International Oral History AssociationBulletin of the International Oral History Association
(published twice a year)Volume 14:2, 2006
Starting Points
From the Editors
We are approaching the end of our two-year term as editors of the bulletin and as IOHA council members. During this time we have been in contact with a large number of researchers (both members and non-members of the IOHA) who use oral history in their projects. We have come to appreciate the good health of oral history around the world. Indeed, this bulletin has documented many diverse forms of undertaking oral history, and of developing projects and archives with oral sources. These projects have shown us the capacity of oral history to recover the memory of those without a voice and to contribute to the defense of human rights around the world.
The IOHA bulletin is also an example of the expansion of our worldwide association, highlighted by our upcoming conference in Australia. In all of this, the cornerstone has been the new IOHA web site, hosted by the Getulio Vargas Foundation and Suemi Iguchi in Brazil. It has also been very satisfactory, in this short period, to witness the formation of new oral history associations in Italy, Brazil, and Japan, and the general expansion of oral history in Latin America.
Personally, we would like to express gratitude to our translator Isabel Anaya, who recently passed away, for helping to put together our bulletin and make it bilingual, and to our new translator, Chris Paetzold. We would also like to thank everyone who sent in articles as well as our president Rina Benmayor, who is always concerned and involved with the bulletin’s affairs.
Pilar Domínguez (Spanish text)- pdprats@dch.ulpgc.es
Don Ritchie (English text) - oralhistorians@comcast.net
Co-editors, IOHA News
From the President
As I wind down my term of office as your president, I want to again say that I’ve been very honored to be able to serve IOHA. I thank you for the trust you placed in me and am looking forward now to serving on the council as past president! I’d like to offer a synopsis of our accomplishments over the past two years, and thank the many members who made these possible.
The Sydney conference is “conga-ing” along, led by the terrific trio of Paula Hamilton, Janis Wilton and Rosie Block (see their report below). The conference promises to be intellectually stimulating and fresh. I was truly fortunate to have had such thorough, experienced, and committed conference leadership during my term as president. I can’t thank Paula, Rosie, and Janis enough for having taken the conference fully in hand, allowing me to focus on other aspects of the association. I am truly grateful. My term of office also coincides with IOHA’s tenth anniversary, which we will be celebrating in Sydney with a plenary of founding members who continue to inspire us and chart new ground – Marieta de Moraes Ferreira, Ron Grele, Sandro Portelli, Alexander von Plato and Don Ritchie.
When I took office, I pledged to enhance the bilingual capacity of our conferences and association. Thanks to the generous pro-bono help of members, Juan José Gutiérrez (Mexico/Spain/US), Pilar Folguera (Spain), and Pilar Domínguez (Spain), we are working hard to provide a booklet of bilingual paper abstracts for the conference. Juan also assisted me in translating our fully bilingual IOHA and Conference webpages. Council will be putting forth a proposal to add a new job to the council of translation director, to help move us toward increased bilingualism. With the boom in oral history from Latin America, it will be increasingly important OHA to develop a richer and stronger capacity to work across both languages.
We’re also very fortunate that Maggie Caldwell, a student and webdesigner, worked over an entire summer to revamp the IOHA webpage. She redesigned it to make links more visible and user-friendly, to include visuals, a space for hearing oral histories and an interactive blog-site for commenting on intellectual and methodological issues. I invite you to please use the blog-space, and if you have sound files of oral histories, please send us the link and a brief description so we can add them to the website.
The newsletter, IOHA News, is ever-growing and exciting! Thanks to Don Ritchie and Pilar Domínguez, the issues are more international in scope and the submissions from the Spanish-speaking world have increased dramatically. Bravo, Pilar and Don, for an expert job! Our journal, Words and Silences, ran into bureaucratic snags this year, with changing leadership in the Mexican institution that sponsors its publication, and unforeseen legalities. Gerardo Necoechea has valiantly served as sole editor over the past two years, single-handedly editing and translating the journal. We are indebted to him for his tireless work. Council is discussing ways to provide appropriate editorial support, continuity, and perhaps even a move toward a peer-reviewed journal.
Our scholarship and fundraising committee, comprised of Sean Field, Funso Afolayan, and Antonio Montenegro, worked very hard to move our fundraising capacity forward. We now have grant proposal documents available for fundraising, and although we have not been successful in getting outside funding for our two high-cost items–scholarships and translation services--Sean put much work into developing the needed documents. We also owe a debt of thanks to Pilar Dominguez and Antonio Montenegro for their fundraising efforts. Sean, Funso, and Antonio worked seamlessly to organize the scholarship process, revising the application, making the criteria more visible and vetting more than fifty scholarship applications. Thanks to the most generous contributions of our national organizations, the Oral History Association of the U.S., the British Oral History Society, the Brazilian Oral History Association, the Oral History Association of Australia, several individual donors, and to Sandro Portelli, for generating a considerable profit at the Rome Conference, we were able to provide support for twelve scholars to attend the Sydney conference, from Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and South Asia. Even so, money was limited and we received many more applications than we were able to fund. Fundraising remains a significant challenge and priority.
Over the course of the past two years, the council has worked hard on governance issues. Global communications and online conference site hosted by the University of New England, in Armidale, Australia, have made it possible for council to conduct regular bi-annual online meetings, to enhance communication and work between conferences. Over the past two years, we have updated the constitution and by-laws as per decisions made by membership at the Rome meeting. We are proposing several more changes to the terms of office, the electoral process, and the composition of tasks within council, which will be sent out via email to members in advance of the July conference.
Two years have really flown by, but smoothly, which speaks to the stability and increased maturity of the association. I want to thank all the Council members who have helped insure IOHA’s continuity and growth–Parita, Janis, Paula, Pilar, Eriko, Don, Gerardo, Sean, Antonio, Funso, Aviston, and Gunhan. You’ve been great colleagues and I’ve enjoyed working with all of you. In the January issue of IOHA News, we published the list of elected offices and responsibilities. I encourage members to consider running for elected office. IOHA needs your energy, ideas, and contributions!Rina Benmayor
IOHA President
Rina_Benmayor@csumb.edu
The World of Words
Future Conferences and Meetings
United Kingdom
Passion, Play and the Everyday: Oral history and the Consumer Society, June 17-18, 2006The Annual Conference of the Oral History Society, in association with Sheffield Wednesday Football Club, will be held at Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield, UK
Polly Russell: polly.russell@bl.uk
This oral history conference will examine the impact of changing lifestyles, leisure, consumption and the development of the consumer society. The emergence of a consumer society raises important questions about changes in political, corporate and consumer power, the influence of the media, individual and group identity, the relation between choice, freedom and regulation, ethical consumption, pleasure and desire, the changing role of leisure and the relationship between consumption and production.
Consumer society is often thought of as a contemporary phenomenon but oral history provides an excellent means of exploring the historical dimensions of consumption and consumer culture. Holding the conference in Sheffield, a city whose wealth was founded on the coal and steel industries, will allow us to reflect on whether oral history can capture local, regional, national and global shifts from production to consumption-based economies and cultures. The conference will draw together a diverse range of oral history practitioners and researchers, as well as people who use oral history as part of their work or interest in the media, museums, education, local and community history and entertainment. The booking form and conference leaflet can be downloaded:
http://www.ohs.org.uk/conferences/
Michelle Winslow: m.winslow@sheffield.ac.uk
Liz Carnegie: e.carnegie@sheffield.ac.uk
AUSTRALIA
Dancing with Memory: Oral History and its Audiences, Sydney, Australia, July 12-16 2006
As the papers and abstracts arrive for the 14th International Oral History Conference, we stop to read, reflect and be inspired. We are starting to connect presenters to conference sub-themes and to each other, and to shape sessions where dialogue will be across countries, languages, approaches and forms. People have engaged with the conference theme and its sub-themes in expected and unexpected ways. The latter cause us to reconsider the shape, tone and parameters of some sub-themes. Here are some tastes of what the conference has to offer.
Her Excellency, Professor Marie Bashir AC, Governor of NSW, will open the conference, and the Hon. Bob Debus, NSW Minister for the Arts and patron of the conference will deliver the welcome address.
The opening plenary session will include a presentation from the noted Australian oral historian Peter Read, who will take us on a journey--in English and Spanish--through his comparative experiences in working with indigenous communities in Australia and Chile. The accompanying opening presentation will take our eyes and ears to Timor Leste, a close northern neighbor to Australia and a new country struggling to overcome years of turmoil and trauma. The conference will then break into its parallel sessions, following the various sub-themes.
Papers in fire and water invite encounters with environmental movements, activists and their opponents in Germany, Finland, Australia and the United States. Other papers take us diving with Japanese women abalone divers or to consider the significance and symbolism of water in a Turkish context.
Political pasts takes up the experiences of political activists in a number of different countries (Thailand, Spain, Australia, United States, Czech Republic and Hong Kong) as well as exploring different ways in which prominent political figures are remembered.
Archiving memory has drawn a range of offerings about the potentials and pitfalls of digital technologies as a challenging part of the future of oral history. As well, there are discussions of particular projects, their resources and approaches.
Pleasures of memory have people dancing, remembering, listening, touching, telling stories: museums, film, theatre, emotion are the focus of papers being drawn together in this sub-theme.
Migration experiences to, in and across many different countries (including Australia, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, Hawaii, Spain, India) and the encounters between different cultural practices form the core of stories in translation.
Talking to ourselves brings together a range of papers about oral history practice and methods as well as a plenary session in which long term oral historians such as Ron Grele, Alessandro Portelli, Don Ritchie, Marieta de Moraes Ferreira will reflect on and debate the past, present and future of the international oral history movement.
And there will be much more as papers shape around other sub-themes: healing memories, island stories, memory and community, memory and trauma, places and buildings, remembering the land, sharing/passing on beliefs, teaching and learning.
