives so that they can be integrated in the State Archive Network where the material can be consulted by researchers, after proper authorization. From the year 2000, the SFO considered that these collections had been under-utilized and should be made available to researchers on Spain’s recent history, and therefore established a work procedure and requested public funding, which was obtained on three occasions; thanks to these subsidies the material costs of transcription and copying of oral documents have been covered.
After recording of the interviews, a process of cataloging, transcription, copying and archiving was carried out, where the mechanics involved were: duplicating of the tapes, both in cassette and CD format, in order to be able to manipulate them without a risk of damage; revision of the interviews, together with a thorough analysis of the information and the conditions of the magnetic format; classification of oral documents from the different projects; transcription and correction of interviews. Each transcription presents a description card of the document with the following information: place and date of the interview; project name; interviewee and interviewer name; information of the original recordings (tapes); interview abstract; request for permission from the interviewees, if such is the case, to integrate their testimonies in the SFO Archive, and for further research.
Once these procedures were finished, a copy containing the complete material was submitted to the Direction of State Archives, to be deposited into the General Archives of the Civil War. The six projects mentioned are:
- Women in Madrid during the Civil War. A work with 42 interviews, directed by María del Carmen García-Nieto, from the Complutence University of Madrid, and professor Mary Nash, from the Central University of Barcelona.
- Popular classes and city planning: Palomeras, a working class neighborhood during the Franco regime, 1950-1980. Consisting of 41 interviews, the project intends to collect the history of the new neighborhoods of Madrid that were formed under the industrial development period of the sixties and seventies
- From the project: Late Franco Regime and Transition, 1970-1982, there are 10 interviews related to the last years of Franco’s dictatorship, and the beginning of the political transition into democracy in Spain.
- The school during the Franco regime, 1938-1957, with a total of 21 testimonies, is a reflection of the teaching system in Spain during the first twenty years of the post-war period, from the point of view of the protagonists.
- The project Working conflicts and political transition includes 24 interviews. They are life stories of union leaders and workers from different sectors, which include vindication and mobilization-experiences during the last years of the Franco regime, and the first ones of the political transition.
- Work, culture and personal identity of women in an urban space. Madrid, 1950-1980, collects 21 interviews. It was in its time a pioneer work related to genre and women identity. A research that covers more than thirty years of Spain’s recent history, from Franco’s dictatorship, to the political transition into the democratic system.
The testimonies collected through oral methodology put together the interest of the historian in confirming the information, dates and places of history, with the experiences of the protagonists, whether they are prominent personalities from the historic period, or anonymous persons that generously show their lives to allow future researchers to reconstruct with them the history of present time. Each document has been registered with a unitary number, which groups the issues submitted so far (years 2002 and 2003, with a total of 78 interviews submitted), allowing us to continue with the numeric order for the subsequent and definitive submissions expected to be finish by 2005. Likewise, the Seminar of Oral Sources Cultural Association from the Complutence University of Madrid, has authorized free access to the documents donated to the State and placed in the General Archive of the Spanish Civil War, since the Seminar holds the rights to this material, and also since many of the recorded documents already include the authorization within the audio itself. In those cases where this does not happen, they are always interviews carried out for the seminar itself, where the interviewees participated voluntarily with the intention that the information they provided could be used afterwards.
The General Archive of the Civil War was authorized as well to freely divulge the content of the documents, with the only restriction that the interviews cannot be totally reproduced without the expressed permission of the SFO. The Seminar of Oral Sources also keeps a copy of the recording and transcription of every recorded interview. These documents are available as well to Internet users through: http://www.cultura.mecd.es
José María Gago González
Chairman of the Seminar of Oral Sources
jmgagog@yahoo.es
UNITED STATES
New Head of UCLA Oral History Program
The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) has appointed Teresa Barnett as the new director of its Oral History Program. She joined the Oral History Program in 1987, as an editor and interviewer, became principal editor in 1995, and associate director in 2001. She has conducted numerous interviews in the areas of the visual arts, social activism and UCLA university history. The UCLA Oral History Program was established in 1959 to collect and preserve oral recollections documenting the history of Southern California. The program's collections now total more than 800 interviews. Major subject areas include African American history, biomedical science, books and fine printing, civil liberties, jazz, politics and government, and visual art. Oral histories with major campus figures supplement the holdings of University Archives.
