Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating our pasts: The social construction of oral history. (Cambridge studies in oral and literate culture, 22.) Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xiv, 171. [Pb reprint, 1995; $16.95.

Abstract

Tonkin treats a complex and timely set of ideas when she studies the relationships between oracy and literacy, oral narrative performance and written texts, memory and history and society. To discuss these areas of scholarly debate, she employs a multidisciplinary, sometimes contentious variety of studies and assertions. Her efforts mostly succeed in promoting her claims for the necessity of blurring past distinctions and categories in the study of oral history, and for taking a much more performative/interactive view of its construction in a living context.