Oral history’s credibility, role and functionality

Abstract

Oral tradition and oral history was and still is a main battlefield for the impoverished, the marginal, the oppressed and the colonized. However, history primarily considers just such people with their voices, which must be heard and registered. The author presents the richness and new knowledge of the oral qualitative interviews, which he conducted with Lubyans, from the demolished Palestinian village in northern Galilee, dispersed to fourteen different countries around the world. The interviews reveal the richness of the cultural remains – “les lieux de memoire” and the vitality and vividness of its memories, seven decades after the Nakba of 1948. His approach is based on Steinar Kvale’s “qualitative research interviewing”, Jan Vansina’s work on African “oral tradition as history”, the monumental work of Maurice Halbhwachs and Pierre Nora’s apprehension of “history” and “landscape” as “les lieux de memoire”. Such “modern” European disciplines had their cultural roots in antiquity, in Mesopotamia, in Greece and later in Arab-Islamic culture.