This week's reading was a collection of oral histories, taken by Studs Terkel in his book Hard Times. The histories were taken from a variety of people who lived during the Great Depression as well as young adults, growing up in the late 20th century, and how they understood the Depression, if at all.
Oral history is a funny thing. It feels more permanent than a conversation but less reliable. It is, after all, a memory and we all know how fuzzy they can be. In class it was discussed that the reliability of the memory is not at all detracting from a historian's work; that the feelings and emotions evoked were what was important. These feelings are what make oral histories so useful.
However, the real bugger of this topic is accuracy. In class it was discussed that with the rise of literacy and the believed permanencec of printed documents that these documents were somehow more reliable, more evidentiary, more accurate, and more Truthful than anything else. Historians and archivists held on to diaries and newspapers and receipts, as well as photos, advertisements, film reels, and anything else from the time as somehow more honest and accurate than other sources. What were these other sources? They aren't always described but the point here is that if it was printed on paper than it was taken as somehow more accountable for historic study than living people's memories.
It seems problematic to argue that something taken from the past is somehow more accurate than anything else. The argument here is about perspective. All of these materials are equally honest because they are all the subjective truths of the person who writes them or emits them. They are neither more or less honest than other documents- what matters is that they are true to them. Accuracy in any source is not the point because historians may never get to that material.
It is somehow flawed to argue that oral history is legitimate because it evokes memories and feelings and that accuracy is somehow unimportant. Oral history is legitimate because it is history. Accuracy is something that no written or oral document can produce because all of it is truthful to the person associated with it and one can be neither more or less accurate than the other. Whether it is contemporary or removed by decades does not matter because neither can be held acccountable as being more accurate than the other. What about documents of numbers? Surely numbers are more accurate but censuses are lost, people lie, estimates are made. Numbers provide a level of accuracy about certain experiences but even they only seem to marginally increase information.
It is interesting that Hard Times evoked such feelings. It certainly was unexpected.
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Your musings are very interesting to me, Elizabeth. My first impression of Hard Times was that it was frustrating because memories seemed so vague in a sense; many were recalling feelings and internal dialogs. Very little factual background was offered to provide any context for the imagery and that almost made it more dreamlike than historical, somehow. Those with differing perspectives certainly made for a conflicting sense of the event, also characteristic of dreams. I kept getting left behind by Terkel's assumption that I would know who the subjects were referencing, with no explanation needed... I often felt like a high school junior trying to follow a Dennis Miller monologue. If there were any ancillary shades of meaning to enrich the words themselves, I missed them.
ReplyDeleteYet I do realize that many primary source documents are not so different, as you point out. And I have to conclude, as you did, that oral history is legitimate because it's history. It will be our job to fill in the gaps with research and weave the distinct stories into a mutually supported narrative. That was this book's lesson for me, at any rate.