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OHR Conversations: Myrl Beam & Elspeth H. Brown on “Toward an Ethos of Trans Care in Trans Oral History.”

In our latest installment of OHR Conversations, our recorded conversations with oral history practitioners and scholars, Myrl Beam & Elspeth H. Brown join OHR co-editor Janneken Smucker to discuss their recent OHR article, “Toward an Ethos of Trans Care in Trans Oral History,” examining the role of oral history within the context of trans visibility. 

OHR Conversations, between Myrl Beam & Elspeth H. Brown & OHR co-editor Janneken Smucker, recorded May 27, 2022

 

 

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Parting Ways: The Birth and Death of “Childhood” in the Life Narratives of Peruvian War Veterans

This week, our guest contributor José Ignacio Mogrovejo discusses his use of oral history narratives to explore Peruvian War veterans’ recollections of their youth prior to the Peruvian Ecuadorian War of 1941.

 

By José Ignacio Mogrovejo

Childhood, both as an idea and a biological experience, has been a highly contested concept in the social sciences in the decades since the publication of Philippe Ariès’ book Centuries of Childhood. Consequently, contemporary works that emphasize the constitutive dynamics of personhood have  trended toward analyzing childhood as a social and cultural construction, rather than as a natural phenomenon. This perspective applies to the narrative component of life history interviews, in which memory gives shape to past experiences, with interviewees recalling “childhood” or “adulthood” as constitutive elements of a life. For Peru, a nation immersed in the legacy of its conflict-ridden recent past, highlighting the life testimonies of aging war veterans can be useful to unveil frequently absent stories that took part in the collective signification of historical events, and whose transversal issues still define the country’s memory landscape.

As a young and still emerging scholar of modern Peruvian history, I knew that studying the lives of the last surviving generation of my country’s oldest war veterans posed a challenge, not only because of their almost nonexistent relevance as a social group in the media and public commemorations, but because the Peruvian Ecuadorian War of 1941 has predominantly existed in historiography as a conflict with nearly zero social and cultural repercussions.

Trying to look beyond the war, when interviewing veterans I asked them to reconstruct a personal narration of their lives. I noticed that they associated the idea of childhood with the ability to freely decide their fate. In contrast, the early 20th-century view prior to the war approached childhood from a paternalistic perspective, in which children should be protected from social vices and the hardships of industrial labor under the restrictive wing of a nuclear family. Coming from a low or low-middle-class background, the veterans I spoke with found purpose in searching for an individual path towards “success,” especially when they recalled the beginnings of their childhood and acknowledged the struggles they had to endure with their families to survive, an issue that eventually led them to part ways. Having separated from one of the most important tutelary institutions of postcolonial Peru (the triad being composed of the family, church, and the armed forces), they found themselves working in various occupations until the war inserted them into the government’s efforts to discipline its citizens. Although the military experience reinforced their persona as proud symbolic bearers of “the first conflict we (Peruvians) have ever won,” it also meant the death of childhood, as they ceased to be independent youngsters, having transitioned to disciplined recipients of the fruits of a modernizing nation-state. 

Although the military experience reinforced their persona as proud symbolic bearers of “the first conflict we (Peruvians) have ever won”, it also meant the death of childhood, as they ceased to be independent youngsters, having transitioned to disciplined recipients of the fruits of a modernizing nation-state.

For the veterans, recalling their youth produced different individual trajectories that didn’t defy preexisting socio-economic hierarchies, but were aimed at finding better opportunities if it was possible. To provide an example, education has continued to be viewed by many societies in the Global South as one of the main tools to escape from poverty and—from the perspective of pedagogic bureaucrats—to reduce the gaps that characterize historically-entrenched inequalities. For Humberto Tejada, it meant acknowledging the limitations of his working-class Paiján childhood, as he couldn’t attend private schools in the region’s capital according to his mother’s desires. Without it, the only option left was to work at an early age, and by the time he was prepared as a soldier, he had sufficient knowledge to instruct young recruits and fulfill his country’s expectations of discipline and order: “I was drafted because of my age, and I fulfilled my civic duty…By the time my service ended, I had to stay to train the newcomers, and half a year later, I received my certificate as a soldier.”  

When the conflict against Ecuador erupted in January of 1941, almost every corner of Peru mobilized in optimistic public manifestations of support, with mayors and governors organizing military parades every time the conscripts gathered. Thousands of people were drafted, especially those coming from the Highlands with an Indigenous background, who were then transported up north to the front lines in the Amazonian jungle.

“I’m not from the chacra (small farming land),” recalled Máximo Teodoro Jara, “I’m from Wari province in Ancash, and we saw them (as different), the cholitos de chacra (poor indigenous peasants).” His childhood was shaped by navigating the internal hierarchy of the Paramonga estate, despite not being in charge of productive activities or being responsible for recruiting wage laborers from the Highlands. In a country profoundly marked by racism and discrimination, Máximo pretended to act like an “adult” to gain respect and admiration from other workers by buying expensive clothes and dominating the estate’s soccer games when he was 12. For him, military instruction meant giving up this earned autonomy to gain social recognition, as being a military officer allowed you to be seen as “a respectable and powerful person,” without belonging to the elites. Máximo embraced that, and his words reflect how living under hardships defined his identity. He refused to remain stagnant in a powerless condition, and instead used the military discipline to improve his material and social situation: “I’ve always liked to be the best, and I’ve never been anyone’s servant.”    

Recalling the first time I went to talk with the veterans, I found myself in their association headquarters with no idea of what to expect from their testimonies. I feared silence or an unwillingness to speak, rather than my own ability to ask the right questions. However, my motivation to listen and make sense of their identities before becoming soldiers elucidated the ideas that shaped their experiences between the collective struggle of their youth just to survive and the brief moment of militaristic enthusiasm offered by the 1941 war. I also discovered how they as a group were able to internalize both processes as a constitutive part of their current self.

