Story in Oral History: Clues to Historical Consciousness

Abstract

Historical researchers using oral history collections are usually looking for answers to specific questions about particular subjects. But the content of oral history-what people have said -is only part of its value to historians; the form that oral history takes how it is told can also be useful in addressing larger historical questions. Story, for instance, is one such form that affords rich interpretive potential for historians interested in how narrators perceive and construct historical experience. Fashioning stories about our experience is a process with which we are all familiar, in which we all participate on an everyday basis in conversations with family, friends, and colleagues. Because stories afford a natural means of describing experience and expressing its meaning, they often appear in oral history interviews. The historical meaning of stories, however, transcends the individual experiences they describe, for storytelling is necessarily communal in nature. In storytelling, whether in conversation or in an interview, narrators are involved not only in communicating experience but also in constructing a shared consciousness of that experience. Stories can therefore tell us something about the larger structures of historical consciousness within which individual narrators understand their own experiences. This is what makes them of value to historians, for stories of personal experiences told in oral history interviews can suggest larger, collectively constructed notions of experience. We come to know what stories are and learn how to tell them ourselves by hearing them from others, so our own stories about personal experiences are constructed both from ideas of what stories are and from communally understood notions of the kinds of experiences one can have, can talk about, can tell in story form. The stories that people tell in oral history interviews can thus suggest key elements or categories of experience around which their memories are organized and their historical consciousness is shaped. This is especially true in a corpus of interviews recorded from narrators who represent a community of experience and who have talked about the events or experiences in question among themselves. Using oral histories to get at these underlying structures of consciousness means developing a sensitivity to the occurrence of stories in interviews. Stories are not always easy to locate, for oral history collections are most often indexed only by subject. Searching for narratives can mean prospecting through whole transcripts