To watch the links emerge and to read the paper abstracts, regularly visit the conference website at http://www.une.edu.au/ioha2006.
The conference sessions on their own will offer the stimulation and exchange that we have come to expect from our international oral history conferences. In addition, participants can attend a range of cultural events which all tap into the conference theme of Dancing with memory: oral history and its audiences. These include:
• a conference dinner at NSW Parliament House with entertainment supplied by Touchwood, a trio who play and sing a capella in many languages using oral histories and songs handed down from migrants who came to Australia.
• performance and film events including a one hour performance by the Australian Theatre for Young People entitled “Light Years.” The performance is based on oral history interviews with six older members of the community who come from different backgrounds, some migrants and some Australian-born and all with widely varying life experiences. The young people act out incidents from the lives of these informants and, in one case, the younger “alter ego” actor is on the stage with the original storyteller.
• post-conference tours which take you on sensory excursions outside Sydney; one to the Australian capital, Canberra, and its amazing museums; the other to the Hunter Valley with its history and heritage sites, wine and food.
For more details about cultural activities, visit the conference website at http://www.une.edu.au/ioha2006.
Janis Wilton: jwilton@mail.une.edu.au
UNITED STATES
Generational Links: Confronting the Past, Understanding the Present, Planning the Future: Oral History Association, Little Rock, Arkansas, October 25-28, 2006
The Oral History Association will hold its next annual meeting at the Peabody Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas, October 25-28, 2006. A highlight of the meeting will be a behind-the-scenes tour of the new William J. Clinton Presidential Library, and a panel discussion on oral history in the presidential libraries.
In keeping with this year's theme: "Generational Links: Confronting the Past, Understanding the Present, Planning the Future," the 2006 l meeting will focus special attention on oral history work with groups and individuals who risked their lives to confront injustice in its many forms, institutions and organizations, which promote understanding and oral history projects, which encourage a just and diverse future. Presentations will deal with school desegregation, the civil rights movement, the Japanese-American Internment, regional and southern histories, women and men of conscience who promoted freedom and resisted oppression, and the dynamism of "the New South." We anticipate that the stories of political activists and civil rights workers, labor organizers and "freedom riders," radical reformers and social protestors for various causes will be an important part of the meeting.
Tracy K' Meyer, Program Chair: tracyk@louisville.edu
Allan Stein, Program Co-chair:asteinca@earthlink.net
PANAMA
Second Latin American Meeting of Oral History, Panama, January 2007
Preparations are already underway for the Second Latin American Meeting of Oral History being held in January 2007 in Panama.
Professor Marcela Camargo of the University of Panama is organizing the papers for this conference. For more information please visit the website www.hola.pro.br
Face to Face
Information on Congresses and Associations
BRAZIL
Between 2-5 May 2006 the 8th Brazilian Oral History Encounter took place in Rio Branco, Acre (Amazonica Region). It was the first time that a national conference was held outside one of Brazil’s major cities. While Rio Branco is the capital of Acre, it is not a large urban centre. Indeed, it is located in an area with a long tradition of defending the Amazon Chico Mendes, for example, a famous seringalista (rubber tapper) and social and political activist who fought against the devastation of the rain forest, was born in Acre and was assassinated in a city close to Rio Branco, where he lived. For more information on the Acre conference, visit the website:
www.cpdoc.fgv.br/abho
Antonio Montenegro: antoniomontenegr@hotmail.com
Update on the Oral Documents Conference at the 6th Archival Congress of MERCOSUR
For the first time, the Oral Documents Conference was held in tandem with the 6th Archival Congress in 2005, which brought together more than seven hundred archival professionals. During the conference, we had the opportunity to verify a common issue shared among the member states of MERCOSUR. One widespread theme concerned access prohibitions to archival deposits that were imposed during military dictatorships and that lasted until the 1970s and 1980s. Similarly, we observed that presently there is pressure from political, professional and activist groups to make archives and documentation centres more accessible.
Archive policies, staff training and methods of document handling has developed in Latin America–especially since the 1970s–with the support of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the International Archive Council. Discussions held at the conference helped participants see firsthand that initiatives and difficulties that each country has had in this difficult and complicated process. These sessions have also shown that a network has been formed where technical cooperation and shared experiences have become important tools.
Also during this meeting, I EDO stressed that archives have warily responded in developing policies concerning oral documents, such as their placement and treatment. As registries are collected and treated in a more systematic manner, it has become evident that there are specific requirements needed during their production, which will aid in their preservation. One proposal being considered is increasing funding for workshops on oral source production and treatment. This should be organized by those experienced in teaching how to refine technical procedures, who can stimulate inclusive discussions on choosing appropriate equipment and consumables. The general goal should be to make the seminars widely accessible.
On another level, discussions took place regarding description criteria and access to archival deposits and other collections. There were several references to the ISAD-G regulations, broadly formulated by the International Council on Archives, and which has recently introduced computer resources to archival descriptions. National commissions continue to discuss general guidelines, with the goal of adapting them to local needs. At the same time, archival and documentation centers already have discussed and adopted these guidelines, rules that also extend to oral documentation collections.
These congresses have also proved to be fertile grounds exchanging ideas and extending networks that go beyond those that already take place through national oral history associations, such as the Brazilian Oral History Association. In this sense, the participants of the I EDO de MERCOSUR warmly received news that the BOHA recently organized “Space of Dialogue” between Latin American countries that can be used as another mechanism for linking those involved and acting on these discussions and proposals.
Yara Aun Khoury
Coordinator of the CEDIC documentation center of the Universidad Pontifícia -Católica de São Paulo
yara@belk.com.br
GREECE
ESREA Life History and Biography Network Conference
On March 2, 3, and 5, the ESREA 2006 Conference was held in Volos, Greece. It was organized by the University of Thessaly’s Department of Early Childhood Education, the Volos Municipal Centre for Historical Research and Documentation (DIKI), and the Greek Society of Clinical Social Research, on the theme of “Transitional Spaces, Transitional Processes and Research.”
The Conference focused on the social structures and social relations that are undergoing continuous change in both private and public spheres of life. Ideas of lifelong learning, reflexivity and “biographicity” came to the fore. The 2006 Conference explored the implications of story telling, biographical, autobiographical, and life history research in relation to learning, and notions of transitional space and transitional processes. The way we used to think of and understand learning and such spaces as education, community, social politics, work, family, health, and, for that matter, research, was reconsidered and reanalysed. Consequently, processes and understanding were reviewed in a wide range of spheres, from the social and the political to the institutional, clinical and empirical. Participants were encouraged to offer their experiences in such situations.
During the three-day conference ten thematic lines where developed around several topics:
• Education and Learning: lifelong learning, democracy and education, adult and children’s education, teacher training.
• Identities and Selves: the dialogical self, the narrated and narrating self, the self and the other.
• Social and political spaces and processes of globalization: from above, from below and in-between.
• Transitions and transformations of the local, regional, national, global economic and social structures.
• Community and exclusion: migration and belonging, dialogue and narration, poverty, borders and boundaries, ethnicity, gender, travel.
• Labor relations and employment spaces: changes in work concepts and processes, technology and virtual work communities, work ethics.
• The politics of war and terrorism: the nation and the nation-state, violence and cultural fear, religion.
• Artistic spaces and processes: music, literature, theatre, performance, visual arts and architecture.
• Health and healing: new therapeutic relations in the clinical practice, individual and group therapy, alternative medicine, family.
• Research as a transitional space.
More information about the 2006 ESREA Conference and the papers presented can be found on the Conference’s website: http://esrea2006.ece.uth.gr/
Katerina Kranou: katkran@gmail.com
INDIA
An Oral History Tour of India
During the second half of December, 2005 and the first half of January, 2006, two Americans visited India where they participated in oral history conferences and conducted oral history workshops. Under the auspices of the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs, Bruce M. Stave, Director of the Center for Oral History at the University of Connecticut, and Dr. Sondra Astor Stave interacted with a variety of audiences ranging from the nation’s most accomplished scholars to undergraduate students and the general public. Questions regarding memory, the distinction between oral history and oral tradition, and the mechanics of the process informed their conversations.
They began by traveling to Nagaland, a restricted area in India’s far northeast near Burma that requires special permission to visit. At Nagaland University in the Himalayan city of Kohima, they participated in an oral history workshop, which brought together scholars, teachers, and journalists. The participants, steeped in Naga history, deal with a non-literate society based in tribal villages. One folklorist, for example, is collecting the songs of the region in an attempt to reconstruct cultural history. The historians present raised questions about the reliability of oral sources as compared to those that are written. The daylong meeting encouraged an exciting and thought-provoking exchange in a place that may seem quite remote to most westerners. Participants demonstrated great enthusiasm while learning about the practice of oral history and the Staves learned a great deal about Naga society and the complexities in documenting a non-literate culture.
[Sondra Astor Stave speaks to the workshop on oral history organized by Nagaland University in Kohima, Nagaland, India. Professor Neivetso Venuh of the university and Karuna Singh of Kolkata's (Calcutta's) American Center are seated to her right. ]
At Jamshedpur in the new Indian state of Jharkhand, they interacted with students at the Institute for Tribal Education, Gamharia, and met with the Institute’s founding director, Father P.D. Thomas, a visionary Jesuit priest and his staff, who bring tribal students from near and far off villages to study. The ability to access live internet in this distant location allowed for showing the tribal students a web site on the Voices of World War II created by students at the University of Connecticut and discussing the potential of similar activity on their part. In nearby Ranchi, the Staves met with a management group at the Xaviers Institute for Social Sciences, where the prime interest was methodology. They completed their eastern India tour in Kolkata (Calcutta), where they participated in a conference at the American Center dealing with oral history and Indian Partition that brought together leading scholars from Kolkata and a few from New Delhi. The Center for Refugee Studies at Jadavpur University and the Maulana Azad Institute of Asian Studies co-sponsored with the American Center, and scholarly interchange was especially stimulating. A paper, “A Daughter’s Testimony and the Partition of Punjab,” by Nonica Datta of the Department of History at Miranda House, Delhi University exhibited the sophisticated use of memory common to an increasing number of Indian scholars. That conference was followed by an energetic and lively meeting with a general audience interested in oral history that included filmmakers, attorneys, writers, and teachers, and showcased the passion of the Bengali intellect.