The legacy of their memories has left a door open for a detailed analysis of the lives that often disappear into commemorative acts of patriotism, but also in the recollection of earlier epochs when they had to find a purpose for the future yet to come.

In February of 2020, one of the workers at their association told me that no more than fifty veterans were still living across Peru, and now with the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s uncertain how many of them have passed away. Nevertheless, the legacy of their memories has left a door open for a detailed analysis of the lives that often disappear into commemorative acts of patriotism, but also in the recollection of earlier epochs when they had to find a purpose for the future yet to come. 

José Ignacio Mogrovejo obtained his BA in History from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and is currently finishing his undergraduate dissertation about the medical origins of a national racialized geography in late-nineteenth-century Peru. Between 2019 and 2020, he interviewed seven Peruvian war veterans about their life experiences before, during, and after the Peruvian-Ecuadorian War of 1941, as part of an ongoing project titled “Testimonies from the War of ’41 Oral History Project” for the digital collections of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History.

Featured images from Wikimedia Commons used with CC BY 2.0 license.

 

Author Interview: Jakub Mlynář on Conversation Analysis of Oral History

In OHR’s spring Issue, sociologist Jakub Mlynář uses conversation analysis to explore the nature of oral history, investigating how all participants—interviewers, interviewees, and later listeners and others users—make sense of the interview with cues such as temporal markers and existing knowledge. His article, “How is Oral History Possible? On Linguistically Universal and Topically Specific Knowledge,” draws on his analysis of a set of interviews with Holocaust survivors remembering and commemorating this historic event. At OHR, we love when our multi-disciplinary authors introduce us to new ways of approaching oral history.

Why is the study of language a useful approach to help inform oral history theory, method, and interpretation?

My background is in sociology and not in linguistics and my answer is certainly influenced by this disciplinary orientation. Language is interesting for me primarily as people’s resource for accomplishing social life and its miscellaneous scenes and situations. As Harvey Sacks observed: “It was not from any large interest in language or from some theoretical formulation of what should be studied that I started with tape-recorded conversations, but simply because I could get my hands on it and I could study it again and again, and also, consequentially, because others could look at what I had studied and make of it what they could, if, for example, they wanted to be able to disagree with me.” Sacks founded the method, conversation analysis, which looks at the detailed organization of the ways talk features in interaction, and his groundbreaking work from the 1960s and 1970s (he died in 1975) is extremely inspiring to me and thousands of other researchers worldwide. Yet only a handful of works on oral history have drawn on this approach. 

An oral history interview is indeed a conversation within a specific social setting with its local organization, relevancies, rules, and norms. As I explain in my article, by attending to the interactional details of oral history interviews, we can learn more about “the past” as a shared object that can be talked about, contested, commemorated, and accounted for. We can also learn more about what constitutes the tacit knowledge in oral history interviewing, which is the background for both the “production” (i.e., methodology) and “recognition” (i.e., interpretation) of oral history. The sociologist Harold Garfinkel pointed out that the production and recognition of social activities—such as asking a question, remembering, telling a story—rest on the same sets of practices. We use the same culturally shared resources to produce features of social life that we in turn use to recognize them as meaningful. I can see that someone else is telling a story because I am capable of storytelling; I can see that someone is asking a question because I can myself ask a question competently. In this sense, the theory of oral history, its methodology, and its interpretation are crucially intertwined, with serious attention devoted to the organization of talk and social conduct. Using conversation analysis can lead to a better understanding of oral history as a social praxis.

Tell us about the interviews you work with in your study.

I selected the interviews from the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, which contains more than 50,000 videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors and witnesses. I used this resource for two main reasons. First, as one of the largest digital oral history archives, it deals with a topic of extreme moral significance, and the topic of commemoration and remembrance is highly important in this context—for the narrators, interviewers, but also the general public as a “moral universal” (to use Jeffrey Alexander’s phrase). My second motivation was more practical. Since 2010, I have been working as a coordinator at the Malach Center for Visual History at the Charles University (Prague, Czechia), an access point to the Visual History Archive and other databases related to genocides and violent traumatic past. I knew the collection and many individual interviews rather well, and I could conveniently access the interviews in Czech and Slovak languages, taking into account my linguistic capabilities.

Your article describes linguistically universal and topically specific knowledge. Tell us what these two terms mean and how you used them in your analysis.

While introducing the archives to interested researchers, students, teachers, journalists, and other audiences at the Malach Center for Visual History, I have started thinking in very practical terms about the various motivations, needs, and interpretive frameworks that are distinct and common among these users. While working with the interviews, I have also noticed that narrators and interviewers work together in the course of an interview to produce, among other things, what I call “commemorative sections”: segments of interviews that have remembrance or commemoration of the past events as their topics. In the article, I set out to analyze such segments, and I try to specify what makes them intelligible to audiences such as the users who arrive at the Malach Center to listen to interviews.

My suggestion in the article is that the comprehensibility of commemoration and remembrance in oral history interviews rests on two sets of practices. The first set constitutes “linguistically universal knowledge”—the competence of any speaker of a given language. For instance, it entails grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. In these cases, you would not need to know anything about the past, the Holocaust, or World War II, to recognize that the narrator speaks about something that had happened in the past and was commemorated several years later. However, there are many examples in the interviews when such knowledge is necessary—the speakers mention specific years, locations, or events that the interviewer and the listeners have to work with to collaboratively produce a meaningful narrative. These constitute the second set of practices that I call “topically specific knowledge.”

It is part of my argument that these two sets of practices are socially distributed, as Alfred Schütz taught us about all knowledge: not only culturally, geographically, or across the social structure (e.g., in “social classes”), but also temporally across different generations. It is quite possible that the topically specific knowledge, relatively ordinary and unremarkable for us today, is not going to be part of the make-up of future audiences. Although databases such as the Visual History Archive establish a record of the past “for perpetuity,” it will inevitably happen that these materials will at some point start losing the transparent intelligibility they had for the interviewer and interviewee (and that they still have for us today, more than two decades after the recording). The knowledge that used to be taken for granted by the interview participants just will not be there anymore. Our question then might be: how can oral history practice incorporate, explicate, and provide some amount of the topically specific knowledge? Is it even reasonably possible as part of the interview? Or should it be one of the tasks for the presentation and contextualization of the interviews in archives and databases? I don’t really answer these questions in my article, but I believe that I open up a space where they can be posed, and I offer an analytic and descriptive vocabulary that could be useful in seeking answers. 