Columbia’s September 11th Project
Columbia University’s ongoing oral history project about the events of September 11, 2001 was the subject of a recent article by Andie Tucher, “Whose Turf Is the Past?” in the Columbia Journalism Review (September/October 2004), pp. 46-48. The article observed that the boundaries between historians and journalists are disappearing as more journalists are writing history and more historians are “incorporating interviews and on-the-spot research into their writing about current or recent events.” It notes that interviewers from Columbia’s Oral History Research Office “were out on the streets just days after the reporters were to ask people about their experiences on September 11, 2001.”
Mary Marshall Clark, the director of Columbia’s Oral History Research Office, organized the 9/11 interview project, and explained that it was designed to counter much of the journalistic coverage of that day: “While the goal of oral-history interviewers is to gather and interpret people’s testimony about their experiences-‘to witness the process of witnessing,’ says Clark-and allow the account to unfold in its own way, many journalists were doing exactly the opposite, fitting the tragic events of the day into ‘a highly nationalistic frame’ that emphasized the heroism of the dead. ‘The oral historians, on the other hand,’ says Clark, ‘picked up aspects of the whole experience-the immigrants afraid that their “alien” looks might bring violence down on them, or the firefighters who were uncomfortable with being portrayed as heroes because they knew they’d made mistakes.’ People like them were much less likely to make it into the mainstream media coverage at the time because they didn’t advance the narrative that both the public and the press seemed to prefer.”
Doin’ Time
Rosalie Riegle has been recording for a new project, “Doin' Time: The Prison Reflections of Non-Violent Activists for Peace.” For this oral history, she seeks to interview people who were jailed for peace-related activities from World War II to the present. She is also looking for people who "served their time" by maintaining community and family while their partners were incarcerated. People from outside the United States are especially welcome, but interviews must be recorded in English. Telephone interviews are possible. Please contact her at 847-425-3605 or at riegle@svsu.edu
Nisei Project at the University of Connecticut
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which interned 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II. The order had deep consequences for civil liberties in the United States, and in 1990 led to a government apology. While most internees suffered in camps located in the nation’s interior away from the west coast, selected young people-second generation Nisei--escaped the internment by being placed in eastern colleges, including the University of Connecticut, by the National Japanese-American Student Relocation Council (NJASRC).
In October, 2003, when eight of these students returned to Storrs to celebrate a 60th reunion, they were interviewed by Bruce M. Stave and Sondra Astor Stave for the University of Connecticut Center for Oral History. Transcripts of the interviews will become part of the Center’s collection and will also serve as source material for a history of the university being written by Bruce Stave. Among other topics, the interviews considered the reasons why the students’ families immigrated to the United States, their pre-war life and culture, the impact of Pearl Harbor, the events immediately following the attack, conditions in the internment camps, the selection of the University of Connecticut as a destination, their adjustment to the campus, friendship networks, the attitude of faculty and staff, and the long-term effect of having studied in Storrs. Their experiences shaped a small but significant aspect of the university’s history.
Bruce M. Stave
bruce.stave@uconn.edu
U.S. Latino & Latina WWII Oral History Project
On Sept. 12, 2004, at a public forum at the U.S. Navy Memorial, in Washington, D.C., sixteen academics from across the country made presentations featuring videotape or audiotape excerpts from interviews collected by the 5-year-old project at the University of Texas at Austin. The Project has published a newspaper with excerpts from over 450 interviews in the collection. The academics provided some salient themes for these interviews, including how the war experience had altered the social landscape for U.S. Hispanics. Before the war, Hispanics in the United States had been subjected to segregation in many parts of the country, but the war, and particularly the post-war GI Bill of Rights (which provided funds to help veterans improve their educations and finance their homes), provided tools that they could use to fight racism. Other topics included how the war experience altered Latina women’s roles; issues raised by Mexican nationals who served in the U.S. military; the racial aspects of mental and physical testing of Puerto Rican recruits; and how the GI Bill changed people’s aspirations.
