A Dialogical Relationship. An Approach to Oral History

1. Oral sources and oral history The phrase oral history is a common abbreviation for what we might describe, more articulately, as the use of oral sources in history or the social sciences. 1 In its most elementary form, the oral narratives and testimony which constitute oral history are but an additional tool in the historian's panoply of sources, and are therefore subject to the same critical scrutiny as all other sources, in order to ascertain their reliability and their usefulness. From this point of view, we distinguish the oral source from the oral tradition: the latter is made up of verbal constructs that are formalized, transmitted, shared, whereas the historian's oral sources are individual, informal, dialogic narratives created in the encounter between the historian and the narrator. Of course, these narratives may incorporate traditional materials, and oral historians may also avail themselves of oral traditions. However, it is best to keep the two concepts distinct: not all that is oral is traditional. However, when we speak of oral history we also mean something more specific. Rather than an additional, often secondary tool in the historian's panoply, oral sources are used as the axis of another type of historical work, in which questions of memory, narrative, subjectivity, dialogue shape the historian's very agenda. When this is the case, the critical use of oral sources requires specific approaches and procedures, adequate to their specific nature and form. As opposed to the majority of historical documents, in fact, oral sources are not found, but co-created by the historian. They would not exist in this form without the presence, and stimulation, the active role of the historian in the field interview. Oral sources are generated in a dialogic exchange – an interview-literally a looking at each other, an exchange of gazes. In this exchange questions and answers do not necessarily go in one direction only. The historian's agenda must meet the agenda of the narrator; what the historian wishes to know may not necessarily coincide with what the narrator wishes to tell. As a consequence, the whole agenda of the research may be radically revised. For instance, when I started a project on the history of the labor movement from 1949 to 1953 in Terni, an industrial town in Central Italy, many narrators insisted in connecting the events I was interested in to the long-term history of their families and their town. Though …