What other types of language analysis might be useful for understanding the nature of oral history?

As with most kinds of human social activity, oral history is profoundly related to language. Of course, it is talked into being. There are several established approaches to language in society that could analyze recorded oral history interviews, including conversation analysis, discursive psychology, gesture studies, and discourse analysis. In turn, oral history scholars and practitioners can also gain a lot from these perspectives. From my point of view, informed by the principles of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis that form the framework of my article, we should remain as close as possible to the participants’ displayed orientations. What we know for sure is that a moment of oral history was captured on camera 25 years ago: how did they do it, together, right there, at the time, with the resources at hand? And how are we making sense of it today as listeners, with our own tasks and interests? Focusing on language and its use makes it easier to ground the analysis in what can be documented and evidenced in the recorded materials, and deal with the evident and witnessable order rather than with the hidden and imagined orders (to borrow Eric Livingston’s distinction). Marcel Proust has noted that “all action by the mind is easy if it is not subjected to the test of reality.” The careful study of language in social life, considering the participants’ concerns rather than our theoretical disciplinary agenda, provides us with such a “test of reality.” And any kind of research that examines talk as well as other aspects of social conduct, such as gaze or bodily movements, while taking them seriously and non-ironically as constitutive of the setting, studying them in their real lived time, will certainly be useful for a better understanding of the phenomenon of oral history.

Jakub Mlynář is a researcher at the University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland and the Charles University (Czech Republic). His current research focuses on the use of digital technology in classroom interactions, sociological aspects of Artificial Intelligence, and on the situated aspects of oral history, narrative, and identity.

Featured image from Flickr user Valery Kenski used with CC BY 2.0 license.

5 Questions About Floodlines

We ask authors of projects reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should read their projects. In our latest installment of the series, Vann Newkirk II discusses his podcast Floodlines produced through The Atlantic, which focuses on the the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

Sheldon Yeakley’s review of the Floodlines podcast is available online and in OHR issue 49.1.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

Floodlines is a story about what happened to the people of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. We follow those who lived through the catastrophe of the levees breaking and, through their lives, look at what a human-created disaster says about America. We believe Floodlines matters because the people who shared their stories with us matter.

How does oral history contribute to your project?

Floodlines is available online wherever you get your podcasts.

Some of the archives and projects that meant the most to us in our research, such as the Neighborhood Story Project, the House of Dance and Feathers, and the Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum are all based on a bed of rigorous and rich oral histories. Our goal was not to replicate those works nor to reinvent the wheel, but to credit them and draw inspiration from them as north stars for our methods. We created a systemic interviewing process that we hoped would be sensitive to traumatic experience, and in the making of the podcast joined those interviews with contemporaneous news footage from Katrina and historical archives to help create the sense that the listener is always inside the moment being described.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology? 

In my opinion, oral history carries so much information that other mediums cannot. Writing conveys a level of factual information and words, but oral histories contain emotion and texture. I’m also just interested in how people talk. I’m interested in why they talk, and in tone and the relationship between them and an interviewer. I think many times, the information encoded there is more useful in understanding the past than information you get from writing or even images.

“Writing conveys a level of factual information and words, but oral histories contain emotion and texture.”

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your project? 

I won’t say “fellow” here because I am just an amateur playing at the form, but I hope that oral historians are interested in the podcast because of the richness of information that I think is part of all of our interviews, and because the team really worked hard to get it right. We wanted to do work with both rigor and care for the people who shared with us, and I hope that this community of professionals finds value there—and also lets me know what they think.

What is the one thing that you most want the audience to remember about the project?

I hope that people are able to see themselves and their own circumstances in the stories of other people. I hope that people recall moments like our interview with Michael Brown and listening to Le-Ann think through it, because to me those moments are fundamentally about empathy, and how it—or the lack thereof—shapes our society.

Vann R. Newkirk II is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He has covered the battles for voting rights since the 2013 Shelby County Supreme Court decision, the fate of communities on the front lines of climate change and disasters, the Black vote in the 2018 and 2020 elections, and wrote the September 2019 cover story for the Atlantic on black land loss. He is the host of the Atlantic’s podcast Floodlines, a narrative series about Hurricane Katrina. His forthcoming book, Children of the Flood, a chronicle of Black America’s fight against climate crises, will be published by Random House.

5 Questions About Seeds of Something Different

We ask authors of books reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should read their books. In our latest installment of the series, Irene Reti, Cameron Vanderscoff, and Sarah Rabkin discuss their book Seeds of Something Different: An Oral History of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Read former OHR editor Troy Reeve’s review of Seeds of Something in our latest issue.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

Seeds of Something Different is a sweeping and ambitious book. First of all, it is a compelling history of UC Santa Cruz, a unique experimental college campus founded by a small team of innovators in the 1960s. Gathered on a stunning sweep of land overlooking the California coast, these visionaries imagined a new and different kind of university—one that could reinvent public higher education in the United States. Published at a time when the basic tenets of education are once again being rethought, Seeds will be of interest to anyone engaged in that project. The book offers useful insights not only for readers who know and love this unique campus tucked into the redwoods, but for anyone who cares about the past and future of public higher education.

But for oral historians, Seeds of Something Different: An Oral History of the University of California, Santa Cruz also offers an inspiring model for stitching together archival oral history to tell a riveting tale. We composed Seeds almost entirely from excerpts from two hundred oral histories collected by the UC Santa Cruz library’s Regional History Project (RHP) over the past fifty years, as well as other archival oral histories and primary sources preserved in the library’s collections.

