Oral History and Public Memories - Couverture souple

"A fine, well-conceived book, refreshingly direct and engaged. A collection of sparkling essays that show oral history at work in a diverse array of contexts, levels, and engagements. They demonstrate powerfully its consequentiality for thinking clearly about meaningful intersections in public space, public life, community sensibility, and mobilized memory. This is no small accomplishment." --Michael Frisch, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

"Oral history interviews often turn up surprises, and this book is full of surprises.... No "Cliff Notes" like this review can do justice to this book because the rich details, subtle nuances, and brilliant research strategies are not explored, but the breadth and depth of the collection can be glimpsed. Oral History and Public Memories will speed the development of oral history in the direction of international sharing of information and will make a significant contribution to refinement of oral history research methods." --Oral History Review, May 2009

"The welcome purpose of this collection is to...seek some form of rapprochement between oral history and memory studies... Each chapter takes us somewhere quite different, geographically as well as culturally, but each author considers in some way the relation between their own ethnographic practice and the link-ups between individual life stories and social memory. Through this focus on the broader cultural meanings and significance of oral history narratives, the book operates as a creative exchange between the adjacent but hitherto largely separated fields of memory studies and oral history... The real promise of the book lies in the marriage of an empirical concern with memory in public with the critical question of the publicness of memory." The Journal of Folklore Research "This book is the result of a fruitful collaboration between two highly regarded oral historians...In the introduction, the authors regret the lack of published work on 'how oral history... both reflects and shapes collective or public memory.' This anthology is an important contribution towards rectifying that lacuna." --Oral History

"Oral History and Public Memories" is the first book to explore the relationship between the well-established practice of oral history and the burgeoning field of memory studies. In the past, oral historians have generally privileged the individual narrator, frequently fetishizing the interview process without fully understanding that interviews are only one form of memory-making. Historians engaged in memory studies, on the other hand, have asked broader questions - about the social and cultural processes at work in remembrance. What distinguishes these essays from much work in oral history is their focus not on the experiences of individual narrators, but on the broader cultural meanings of oral history narratives. What distinguishes them from other work in memory studies is their grounding in real events. Taken together, these contributions explain the processes by which oral histories move beyond interviews with individual people to become articulated memories shared by others.