The public forum began with a one-week workshop in Austin for the academics, who made presentations about various aspects of the WWII Latino experience and learned from one another. Since then, the project has been developing a method to share key tapes with researchers. A 7-page indexing form was developed to look for areas relevant to several themes, and those indexes were put on a secure web site, available only to the scholars involved. (At a later date, the indexes will be available at the project archives, to be housed next year at the University of Texas at Austin’s Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection.) The Project is considering a second forum next year. In the meantime, the 16 presentations will be reworked into manuscripts for publication in an anthology. For more information about the project, please see our Website: www.utexas.edu/projects/latinoarchives
Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez
mrivas@mail.utexas.edu
Veterans History Project. Library of Congress
A bold and unique national oral history project, the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., is an initiative to honor America's war veterans, to educate young people and adults about oral history methodology, and to have them create and deposit at the national library these oral histories (as well as memoirs, letters and photographs) comprising personal accounts of wartime experiences. Sought are: substantial personal accounts of veterans and active civilians who experienced World War I, World War II, and the Korean, Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars. Created by the U.S. Congress, the initiative has so far built a collection of over 18,000 veterans' accounts that can be used, now and in the future, by those who want to learn history from those who lived it. The Veterans History Project Library staff organizes workshops around the country to teach oral history basics, and then when the materials arrives at the Library of Congress, the staff catalogs and archives the collections, ready to serve to researchers. The searchable database is on the Web, www.loc.gov/vets, under "Search the Veterans Database." The project's Web site also provides oral history instruction, and exhibits over 600 digitized oral histories and unique personal documents from wartime. The project's first book, Voices of War, tells stories from 60 veterans in the collections. It will be available on Veterans Day, November 11, 2004 from the National Geographic Society in Washington, DC.
Sarah Rouse
srou@loc.gov
Oral History Projects Using Digital Technology and New Media
To promote an exchange of ideas and to publicize innovative applications, the Oral History Association’s Committee on Digital Technology and New Media seeks descriptions of projects that use oral history and new media. These initiatives could involve pedagogy, archives and indexing, storytelling, publishing, and oral history as an integral part of larger web sites. They also could address legal and ethical questions, oral history theory and methodology, sound/technological/ design issues, interactivity, and experimental work and media art. We encourage submissions not only from established oral history programs and academic institutions, but also from community-based projects and others making creative use of oral history in new media.
In no more than 500 words, descriptions should include the following information: sponsorship and key personnel associated with the project; a brief description of the project, including how oral history is employed in this particular format or medium; technical specifications and needs; ethical or legal considerations; any other oral historical issues, concerns, or ramifications raised by the project. After review by the committee, some of these projects will be linked to the OHA web site and featured in the OHA Newsletter. Submissions should be sent to Cliff Kuhn at ckuhn@gsu.edu.
Cliff Kuhn
Chair, OHA Committee on Digital Technology and New Media
ckuhn@gsu.edu
Archive Stories
ARGENTINA
New Winds at the University of Buenos Aires Oral History Program
- A new stage is starting at the University of Buenos Aires Oral History Program, under the guidance of Doctor Pablo Pozzi, with the aim to:Constitute an Archive of oral sources.
- Establish exchange agreements with different institutions across the country in order to create an Oral Archive based in the Oral History Program from the Ethnohistory Section of the Anthropology Institute from the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts of the University of Buenos Aires.
- Deepen the ten-year collaboration between the Oral History Program and the Buenos Aires Historical Institute.
- Develop human resources in oral history.
The program is currently working in the following topics:
- Violence and politics in contemporary Argentine history: encloses testimonies from labor unionists, militia, activists, businessmen and guerrilla members from the 1955-2004 period. The suggested archive includes the interviews regarding the Peronist Resistance, led by Ernesto Salas and others; the Armed Forces by Daniel Mazzei; the different guerrilla experiences by Pablo Pozzi, Marcelo Raimundo and Laura Pasqualli; and labor unionists by Alejandro Schneider. At present, and within the group of Violence and Politics, researchers Laura Benadiba and Graciela Browarnik are directing interviews on the transmission of communist morale within cultural spaces of the Argentinian Communist Party between 1960-2004; and researcher Alexia Massholder is currently working on the relations among scholars within the Communist Party.
- The world of work: collects the interviews on life and culture of Argentine workers during the XX century, including those by Roberto Izquierdo on the tobacco industry; Leticia Guindi on graphics; Alicia Gartner and Gabriela Fernández on women labor in the Thirties; Graciela Romano on Tucuman sugar workers in the Forties; and Mariana Mastrángelo on the labor conditions in the cities within the Córdoba province in the Twenties. At present some members of the research team are carrying out interviews to industrial workers of the Communist Party.
- Political exile in Argentina: includes interviews about republican Spanish exiles, Armenian who escaped from the genocide, and Chilean refugees from the Pinochet dictatorship.
- Memory and social organizations facing State Terrorism: about the creation and consolidation of human rights organizations during the dictatorship era (1976-1983), including the Miguel Galante Archive regarding the Arrested-Disappeared Relative’s Association, and the Founding Line of “Madres de la Plaza de Mayo”, as well as the research directed by CTERA on workers subject to State terrorism and censorship mechanisms. So far, training workshops have been held for assigned researchers, and we are currently working on a number of publications for the divulgation and access to the compiled oral material.
