What sort of Oral History?

What kind of Oral history is it going to be?

According to The Oral History Society's website, oral history is:

A living history of everyone's unique life experiences

An opportunity for those people who have been 'hidden from history' to have their voice heard

A rare chance to talk about and record history face-to-face

A source of new insights and perspectives that may challenge our view of the past.

The NoFit State oral history is not an individuals view of their own lives, but their view of the circus as they knew it and how it impacted on their lives.

There are many ways to carry it out.

"Oral history, with its combination of methods drawn from history and sociology, places emphasis on the significance of temporal context and memory by interviewing people about their past experience.
Key Points:
Oral history values the contribution which individual experience makes to understanding the past and society today.

By recording an interview the many nuances, accents and emotions of speech are preserved. Transcription aids analysis but cannot fully represent these qualities.
The oral history interview is a dialogue, a social relationship between two, or more people.
A life history or biographical approach enables reflection and analysis which draws out the significance of time in individual lives and wider society – it is an approach that is central to qualitative longitudinal enquiry. 

While valuing the ensuing data for what it tells us about the past, oral historians also regard the interview as an object in itself; it has a shape and totality determined not just by someone’s life events but how that life is narrated and by the social relationship of the interview.  

Oral history takes its place amongst other terms proliferating in the social sciences such as biography, narrative analysis, life story work and life review. 

All draw on individual accounts of past experience as sources for understanding change and continuities in society across time and within generations and epochs (Thompson, 2000). 

Oral history’s distinctive features are its interdisciplinary roots in sociology and history, and its valuing of orality."

From http://www.timescapes.leeds.ac.uk/assets/files/methods-guides/timescapes-bornat-oral-history.pdf

Along with the logistics of capturing the moment of the flight of fancy, there is the future people to think of.

So along with working out how to get people in the room, when and where, you have to transport yourself into the future and try to imagine coming along to the archive of Cardiff's first great New Circus company from a century or two distant and what and who you would like to hear.

Obviously the five founder members, they're a must, and they need to be done separately.

Then it gets more complicated and decisions need to be made.

The contact list that Toby has been busy compiling from the show programs runs to over 700 people!

So one thing is certain.

There is

that everyone who was involved in the performances over the last 30 years can be individually interviewed.

So how about grouped interviews. A group, perhaps linked by the same show, or maybe a similar era of involvement, coming along around tea and biccies, or maybe a bottle of plonk, and creating a feast of reminiscences.

Well, even were sound able to be superb, due to multiple use of recorders strategically positioned, there might be a mumble-jumble result, with people talking over or laughing over each others sentences.

And if there were 10 people to a sitting, that would still need to entail 70 sittings to be exhaustive!

Say by some miracle of organisation we could get each group into the same room, in the same city, on the same day, at the same time, how likely is it going to be that the end result will be recognisable oral history.

Oral historians approach potential interviewees with questions, presumptions and research. 

And the documents of oral history are created by the interviewer, or made possible by the questions they ask(1). 

Equally, the oral historian does not work solely from textual archives, history books or pre-recorded autobiographies, but from the 'rawness' of personal and social memory and the conversation. 

This requires interviewers to listen 'in stereo'(2), to both vocal recollection and evidence of self-repression (pauses, uncertainty and the use of an 'official discourse'(3). 

In addition, like the comparative focus of anthropology, oral history allows us to discuss and interpret different perceptions of 'popular memory', allowing communities to understand and form their own, self-conscious identities through recollection (see Popular Memory group 2006)
(1)Ronald Grene1991) Envelopes of Sound: the art of oral history. New York: Praeger
(2)Kathryn Anderson and Jack, D.C. (1991) ‘Learning to listen; interview techniques and analyses’ In The Feminist Practice of Oral History. London: Routledge
(3)Abu-Lughod, L. (1986) Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: University of California Press
From the Imponderabilia website (the international student anthropology journal)

However these ideas are played out in NoFit's oral history, two aspects are certain:

 THE FRAMEWORK WILL NEED TO BE CAREFULLY WORKED OUT BECAUSE THE RESULTS ARE GOING TO LAST A HECK OF A LONG TIME
                                      &

                THERE'S PRETTY MUCH AND MORE OR LESS ONLY ONE CRACK AT IT!