Oral History and Anthropology

Oral historians no longer can take it for granted that the seated, recorded, one-on-one life history interview is the best way to do our work. We are rewriting our origin stories, questioning who our disciplinary ancestors are, and imagining what roots we would want to draw from to build more expansive futures for our field. In this moment of expanding our methodology, the discipline of anthropology has much to offer oral historians, and vice versa. The work of oral historians often shares qualities with that of anthropologists—it can be long, slow, and at an intimate scale. Both fields use life histories. But it is the differences between the fields that are most generative. Oral history’s practices of archiving, ongoing consent, and shared authority are of use to anthropologists seeking to unsettle power imbalances in their work. Oral historians can use participant observation to help them pay attention to ways of doing oral history that go beyond the seated, one-on-one life history interview. Anthropological research on the production of history, on archives, and on life history narratives can help oral historians to see our work as a social practice situated within a larger landscape of history-making. Oral historians can find inspiration in the experimental life history writing of anthropologists. While curiosity and ideas and people have flowed back and forth between oral history and anthropology, there is little writing that explores this terrain from a deep grounding in both fields. As a survey, this article creates a foundation for further informed conversation between oral historians and anthropologists.

Ethnic group · Government (linguistics · Identity (music · Oral history · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Biographical and Historical Analysis · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis

• Hybrid Epistemology

  Open Access•R Hagen, Denise Milstein et al.•International Journal of…•2026

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