Graciela Browarnik - Alexia Massholder
University of Buenos Aires Oral History Program
ultimoescalon@hotmail.com
UNITED STATES
Virtual Oral/Aural History Archives
Now you can hear them-women who fought for the vote in 1910s, garment workers who were in the forefront of working class feminism in the early 20th century, black men who fought to desegregate U.S. unions during World War II, Japanese Americans who grew up in the fishing village on Terminal Island until their forcible evacuation and incarceration in 1942-and more. The Virtual Oral/Aural History Archive of California State University, Long Beach, has made available online over 750 hours of oral history recordings. Awarded the 2003 Accenture/MIT Award for Innovation in Higher Education, this project is the first of its kind to make its major holdings in people’s audio history available on the web.
Rather than making transcripts, the oral history program has consistently directed users of its material to the original recordings as the true primary source. Initially, three-minute segment summaries of the tape were helpful in locating specific content, but the retrieval process remained cumbersome and access to onsite use was limited.. Now, with the new technology, we can deliver these voices intact to a wide audience with the pitch, performance, and poetic delivery that lend deeper meaning to the oral narrative.
Researchers can browse through the site and listen to segment summaries or the entire tape. More pointed queries can be made either through a word search or by using the subject index. This will bring up all segments, across all collections, on the desired topic. Bibliographic citations, attached to each segment, include both the location of the segment with an assigned segment key (similar to a page reference) and the date of access.
Among the 750 hours of interviews presently available on the site, the Women’s History Collection is by far the largest. It includes over 250 hours with Anglo, Mexicana and African American World War II war workers; reformers, radicals, and revolutionaries, ranging from suffragists to anarchists and communists; garment workers, and Mexican American workers. The Los Angeles Basin oral histories document the development of the Long Beach area, including the impact of the discovery and exploitation of oil and the experiences of the Japanese Americans who lived in the fishing village on Terminal Island, off Long Beach. The Los Angeles area’s film industry also attracted a host of performing artists, including jazz musicians. An initial set of interviews with arrangers, composers and performers is now available online.
Sherna Berger Gluck
sbgluck@csulb.edu
From Mouth to Page
Books
What are the Best Recent Writings on Oral History?
Routledge has contracted Rob Perks and Al Thomson to edit a second edition of The Oral History Reader (first published in 1998). The field of oral history has moved on in the last six years-for example in relation to new media applications or the use of personal testimony in human rights and other legal contexts-and the Reader requires updating. The editors appeal to international oral historians to tell them what they think are the best writing on oral history published in English or translated in English since the mid 1990s. What recent writings about the theory and method of oral history have influenced and impressed you? Please provide publication details on any writings (journal articles or extracts from books) that you believe would make a valuable addition to The Oral History Reader to a.s.Thomson@sussex.ac.uk.
To Look at Life Through Women’s Eyes: Women’s Oral Histories from the Former Soviet Union, edited by Andrea Peto, Network Women’s Program, Open Society Institute, New York, 2002.
This publication provides a small sample of groundbreaking research work undertaken by women scholars/activists from eight countries in the former Soviet Union. The experiences of the fourteen women portrayed illustrate the challenges and small victories of life in Soviet and post-socialist times. To Look at Life Through Women’s Eyes is intended to provide a vision of the region’s diversity and rich history, as well as help create linkages between scholars of this region and the international feminist community. The publication was sponsored by the Women’s Oral History Program in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia, and Ukraine. It is an integral part of the Network Women’s Program’s efforts to expand its activities in women’s and gender history. For more information, see: http://www.soros.org/initiatives.women.
Remembering: Writing Oral History, edited by Anna Green & Megan Hutching, Auckland University Press, New Zealand, 2004.
“Unless the spoken words are published, these accounts of the past are never ‘heard,’” editors Anna Green and Megan Hutching explain the basis for their compilation of essays on theme of “writing oral history.” Using examples drawn from a variety of community-based projects in New Zealand, the book explores ways in which scholars have interpreted oral sources and incorporated them into their writing. The essays include Anna Green, “‘Unpacking’ the Stories,” Judith Binney, “Bringing the Stories Back Home,” Jane Moodie, “The Moral World of the Waikite Valley,” Allison Laurie, “Speaking the Unspoken: Lesbian oral Histories in Aotearoa New Zealand,” Cathy O’Shea-Miles, “The Women of Irishtown,” Juanita Ketchel, “Getting Free: Oral Histories of Violence, Resilience and Recovery,” Kay Edwards, “Cast Within Alternative Realities: An Oral History of Five Actors from the Little Theatre in Te Aroha,” Michael Belgrave, “‘Three Steps Forward-One Step Back’: Individual Autonomy and the Mater Hospital in Auckland,” Danny Keenan, “The Past from the Paepae: Uses of the Past in Maori Oral History,” Leslie Hall, “Confidentially Speaking: Ethics in Interviewing,” and Megan Hutching, “The Distance Between Voice and Transcript.”