From Kolkata, the Staves moved on to other parts of India. They had lived in Aurangabad in the western state of Maharastra 37 years earlier when Bruce Stave taught history as a Fulbright lecturer at Marathwada University and Sondra Astor Stave taught at the Little Flower School.. They visited there and found a much-expanded city, school, and university, where they spoke to history students about oral history and met with faculty and administrators.
In Bangalore, the heart of India’s silicon valley, they met with a group brought together by ART Bangalore at the Alliance Francaise in that city. Jagdish Raja, who helped organize the meeting, is the founder of the repertory theater that takes the name ART Bangalore. He immediately inquired whether the “Laramie Project” was a good example of the use of oral history in theater and proudly pointed out that the play recently had been produced in his city. Further south in Chennai (Madras), the students and faculty at Women’s Christian College showed a great interest in oral history and after the presentation there determined to establish a regional oral history association. At the National Folklore Support Center (NFSC) in the same city, the differences between oral history and folklore received a great deal of attention and discussion. Dr. M.D. Muthukumarasamy, the NFSC director, shared his valuable insights and knowledge, as did other participants at a workshop. The Americans learned a great deal about folklore.
They completed their tour in New Delhi, where they participated in conferences at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) and at the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts. The latter meeting was jointly organized by the National Mission for Manuscripts. Both conferences brought together leading scholars in the field. They found it was exciting to speak at the NMML, which since 1966 has housed what is probably India’s most professional oral history project (in the western sense). The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library reminds one of a presidential library in the U.S. and impresses visitors as a magnificent institution. The Staves met briefly with B.R. Nanda, the pioneer who established the project, and could not help but think of him as the Allan Nevins of India. They also conferred with Usha Prasad, who does the actual interviewing and oversees the oral history process at the NMML, and Deepa Bhatnagar, the institution’s Research Officer.
Newspapers in Nagaland, the Tamil weekly edition of India Today, and a major paper, The Hindu, carried stories about the visit and the uses of oral history, which appears to have a promising future as well as a substantial past in India.
Bruce Stave: bruce.stave@uconn.edu
JAPAN
Workshop for Practitioners of Oral History in the Digitized Media World, Japan Oral History Association, March 11-12, Mejiro, Japan
On March 11 and 12, 2006, the second Japan Oral History Association’s Workshop for Practitioners was held at Japan Women’s University’s Mejiro campus. Professor Sherna Gluck, founder and director emeritus of the California State University Long Beach Oral History Program, delivered the keynote speech on “Issues and New Approaches to Practicing Oral History.” The next morning was devoted to the “Practice of Oral History Interview Skills,” while the afternoon offered presentations on the “Introduction of Case Studies of Actual Oral History Projects by Theme, Methodology, Issues and Solutions.” The program represented various approaches to oral history practice to be considered.
In an overview of oral history in the USA, Professor Gluck said that the first generation of oral historians started with the hearing of elite white men’s life stories after WWII, and the second generation started during the 1960s with the feminist movement and other social movements using oral history methodology (Sherna Gluck considered herself as belonging to this second category). The third generation was started by the Italian scholar, Alessandro Portelli, who raised the consciousness of the theory of social awareness among the recollections of the masses. A fourth generation was represented by those who built the Oral History Archive on the website using the benefits of the Internet. She also explained how the Virtual Oral/Aural History Archive (http://www.csulb.edu/voaha) could be used.
On the second day Professor Gluck and Ann Sado of Legacy Memoirs offered various advice to both beginners and those with experience on how to conduct an interview, from the preparatory stage to the actual conditions during the actual interview. Gluck emphazised the inter-subjectivity of the intention of the interviewer and the interviewee, and the dynamics between the two. By contrast, Sado explained the approach that she used in family oral history under Ellen Epstein’s methodology, in which the interviewer became “a conduit as the non-judgmental listener.” Later in the afternoon three practitioners presented 1) family oral history, 2) oral history used for a non-profit organization, and 3) oral history project that was implemented in the higher educational organization.
For two days a total of 95 people participated (43 on the first day and 52 on the second day). There is high expectation that the workshop will encourage many of the participants to become members. Much appreciation from JOHA goes to Professor Tazuko Kobayashi of Japan Women’s University for the use of their multi-media room as the venue, for the use of equipment, and for the assistance of a graduate student. Professor Atsushi Sakurai, President, and Secretariat Junko Sakai gave generous support in the management of this workshop. The board of directors of JOHA and volunteers from Legacy Memoirs also provided support.
Kayoko Yoshida (reporting in Japanese)
Ann Sado (reporting in English): ye6a-sd@asahi-net.or.jp
UNITED STATES
Oral History at the Crossroads, OHMAR, March 23-24, 2006, Baltimore, Maryland
OHMAR (Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region) celebrated its thirtieth anniversary at a meeting held at the Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture in Baltimore, Maryland, March 23-24, 2006. The regional group, which is affiliated with the Oral History Association, covers the U.S. states from New York to Virginia (http://www.ohmar.org/). Its anniversary program blended the old–reminiscences of past presidents about how OHMAR was founded and developed–with the new–the directions in which students and younger oral historians are taking the field. A highlight of the OHMAR meetings is the presentation of the Forrest C. Pogue Award for significant contributions to the field of oral history (named for a pioneer oral historian who conducted interviews at Normandy Beach during World War II). This year the award went to Charles Stuart Kennedy, founder and director of the Foreign Affairs Oral History Program, which has conducted interviews with hundreds of American foreign service officers posted in countries everywhere around the world. The catalog for the collection is at: http://www.library.georgetown.edu/dept/speccoll/diplo.htm, and Kennedy’s description of the project can be found at: http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/AD_Issues/amdipl_6/kennedy6.html
From Page to Mouth
Oral History Projects
AUSTRALIA
Simply Australia has been online now since October 2001 at http://simplyaustralia.net. It is a Web site for Australian heritage folklore, oral history, and song.
In March 2006 it underwent a major shift in presentation, changing from a static magazine style to a more interactive site, giving readers the opportunity to comment on individual items on the site and to contribute, through the comments, their own thoughts and ideas on each subject.
For those interested, among the latest articles are:
• The account of John Anderson and the Shetland fiddles brought back to life in Australia [Neil Adam]
• Dr Mike Richards’ detailed account of Ronald Ryan, the last man to be hanged in Australia, together with songwriter Mark Cryle’s great song about him.
• The story of the theft and recovery in Summer Hill of a Victoria Cross, which belonged to a local war hero called John Paton. [John Godl]
• A personal tribute to the late Denis Kevans together with a song written for Denis after a bushwalk with him [Jim Low]
• Warren Fahey’s article, “The Songs the Diggers Really Sang,” revisited from the very first issue in 2001
Simply Australia is now set up to be even more user friendly, and is once again looking for contributions.
Jim Low: thefolk@simplyaustralia.net
BRAZIL
Latin American Culture
Oral history provides a window into Latin American culture, as expressed through native (or indigenous), European or African communities, and helps to capture its passion through its complexity. An “exoticism” emerges in the confrontation between distinct imagined worlds and cosmic visions. Out of this confrontation between imaginary and cosmic visions, the América Mestiza arises, not solely from the mixing of races, but through a joining of visions. In a multicultural New World, interculturalism predominates, preserving values, relations and ideologies. A plural America has allowed multiple cultures to defend and cultivate their unique cosmological visions and traditions.
From this perspective, my work has been on the cultural expression that occurs during the Día de los Muertos [All Saint’s Day] in Mexico. It is the fiesta where the dead and living meet. It is also a space where the sacred and the profane intertwine in perfect ymbiosis, where pre-Hispanic culture and western Christianity integrated and where cultural permanencies are seen. These fiestas and rituals are documented in indigenous codices and in the work of the chroniclers that were in Mexico after the arrival of the Spanish.
In the Andean region, the Quechua world revelled in the combination of everyday life with that of the cosmological world. The profane world survived only through the presence of the sacred,which gave consistency to everyday life. Among the sacred myths, Qoa (also known as Quoacha or Titi) stands out and shares cosmogonic similarities to the myth of Illapa. Qoa, like Illapa (or Inti-Illapa) controls water (especially the rain) and is one of the oldest Andean millenarian myths. Another indigenous myth that draws one’s attention in contemporary Andean culture is that of Wana Kawri, the god of the land, which was known to Spaniards as the devil (or god) of the shadows and has held a special divinity in the Incário. This divinity has remained until the present and is represented (with variations) in the Carnival of Oruro.
As Wana Kawri was considered a demon (or devil) by the Christian minded Spaniards, the Quechuas were condemned for idolatry. Not surprisingly, the Spanish persecuted the idols and their admirers alike when confronted with the Other, lo diferente, that adored local gods and in contrast with the ethnocentric European perspective of Christianity’s superiority. For the Spanish, there was only one God, eternal and absolute. Nonetheless, these cultural manifestations reflect the “socially imagined” that were reproduced in the collective memory and which have been fundamental elements for the preservation of values and traditions in Andean society. As a result, we are all white, black and Indians, not because of color, but as a result of the hybrid cosmic visions forged through the encounter of indigenous, black and European cultures that have structured the manner in which we think about our América Mestiza.
