A peculiar impasse has developed between oral history and memory studies. It is peculiar because of the apparent closeness of their key concerns: the one with the remembered past, the other with the process of remembering. It is true that they have not developed chronologically alongside each other. Oral history has grown in importance since the late 1960s, while memory studies emerged in the late 1980s and is still in some ways an emergent field. Despite this, memory studies is predominantly focused on social or collective memory, and oral history provides a notable means for producing collective memory even if this is usually confined to a neighbourhood or community context. One would have expected a fruitful critical dialogue between them. This has not happened for a number of reasons.
In their introduction to this volume, Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes offer a useful explanation for the impasse. Oral history is primarily regarded as a practical method used in the social sciences for generating data about the past. Over the past twenty years scholars have become increasingly sensitive to the hermeneutic issues involved in oral history, considered as both method and material, but as yet have not engaged in any extensive way with the public dimension of memory and the question of how this is constituted. On the other side of the divide, those involved in memory studies have failed to engage, again in any extensive way, with oral history. Hamilton and Shopes point to the preoccupation of memory studies with the Holocaust and collective “trauma,” with national history and heritage, with commemorative social practices, and with macro-cultural memory rather than individual micro-processes of remembering. In addition, when you read works like Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting, or going further back, Bergson’s Matter and Memory, you could hardly be at a further remove from oral history’s concern with lived experience in the localised past.
The welcome purpose of this collection is to overcome this intellectual stand-off and seek some form of rapprochement between oral history and memory studies. This carries the aspiration that individual and collective remembering may be realigned. To this end, the contributions are organised into three sections. The first of these is directed towards official, often state-sanctioned, initiatives in the creation of cultural heritage. One example of this, discussed in the opening chapter, is the Parks Canada project which, as well as drawing on their ecological knowledge in the revision of land management, has sought to include First Nations people in the construction of public memory and national historical narrative. Another chapter attends to the curating of video interviews within the museum, discussing how private memories are transformed into public accounts when they become an integral feature of exhibitions that, inevitably, lend them an altered integrity and legitimacy.
The second section turns to more locally based attempts to sustain or celebrate a common identity and sense of community for a particular social group. There are chapters dealing with memory reconstruction and idealization in post-apartheid South Africa; changing interpretations of cultural heritage among Japanese Americans; the complex biculturalism involved in historical representations of Dalmatian and Maori workers in New Zealand’s gumfields; memory and mourning among the queer Latinas/os of San Francisco in relation to the devastation of HIV/AIDS; and moral tales told in the ritualised public setting of veterans’ reunions by black ex-GIs from World War Two. The final part of the book is devoted to oral history as an activist practice. The four chapters here investigate the reality of eastern European migrant experience that is usually buried beneath silence or stereotypicality; “giving voice” to the homeless in Cleveland, Ohio, enabling them to articulate their own critical analysis of urban change and management; the narrative framing of the experience of Albanian women in Kosovo during the Balkan wars of the 1990s; and the personal and collective dimensions of remembering and storytelling among internally displaced people in Colombia, South America.
While addressing their own specific projects, questions, and issues, all the contributors reflect on the making-public aspect of doing oral history when individual or group remembering becomes turned outwards, transfigured into a more avowedly collective form of memory, and variously changed in the identity and status of the knowledge it provides of past events, episodes, and experiences. Each chapter takes us somewhere quite different, geographically as well as culturally, but each author considers in some way the relation between their own ethnographic practice and the link-ups between individual life stories and social memory. Through this focus on the broader cultural meanings and significance of oral history narratives, the book operates as a creative exchange between the adjacent but hitherto largely separated fields of memory studies and oral history. It shows how a preoccupation with public memory and social remembering can be grounded in everyday situations and circumstances. Yet if memory studies can become more practically oriented, so oral history can become more theoretically informed. The real promise of the book lies in the marriage of an empirical concern with memory in public with the critical question of the publicness of memory.
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[Review length: 840 words • Review posted on October 8, 2008]