One of the oldest oral history programs in the United States, RHP, founded in 1963, helped create the Oral History Association itself. Elizabeth Spedding Calciano, the project’s founding director and initially its sole staff member, was UCSC’s thirteenth employee, joining the architects and planners housed initially in the campus’s temporary offices at nearby Cabrillo College, the community college that preceded UCSC in Santa Cruz County, and later in a converted barn on the city’s historic Cowell Ranch.

Seeds weaves together excerpts from interviews with students, staff, faculty, community members, and campus leaders to tell a dramatic story in multiple acts, featuring diverse perspectives, complete with recurring characters, surprising plot twists, unlikely endings, and new beginnings. It is authentic history from the bottom up.

Printed on elegant semi-gloss paper with a cover photo by Ansel Adams, who was UCSC’s first official campus photographer, the two 8×10 volumes feature more than 250 images from the library’s historical archives. The entire set (indexed and with extensive footnotes, a timeline, and bibliographic material) runs 925 pages.

Irene Reti, Cameron Vanderscoff, and Sarah Rabkin, Seeds of something different : an oral history of the University of California, Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz: Santa Cruz University Library, 2020).

Transcending nostalgia-driven reminiscence or university-relations marketing, Seeds presents a penetrating portrait, through the lens of one rather unusual college campus, of the social movements and historical changes that have swept through the United States and the world over the past several decades. The book locates UCSC’s history in a context involving a half-century of pivotal events including the Vietnam War; the civil rights movement, feminist and queer movements, recessions, elections, and more. “What I appreciate most about Seeds,” notes UCSC’s Professor of History of Consciousness Jim Clifford, “is that it finds ways to make UCSC’s past always be about its future. By featuring dialogue, debate, and change… it sidesteps nostalgia and narrates a radically open history.”                    

How does oral history contribute to your book?

We combed through 40,000 pages of oral history transcripts to choose potential excerpts. We three editors are all oral historians and writers; one of us is a professional editor, one is a photographer and book publisher, and one is a musician. All of these skills proved to be invaluable. The book was designed and published through the UCSC Library on a shoestring budget with unusual editorial independence. Only one of us was a full-time staff oral historian; the other two were freelancers. Seeds offers an example of what a small oral history program can put together with determination and creativity.

Through an iterative process, we built a fitting structure for the narrative and populated it with quotations that created the feeling of a “round table,” as if our narrators were engaging in conversation with each other across time. We wanted to emphasize anecdotes in and of their time—sensory details and compelling stories that keep the reader in what writer John Gardner in The Art of Fiction calls “a vivid and continuous dream.” So we chose excerpts that we hoped would inspire and provoke, making judicious use of relatively abstract and theoretical segments in cases where those effectively provided meaning and context. We conceived of the book as a kind of musical composition or a radio documentary in written form, with no Voice-of-God narrator.

During the five years we spent wrestling with this mass of material (we came to refer to our unwieldy project as “The Dragon”), we began to think of Seeds as a literary endeavor, and plotted the book around dramatic points in the campus’s history. These include, for example, its utopian beginning; a campus rocked by the counterculture; an enrollment crisis that threatened a campus shutdown; a chancellor lacking leadership abilities who was ultimately forced to resign; a controversial reorganization and remaking of the campus’s college system; battles and tensions over diversity and difference of all kinds; affirmative action and backlash; a major earthquake in Santa Cruz, and tensions between the campus and the community over growth.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

One of the great strengths of oral history is its power to make room for ambivalence and creative tensions. We wanted to use the multivocal power of oral history to present a more complex, nuanced story than could be told in a single written narrative. At the same time we took care to bring out a sustained, coherent conversation through skillful editing. The resulting discussion in Seeds is by turns celebratory, passionate, humorous, ecstatic; sometimes anguished, angry, elegiac. The characters converse with each other across the years—not always in agreement, but certainly in dialogue. This is a book with voice. We’ve been told it’s a page turner.

Irene Reti opening the first box of Seeds to come back from the printer at the UCSC Library’s Special Collections.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

Seeds offers a powerful model for oral history programs seeking to connect with their communities by overcoming the sometimes intimidating impression that can be presented by undigested archives. Far more accessible and appealing than a mass of archival transcripts, a book like this draws in the public in a way the raw sources cannot. Seeds now serves as a gateway to the rich archives available to researchers who want to dig deeper into the library’s collections; several UCSC courses have already adopted it as a teaching tool; others have featured it  in community-based discussions about local history. Thanks to the book’s publication, our program’s profile is now higher than it has ever been. Just after the pandemic began, we held a series of six book-launch events on Zoom that attracted hundreds of engaged people. The book stimulated fascinating discussions about both the past and future of UCSC. It is a tribute to the power of oral history to start conversations and strengthen community.

Finally, Seeds is good history and it’s fun to read!

What is the one thing that you most want readers to remember about the book?

Oral history can be as compelling and immediate as a live concert or street theater. Don’t underestimate its literary and artistic power.

5 Questions About Queen’s Memory Podcast

We ask authors of projects reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should explore what they made. In our latest installment of the series, Natalie Milbrodt and Melody Cao discuss the Queens Memory Podcast Season 3: Our Major Minor Voices.

See Bridget Bartolini’s review of the Queens Memory Podcast, Seasons 1-2, in our new issue of OHR.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

The stories in the third season of the Queens Memory Podcast, “Our Major Minor Voices,” document the experiences of our borough’s rich and diverse Asian communities in their own voices.

Each episode features stories about identity and belonging from this broad array of people who have made valuable contributions through their cultural traditions, belief systems, and linguistic diversity. Bookended by the season introduction and finale, the series includes eight bilingual episodes representing the most widely spoken Asian languages in Queens: Bangla, Hindi, Korean, Mandarin, Nepali, Tagalog, Tibetan, and Urdu.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, these communities have been in turmoil. Already grappling with longstanding issues such as income inequality, immigration barriers, and racial stereotyping, Asian Americans now faced concerns for their personal health and public safety.