To Wear the Dust of War, edited by J. L. H. Kelley, Palgrave, New York, 2004
A World War II refugee’s reminiscences are the subject of the latest volume in Palgrave’s Studies in Oral History series, edited by Linda Shopes and Bruce Stave. To Wear the Dust of War: From Bialystock to Shanghai to the Promised Land: An Oral History (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004) is told by Samuel Iwry and edited by Leslie Kelley. Iwry’s tumultuous life took him as a refugee from Poland to Russia to Shanghai and eventually to Baltimore and Jerusalem, where he became a prominent scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Kelley first transcribed the tapes of Iwry dictating his reminiscences. Then she then interviewed him herself, although, as she noted, “Dr. Iwry would not tolerate my setting the agenda. He always had his own mind prepared as to what he wanted to talk about and to relate.” Kelley helped guide him through some of the more painful episodes in his personal history. As an editor, she gave the material more chronological order, divided it into chapters, and provided historical context to aid the readers. She explained another of her editing strategies: “Dr. Iwry never failed to find the exact words to express himself, and his voice could not be improved upon in that respect. However, his thick Polish syntax, which sounded musical to the ear, looked quite odd in print. The essential problem was his use of verbs, and beyond reducing the length, that is the primary place where I edited. For instance, ‘This train of ours was going slowly, bur surely. We were told it will disembark us in Moscow. It is there we will be to wait, after a new inspection, of course, for a train, which will bring us, perhaps. . . .’ I edited to: ‘Our train went slowly but surely. We were told it would eventually arrive in Moscow. And there we will have to wait, after a new inspection of our papers, of course, for another train which would take us. . .’ However, I did not fully correct his verb usage. Dr. Iwry tended to narrate in present tense, switching to past tense in a way that, though perhaps grammatically incorrect, was logically consistent with the manner in which he told his story, and in order to preserve his voice, I left his usage alone unless it was jarring. The primary concern throughout all the editing was that Sam’s story should reach the reader in as close to Dr. Iwry’s own spoken words, if he could have perfectly chosen them, as possible.”
Dialogue with the Past: Engaging Students and Meeting Standards Through Oral History, by Glenn Whitman, AltaMira Press, California, 2004
Educators who wonder how they might use oral history to inspire their students while still teaching the necessary curriculum and meeting standards, will find much to appreciate in Dialogue with the Past. A secondary-school teacher, Glenn Whitman addresses these concerns from his own rich experience and that of many other teachers and students. He helps readers understand the background and methodology of oral history, guides them in creating and conducting an oral history project in the classroom, and directly addresses the issue of meeting standards. Peppered with useful tips, examples from students and teachers, and reproducible forms, along with a comprehensive bibliography, this book will be a vital and inspirational tool for anyone working with secondary students. Forms are included in reproducible format and book has lay flat binding for ease of use. Sample student interviews are accompanied by author's detailed comments on technique and methodology. Further information is available on Whitman's website, http://www.americancenturyproject.org
Heart so White, by Javier Marías, México, Alfaguara, 2002.
My hands are of your color; but I am ashamed to carry a heart so white.
Usually, scientific journals address specialized book’s reviews, but why not invite to read a novel concerning the everyday topics at work? Heart so White explores the power of memory, which is transmitted through constructed words and silences. The weakness of present time, and the fragileness of the events that grow strong when narrated and imbued with a specific meaning. This novel, whose title is taken from a quotation from Macbeth, deals with those events that have caused pain and are intended for erasure with time. It shows those hidden social silences that are not told to children, but that the sense of forbiddance itself encourages their persistence. Finally, the novel addresses how the new generations end up knowing what they have never wanted to know but have always known.
Throughout the life of Juan Ranz, translator and interpreter Javier Marías explores the strength and power of words. Two deaths have passed by before the birth of the leading character, which mark his existence. Even though hundred of events of his father’s life were lost in time, one of them is remembered in an outburst of love, covering the memory with significance. Then the life of the father ends in tragedy.
With an interesting philosophy, the author shows us the importance of silences, of those small, unknown matters in the lives of others that allow mystery. Listening is dangerous: love persists only when little is known about the beloved person, when remaining quiet allows mystery, and not by whispering in the other’s ear, trying to convince him that he must loves us.
