Oral History and the Study of Communities: Problems, Paradoxes, and Possibilities

Abstract

Community oral is a protean term, invoked by scholars and grass-roots historians alike to describe a variety of practices developed for a variety of purposes. The term itself is vague and conceptually limited, with generally positive associations and not entirely deliberate implications of commonality and comity. A community oral history project typically refers to one defined by locale, to a group of interviews with people who live in some geographically bounded place, whether an urban ethnic neighborhood, a southern mill village, or a region of midwestern farms. Yet also refers to a shared social identity, and so we speak of interviews with members of the gay community, the black community, the medical community. In fact, many community oral history projects combine the two meanings of the term, focusing on a particular group's experience in a particular place-steelworkers in Buffalo, Chicanos in El Paso, jazz musicians in Los Angeles. Distinctions exist among broad genres of oral history. One axis of difference is defined by the provenance of interviews: At one end, there are interviewing projects developed by grass-roots groups to document their own experience; at the other, interviews conducted by scholars to inform their own research or to create a permanent archival collection for future scholarly work. In practice, most oral history projects fall somewhere between the two poles: historical society volunteers develop a project to document some aspect of local life in collaboration with the local college; a scholar, working on his own research project, makes contact with the retirees' group of a union local as a means of entree for interviews he wishes to conduct about the union's history and along the way agrees to participate in a union educational program. The second axis is defined by voice, that is, the extent to which the narrator's voice or the historian/interpreter's voice dominates the final product of the interviews. At one end are archival collections of interviews that are almost entirely in the narrators'