Knowing, experiencing, and reporting: Social memory and participant roles in a Tibetan woman's oral history

Abstract

This article argues for attention to the formation of social memory in interactive contexts, by analyzing a Tibetan oral history interview. In the course of the interview, an English-speaking interviewer and a Tibetan-speaking interviewee communicate through a translator, the interviewee's daughter. By joining analyses of genre, participant roles, the use of the grammatical markings known as evidentiality, ergativity, and egophoricity in Tibetan, and their subsequent translation into English, I look to multiple structures shaping the interactive context. This analysis reveals a generational difference in participants' shaping of narrative, and tensions among participants in the effort to align remembered events with ideologies that construct interviewees as eyewitnesses to political history.