In bed everything is said, and to please the beloved person, our own secrets and those of others are betrayed. This is the moment when truth disappears, says Ranz, because the only truth is the one that is neither known nor transmitted, because when it is told, it is not true any more. Telling stories deforms. Deforms the facts and distorts them even if what is narrated is true, since the truth does not depend on whether the facts happened or not, but in their becoming an analogy and symbol. This way, the death past turns into a recognition; a recognition that gives sense to the brief present and the non-existent future, and changes even the life of the unborn.
In fact, nothing remains in time, not even the life of people, and nevertheless everything is there waiting to be brought back through memory. And when the heart is not so white any more, and one is not able to remember but what has happened to us, but not what has been told to us, then the oblivion of the forgetful person can come over. As the life of the Ranz family, which passed over choosing, throwing and selecting memories
Martha Beatríz Cahuich
marthabeatriz@att.net.mx
Modernidad habitada, multifamiliar Miguel Alemán, Ciudad de México, 1949-1999 / Inhabited Modernity: Miguel Alemán Housing Complex, Mexico City, 1949-1999, coordinated by Graciela de Garay, M. Concepción Martínez OmaZa, Gerardo Necoechea, Lourdes Roca y Patricia Pensado, Mora Institute, México, 2004.El espacio generador de identidades locales. Análisis comparativo de dos comunidades: San Pedro de los Pinos y El Ocotito / The Generating Space of Local Identities: Comparative Analysis of Two Communities: San Pedro de los Pinos and El Ocotito, coordinated by Patricia Pensado, Guadalupe Barrientos, M. Concepción Martínez OmaZa, Adriana Arroyo y Amelia Espinosa, Mora Institute, México, 2004.
Last October these two books were presented at the Mora Institute; the first one coordinated by Graciela de Garay, and the second by Patricia Pensado Leglise. Santiago Portilla, director of this institution, was among those present at the event, and Patricia Ramírez Kuri, from the UNAM’s Social Research Institute, together with Miguel Ángel Aguilar, from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa, acted as keynote presenters. The two collective works are investigations based on oral resources, with an emphasis in the work of a research team that from the beginning proposed as a working method the discussion and reflection of the problems that were recognized as important.
In the first book, the intention was to include from the architectonic work of Mario Pani represented by the first large social interest housing complex built in Mexico in 1949, to the effects of the modernizing process in the life of its inhabitants, as well as the process of use and appropriation of space that allows inhabitants and neighbours to create an idea of place.
The second text raises as central topic the local identity in two communities, one of them urban, San Pedro de los Pinos, in Mexico City, the other rural, El Ocotito, in the State of Guerrero. The study demonstrates that no matter the countless fractures that ruin communities as a result of the absence of adequate urban politics, there is always the possibility of recreating this kind of identity that expresses itself in different ways throughout time, but always reveal the need of the individual to recover it. The collective imaginary generates ties through representations of what remains in the individual experience, and how the individual represents himself driven by the need to investigate and re-found his own history, of which he recognizes himself as creator, and not only as receiver.
It is important to add that for us these texts have meant also, on one hand, the consolidation of the Mora Institute Oral History Area after almost fifteen years of existence as such, and on the other, the consolidation of the linking works with other institutions across the country which carry out this kind of research projects, and participate in the Mexican Oral History Association (AMHO).
Patricia Pensado Leglise
Instituto de Investigaciones Doctor José María Luis Mora
ppensado@yahoo.com
Labor World at RENFE. Oral History of the Infrastructure, by Pilar Folguera, Pilar Díaz, Pilar Domínguez and José María Gago, RENFE and Fundación de Ferrocarriles EspaZoles, Spain, 2003
An excellent work, well written and edited, this book deals with railway workers, their lives and works, their subsistence and thoughts, their struggles and achievements. In its introduction, the judgments relative to the design of oral display are explained. But in strict sense, the book starts with the chapter regarding the company’s board of directors written by Pilar Folguera. The Engineer Corps acquired an unprecedented leading role within economic and social life in Spain during the Forties and Fifties. The exhaustion of the autarchic model led also to the decline of the engineers’ leading role in public politics, at the same time it opened the door to the economists and the liberal postures. The first changes within RENFE towards a business concept were forged in the Seventies. Technicians and managers demonstrated a high degree of identification with the company. Pilar Díaz deals with the work regarding “Tracks and Construction.” The chapter describes the life and conceptions of men and women who were employed at the conservation and maintenance of the railway tracks. A large number of workers came from rural zones, with no qualifications at all. Labor conditions were extremely hard, and real wages inferior to those of other sectors.