Maria Teresa Toribio, University of Rio de Janeiro
CZECH REPUBLIC
Victors? Vanquished? Political Elites and Dissidents in Czechoslovakia
A three-year research project, “Political Elites and Dissidents during the Period of so-called Normalization in Czechoslovakia: Biographical Interviews,” was conducted from 2002 to 2004 by researchers at the Oral History Center at the Institute for Contemporary History in Prague. The research team was composed of historians who specialize in the use of oral history methods and was built upon experience gained through an earlier project “Students during the Fall of Communism: Biographical Interviews (1996–1998).” Our main objective was to study Czechoslovak society during the period that started with the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 and ended with the peaceful November (Velvet) revolution in 1989. Realizing that it would be impossible to study the society as a whole, we concentrated on its two political poles: the Communists who were party functionaries at various levels (from the district, regional and central committees), and the dissidents who opposed the regime. Our study included interviewees from the capital city Prague as well as narrators from other regional centers in the former Czechoslovakia.
The project, currently the only one of its type and extent to have been conducted in the former Eastern Bloc, presented us with a broad spectrum of potential questions and problems, including the usage of oral history methods in general. From the very beginning, we were aware of several specific methodological as well as practical problems. Firstly, a number of Czech historians remain skeptical of a method that relies on individual life stories, experiences, and opinions. They continue to give preference to documents, even though many of the written sources of official provenance from this period were either stolen or destroyed by the secret police during the hectic November days in 1989. We feel that archival documentation can give us only a one-sided, flat and superficial view of the events.
Secondly, we found works on oral history methodology from the West to be helpful for our research, although we saw that the focus of this literature, produced in states with traditional and uninterrupted democratic systems, was on researching the various social, ethnic and cultural minorities in these countries. Our task was to study “normalization“ as a society-wide phenomenon. At the same time, we tried to avoid generalization, which is an element useful for social science research but not as beneficial for the qualitative research conducted from a historical perspective.
When discussing this project with the broader community of historians, we encountered doubts about the willingness of ex-Communist functionaries to give us their life stories or to speak openly and sincerely on tape. Even assuming they were willing to do so, we were questioned as to whether we would be able to find any real historical value in the ex-functionaries´ subjective and presumably self-defensive narratives. We were also aware that not all of the dissidents were satisfied with the results of the November revolution and that some of them might feel disappointed or undervalued, so we could not be sure whether they too would be willing to give us interviews.
Before the interviewing phase began, we had to solve several legal problems so that our narrators could be sure that their interviews would not be used against them in any way. Every narrator was given a copy of the tape recording and a precise transcription of the interview and was asked to authorize it. A second authorization was obtained if the life story was to be published after additional orthographic and stylistic editing.
[Interview with former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Milos Jakes, by Miroslav Vanek, Prague, 2004.]
With the feeling that “time is running out fast” for the aging narrators, we tried to find and contact them immediately. It was easier to locate narrators from the dissident circles because we already knew some of them personally from our previous work, and we used the "snowball" method to identify additional interviewees. For our initial contacts with the former Communist functionaries, we had at our disposal several resources providing us with individual names, including: the lists of party functionaries on the district, regional, and central levels; the periodical press; and an abundance of official sources. At the end of this contact phase, we were genuinely surprised at how many of the ex-functionaries were--after initial hesitation--willing to tell us about their lives. We were also more than satisfied with the number of dissidents who found the time to give us an interview. By the end of the project, we had collected overall about 120 interviews, comprising more than 450 hours of audio or video recording and almost 7,000 pages of transcription. This included interviews with both Miloš Jakeš, the General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1989, and the dissident leader and first President of post-communist Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel.
A number of interesting features appeared during the course of our research. We felt that our most important task as interviewers was to obtain the trust of the narrators and to assure them, after forty years of self-censorship, they could speak openly and freely now. A number of the Communist functionaries openly expressed their ideology as well as their opinions about the past and present, sometimes accentuated with emotional expressions concerning their defeat in November 1989 and the succeeding political developments. We also found that it was easier for our narrators to tell us about their childhood, professions, positions, and ambitions than it was for them to talk about their private lives, such as everyday life, hobbies, and friendships. Many of the functionaries and dissidents seemed to share a sort of “workaholism,” neglecting their families and their personal lives. The social relationships in both of the groups we studied were more likely to be groups of similar interest rather than friendly or collegial relations. We also discovered that the already-familiar term “dissidents´ ghetto” has an analogy in a sort of “functionaries´ ghetto,” i.e. a group of people whose inner quarrels and conflicts seemed more important to them than their relationship with the opposing group.
We have already published a series of interviews from this project in the two-volume work Victors? Vanquished? which was followed by a collection of interview analyses (an element of oral history research that we consider indispensable) that brought together the various individual and interdisciplinary approaches of a group of authors. These results serve as the starting point for our present project, launched in 2006, in which we will collect, analyze and interpret interviews with Czech "white-collar" (intellectual) and "blue-collar" (manual) workers who, regardless of their political opinion, had little choice but to live through the two decades of so-called “normalization.”
Miroslav Vanek
Director of the Centre of Oral History, Institute for Contemporary History CAS, Prague, Czech Republic: vanek@usd.cas.cz
ITALY
The House of Memory
The city of Rome inaugurated its new House of History and Memory on April 24, the anniversary of the Nazi Massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine. The new institution has a two-fold purpose. On the one hand, it provides a space for the historic association of former partisans, political victims, political exiles, that have kept the memory of anti-Fascism, Resistance and the Shoah alive through their testifying and organizing. On the other hand, it houses two research institutions: Rome’s Institute for Italian History from Fascism to Resistance, an organization of teachers and historians dedicated to the study of contemporary history with its roots in the Resistance; and the Circolo Gianni Bosio, the organization founded by Alessandro Portelli, dedicated to the study of oral history and folk music (and especially its sound archive, which our readers may remember was in danger of deterioration and dissolution from the lack of an adequate space).
The House of History and Memory is host to many cultural and political events, ranging from documentaries on the Resistance to the oral history of working-class neighborhoods, from the launching of books on gay history under Fascism to discussions of Bruce Springsteen’s homage to Pete Seeger. Two oral history books, recently produced by the Circolo Gianni Bosio, have been presented at the House of Memory, indicating the vigor of the oral history movement in Rome: Città di parole (City of Words), an oral history of the working-class neighborhood of Centocelle in Rome; Un anno durato decenni (A year that lasted for decades), a collection of life stories of “non-leaders of the ‘60s movements.
The founding of the House of Memory and History is also a continuation of the city administration’s concentration of memory and history, as shown by the International Oral History Conference, which took place in Rome, under city government’s auspices, in 2004. On May 27, it also hosted the founding meeting of the new Italian Oral History Association.
Alessandro Portelli: Alessandro.portelli@uniroma1.it
SPAIN
In-depth Interviews, Life Histories: Words and Memories of Refugees in Central-Eastern Spain during the Francoist Period
Oral history, life history and in-depth interviews together make up a research “technical package” qualitatively and carefully used by social scientists. These techniques can be employed as a singular method or be part of a multiple perspective, known as triangulation, where various methods, perspectives, disciplines and data are used conjunctively. The latter has been our choice for our current research project, which is being carried out by academics in universities the world over. Indeed, this topic could not have been approached in any other manner as it interconnects themes as varied as international relations, the history of communication, migratory movements, political history and political economy.
Our project, entitled “Relations between Spain and Central and Eastern Europe: political refugees, communication, culture and economy, 1939-1989,” examines the relations and interrelations between various countries during a period which extended from the end of the Spanish civil war in 1939 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The internal structure has four chronological phases: the first (1939-1945) investigates the presence of International Brigade soldiers from Central and Eastern Europe and Spanish exiles in Eastern Europe, as well as the slow breakdown of diplomatic relations. The second phase (1945-1955), corresponding to Spanish international isolation and the configuration of the Iron Curtain, analyzes the formation of extra-official diplomatic ties, cultural activities, and the beginning of secret economic contacts. It also examines communication, a legitimizing element of government policies. The third period (1955-1975) studies cases of real socialism and dissidence against the USSR as well as the intent to seek a rapprochement as a result of warming relations, third country economic agreements and, finally, and the situation of Spanish communists in Eastern Europe. The fourth and last part (1975-1989), a period which covers the Spanish transition, focuses on the normalization of democratic Spain’s foreign relations and its role as a possible model and roadmap for communist transitions. To undertake and carry out this research project, we have used written sources, particularly those housed in the archive of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the national archives found in Prague, Budapest, Sophia and Warsaw.
The importance of the “individual” as a subject and an object of analysis has been a key element during the entire research project. Out of this the need to fall back on oral history methodology beginning from the in-depth interview. Its use has given us a wide ranging and multiple thematic focus through direct contact with actors directly involved in events. Through these subjects we have obtained useful primary material, both from individual testimonies and collective experiences.
The methodological steps were realized in two stages:
1. A plan to gather testimonies: Written sources have provided us with personal information about the refugees at the time of their arrival in Madrid, Barcelona or Central European capitals. Once these became known and were processed in the database, we proceeded to contact the embassies and consulates of the target countries of our study: Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and the former Yugoslavia.
2: Plan of action--direct fieldwork: Once possible testimony sources were located, we prepared an in-depth interview. Our interest lay primarily in obtaining the voice of those who were held in the Mikranda de Ebro concentration camp and that of the Spanish exiled in Eastern Europe. Second, we wanted to obtain the voice of refugees who fled from puppet communist governments. Among this subset, we included a group of Catholic anti-communist youths who lived at the Colegio Mayor Santiago Apóstol [St. James the Apostle University Residence] while continuing their higher education in Spain. Third, we required testimony from member of Eastern European aristocracies and dethroned dynasties that were granted asylum by Franco’s Spain. Overall, the fieldwork has not been an easy task, with the largest problem being the age of the chosen sample group: foreign prisoners at the Mirando de Ebro camp, for example, currently are more than 80 or 82 years old.
Each group has also required a personalized qualitative method. Among the surviving members of the group we have labelled “the young anticommunist Catholics of St. James University Residence” we used group discussions and a survey sheet. We considered that opening a debate among these former “college boys” about their university and work experience in post-war Spain needed to be a common objective that might lead to the possibility of comparing opinions and detecting possible omissions through in-depth interviews. In the same way, we observed that that the sample group was insufficient, which resulted in the preparation of an open-ended questionnaire where we defined what kind of information we wanted, but leaving it to the interviewee to express himself freely. The mail survey sent out to subjects currently living in different countries was returned relatively quickly, along with documents and pictures voluntary sent in by the former college members.
Oral history and qualitative methods have given us a superb perspective for our study. This becomes clear when one considers that a large part of the topic covers the Cold War period, when great care was taken to maintain confidentiality, whether in developing commercial contacts or granting asylum. It is particularly apparent when examining the treatment given to the high aristocracy or dethroned kings, such as Bulgaria’s Simeon, Otto von Habsburg, , Vladimir of Russia and Nicholas of Romania, etc. The result of this study has been a notable enrichment of our historical understanding of Spain’s paradoxical relation between two irreconcilable enemies: Franco’s Spain and the countries behind the Iron Curtain.
Matilde Eiroa San Francisco: TOFALAR@terra.es
Between the Neighbourhood and the Factory: Culture and Worker’s Identity in Union Activism, Catalunya, 1951-1988.
This research is the result of a joint project that began in 2002 with the support of the Centre de Promoció de la Cultura Popular i Tradicional de Catalunya [Centre for the Promotion of Catalan Popular and Traditional Culture], a publicly funded organization that, for several years, has motivated and stimulated research into the oral tradition of Catalunya. It has also promoted the use of oral sources in anthropological and historical studies concerning contemporary Catalan society.
What we are proposing is an historical approach to the new labor movement that arose during the 1950s and 1960s in Spain as a political subject. Research on this topic has been diverse and has resulted in lines of study that have not always coincided. Their contribution, however, lies in that they have enhanced interpretations on the processes of destruction and reconstruction of the worker’s movement. Parallel to this is a longer-term problem that arises out of the nature of dissent and consent within the working class in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.
In the Spanish case, different studies have insisted on structural conditions with sociological concepts related to the new social movements, political opportunities for collective action and availability of resources and individual leadership, being incorporated afterwards. Our intention is to draw into the debate issues surrounding the participation of social actors in social protest and their effect on the course of events. In other words, how did these players interpret what was happening? This is similar to research carried out by Joseph Gusfield, New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity (1994), on collective movements, which pays special attention to the “social construction” of mobilization.
The first objective that we seek is to attempt to define and interpret the cultural resources used to create social representations about the labor question through political power and different social groups.
Within the group of methods and techniques that we have used, oral sources occupy a central although not exclusive position. “Life histories,” which consist of oral sources, have been used. A collection of “Workers biographies,” put together by the Historical Archive of Comisiones Obreras of Catalunya between 1997 and 2005. The collection is an extensive series of 164 interviews of women and men who were connected with union activity, in different industrial sectors and in different geographical locations throughout Catalunya. This use of oral sources is combined with written sources from different public and private archives. Through documentation, one becomes aware of the attitudes authorities held and the decisions they took. In these sources, one can also find discourses and initiatives concerning “worker’s issue” generated by citizen groups and the Catholic Church’s institutions and groups. In the interviews that we collected (which were designed as semi-structured and open-ended) a “story of daily routines” was voluntarily sought. This has allowed us to collect descriptive elements about the subject’s personal life--family, education, work, etc.--and, at the same time, information about the militancy of the activists. Both of these aspects are conceived as being unified and are the reason why a biographical focus was used. This focus has been useful in our strategy of approaching the inner workings of memory and of looking at how recollections of militancy have been constructed, while still conscious that order, intelligibility, and life story coherence of those interviewed are also critical research criteria. Through this, a third objective was established: how activist groups explain and perceive the events that they recall. This type of position allowed us to agree with Alessandro Portelli (Terni en Huelga: 2004) that people see, narrate and remember events in different ways, depending on their social and political position. Memory of the same event also changes with the passage of time, which reflects changes in the preoccupations and ideologies with a given social group. Written memories are fixed, while oral memories, by their nature, change. Undoubtedly, the personal perspective and the selective character of memory provoke questions of “false memories” or “memory error.” However, this does not mean that these memories are impostures, rather that they are they should be considered in the light that “there is no evidence that is valid when one wants to believe” (Leonardo Sciascia, El teatre de la memòria), which suggest that witnesses defend their recollection. The job of the historian is to shake up memories, to analyze resistant myths against those that are currently being forged.
Javier Tébar Hurtado
Director of the Fundació Cipriano García de Comisiones Obreras de Catalunya: arxiu@conc.es
UNITED STATES
Southern Oral History Program Will Digitize its Oral Histories
The Institute for Museum and Library Services has awarded the University of North Carolina’s Southern Oral History Program (SOHP) a $505,232 grant to digitize and publish online 500 oral history interviews conducted by the SOHP over the past thirty years. This project, entitled “Oral Histories of the American South,” will provide access to previously unheard voices and stories that, taken together, reveal the everyday choices, vibrant characters, and dramatic events that make up the history of a unique and rapidly changing region.
“Oral Histories of the American South” will make tapes and transcripts available to a broader audience than ever before. It will also develop new technologies for synchronizing sound and text. For the first time, users will be able to search large numbers of oral history interviews by theme, access interviews at the point of their interest, and, with a few clicks of the mouse, hear the spoken word, read the related transcript text, and learn from additional historical commentary.
Professor Jacquelyn Hall has directed the SOHP since its founding in 1973. “What excites me most,” she says, “is that this project will allow us to restore the power of the human voice to the heart of oral history research and use. Because it is so much easier to consult transcribed text, students and scholars often never listen to the tapes at all. Yet a transcript can’t capture how the story is told—the tone, the inflection of words, the sound of laughter, the catch in the voice, the ironies, the personal interaction between interviewer and interviewee, the silences that sometimes speak louder than words. Now people will be able to search transcripts with ease and, at the same time, hear the many nuances of meaning in the spoken word.
Public service is a major priority of the project. Scholars throughout the world will be able to consult oral history interviews in their richest form--as a simultaneous presentation of sound recordings and transcripts. K-12 teachers and their students will be able to use curriculum materials based on personal accounts of historical events. The general public will enjoy free access to materials previously available only to visitors of the UNC Library. The project will also share the software it develops with oral history projects everywhere.
Joseph Mosnier
Associate Director, Southern Oral History Program: mosnier@unc.edu
EVOCA Offers a New Digital Voice
On March 15, 2006 in Savannah, Georgia, Evoca, was launched as an innovative new Web 2.0 audio technology services company (www.evoca.com). Evoca is high-tech company that will give oral historians around the world the tools to create, organize, share and search voice recordings anytime, anywhere.
Evoca’s founders are US-born Murem Sharpe and Colombian Diego Orjuela, who formulated the idea while colleagues working together in Barcelona. They launched Evoca in March 2006. The Evoca team consulted with leading experts in the oral history field, joined the Oral History Association and the IOHA, and began to reach out to the oral history community to identify oral historians who were interested in getting involved. The company’s vision statement speaks to oral historians: “Evoca will change the way we communicate by empowering voices in ways never imagined before. We envision people everywhere speaking their minds, sharing their ideas, and storing their memories on Evoca. We see voice becoming the next tool for publishing and communicating online and through your telephone.”
Early in 2005 the Evoca team identified an opportunity to test the new technology and to support a prominent history organization in its own community and state: the Georgia Historical Society (GHS) (www.georgiahistory.com). Together, GHS and Evoca initiated the first oral history of Savannah’s historic preservation movement. Nora Galler, Library and Archives Manager and Dr. Stan Deaton, Director of Publications and Scholarship and Assistant Editor, Georgia Historical Quarterly collaborated with Jaime Trotter of Armstrong Atlantic State University and Evoca to make this innovative oral history project a reality. Key people in the Savannah community who were interviewed included public officials, architects and planners, business owners, and private citizens. All were involved during this fifty-year era of historic preservation, beginning with the efforts of local citizens to save and preserve the historic Isaiah Davenport House. The entire set of interviews is now available online at: www.evoca.com/groups/SavannahHistoricRestorationOralHistory.
Among the nineteen donors interviewed to date are:
• Beth Reiter, Preservation Officer, Metropolitan Planning Commission
http://www.evoca.com/everyone_recording.jsp?rid=130
• Christian Sottile, Urban Planner/Designer and Architect
http://www.evoca.com/everyone_recording.jsp?rid=671
• W. John Mitchell, Chairman, Historic Review Board
http://www.evoca.com/everyone_recording.jsp?rid=246
• Lawrence and Celia Dunn, Local Preservationists and Realtors
http://www.evoca.com/everyone_recording.jsp?rid=224
• Melissa Jest, Neighborhood Coordinator, Historic Savannah Foundation
http://www.evoca.com/everyone_recording.jsp?rid=230
The Georgia Historical Society has been proud of its important role as a major research center for Georgia history, through collecting, preserving, and sharing unique document, rare books, maps, photographs, and artifacts that tell the story of Georgia’s contribution to the region and the country. Now its Savannah Historic Preservation Oral History Project is available in digital form at www.evoca.com/georgiahistoricalsociety and at the group formed for future contributors to the project at www.evoca.com/groups/savannahhistoricpreservationproject. For further information about how the project was planned and executed or to volunteer to help continue the project as an interviewer or donor contact Nora Galler, Library and Archives Manager at The Georgia Historical Society, ngaller@georgiahistory.com, or 501 Whitaker Street, Savannah, GA 31401 USA.