In this unique moment, we aim to document the stories of these vital communities and capture snapshots of our ever-changing neighborhoods as they are now.

How do you use oral history and make novel use of media in your podcast?

We use our podcast as an opportunity to collect oral histories in an area where we want to grow our collections. In this case, we have an NEH grant to support the collection of stories from our Asian American neighbors in Queens. That funding allows us to hire talented producers who can conduct those interviews in Bangla, Hindi, Korean, Mandarin, Nepali, Tagalog, Tibetan, and Urdu, as well as English. In some cases, these are the first additions to our collections in those languages. 

We are so excited to share these producers’ beautifully written, edited, scored and mixed podcast episodes, but we are just as thrilled to archive and share their behind the scenes, full-length interviews too. Many of the producers have never contributed to an archive before and they are being very patient with all of the metadata we are requesting from them for each of their interviews!

One of the interesting challenges in producing the same episode in two languages has been the translation and voicing of not only narration, but also of the interviews themselves. In some cases producers have worked with their interviewees to record translations of their own interview segments featured in the podcast. It’s so nice to have the real person’s voice in two languages! In other cases, producers have cast professional actors, or even family and friends to voice the translated portions of their episodes. They did their best to capture the emotion and intent of what our interviewees were communicating. There were also interesting challenges matching intergenerational differences between speakers who, like in our Korean episode, almost sound like they are speaking different languages based on how many decades ago they left their countries of origin. We also decided as a team that we wanted to hear an interviewee’s real voice for a while before overdubbing with a voiceover. Our intention is to uplift and amplify voices that do not always get the attention they deserve so it was important to us that we followed through on that by literally keeping the volume up as they spoke!

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

As a tool for understanding History, oral histories are powerful because we can connect with them emotionally. Those moments of emotional connection imprint lasting impressions (learning!). And when we learn History by way of personal accounts of lived experiences, our empathy response helps us understand that we, too, are part of History and we can begin to see our own circumstances with a broader perspective. 

The small details that come through in someone’s recalled memories often stay with us for years after hearing them. As humans, we are hardwired to understand the world around us in the format of stories. So if we at the Queens Memory Project want to increase empathy and decrease social isolation, connecting people with different life experiences through their life stories seems like a good approach.

As a tool for understanding history, oral histories are powerful because we can connect with them emotionally.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in the podcast? 

The voices and stories in these episodes are irresistible. They tell us so much about the world while focusing on this small collection of individuals. And for folks who enjoy beautiful audio production, they are in for a treat with the scoring and mixing the team has put so much care into creating.

What is the one thing that you most want the audience to remember about the podcast?

We want people to know what a partnership this podcast has been with all of its contributors. That extends beyond our production team to the dozens of community partners who have contributed their knowledge, shared introductions, and helped in other countless ways to ensure these episodes are true reflections of life in Queens, New York.

 

5 Questions About Making Gay History

We ask authors of projects reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should explore their projects. In our latest installment of the series, Eric Marcus discusses the Making Gay History Podcast.

Read Kae Bara Kratcha’s review discussing the recent season of Making Gay History Podcast drawing on the Studs Terkel Radio Archive.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

Image courtesy of Eric Marcus

The Making Gay History (MGH) podcast brings LGBTQ history to life through the voices of the people who lived it, drawing principally on the oral history archive Eric Marcus recorded for the two editions of his oral history book, which was first published in 1992 under the title Making History (the 2002 edition was titled Making Gay History). MGH’s episodes create intimate, personal portraits of both known and long-forgotten champions, heroes, and witnesses to an aspect of American history that’s too often been relegated to the shadows.

The MGH podcast provides a window into that history through the stories of the people who helped a despised minority take its rightful place in society as full and equal citizens. Our goal is to encourage connection, pride, and solidarity within the LGBTQ community and to provide an entry point for both allies and the general public to its largely hidden history.

How does oral history contribute to your project?

We use recorded oral history in a podcast format, which is still somewhat unique. But I don’t think we make novel use of media in our podcast. What we do is use novel media. And it’s only novel because so few oral histories were recorded with the kinds of people and stories we’ve featured in Making Gay History over the past five years. Aside from the recordings in my archive, we partnered with the Studs Terkel Radio Archive to feature some of their recordings. And MGH has also uncovered and shared never-before-heard archival interviews with iconic figures in LGBTQ history including Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and Bayard Rustin.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology? 

I’ve always loved hearing people’s stories. This was long before I even knew what oral history was. And then I was commissioned to write an oral history book and fell in love with learning about history through individual stories. It brought history to life in a way that dry history books never could. And now I’ve gotten to share these oral histories in an audio format that lets the people I interviewed tell their stories in their own voices, which adds multiple dimensions to what would otherwise be two-dimensional transcript.

I want people to remember the stories of the people we feature—their heartbreaks, their triumphs, their struggles, and ultimately their humanity.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your project? 

From a purely academic perspective, the Making Gay History podcast provides an example of how recorded oral histories can be used to share stories in a format that’s highly accessible and powerfully affecting. And I’m not speaking of simply taking recorded oral histories, cutting out a 20-minute chunk, for example, and slapping on an introduction and conclusion. These are highly produced episodes that are edited for clarity and brevity with the goal of never changing what the interviewee intended to convey. We have the added benefit of the fact that I recorded the interviews and I’m here to provide descriptive and historical context. Even so, I’ve had to rely on contemporaneous notes that I took at the time of the interviews to set the scene for each of the episodes. In our special season on “Coming of Age During the AIDS Crisis,” I think oral historians will be interested in listening to what happens when the oral historian becomes the subject. In this case we used my own recorded oral history as a framework for the storytelling.

What is the one thing that you most want the audience to remember about the project?

I want people to remember the stories of the people we feature—their heartbreaks, their triumphs, their struggles, and ultimately their humanity.

