Articles with the keyword cultural construction
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Reflections on the Practice of Oral History: Retrieving what we can from an earlier critique
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 2007 32(4): 11-23.
Abstract
Oral history research as an academic discipline emerged in the 1940s and 1950s; this article explores its development and continuing challenges. During its first decades, the main focus was on the production of documents and new information, especially on the lives of people previously ignored by historians. a new perspective emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, when the oral history interview was reconceptualized as a dialogically constructed text, rather than a factual document. The interview is also discussed as a public and performative event, and as a blending and negotiation of individual and collective remembering. The author emphasizes the complex and creative relationship between history and collective memory. oral history is defined as a conversational narrative created by the interaction of the interviewer and the interviewee and determined by linguistic, social and ideological structures. Finally, the contemporary challenges of oral history are discussed. The practice of oral history is moving to the stage of internet and digitalization, while oral historians are participating in the actual debate on colonization and “social death”.
Keywords collective memory, conversational narrative, cultural construction, dialogic interview, intersubjectivity, oral history research