Evoca allows people to make recordings: by going online to use EvocaMic™, the in-browser recorder, by phoning EvocaTell™, the in-bound recording service, from anywhere in the world, and by using Skype ™. Users also can make recordings with digital recorders and easily upload existing recordings to their Evoca profiles – the method used in the Savannah project. All recordings can be tagged, organized in albums, posted to blogs, shared through RSS feeds and emailed and downloaded to an iPod™ or any other MP3 player. Evoca members can form and join groups that allow them to share their own and other people’s recordings. The Georgia Historical Society set up a Member profile for the organization and a group, to which new recordings for the project can be added. Evoca’s unique search function presents both audio search, provided by Podscope™ and meta-tag (word) search results, assuring that when “Savannah” is typed in as a key word by a researcher, The GHS project’s recordings will appear instantly as resources. Additional “how to” information is available Evoca for oral historians who already know how to record with digital equipment or who are novices, and need to learn about the convenience of digital recording creation, organization, sharing and searching. Th is link will take interested people to the special “how to” section for oral historians at Evoca.com. http://www.evoca.com/started/oral_historians.jsp The team responsible for the successful launch of Evoca has included members from all over the world: Canada, France, Spain, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, The Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Peru, Iran, India, and the United States. An interesting range of what Evoca Members are making recordings from many different countries include:
http://www.evoca.com/everyone_recording.jsp?rid=5015, vivismar13 publishes a podcast from Cauca, Colombia on the displacement of Colombian families due to the guerrilla warefare in the country. Interviews of displaced families.
www.evoca.com/everyone_recording.jsp?rid=4942, brittanyodom's interview with her grandfather, William W. Scott Jr.
http://www.evoca.com/everyone_recording.jsp?rid=3758 Najla, a high school senior, speaks about her dream of becoming the Minister of Commerce and the Economy in Qatar.
http://www.evoca.com/porres Pere Alphonse shares his reflections on Jesus's appearance to Thomas after Christ's resurrection.
For more information about Evoca, including how to use Evoca services to support your oral history projects, you can contact Murem Sharpe at msharpe@evoca.com
From Mouth to Page
Oral History Archives
SPAIN
Archive of Memory: AHOA
AHOA (Ahozko Historiaren Artxiboa/Archivo de la Memoria/Archive of Memories) has the goal of compiling, conserving, and diffusing oral and audiovisual testimonies in the Basque Country. It is the initiative of a group of historians, philologists, archivists and technicians connected with the University of the Basque Country, as well as private institutions that seek to rescue, through oral testimonies, aspects of Basque social and community history.
Through the oral archival registry (largely made up of interviews with elderly subjects and auto-biographies) AHOA is actively trying to end the loss of this intangible historical patrimony as well as guaranteeing the conditions necessary for their future survival. Currently, AHOA is in its beginning status. The archives was founded in 2004 and has brought together an important collection of oral sources for the history of the Basque County.The archives current contains more that 130 oral testimonies spread between four collections. In recent months, a process of cataloguing and digitalizing AHOA’s deposits has begun, a process that seeks to conserve testimonies to the highest standard.
At the same time, AHOA aspires to be a key center for research projects and a clearinghouse for specialized bibliographical material.
Along with the conserving existing documents, AHOA also aspires to be the driving force behind the creation of new oral sources, and to compliment this work by disseminating the collection through exhibitions and other events.
AHOA’s members consider that today’s world is one of un-ending change. Rapid lifestyles, the fragility of everyday experiences, uprooted or unanchored lives confirm one’s sensation of the ephemeral. We believe that this is not an experience limited to the individual. Basque society has crossed into the new millennium with a series of changes that has affected culture, urban landscapes, transportation, and communication that has resulted in a constant change of setting. This situation has only deepened, collectively speaking, the sensation of being witness to a permanent metamorphosis of the past towards a new, unknown present.
Although links with the past have seemingly dissolved in the context of Western lifestyles, a natural reaction this breakdown of roots has been the reconsideration of the value of memory. Certainly, to remember and remind ourselves about the past grants us a feeling of permanence through time and space, an activity that sustains collective and personal identity. The creation of our website http://www.ahoaweb.org/ in 2006 has responded to an urgent need within Basque society, which has been confirmed by the excellent response that the site has received. With the creation of the website, we hope to satisfy some of the many inconveniences that of a lack of an oral history archive in our community has caused. At the same time, we are conscious that this website is only a first step.
In making this project a reality, AHOA has relied on the support of diverse grant-giving organizations. Nonetheless, our greatest short-term challenge is to find institutional support or the creation of a physical centre for AHOA that will allow us to begin working as true centre for oral source consultation and as a stimulant for oral history projects.
Miren Llona: ahoa@ahoaweb.org.
Memoria Abierta de Argentina presenta la Colección "De Memoria"
The educational collection “De Memoria” was produced by the work Memoria Abierta carries out to build a social memory of state terrorism. “De Memoria” was developed with the support of the Secretary of Education of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. It is composed of three volumes, which together cover the years that preceded the coup d’etat of 24 March 1976, the period of state terrorism, and the years of the democratic reopening. Each volume is composed of a selection of oral testimonies, photographs, State documents, journalistic articles, audiovisual sources, and explanatory texts to facilitate the comprehension of the main events and phenomena that shaped each time period.
The historic sources selection is the product of the research and compilation carried out by Memoria Abierta as well as the contribution of other people and archives pertaining to the human rights movement. The fragments of testimonies presented in the CDs pertain to the heritage produced by Memoria Abierta’s Oral Archive. This Archive contains, at present, more than 400 audiovisual testimonies given by a diverse range of protagonists.
It is important to clarify that the collection is the result of a selection of testimonies and sources, and does not attempt to represent the totality of possible perspectives. It is probable that there are voices and experiences that are not widely represented. Nonetheless, in accordance with the possibilities that our Archive offers, we try to reflect a broad range of social and individual experiences, political perspectives and reflections. We believe that the documentary collection assembled is representative of the diverse viewpoints and experiences that our recent past and its consequences have to offer. The themes covered by this collection refer to the most tragic period of Argentina’s history and the interpretations of this period are today the subject of important debates in the academic sphere, in the human rights movement, and in society in general.
The collection was conceived with the objective of sharing the heritage of the archives with Argentine society in order to build a social memory regarding that period, to consolidate a democratic political culture, and to prevent all authoritarianism’s forms in the future. For that purpose, “De Memoria” proposes to shed light on those periods that have had less presence in the educational realm and in the mass media, encouraging, increasing and incorporating new protagonist into the debate in a way that favours the transmission of these experiences to new generations.
Volume 1: "The Springtime of Peoples: The political and social mobilization of the early seventies"
This volume analyses, approximately, the period of the late fifties through the mid-seventies. In six chapters it addresses the principle characteristics of the cultural renovation and the social and political mobilization that characterized those years:
A) Youth, Dictators, and Limited Democracies.
B) Cultural Renovation: The generation of the 60’s.
C) The Commitment: Political and social militancy in the 60’s and 70’s.
D) “The Camporist Spring”: Peronism, from proscription to power.
E) Conflicts and Debates: Political and economic problems during the third Peronist government.
F) Into the Darkness: The advance of the repressive forces.
Volume 2: "March 24th, 1976: the coup d’etat and State terrorism"
This volume examines the period beginning with the moments immediately preceding the coup d’etat through the early 80’s, approximately. It addresses the repressive regimen implemented by the last military dictatorship and at the same times recuperates some forms of individual and collective resistance that emerged from within civil society.
A) An expected Coup: The intensification of the crisis and the different expectations regarding the military advance.
B) March 24th, 1976: The coup d’etat and the collapse of the Republic.
C) The Illegal Repressive System: The planning and execution of State terrorism.
D) Terror and Resistance: The options of a society riveted by fear.
E) Epilogue: The past, present, and future of a living history.
Volume 3: "1983: The democratic transition and the path towards justice"
This volume addresses the period from the democratic reopening until the present. It focuses on the long process of the search for Justice in relation to the human rights violations that occurred during the last military dictatorship.
A) The Crisis of the Military Dictatorship and the Search for Legitimacy.
B) “With Democracy One Eats, Cures, and Educates”: The labour of democracy.
C) “I Didn’t Know Anything”: Argentine society facing the acknowledgement of the horror.
D) “Never Again”: The report of the National Commission on the Disappearance of People and the Trial of the Military Juntas.
E) Epilogue for an Open Ending: Truth, Justice, and Memory.
We invite you to view and spread the collection. It is available in the office of Memoria Abierta. For further information contact us via telephone, 4951-4870 or via email: contacto@memoriaabierta.org.ar
There is an English copy at: http://www.memoriaabierta.org.ar/eng/novedades01.html
Historia, memoria y fuentes orales: Vera Carnovale, Federico Lorenz y Roberto Pittaluga (ed.) with articles by: Vera Carnovale, Marieta de Moraes Ferreira, Elizabeth Jelin, Selma Leydesdorff, Federico Guillermo Lorenz, Alejandra Oberti, Roberto Pittaluga Alessandro Portelli y Mercedes Vilanova.
This volume, edited by CeDinCi Editores y Asociación for Memoría Abierta, began shortly after the death of Dora Schwarzstein, a pioneer and proponent of oral history in Argentina. We decided that the best homage to her would be contributing in the same form that she had orientated her intellectual work. The volume that we compiled recognizes this work on two levels. First, the volume revisits debates of theoretical and methodological problems involving history, memory and oral sources, problems that Dora herself enriched and brought to life through her different professional activities. Second, by addressing issues that have become central in recent year with the opening of the Oral Archive of Open Memory on State Terrorism and Political Violence, this book has brought together approaches to issues involving testimony during a century defined by human catastrophes and extreme violence. Understanding and relating the different dimensions of the relation between testimonies and those experiences is the common thread that joins this collection of essays.