Eric Marcus is the founder and host of the award-winning Making Gay History podcast, which mines his decades-old audio archive of rare interviews — conducted for his oral history book of the same name about the LGBTQ civil rights movement — to create intimate, personal portraits of both known and long-forgotten champions, heroes, and witnesses to history. His many other books include Is It A Choice?, Why Suicide?, and Breaking the Surface, the #1 New York Times bestselling autobiography of Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis.

Eric is also co-producer of Those Who Were There, a podcast drawn from Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. He is the founder and chair of the Stonewall 50 Consortium, an organization that brings together 240 nonprofit institutions and organizations committed to producing programming, exhibitions, and educational materials related to LGBTQ history and culture. He is a founding board member of the American LGBTQ+ Museum.

Photo of a gothic chapel

Holly Werner-Thomas on Experimenting with Senses

In OHR‘s upcoming Spring Issue, Holly Werner-Thomas shares her methods of detailing all five senses within an oral history interview in her article, “Sensory Roadmaps: How to Capture Sensory Detail in an Interview and Why Doing So Has Exciting Implications for Oral History.” Here she shares her zine, featuring ethnopoetic transcription and experimental writing forms, which showcase her interview with author Mark Thomas.

By Holly Werner-Thomas

In my OHR article, “Sensory Roadmaps: How to Capture Sensory Detail in an Interview and Why Doing So Has Exciting Implications for Oral History” (Spring 2022), I argue that focusing on the five senses allows oral historians to capture stories that are more evocative and emotionally true than oral histories—so often focused on “big events”—that skip over such detail. I describe why this is important for what we can learn about people’s lives today, but also state that this focus on the sensory is an exciting prospect for storytelling outcomes. 

But what are some of those storytelling outcomes? To me at least, they include nonfiction writing, ethnopoetic/poetic transcription, and performance. Here, I focus on the first two, using the interviews I conducted with Mark Thomas (on November 14 and 19, 2018, at the author’s house in Washington, D.C.; full disclosure: Mark is my husband) to show how I got “into his head” to write a short profile of him. I also transcribed interview segments using a technique first developed by anthropologist Dennis Tedlock that Tedlock called “ethnopoetic transcription.” My own storytelling outcome, in this case, also included a zine I put together, embedded here, which is just for fun, and displays the visual nature of the (transcribed) poetry. As for the performative aspect of the (transcribed) poetry, much has been written about it (see for example, Della Pollock, Remembering: Oral History as Performance), but the poetry of oral history is evident even in its written form on the page when using Tedlock’s method, (see below). I hope that it is also evident that no matter how seemingly insignificant, descriptive detail brings listeners and readers closer to events imbued with emotion and perspective that have the power to teach us about lived experience, and that focusing on the five senses is also simply beautiful.

Boy From Leeds, by Holly Werner-Thomas, 2020

 

Experimental Nonfiction Writing

I borrow my approach for the brief experimental profile piece I wrote for my zine from a nonfiction writer I cite in my article (Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, 2012). Boo, though she does not reveal how, so thoroughly understands the points of view of the people she writes about, that she writes with confidence from their perspectives as if inside their heads. Her nonfiction therefore often carries the psychological depth of great fiction, where writers are free to invent. For example, in this passage from page 43:

“Abdul felt protective of the undersized scavenger. The boy got excited about unusual things, like a map of the city he’d recently seen outside an airport workers’ canteen. Back at Annawadi, Sunil talked about that map as if it were a gold brick he’d found in the gutter, and seemed surprised when other scavengers took no interest. Abdul recognized this tendency to get punchy about discoveries to which other people were indifferent. He no longer tried to explain his private enthusiasms, and figured Sunil would learn his aloneness, in time.” – Katherine Boo

As readers, we cannot know how Boo learned how Abdul felt about the scavenger, described in the first sentence: did Abdul tell the author, did she observe him, or both? In the the last sentence, we don’t know whether Boo observed Abdul so long that she noted a change in his conversation to other people, or, again, whether it was a detail about himself that he related. Either way, her paragraph on Abdul and Sunil is a masterclass in interpretive research (including interview/conversation combined with observation) that she translates into an elevated form of nonfiction prose where she provides us access to the interior lives of her subjects.

For my own very short experimental profile piece, “The sound was the focus (chapel),” (beginning on page 8 of the zine embedded above) I combined a bit of historical research with what I learned about Mark’s life, both as a schoolboy at Leeds Grammar School in the 1970s, and more generally (in this case as a fan of Leeds United) in our interviews. I researched only part of the first sentence of the piece, about the Gothic/Victorian buildings, and combined that information with my own knowledge of industrialized Leeds. Otherwise, the writing is a translation of our interviews, with the last paragraph a mix of conversational samples of Mark’s language (“Elland Road” is the soccer grounds where Leeds play; “Hot Shot Lorimer” was the nickname of the great 1970s player, Peter Lorimer; “the winning strike” is a British turn of phrase). I combine these with what I imagined his thoughts—as a boy entering obligatory morning chapel—might be, which is also why I use the phrase “no doubt” in the last sentence.

Experimental Profile Piece

Embedded in PDF of Zine above, page 8

“The sound was the focus (chapel)”

Leeds Grammar School is a Gothic building that dates from 1552, but the school’s small stone chapel is probably Victorian, which means it was built around the same time that this northwestern Yorkshire market town industrialized. 

The chapel has an ornate stained-glass window, and carved wooden pews made by a local carpenter whose trademark was a little carved mouse, but it is the organ that Mark remembers most, and that the chapel’s ceilings were high, which created an echo when he and the other boys marched over the cold flagstones after shoving their school bags into their desks and before class. Typically, he said, his music teacher played the organ quietly as they shuffled in, “single-note-type music rather than big music,” which was reserved for holiday spectacles like Christmas, Whitsun, and Easter in which Mark participated, when he was very young, as a soprano in the school choir. He sang the descant for a carol called “Once in Royal David City,” as his son would decades later at a British Embassy in an American city. Otherwise, Mark said, the religious services, especially the school prayer, were “part of the wallpaper.” 

