Week 12: Creating Sources: Oral History
The reading assignment for this week, Oral History and Public Memories, edited by Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, does a good job of showing how oral history can add to the accepted or ‘official’ history. The use of chapters from a wide range of authors and researchers works particularly well in this volume, as does the division of the chapters into three sections covering ‘Creating Heritage’; ‘Recreating Identity and Community’; and ‘Making Change’. Each of the chapters fits well within its section giving the volume a feeling of steady progression. I think the format of individual topics, and/or authors, works by using many specific cases or examples to build toward a unified whole: each vignette adds support to the others.
The range of topics for this volume was very interesting. I was thoroughly intrigued by nearly every one from the Canadian First Nations to the streets of Cleveland and Kosovo. I was especially drawn to the chapters focusing on the Japanese internment, perhaps because I have just recently read ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’. The use of the dialogues/conversations in the museum exhibit ‘A More Perfect Union’ (Thomas, pp. 90-5) seems especially effective to me. I am fascinated by the idea of creating bits of personal interaction within a museum exhibition backdrop. Yesterday at the Museum of Florida History it occurred to me that the new exhibit they are producing may be trying to create this same personal interaction with their ‘mannequins’ in the contact area.
While this is very attractive to the visitor, especially visitors who have minimal knowledge about the period being recreated, I wonder how you put words in the mouths of people long dead without going too far. The Japanese internment exhibit was able to use the actual oral histories of people who lived the experience and then put them into the ‘conversations’ or vignettes. I guess what I’m really questioning is the power that choosing what tidbits to take from an entire oral history, or from an entire diary, is enormous. In another of the chapters that discussed the Japanese internment, George Takei’s words are used to illustrate two very different experiences (Dubrow, p. 133). By choosing which words to focus on, Takei’s experience was either frightening or full of childhood wonder. That’s a big difference. Further, it illustrates the effects that passing time and growing older have on memory.
I really do like the idea of presenting history this way: it’s engaging, entertaining, and educational. But I also feel it can easily go too far and become Disney-esque to the point of cheapening if not falsifying history.
The concern you bring up, Kathy, about selecting representations of oral histories to serve as dialogue for people long dead is completely valid. Takei's words on his experience could be taken in either direction, depending on the curator/researcher's agenda, and the limited information available from the early explorers in the Museum of Florida's History does not provide many options for that interactive dialogue.
ReplyDeleteAs you say, the book added to acepted or official history. It offers a first hand perspective of someone there in that moment. I agree when you refer to oral history as "it’s engaging, entertaining, and educational." However, I do not think it will become "Disney-esque" because it serves a purpose other than pure entertainment. Oral history,a social practice, has a great purpose of capturing historical perspectives that would otherwise be lost.
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