It was only from the Eighties that wages began to be noticeably improved. But at that moment mechanization drove out the old workers, whose places were taken by skilled ones. Pilar Domínguez is the author of two chapters. One refers to the track’s supervision, and the other to security fixings and installations. Her brilliant research on the female wardens deserves special analysis. The security of the trains’ traffic was one of the major concerns among railway companies. The custody of secondary level crossings, which were the majority, was entrusted to women who were related to track workers. Their wages were very low, since the work was considered a sort of “aid” to the familiar group. This female labor diminished at the same time as the railway sector modernized, and finally disappeared between the Eighties and Nineties. The case of the female wardens represents one of the most distinct examples of work segmentation according to genre. José María Gago and Pilar Folguera make a careful examination regarding the electric and communication installations, two sectors where the company has intensely incorporated technological advances. Nothing remains today from the hard conditions of the early days. The last chapter -“To Be a Railway Worker”- exposes the own identity signs of the railway worker: identification with tasks, inbreeding character, low wages together with social assistance.
Their analysis of the survey carried out among RENFE workers in 1982 shows an exquisite fineness. I do not dare to raise a fundamental criticism, but only a question: no matter how well the employees have been chosen, are thirty interviews enough to reflect the history of such a hierarchical and diversified collective sector? In any case, there is no doubt the work is imbued with great interest. It is, undoubtedly, an excellent book that highly fulfils the intended goals.
Tomás Martínez Vara
Complutense University of Madrid
Journals
CONTRIBUTIONS SOUGHT FROM ROME PARTICIPANTS
Oral History, the journal of the UK Oral History Society, welcomes articles from contributors from all disciplines and backgrounds who are interested in joining in debates and discussions and seeing their ideas and research published in a journal which has been established for over thirty years. Oral History is unusual in that it seems to make an appeal that crosses traditional boundaries between academic and community based activity, while remaining in dialogue with both. If you presented a paper at the Rome conference and would like to work it up for publication in Oral History, we look forward to hearing from you. Our notes for authors are available on the Oral History Society web site: http://www.oralhistory.org.uk
For further information contact any of the journal editors:
Joanna Bornat: j.bornat@open.ac.uk
Rob Perks: Rob Perks: rob.perks@bl.uk
Sheena Rolph: s.e.rolph@open.ac.uk
Al Thomson: a.s.thomson@sussex.ac.uk
From All Quarters: Journal of the Oral History Association of Australia, no.25, 2003
ARTICLES:
| . | Oral History and Heritage Work, David Dolan |
| . | Services, Management and the Construction of Place, Maria Concepción Martinez OmaZa |
| . | From Favour to Right: Two Generations View Their Living Space in Mexico City, Gerardo Necoechea García |
| . | Elements of Identity in a Modern Community, Maria Patrica Pensado Leglise |
| . | Listening to Clio: Toward a Pragmatic Theory of Oral History, David Faber |
| . | Oral History & Autobiography: Some Observations Recording the Life Story of Dr. Doreen Kartinyeri, Sue Anderson |
| . | Oral History as Modern Personal Papers: In Defence of the Long Interview, Julia Horne |
| . | Oral History, Autobiography & An Intra-History of New Norcia, Cristina Rodriguez |
| . | Whose Story Is This? Claremont Cameos & the Dilemmas of Working Within a Feminist Framework, Janina Trotman & Lynne Hunt |
| . | Between Two Worlds: Meta-Narrative & Creative History, Jeanie Wood |
| . | Riding & Swimming Through the Curriculum, Helen Andreoni |
| . | The Bankstown Oral History Project: A Multicultural Perspective, Tim Carroll |
| . | Living Amongst the Kmauit (Zombies), Iain Dunstan |
| . | Boxing the Compass: On First Navigating the Sydney Maritime Museum Oral History Project, State Library of New South Wales, Rosemary Block |
| . | Archives, Oral History, Outcomes, Wendy G. McKinley |
| . | The Department of Public Works & Services Oral History Project, Frank Heimans |
| . | ‘A Bunch of Loose Cannons’: Vietnam Veterans Search for a Place in the Legend, Janine Hiddlestone |
| . | Out on a Limb: Young Men and Post-War Travel from Australia, Valwyn Wishart |
| . | Migration Memories on Multi-Media at a Museum, Jill Cassidy |
| . | Take 1: The Heights & Hazards of Recording Life Stories on Video/DVD as a Commercial Enterprise, Laurel Wraight |
Oral History, Vol 32, no 1, Spring 2004
ARTICLES:
