Class Notes - Visitor: Professor Richard Candida Smith

Visitor: Professor Richard Candida Smith, Director of the Regional Oral History Office
-- WWII home-front experience

transcription - no description of gestures. semi? official status - presumptive of reader to interpret other's gestures... how do you convey to the reader the info?

oral history - to sit beneath cover stories; get beyond zone of comfort

develop rapport with person, aesthetic

"The Gleaner's & i" -> objectivity thrown away


what makes language work is that it's incomplete and partial... that which allows us to communicate, prevents us from communicating

subject is constantly circulating through its forms of expression

when we reach a point when we can't express in experience/words, it gets thrown off into a different form

what we can't express in one form, we go to a different form; we turn to art because it articulates aspects of our experiences that we can't articulate in words.

oral history - not everything can be put into words... thus, gestures. performativity of this is inherent to the articulation; words can be trivial, but what they're saying is enlightening

multiple attempts to project history to the world - what are the other forms of expression

where are institutions unable to control cracks.

rosie project: how does a country go from the least militarized to the most? how does this affect the people? social relations of people. [only 1 generation that can tell that story] a culture that was anti-militarist. what does it mean for us who are living in institutions that were created for this. a government that projects its will

is a video camera less intrusive because people are more familiar with how to perform to it?

international oral history association - website

people look dumber on paper because the oral manner doesn't translate

thinking about blogging/im as somewhere between text/oral

narrator: political decision... interviewee has a passive context, as though they aren't doing anything

pragmatic issues & methodology
- not interested in how good the person is as a narrator
- question to self: why am i doing this?
- what do you expect you're going to get other than going into the archives/newspaper? are you going to get trivial recounting? what is other than people's diaries?
- people's stories are not available until you open the door. memory is not like an open file system
- should get people to tell the stories they feel they need to tell. or that they are comfortable telling. but this is a particular type of narrative
- you want the cover stories - tells how the person, group of people come to talk; get below the cover stories... which are partially bs. the preparation lets you get below that, below the anecdotal
- collective understandings of things - informed and filled with tacit understanding... collective unconscious at work - where everyday life decisions are made
- if we put subject back into history... we don't understand how the subject is formed, how s/he leaves traces
- people bring forward their own questions about the historical process
- ask about childhood, birthplace, family.. tension releasing, confidence building way of building the relationship.
- interviewer is always an outsider
- need to decide what boundaries are to be set. flirting is quite common in oral histories. so situational and individual
- in group environments, people dampen their disagreements - they reinforce each other and you lose accuracy. people need to know that you're interviewing other people with different points of view. in individual interviews, you set up a group dynamic and you play on that without having the dampening effects.

URL: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/


what does it meant to do oral histories over the phone where audio is the focus? perhaps this creates a clearer document of what is occurring [difference between oral history and ethnography]