The first article, “Politics and memory during an interview,” written by the editors, delves into issues surrounding the theory and methodology, ethics and politics involved in planning, design and construction of the Oral Archive of Open Memory. In “Telling it to ourselves: The biographical dimension of women participants in political-military organizations in the 1970s,” Alejandra Orberti analyzes the meaning given by several women of their experiences of militancy in the Argentine armed forcers in the 1970s. Elizabeth Jelin, in “The personal narrative of the ‘unliveable,’” introduces three themes that arise while completing and circulating the testimonies: the relevance witnesses put in the construction of juridical truths; the presence of “the other that listens”; and the concept of “the conditioning present.”
Marieta de Moraes Ferreira, in “Voices of the opposition: dictatorship and political transition in Brazil,” studies the construction of left-wing Brazilian memory, and examines those who opposed the military regime and participated in the political struggles during the transition to democracy. The work of Mercedes Vilanova, “Remembrance and Oral Sources,” reflects on the meaning and reach of recollection and makes a distinction between the obligation to remember and memory as part of one’s being. Selma Leydesdorff analyzes the life history of a concentration camp survivor. Her essay on “The state within the state: a craftsman remembers his identity in Mauthausen,” is set against the memories of Primo Levi. Finally, Alessandro Portelli analyzes several representations of poor white communities in the Appalachian mountains of the United States. Through interpreting oral and musical sources, Portelli uncovers a culture of survival, pride, and self-confidence.
For information on acquiring this book please write to one of the following: Asociación Memoria Abierta:
memoriaabierta@memoriaabierta.org.ar y CeDinCi: informes@cedinci.org
Vera Carnovale: vera_carnovale@hotmail.com
Memoria social, by James Fentress and Chris WICKHAM. Spain: Cátedra, 2003 [Originally published as Social Memory. New Perspectives on the Past. United Kingdom: Blackwell, 1992.]
The authors claim that this book is limited to two objectives. The first purpose is to show how memory functions, while the second is to critically reflect upon the manner in which social scientists consider and use memory as a research tool. As a result, they suggest different manners in which improved understandings of memory might result in more convincing results.
An anthropologist and historian respectively, Fentress and Wickham have provided a guide to grasping what people have done with their memories. The concept of social memory does not exactly coincide with collective memory. Social memory originates from individual memory which, at the same time, becomes social memory through shared recollections and the establishment of an agreed version of the past. Social memory is often selective, distorted and imprecise although sometimes, very exact.
The first three chapters are conceptually well thought out and researched, while the last two are historical essays illustrate uses of a social framework to describe events that the authors developed in the first three chapters. The fourth chapter, “Medeival Memory”, introduces the very usable notion of the “usable past.” The fifth chapter, “The mafia and the myth of Sicilian national identity” also offers a highly suggestive vision on the topic. The third chapter is the most useful in interpreting oral narratives. Here memories divided are analyzed along class and group lines--memories of farm workers, working class memories, and women’s memories. Several important questions are raised: Why do different social groups remember one event and not another? How can the memory of different groups be structured? How can the basic subjectivity of memory be expressed in group memory? What role does memory play in social identity?
The authors provide a dexterous review of the history of memory in which they are able to distance the “memory of words” from the “memory of things.” They also briefly analyze the process of forgetting. Their main argument is that “…collectively sustained ideas are societal truths”; and they conclude that memory itself becomes a fact on a social level. The book is rounded off with an extensive bibliography, which is preceded by a conclusion that I hazard to reduce to the following: we conserve the past with the risk of removing it from its context and by partially erasing it. Surely by reading this book–not a light read by any measure–will help us to better understand memory’s immense labyrinth.
The Fourth World: Baltimore Narratives, 1990, by Mercedes Vilanova. Turkey, BOGAZIÇI UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005
Through interviews, Mercedes Vilanova has explored the “Fourth World” of poor people living in First World countries, who cannot take advantage of its opportunities for various reasons, especially illiteracy. Her study turns illiteracy from a statistical variable to a human condition, giving the highly literate community of scholars some important insight into a very different world. Vilanova draws comparisons between her studies of “the very bottom of poverty” in both Barcelona and Baltimore, examining issues of self-identification, historical consciousness and voting behavior. In her introductory chapters she explains how the project was conceived and conducted, outlines what they learned, and grapples with her role as interviewer. “Sitting in front of my interviewees in Baltimore, I was conscious of how very difficult it is to interview people whose experiences are very different from my own,” she wrote. “The process is sometimes tense and always unfinished. Words come slowly, hesitantly and then sometimes in a cascade; questions need to be framed spontaneously, in response to the movement, and then reformulated when the interlocutors gain more strength. After pretending to know what was right, objective, and true about the past, I have come to listen carefully to the prosody, the achievements, and the absurdities in other people’s stories, encouraging them to look inside themselves to discern the meaning of their lives.” To illustrate these points, the volume also includes the transcripts of fourteen of her interviews This Turkish-English edition marks the fortuitous collaboration of the author with Günhan Danisman, who served as conference chair of the IOHA meeting in Istanbul in June 2000 when Vilanova was the association’s president. To order copies see: http://www.bupress.com/Scripts/
Des Amours de GI’s – les petites fiancées du Débarquement, by Hilary Kaiser. Paris, Tallandier, 2004.
Wartime, love and hope: Hilary Kaiser shares with us the stories of fifteen French women selected from twenty five interviews originally conducted in France and in the United States. The book is the result of Kaiser’s independent research, driven by her desire to better understand the specifics of wartime inter-cultural marriages, echoing her own family experience.
Stemming from diversified socioeconomic and geographical backgrounds, these women changed their own destinies for love or what they considered love at the time. Those stories are individual voices that render the larger story of tens of thousands of women who emigrated to the United States after the First and Second World Wars as war brides.
In most cases, the circumstances of postwar immigration processes led to the reunion of two strangers and a disillusionment of realizing how unknown they were to each other. With Kaiser, we follow each of those women as they go through emotional disturbances, stress and adjustments. At first, learning a new language, adapting one self to new values, overcoming prejudice. Then, facing the hostility: racism, suspicion from the new family members and the new urban environment as well as dealing with an uncertain legal status. Finally, adjusting to marital life: husbands suffering posttraumatic stress disorder, incompatibility, impossibility to reconcile differences, feelings bogged down in silence. Some have overcome the difficulties, others not, in most cases to never come back to their mother country.
The interest of the book also resides in the essay that precedes the individual testimonies. Based on thorough research in French and American archives, Kaiser brings to our attention the Franco-American discussions, both economic and political, on the issue of bringing the war brides to the United States. Kaiser also recalls the racial segregation prevailing at the time in the American Army, preventing African-American soldiers from marrying Caucasian women as well as American soldiers marrying non-Caucasian women; signs of prejudice supported by archival documentation and interviews.
Michelle Dolbec: MDOLBEC@imf.org
Handbook of Oral History, edited by Thomas L. Charlton, Lois E. Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless. United States, AltaMira Press, 2006.
This new handbook serves as a comprehensive scholarly reference guide to the antecedents, practices, theories, and applications of oral history, aimed at both scholars and interested members of the general public. The handbook brings together a “faculty” of veteran oral histories who offer theoretic discussions of oral history methodology. They include Mary Chamberlain, Thomas L. Charlton, Pamela Dean, James E. Fogerty, Jeff Friedman, Sherna Berger Gluck, Ronald J. Grele, Charles Hardy III, Alice M. Hoffman, Howard S. Hoffman, Mary A. Larson, Elinor A. Mazé, Eva M. McMahan, Charles T. Morrissey, Kim Lacy Rogers, Rebecca Sharpless, Linda Shopes, Richard Cándida Smith, and Valerie Raleigh Yow. For further information see: http://www.altamirapress.com/Catalog/
An Update on the Memory and Narrative Series
Transaction, a publisher of record in international social sciences based at Rutgers University, is now publishing the Memory and Narrative Series edited by Selma Leydesdorff, University of Amsterdam, and Mary Chamberlain, Oxford Brookes University. The series includes new and reissued titles (see www.transactionpub.com).
The Memory and Narrative Series reflects the cross-fertilization of developments in history, culture, and social research. Its books explore historical turning points and how they become embedded in the social conscience. They analyze oral culture for the distinct perspective it provides on the historical experience of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, working life, colonialism, political allegiances, and nationalism. By contrasting the varied forms of reminiscence and the intersections that create regimes of memory, the series promotes a fuller understanding of how remembering and forgetting, patterns of narrative communication, and social practice structure personal and collective identity within overlapping and often competing versions of the past.
