Readings:

M. Frisch – “Three Dimensions and More: Oral History Beyond the Paradoxes of Method” in Handbook of Emergent Methods

J. Bornat et al. – “Don’t mix race with specialty”: Interviewing South Asian Overseas-Trained Geriatricians (this was the wrong piece but we went with it)

Bornat piece

The Bornat might have been the wrong piece but it definitely showed how complex oral histories are. The amount of layers that can be found in the interviews that were conducted with the South Asian Geriatricians would make one hell of a cake. It can be said that all of these layers symbolise a different part of someone’s identity and are all viewed through the lens of memory which makes things extra complicated. The way we remember things lives in the present which is often a very different world to the past. This can be especially seen in the language. The language that we used to describe our identity is constantly changing just look at the ‘new’ identities found in LGBTQ+ or the language that movements like the metoo movement or blacklivesmatter have all given us to talk about life and experience.

When we remember things we take this new vocabulary with us, which sometimes clashes with the feelings that we initially had during the event that is being remember. For example, a woman post-metoo might look back a certain incident that she now understands as being sexual harassment but at the time she just put up with it. These two interpretations of the event, the initial one and the post-metoo one can cause all sorts of reactions.

e.g.

• It couldn’t have been that bad because you are only talking about it now
• It was bad but you did not know why because you did not have the words to describe it
• It didn’t matter at the time and you don’t really care about it now but because of all this language you feel you should

Memory is messy especially when dealing with identity because it changes constantly.

Frisch

I am very familiar with the Frisch piece but many in the reading group hadn’t read it before. What was funny to see was how many had the same reaction I did when I first read it: that it was both obvious, innovative and fundamentally frustrating because he does not give any answers.

Because I had already read the Frisch piece some of the things that had been mention were not completely new to me. The ethical difficulties of oral history archives (Graham wondered whether me might be making too much of a fuss.) Digital silver bullets that will rid us of all access problems?

However, the talk around one theme did intrigue me and that was reuse. This theme was triggered by someone asking whether oral histories even get reused now. Turns out oral historians do not really reuse but oral histories are reused in popular culture, especially for World War novels. All this led me to dig up some old thoughts I had on remixing, which I have already written on after one of the NYU lectures I attended. And at the top of the post is the trailer for the exhibition that planted this idea of remixing in my head way back when.

There are strange power dynamics that are interlocked with reuse and remixing. The decision to store something is an incredibly powerful move, mostly because it involves money. The move to store also automatically highlights documents that are not deemed important enough to store. So now you have items that have been declared important and those that are not, all done by a single person or body of power. However, power shifts over time so eventually someone might want to tell a different story, but they can’t rely on what is stored because that does not represent them, so they remix and create a ‘new’ history. This ‘new’ history might be true or it might be completely fabricated but either way it is necessary. Remixing is a power move that in my eyes should not be hindered by power structures, because the previous power structures already declared what was allowed to be kept.

You can also look at this through the academia vs pop culture lens. Andy pointed out that one of the main reasons people go into oral history is because they like talking to people and not necessarily because they like digging through archives. Now one could easily declare that we therefore should not really bother storing oral histories, but people do use them it’s just that oral historians don’t. In many industries you have those who make and those who can’t afford to make so they adapt and modify often paying tribute to the original. It is exactly this that I am building an archive for; not for oral historians but those who want to remix to reuse.