“Looking back now, to me it feels like something out of, The Name of the Rose or something, you know? You’ve got this sort of group of people standing up and saying: 

Our Father who art in heaven, 
Hallowed be Thy name, 
Thy kingdom come, 
Thy will be done, 
On earth as it is in Heaven.

But as a kid, it was just sounds to us.”

Because Mark didn’t know the meanings of half of the words—DOMINUM  NOSTRUM and REMISSIONEM PECCATORUM—that he was asked to repeat out loud, his breath visible in the cold, his school cap left on a peg near his desk, his thoughts, no doubt, about that afternoon’s rugby match, or whether his dad would take him to Elland Road that Saturday, where he hoped he could watch Hot Shot Lorimer score the winning strike against Chelsea.

The senses Mark recalls here are of a multitude of sounds (the organ, the Latin prayers, the echoing flagstones underfoot), of feeling (cold, formality, tradition), and of sight (the chapel, the organ and organ player, the stained glass, the carved wooden mice). Again, I contrast them with where a restless schoolboy’s mind might be. But the larger point is that only by focusing on the five senses can I gain this depth of insight into this narrator’s boyhood, where not even first-hand observation would be available to me, as it was for Katherine Boo in Mumbai, and is for nonfiction writers in general.

Ethnopoetic/Poetic Transcription

Because the poetry of the spoken word is evident when people use their five senses in describing their memories, focusing on sensory experience also breathes new life into the possibilities of ethnopoetic transcription developed by Tedlock in the 1970s. He wrote that,

“…the relatively casual conversational narratives, which are the more ordinary business of the oral historian, are themselves highly poetical and cannot be properly understood from prose transcripts. The meaning of spoken narrative is not only carried by the sheer words as transcribed by alphabetic writing but by the placement of silences, by tines of voice, by whispers and shouts.” – Dennis Tedlock

Among his instructions for an ethnopoetic transcription of an interview, Tedlock suggested that, CAPITALS can be used to indicate loud talk; small type to denote soft speech; that long dashes [—] indicate lengthened vowels while short ones at the ends of lines [-] mean that the speaker interrupted him or herself; also that other instructions can be put in (parenthesized italics).

I would add, however, that Tedlock borrowed the term “ethno” in what he labeled “ethnopoetic” transcription from his training as an ethnographer to lend heft to his insight into the poetry of the spoken word. Today I would ask if “ethnopoetic” truly best describes what is a form of spoken word poetry, a genre of poetry that is also rooted in oral tradition and performance. Transcription as spoken word poetry might therefore more simply be called “poetic transcription.”

Using Tedlock’s instructions, or what he calls his “Guide to Delivery,” I transcribed a few passages of my interviews with Mark to see what they would look like and hear what they would sound like, and it is striking, how naturally they lend themselves to both poetry and performance. Here is a poetic transcription of a section of my interview with Mark where he describes washing his face in the mornings before he left his house for his paper “round” when he was twelve years old (in the embedded zine beginning on page 4):

Paper Round (a cold morning in a northern city)

A Poem

There’s a thing I remember doing,

when I LEFT the house on my paper round,
which is, I would have,
before I went out, 
I washed my face with soap. 
And I guess I just, 
         I just got up and got ready. 

I think 
I didn’t – 
it’s not like I went out and then came back and had a shower or something. 
So, uh, 
got up and I did 
whatever, 
you know, 
ablutions, 
I did quickly 
and left, 
right? 
So, I was, 

               I was already in school uniform, 

um, 
maybe 
minus the tie,
or something.
But I was already dressed.
And so, 
anyway, 
              I would wash my face with soap in the morning. 
I mean, 
I was an adolescent, 
I guess I had greasy skin or whatever, 
so it was something that I felt I needed to do. 
And I remember going outside and walking down the drive, 
and 
you know that feeling you have when you’ve washed off all the grease from your face 
and 
             it’s kind of creaky? 

And I LIKED that feeling,
and it would often be COLD, 
and I remember, 
you know, 
I’d sort of GU––––RN, 
you know? 
I would SORT OF MAKE FACES, 
[makes faces]
and I’d FEEL my skin kind of cracking, 
kind of like it does when it’s real, 
when your skin’s dry, 
when you just cleaned it. 
And it’d be cold, 
and I’d be breathing out, 
and there would be condensation. 
You could see your breath
and, 
and, 
I’d be doing that. 
And it was that, 
            that was the feeling of waking up, you know, on a cold morning in a northern city. 
And so that’s a really strong memory I have. 
I used to really like doing that.

In my OHR article, I write that in a literary sense, oral historians tend to focus on plot (“Tell me what happened then”) over explicit sensory description (“What did it smell like?” “What sounds do you remember?”). As we read the short profile of Mark at school chapel when he was a boy in Leeds and listen to the verbatim transcript-cum-poem, we can see that by helping narrators to evoke the five senses in an oral history interview, we allow the ultimate reader—or listener—to feel the texture of another person’s life, which is the basis for most good stories.

For more, see my zine, “Boy from Leeds”, above.

Holly Werner-Thomas is an oral history consultant and independent scholar. Her documentary play, The Survivors, won Columbia University’s Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award in 2020. The play is based on the interviews of gun violence victims she has collected for her ongoing campaign, “The 40 Percent Project: An Oral History of Gun Violence in America,” which will be housed at the Columbia Center for Oral History Archives (CCOHA) starting this year. She is a graduate of the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University and has conducted major oral history projects for The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Vera Institute of Justice, The National Building Museum, and others. She is currently co-chair of the upcoming symposium entitled, “Assessing the Role of Race and Power in Oral History Theory and Practice,” in collaboration with the Oral History Association and the Oral History Center at UC Berkeley, slated for June 2022. She can be reached at: holly@hollythomasoralhistory.com. 