Books in the series, many with new introductions by the editors, include:
Pilar Riano-Alcala, Dwellers of Memory: Youth, Memory and Violence in Medellin, Columbia
Richard Candida Smith, Text and Image: Art and the Performance of Memory
Mary Chamberlain, Family Love in the Diaspora: Migration and the Anglo-Caribbean Experience
Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson, and Anna Rotkirch, eds., Living Through the Soviet System
Gadi BernEzer, The Migration Journey: The Ethiopian Jewish Exodus
Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin, eds., Memory and Cultures: Memory, Subjectivity, and Recognition
Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, eds., Memory, History, Nation: Contested Paths
Stephen Hussey and Paul Thompson, eds., Environmental Consciousness: The Roots of a New Political Agenda
Rina Benmayor and Andor Skotnes, eds., Migration and Identity
Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson, eds., Between Generations: Family Models, Myths and Memories
Selma Leydesdorff, Luisa Passerini, and Paul Thompson, eds., Gender and Memory
Luisa Passerini, ed., Memory and Totalitarianism
Mary Chamberlain, Narratives of Exile and Return
Mathew Campbell, Jacqueline M. Labbe, and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Memory and Memorials: From the French Revolution to World War One
Barbara Miller, The Stasi Files: Guilt and Compliance in a Unified Germany
Junko Sakai, The Clash of Economic Cultures: Japanese Bankers in the City of London
Timothy G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, eds., Commemorating War: The Politics of Memory
Kim Lacy Rogers and Selma Leydesdorff, eds., Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors
Mary Chamberlain and Paul Thompson eds., Narrative and Genre: Contexts and Types of Communication
Molly Andrews, Shelley Day Sclater, Corinne Squiore, and Amal Treacher, eds., The Use of Narrative: Explorations in Sociology, Psychology, and Cultural Studies
For proposals, contact: Katharine Hodgkin, khodgkin@uel.ac.uk or Mary Chamberlain, mcchamberlain@brookes.ac.uk
JOURNALS
FORUM: : QUALITATIVE SOCIAL RESEARCH
The 21st issue of the journal “Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research” (FQS) is available online. The “Special Issue: FQS Reviews IV” is edited by Guenter Mey, Kip Jones & Iain Lang. In addition to more than 30 reviews and review essays, FQS 7(2) also provides a single contribution, 8 articles that belong to the FQS Debate on “Qualitative Research and Ethics,” as well as articles belonging to FQS Interviews and FQS Conferences. FQS is an open-access journal, so all articles are available for free. To access FQS 7(2), use the tables of content at:
http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs/fqs-e/inhalt2-06-e.htm (English)
http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs/fqs-d/inhalt2-06-d.htm (German)
http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs/fqs-s/inhalt2-06-s.htm (Spanish),
Use http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs/fqs-e/bezug-e.htm if you are interested to receive its newsletter (currently sent to about 6,100 colleagues). You will be informed once a month about new FQS articles available online, about conferences and web sites, useful for qualitative researchers, and about open access news.
ORAL HISTORY ASSOCIATION OF AUSTRALIA JOURNAL, no.27, 2005
Talking Families/Talking Communities Issue
ARTICLES:
Tales Full of Music and Strong and Resourceful Women—One Woman’s Memories of a Childhood Spent in Rural
Queensland during the Depression, Katharine Elise Perry
Growing Up in Middle-Class Southern England in the 1920s and 1930s, Gilliam D. M. Turner
Seeing More Clearly: An Investigation into Engaging a Reluctant Family Member in an Oral History Interview,Jennifer Baarman Paradise Camp: Documenting the Holocaust, Frank Heimans
“I’m 21 and Have No Any Happy Days”: An Oral History Narrative from the Hazara Refugee Community, Denise Phillips Interviewing Norman Graham: Memories of Gosford Farm Home for Boys, 1935-1936, Valarie Rubie
A Primary Challenge: Bringing Oral History into Mainstream Historical Collections and Beyond the Comfort Zone, Margaret Park
Sharing Stories: Collaboration, Community, Creativity and Copyright, Helen Klaebe
Creating a City—Logan Celebrates 25 Years, Mary Howells
The Role of Oral Histories in the Gathering of Historic Material for the Town of Victoria Park, Jan McCahon Marshall
Tales from the ‘Scripts, Elizabeth A. Wright
Let’s Not Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater, Tim Bowden
[Contributors are invited from Australia and overseas for publication in next year’s issue of OHAA Journal on the theme of Oral History and its Challenges. Papers are sought that (a) deal with the range of ethical, methodological, legal and technological challenges being met in the practice, collection and usage of oral history; and (b) provide critiques/analysis of strategies and protocols in projects, the perceived value and meanings attributed by oral historians to their work, or the way in which projects and agencies handle their involvement. Papers are due by 30 March 2006. For further detail please contact the editor, Mr. Francis Good, GPO Box 462, Darwin, NT 0801, Australia. Editor-ohaa@digisurf.net.au ]
Oral History, Vol. 34, no 1, Spring 2006
ARTICLES:
“Beyond Healing”: Trauma, Oral History and Regeneration, Sean Field
Researching Chinese Women’s Lives: “Insider” Research and Life History Interviewing, Jieyu Liu
“Do You Really Want to Know What Your Uncle Did?” Coming to Terms with Relatives’ War Actions in Japan, Philip Seaton
The Attrition of Morality: Ethics, Morality and Futures, Parita Mukta
Moving On: Reflections on oral History and Migrant Communities in Britain,” Cynthia Brown
Oral History and New Orthodoxies: Narrative Accounts in the History of Learning Disability: Sheena Rolph and Jan Walmsley
Listening to the Past on the Radio, Jill Liddington with Alan Dein and Mark Whitaker
Listening to the Past on Radio in the UK, 1955-2005: References and Bibliography, Jill Liddington
Vox Pox: The Best of 2005
All the articles are abstracted on the Oral History Society website: http://www.oralhistory.org.uk
Oral History Review, Vol 32, no 2, Summer/Fall 2005
ARTICLES:
Talking about Remembering and Forgetfulness in Oral History Interviews, Neal R. Norrick
Ask and Tell: Gay Veterans, Identity, and oral History on a Civil Rights Frontier, Steve Estes
Secrets, Lies, and Misremembering, Take II, Sandy Polishuk
When Subjects Talk Back: Writing Anne Braden’s Life-In-Progress, Catherine Fosl
Negotiating Voices: Biography and the Curious Triangle Between Subject, Author, and Editor, Deborah A. Gershenowitz
Pushing Boundaries in oral History-Based Biographies, Kathryn L. Nasstrom
Utopía y Contrautopía, Vol. 35, 2006
ARTICLES:
No Island is an Island, Carlo Ginzburg.
Gas war or the atmoterrorist model, Peter Sloterdijk.
The Centrality of Feminism in American Political History, 1776-2000, Kathryn Kish Sklar.
The republican elections from 1931 to 1936, prelude of a war and an exile, Mercedes Vilanova.
Jorge Semprún and Manuel Azaustre: Two life stories, Carlos Fernández.
Orléans 2002, Manuel Azaustre
Paris 2005, Jorge Semprún.
La guerre est finie, in Spain, J.M. Caparrós Lera.
Ostarbeiters of the Third Reich: remembering and forgetting as the strategies of survival, Gelinada Grinchenko.
Testimony. Marc Bloch’s commitment, Mª Ángeles Pérez Samper.
Vicos’ memories, Florencia Zapata.
The oral archives at the Caen Memorial, Stéphane Simonnet.
Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales
E-mail: ahcbhafo@trivium.gh.ub.es
web: www.hayfo.com
Put it in Writing
Words and Silences
the journal of the IOHA, is seeking contributions for the 2006 issue on:
1. Teaching oral history
We are asking authors to reflect on their experience as teachers of oral history, and perhaps measure it against what they think is really worth teaching and learning about oral history. You may teach in a university, middle school or a non-school setting. There are a number of issues to discuss in terms of the different kinds of settings and students, overall goals, central concepts, emphasis on technique or analytical frameworks and so on. And this may lead into a discussion of what books work in what situations or of in-class exercises and practical training projects you have developed. Another large and undoubtedly important question is whether we see our students change as they learn and do oral history. These are of course only suggestions. Your experience in teaching perhaps raises different questions so please do share your ruminations and illuminate other corners of the classroom.
We prefer concise and reflective essays (about 2500 words) rather than longer and descriptive monographs.
2. Collections and archives
This section is devoted to discussion of practical problems encountered in the creation and preservation of oral sources. Please send in preferably short pieces (500-1000 words) and share your accumulated wisdom in the field.
3. Reviews of books, films, plays or other performances or exhibits that rely on oral history.
GUIDELINES
1. Contributions may be written in English or Spanish (or both, which would save us translation work).
2. Use Word for windows 95 or later.
3. In short pieces please include references, if necessary, in the text and not as footnotes.
4. For longer pieces, place footnotes at the end, as text and not in the automatic format.
5. References:
o Author (first and last name), Title (bold if a book, "in quotes if an article, diss, etc."), Publication data (Place, Publisher, date if book; name of journal in bold, no. and date if article), p. or pp.
o Subsequent references: Author's last name, shortened title, p. or pp
o Interviews: Interviewee's full name, interviewed by (interviewer's full name), place, date, reference to collection if any.
Please email your article as an attachment to:
wordsandsilences@inah.gob.mx or gnecoechea.deh@deh.inah.gob.mx H-ORALHIST
H-Oralhist (http://www.h-net.org/~oralhist/), is an on-line network for those interested in studies related to oral history. It is a member of the H-Net, the Humanities & Social Sciences Online initiative, an an international interdisciplinary organization of scholars and teachers dedicated to utilizing the enormous educational potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Its edited lists and web sites publish peer reviewed essays, multimedia materials, and discussion for scholars and the interested public. The computing heart of H-Net resides at the Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online, at Michigan State University, but H-Net officers, editors and subscribers come from all over the globe. You can subscribe for free to the oral history list at: http://www.h-net.org/lists/subscribe.cgi?list=H-OralHist
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 2005 - June 2007)
Individuals: 46 Euros
Institutions: 92 Euros
Students: 23 Euros
IOHA Newsletter Guidelines and Deadlines:
Copy is preferred as Microsoft Word attachment. Footnotes included in items should be included only in parentheses and not formatted.
Images and illustrations should be scanned at 72dpi, and sent in jpg or pic formats.
Send via e-mail to both co-editors:
Pilar Domínguez (Spanish text)- pdprats@dch.ulpgc.es
Don Ritchie (English text) - oralhistorians@comcast.net
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 web site in January.
April 15 – posted to web site in June
If you change your email address, please notify the IOHA treasurer, Almut Leh (almut.leh@fernuni-hagen.de).