| . | ‘I Was Arrested at Greenham in 1962’: Investigating the Oral Narratives of Women in the Anti-Nuclear Committee of 100, Sam Carroll |
| . | Let the Data Sing: Representing Discourse in Poetic Form, Krista Woodley |
| . | Musical Memories of the Greek Catastrophe and Local Bards as Emblems of Belonging: The Case of Maria Kouskoussaina, Georgios Tsimouris |
| . | What More’s to be Said? Understanding Legislative Bodies Through Oral History, Donald A. Ritchie |
| . | Mixing Money and Memories: Running an Oral History Business, Lorna Baker |
PUBLIC HISTORY:
| . | Displaying the Twentieth Century in Polish Museums, Annette Day |
BOOK REVIEWS:
| . | The Japanese Community in Pre-War Britain: From Integration to Disintegration, Junko Sakai |
| . | Reflections: Life Portraits of Exmoor, Steve Hussey |
| . | Union Life: The Story of Luton Past and Present, Elizabeth Carnegie |
All the articles are abstracted on the Oral History Society website: http://www.oralhistory.org.uk
Oral History Review, Vol 31, no 1, Winter/Spring 2004
ARTICLES:
| . | Kissing Cousins: Journalism and Oral History, Mark Feldestein |
| . | Blended Voice: Crating a Narrative from Oral History Interviews, Rebecca Jones |
| . | Exploring Personal History: A Case Study of an Italian Woman, Jennifer Scuro |
MEDIA REVIEWS:
| . | The Intolerable Burden, Tracy E. K’Meyer |
| . | Oroitzapenak Memoires: Basque Oral History Project and the Oroitzapenak Memories: Oral History Project, Troy Reeves |
| . | Radio Diaries: An Oral History of the WASPs, Rhonda L. Smith |
BOOK REVIEWS:
| . | The Cineaste Interviews 2, Paul Buhl |
| . | Resilience and Courage: Men, Women and the Holocaust, Brana Gurewitsch |
| . | African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History, Christopher J. Lee |
| . | Memories of Wind and Waves: A Self-Portrait, Linda McCann |
| . | When a Flower is Reborn: The Life and Times of a Mapuche Feminist, Rosa Isolde Reuque Paillalef |
| . | The Road Not Taken: A History of Radical Social Work in the United States, Marian Mollin |
| . | Big Doctoring in America: Profiles in Primary Care, Charles T. Morrissey |
| . | Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous: A Rhetorical Analysis, Linda E. Norton |
| . | Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America, Mary Kay Quinlan |
| . | Key Themes in Qualitative Research: Continuities and Change, Valerie Yow |
| . | A Shuar Healer in the Margins of History, Christine F. Zinni |
Put it in Writing
WORDS AND SILENCES
The Annual Journal in English and Spanish of the International Oral History Association
Call for Papers for the 2005 Issue
The 2004 issue of the annual journal of the International Oral History Association, Words and Silences, is out and was mailed to members since last July. If you have not received your copy, please contact the editors. The journal is seeking articles for its 2005 issue, particularly on practical problems concerning research, publication and conservation of oral sources. For other articles, as each issue is thematic, please either consult IOHA's web page (http://www.ioha.fgr.br) or contact the editors: Gerardo Necoechea gnecoechea.deh@deh.inah.gob.mx and Paula Hamilton Paula.Hamilton@uts.edu.au
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, place, 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 28 FEBRUARY 2005. 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 72 dpi and sent in jpg ou pic formats.
Send via e-mail to both co-editors:
Don Ritchie (English text) - oralhistorians@comcast.net
Pilar Domínguez (Spanish text)- pdprats@dch.ulpgc.es
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. The Association meets every two years in a different region or continent. Benefits of membership include:
- concessionary rates for the biennial international oral history conferences
- copies of Words and Silences, the annual, bilingual (English and Spanish) Journal of the IOHA (containing oral history articles, an index of oral history journals from around the world, special items and commentaries on oral history issues)
- access to the IOHA home page on the world wide web
- access to IOHA News, the on-line newsletter of the Association
- voting rights at the Association's General Meetings and Council elections
- active participation in the international community of oral historians.
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 Rina Benmayor, from the United States, and current Council members come from Australia, Barbados, Brazil, England, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, Spain, Turkey and the United States
For membership forms, go to Membership on the IOHA website. For inquiries e-mail the Association's treasurer, Almut Leh (almut.leh@fernuni-hagen.de).
Fees for two-year membership (July 2004 - June 2006)
· Individuals: 46 Euros
· Institutions: 92 Euros
· Students: 23 Euros