Giving It Back
Creating Conversations to Interpret Community Oral History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11077804 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nobel Carrie Kline (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1996 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 19-40 |
| Publication date | 1996-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Oral History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0094-0798 • E-ISSN: 1533-8592 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ohr/23.1.19 |
| OpenAlex | W2323922612 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
What constitutes effective and responsible editing of field recordings? What obligations do we have in presenting someone's words? Must we present our narrators in a manner that pleases them? Does receiving permission to use spoken materials exonerate us from the responsibility to return anything to the grantee, or the community from whence she comes? It is possible to avoid confronting such questions, but only if one assumes that conducting interviews throughout a community is a pleasant occupation in which the fieldworker has no particular accountability. Asking the questions casts us into a perplexing realm of contemplation that consumes the thoughts of an oral historian involved in community research, when she is not reliving the image-filled stories to which she is privy. Having explored this realm for some time, I have come to believe that in surveying communities what we must give back is our version of the truth, arrived at after filtering through an array of voices from diverse perspectives. Ideally, we will find a medium by which to offer this interpretation to the community where we conducted the research. In this essay, I will discuss an approach to rendering narratives that allows those interviewed to speak for themselves, while at the same time offering the oral historian the necessary room to develop and present such an interpretation. All of this, of course, is easier said than done: the paper will go on to examine what occurs when a fieldworker tries to conduct research and render her findings in an atmosphere where narrators have strong and divergent opinions about historical and contemporary events in their community.
Accountability · Aesthetics · Art · Contemplation · Epistemology · Interpretation (philosophy) · Linguistics · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Oral history · Political science · Public relations · Realm · Sociology · History · Law · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,17 |
| Citation span | 2003 - 2014 (12) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |