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The point when historians began to use interviews to gather information absent in documentary and printed sources, and whether this can be characterized as ‘oral history interviewing’, has been much debated.1

Journalists routinely used interviews from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards and by the turn of this century social investigators valued interview evidence. Amongst historians, after generations of hostility towards interview data, the emergence of the oral history movement since 1945 has forced a reassessment, as Part I of this volume has shown. Portable tape recorders liberated us from laborious note-taking, and the frisson of excited discovery that marks early writings espousing oral history interviewing as the key to discovering more about the past, has given way to a more acute discussion of the interview relationship. It is this discussion that we explore in this section. If there is an emphasis on audio interviewing to the detriment of video techniques, this is partly because of the paucity of good writings on video interviewing and partly because it is considered in Part V.2

Charles Morrissey’s piece which opens this section was published nearly thirty years ago and although its focus is ostensibly on elite and political interviewing,3 _{there is little that many oral history practitioners would}

quibble with today. He rightly argues that it is impossible to reduce interviewing to a set of techniques or rules, but none the less summarizes the kind of practical advice which is to be found in a plethora of oral history handbooks: the value of preparation, the importance of establishing a rapport and intimacy, of listening and of asking open-ended questions, not interrupting, allowing for pauses and silences, avoiding jargon, probing, minimizing the presence of the tape recorder and so on.4

What has changed in the intervening years, with oral history techniques being taken up all over the world, has been a gradual awareness that the interviewing relationship is both significantly more complex and culturally specific: that the methods taken for granted by oral historians in the North can be wholly inappropriate for researchers in the South. This is the focus

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of Hugo Slim and Paul Thompson’s piece on collecting oral testimony in developing countries, in which they characterize the one-to-one interview as a ‘dangerously intimate encounter’ and emphasize the value of group remembering. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, they point out that in certain societies storytelling has a season (often winter) and that researchers need to be aware of local hierarchies and ‘norms relating to turn-taking’ which may differ markedly from interviewing in the North.5

They also explore the applicability of a variety of interview approaches: family-tree interviewing, single-issue testimony, diary interviewing, focus groups and community interviews. Whilst other oral historians have written of eliciting memories through introducing photographs6 _{and objects}7 _into

the interview, Slim and Thompson highlight the value of visual techniques when gathering testimony in communities unfamiliar with the interview form: time-lines, maps and diagrams become expressions of personal and collective memory.

These are techniques that Jan Walmsley finds similarly valuable in working with people with learning disabilities, though she sees them as supplementary to the life story or ‘biographical chronology’ form of interviewing that many oral historians now espouse as the most effective means of contextualizing specific experiences. For Walmsley, life story interviews with people with learning difficulties present a challenge and she emphasizes that adaptations have to be made to the research process if the interviewer’s aims are to be fully explained and disempowered people are to have a voice.8 _{She found that one-to-one interviews are not always}

possible and that her interviewees often have carers functioning as participant intermediaries, who in some cases try to control the content and circumstances of the interview.

Ensuring informed consent is never straightforward in any interview context, and in recent years oral history groups and associations around the world have attempted to address the moral issue of ownership by rendering the power relationship inherent to the interview situation into codes of ethics and interview guidelines.9 _{Early oral historians tended to}

see themselves as professionals, slightly aloof from the data-gathering process, where they merely needed to ask sensible questions to extract useful information. Most of the pieces in Part II represent more recent thinking, in which the interview is viewed as a co-construction, a dynamic process of interactivity where there is a recognition that the interviewer takes a major role in shaping the interview.

In this context the issue of ‘insider-outsider’ interviewing is central to Akemi Kikumura’s reflections on interviewing her own mother, an Issei woman from Japan who immigrated to the United States in 1923. Whilst ‘outsider’ status is believed to accord objectivity and detachment, an ‘insider’ perspective has the benefits of special insight otherwise obscure to outsiders. She concludes, in this case, that her mother would only have spoken openly to her because she was an ‘insider’ family member: ‘No!

Interviewing: introduction 103 You don’t disclose your soul to tanin [a non-relative]’; and argues that the dichotomy is a false one. She shows that it is possible to be simultaneously an insider (a family member) and an outsider (generationally and culturally remote from her mother’s Japanese upbringing).10

Belinda Bozzoli also explores ‘insider interviewing’ in an extract from Women of Phokeng, a study of black South African women which seeks to assess the ‘consciousness of the powerless’ in a society of ‘inequality and brutality’. She picks up the issues around culturally specific interviewing raised by Slim and Thompson and goes on to argue that her colleague Mmantho Nkotsoe’s successful interviewing was due to her ‘insider’ status as a local, black female, speaking the same dialect as her interviewees and from the same class.11 _{She observes that a spontaneous and unstructured}

questioning approach of informal exchanges had yielded the most revealing results.12 _{Yet she also found that the interaction between interviewer and}

interviewee affected the women’s remembering.

Kathryn Anderson and Dana Jack take this a stage further by arguing that in ‘uncovering women’s perspectives’ the interviewer needs to shift from ‘information gathering to interaction’, moving beyond facts to subjective feelings, by listening more carefully not only to what is said but what is meant.13 _{When interviewing women we need to learn to listen ‘in}

stereo’, they argue, to women’s dominant and muted channels of thought.14

Although as interviewers we are active participants in the process, we need to be acutely aware of our own agendas, setting aside preconceived structures and interpretations which might directly impact on the interview. We must be vigilant to discrepancies between what is said through the conventions of ordinary social conversation and the meanings that lie beneath. Listening for ‘meta-statements’ or reflections, for silences and for internal consistency, becomes vital.

We close Part II with a piece about an aspect of interviewing which often preoccupies novice interviewers: traumatic remembering. Naomi Rosh White has interviewed Jewish Holocaust survivors and discusses some of the ‘difficulties in telling’ where there is no shared world, no shared values, when words are not enough to describe such horror. In listening for language, as Anderson and Jack and others encourage us to do,15 _words

like ‘cold’ and ‘hungry’ take on different meanings in the setting of a death camp. These meanings can only be guessed at by the interviewer. Indeed some writers, including Elie Wiesel, have suggested that the Holocaust is so traumatic and so utterly removed from ‘normal’ human experience that it can never be spoken about directly, it can only be evoked through silence.16

Listening for silences, as much as for words, becomes central to the interviewing relationship, providing new layers of meaning.

Amongst Holocaust survivors there is a compelling desire to ‘bear witness’ (as there is amongst survivors from the Soviet ‘gulag’ and Central American refugees featured in Part III), and White argues that this ‘shatters the conventional boundaries…and prohibitions against disclosure’. The

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need to speak out to prevent similar attrocities from happening again, forces us to shift our understanding of the relationship between private memory and public memory, where the private takes precedence.17

Ultimately every interview is different and each person brings something unique to the relationship as it evolves. As Beatrice Webb has said: ‘A spirit of adventure, a delight in watching human beings as human beings quite apart from what you can get out of their minds, an enjoyment of the play of your own personality with that of another, are gifts of rare value in the art of interviewing.’18

NOTES

1 For example: P.Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988;C.Morrissey, ‘Why call it oral history? Searching for early use of a generic term’, Oral History Review, 1980, vol. 8, pp. 20–48;C.Silvester (ed.), The Penguin Book of Interviews: An Anthology from 1859 to the Present Day, London, Viking, 1993.

2 An important exception is T.A.Shorzman, A Practical Introduction to Videohistory:

The Smithsonian Institution and Alfred P.Sloan Foundation Experiment, Florida,

Krieger, 1993, which surveys the field. Also Brad Jolly, Videotaping Local History, Nashville, American Association for State and Local History, 1982.

3 A.Seldon and J.Pappworth, By Word of Mouth: ‘Elite’ Oral History, London, Methuen, 1983, surveys this field very effectively. On the challenges of political interviewing see Blee (Chapter 28), and C.Romalis, ‘Political volatility and historical accounts: tiptoeing through contested ground’, Canadian Oral History

Association Journal, 1992, vol. 12, pp. 25–29.

4 For example: R.Perks, Oral History: Talking about the Past, London, The Historical Association, 1995;V.R.Yow, Recording Oral History: A Practical Guide for Social

Scientists, London, Sage, 1994;D.Ritchie, Doing Oral History, New York, Twayne,

1995;M.Hutching, Talking History: A Short Guide to Oral History, Wellington, New Zealand, Bridget Williams Books/Historical Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs, 1993;B.Robertson, Oral History Handbook, third edition, Adelaide, Oral History Association of Australia (South Australia Branch), 1994;P.Hayes, Speak for Yourself, Namibia, Longman, 1992;E.D.Ives, The Tape-

Recorded Interview: A Manual for Field Workers in Folklore and Oral History,

Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1980;E.G.Mishler, Research

Interviewing: Context and Narrative, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press,

1986. Morrissey offers a valuable and amusing blow-by-blow critique of an interview in ‘John Hawkes on tape: The paradox of self-identity in a recorded interview’, International Journal of Oral History, 1985, vol. 6, no. 1.

5 See for example E.Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral

History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992;T.A.C.Royal, Te Haurapa: An Introduction to Researching Tribal Histories and Traditions,

Wellington, New Zealand, Bridget Williams Books/Historical Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs, 1992;and R.Finnegan, Oral Tradition and the

Verbal Arts, London, Routledge, 1991. It is worth adding that an understanding

of these norms has proved equally valuable for researchers working with different cultural groups in the North, see N.North, ‘Narratives of Cambodian refugees: issues in the collection of refugee stories’, Oral History, 1995, vol. 23, no. 2 , pp. 32–39.

Interviewing: introduction 105 interviewing’, in E.M.McMahan and K.Lacey Rogers (eds), Interactive Oral

History Interviewing, Hilldale, N.J., Erlbaum, 1994, pp. 141–161.

7 For example G.E.Evans, ‘Approaches to interviewing’, Oral History, 1973, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 56–71.

8 The US context for oral history and disability is explored by Hirsch (Chapter 18). For the British context see S.Humphries and P.Gordon, Out of Sight: The

Experience of Disability 1900–1950, Plymouth, Northcote, 1993; M.Potts and

R.Fido, A Fit Person To Be Removed, Plymouth, Northcote, 1991.

9 Oral History Association, Evaluation Guidelines, Los Angeles, OHA, 1992; A. Ward, Oral History, Copyright and Ethics, Colchester, Oral History Society, 1995; National Oral History Association of New Zealand, Code of Ethical and Technical

Practice, in Hutching, Talking History, pp. 71–72; Oral History Association of Australia Journal, 1993, vol. 15: special issue on ‘Publicity and privacy: balancing

the interests in oral history’. See also V.R.Yow, ‘Ethics and interpersonal relationships in oral history research’, Oral History Review, 1995, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 51–66; Yow, Recording Oral History, pp. 84–115; A.Lynch, ‘The ethics of interviewing’, Canadian Oral History Association Journal, 1979, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 4–9; and J.Guy and M.Thabane, ‘The Ma-Rashea: a participant’s perspective’, in B.Bozzoli (ed.), Class, Community and Conflict, Johannesburg, Ravan, 1987. On power relations in interviewing see the pieces by Friedlander (Chapter 26) and Blee (Chapter 28).

10 On family interviewing see C.Parekowhai, ‘Korero taku whaea: Talk my Aunt. Learning to listen to Maori women’, Oral History in New Zealand, 1992, no. 4, pp. 1–4; L.Shopes, ‘Using oral history for a family history project’, and T.Harevan, ‘The search for generational memory’, both in D.K.Dunaway and W.K.Baum (eds), Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, second edition, London, Altamira Press, 1996, pp. 231–240 and pp. 241–256; also Oral History

Association of Australia Journal, 1981–2, no. 4: special issue on ‘Family and local

history’. On interviewing friends see M.Zukas, ‘Friendship as oral history: a feminist psychologist’s view’, Oral History, 1993, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 73–79; P.Cotterill, ‘Interviewing women: issues of friendship, vulnerability and power’,

Women’s Studies International Forum, 1992, vol. 15, nos. 5/6, pp. 593–606;

M.Stuart, ‘And how was it for you, Mary? Self, identity and meaning for oral historians’, Oral History, 1993, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 80–83. More generally see J.Stanley, ‘Including the feelings: personal political testimony and self- disclosure’, Oral History, 1996, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 60–67.

11 The issue of interviewing in a second language and through an interpreter is explored in M.Andrews, ‘A monoglot abroad: working through problems of translation’, Oral History, 1995, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 47–50; and North, ‘Narratives of Cambodian refugees’.

12 Whether it is helpful to have a questionnaire or question structure has been much debated. See Thompson, The Voice of the Past, Chapter 7 for a summary; also P.Thompson, ‘Tony Parker: writer and oral historian’, Oral History, 1994, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 64–73.

13 On feminist interviewing see Sangster (Chapter 8) for an overview, and the other essays in the excellent anthology by S.B.Gluck and D.Patai (eds),

Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, London, Routledge, 1991;

also A.Oakley, ‘Interviewing women: a contradiction in terms’, in H.Roberts,

Doing Feminist Research, London, Routledge, 1981, pp. 30–61; R.Edwards,

‘Connecting method and epistemology: a white woman interviewing black women’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 1990, vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 477– 490; J.Scanlon, ‘Challenging the imbalances of power in feminist oral history: developing a take-and-give methodology’, Women’s Studies International

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recording the lives of immigrant women’, Oral History in New Zealand, 1990/ 1, no. 3, pp. 11–13.

14 I.Bertaux-Wiame, ‘The life story approach in the study of internal migration’,

Oral History, 1979, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 26–32, discusses how men and women

reminisce in different ways.

15 R.J.Grele, ‘History and the languages of history in the oral history interview: who answers whose questions and why’, in E.M.McMahan and K.Lacey Rogers (eds), Interactive Oral History Interviewing, Hilldale, N.J., Erlbaum, 1994, pp. 141–161; E.M.McMahan, Elite Oral History Discourse: A Study of Cooperation and

Coherence, Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama, 1989.

16 E.Wiesel, One Generation After, New York, Simon & Shuster, 1970. L.L.Langer,

Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, Newhaven, Yale University Press,

1991, is an essential text on the Holocaust and oral history.

17 For a summary of the public-private debate see A.Thomson, Anzac Memories:

Living with the Legend, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994; and his piece in

Part IV (Chapter 25).

18 B.Webb, My Apprenticeship, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979 (reprint of 1926 edition), p. 411, see also pp. 361–363 on interviewing.

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9

On oral history interviewing