Featured image by Stanley Walker, Leeds Grammar School Situated on Moorlands Road it was built in 1858-59 by E.M Barry; now used as The University Business School. Used courtesy of a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

5 Questions About Archiver la mémoire

We ask authors of books reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should read their books. In our latest installment of the series, Florence Descamps discusses her book Archiver la mémoire. De l’histoire orale au patrimoine immatériel.

Simon-Olivier Gagnon’s review of Archiver la mémoire is now available online.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

This short book is the result of many years of reflection on the way in which the human and social sciences in France have included and accepted the spoken word and, more generally, orality. History has long resisted oral testimonies for epistemological and methodological reasons, but today, after more than a century of controversy, we can say that oral sources have become a part of the historian’s toolbox.

Archiver la mémoire

How does oral history contribute to your book?  

I have been collecting oral testimonies for more than 30 years and I have observed how this method has progressively developed throughout the French territory. Oral history, which emerged in France in the 1970s, has developed a lot thanks to the creation of oral archives in institutions in the 1990s and 2000s. It has made successful inroads in social history, both “from below” and “from above,” by focusing on “ordinary people,” and on so-called “dominated” social groups (workers, employees, immigrants, minorities), but also on the French governing elites (politicians, senior administrators, business leaders, bankers). Since 2000, oral history has benefited from the success of the notion of “oral heritage” and UNESCO’s concept of “immaterial cultural heritage” which has given new dynamism and energy to field investigations.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

I believe in the possibility for actors and witnesses to give an account of their own existential and historical experiences and to contribute to the knowledge of the past through their stories.  I like the dialogue between historian and witness. I find great interest in the deployment of individual memory and I study the ways in which this memory is articulated, or not, within the collective one.

I believe in the possibility for actors and witnesses to give an account of their own existential and historical experiences and to contribute to the knowledge of the past through their stories.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

I hope that oral historians will find some elements of reflection, first on the specificities of the French case, and more generally on the debates around oral history and its developments.

What is the one thing that you most want readers to remember about the book?

Contrary to what is often said, there is a French oral history. It has long been invisible, but it is very much alive, even if it sometimes has other names: oral archives, sound heritage, oral heritage, oral memory, intangible cultural heritage, for example. It takes on different forms, depending on whether it is used by historians or researchers in other social sciences, or whether it is used by archive centers or local communities. But it is still alive and growing because there is a strong social demand in France for everything that concerns the past, especially the past that is experienced and remembered.

5 Questions About Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table

We ask authors of books reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should read their books. In our latest installment of the series, James Hudnut-Beumler discusses his book, Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table: Contemporary Christianities in the American South.

Read Rachel Lane’s review of Strangers and Friends in our upcoming issue and online. 

What’s it about and why does it matter?

My book is an account of religion in the Now South, a culture that has continuities with the Old South, the New South, and the Civil Rights era, but also features some striking innovations. It is a region that is overwhelmingly Christian, where no other faith represents more than .6 percent of any state’s population, yet also where the various Christians are sufficiently diverse to argue with one another about what the Bible means for law, inclusion, sexuality, ethics, and politics.

Book cover to Strangers and Friends

Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table by James Hudnut-Beumler, University of North Carolina Press, 2018

All this matters insofar as the southern states account for a large number of voters and the membership of nationally significant denominations. To understand this region with the soul of a church—united by a commitment to hospitality but riven by fear of scarcity and various others—is to understand a driving force in American life and religion.

How does oral history contribute to your book?

As a work of contemporary religious history, oral history figures repeatedly as evidence and interpretation from actors and observers of the lived religion of the Now South. Often a voice breaks through the narrative to offer just the right explanation of why something is going on, as when Christians embrace the death penalty. I didn’t have the experience of one of my informants who asked a conservative evangelical how they could be for the death penalty when it was used against Jesus, heard the the reply, “If it was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough those sons of bitches.” This is just one example of the you-had-to-be-there insights available to historians that don’t appear in books, but vividly reveal the interior thought and motivations of one’s subjects.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

Oral history takes me as a historian closer to my non-written sources, amplifying and correcting their insights. More importantly, there are things that people tell you that would never get written down if you did not ask them. I have two chapters on religious responses to Hurricane Katrina where the inner logic of religion in the face of tragedy, need, racism, and human resilience comes to the fore. I ended up with more total words in transcriptions from my interviews than published in toto in the book itself and they became alternately the leading sources for some chapters and the most vivid voices in other chapters. I learned a lot from listening to preachers and speakers in participant observer situations, but also from asking open-ended questions in interviews.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

I hope most will be interested in the use of oral history in a mixed methodology work of contemporary religious history. I bring together demographic, economic, data, organizations’ self-depictions, visits to church services, and websites and oral history to unpack what the South is becoming and struggling with. One of the features fellow historians may be interested in is that I shared every direct quote with my informants in the narrative context it would be used in the book itself. This led to three requested changes that I accepted. In each of those cases something the narrator said somewhat cavalierly the first time was said with greater, more helpful precision in the final version. I have been on the other end of that equation with journalists for years and I really wanted to get it right. My press also requires quote verification evidence. I also sometimes teach from the WPA Slave Narrative collection and we often reflect on the duties owed to  interview subjects that were and were not observed by the Federal Writers charged with taking the narratives down. I have conducted oral histories for an archive in the past and this reiterative process was more beneficial for all, in my experience.

What is the one thing that you most want readers to remember about the book?

That even now, after air-conditioning, the end of Jim Crow, and massive in-migration from other regions, the American South remains distinctively religious, a Christianity-tinged culture; and yet, the forms that religious activity takes in the region are broader than ever before. Christian homeschoolers, Hispanic Catholics, and the minority of LGBT affirming churches are just as much a part of the Now South as are revivals, altar calls, and church suppers on the grounds.

James Hudnut-Beumler is the Anne Potter Wilson Distinguished Professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and the author of several books, including In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar.

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