Hi, I’m Sharon Clancy, and I want to talk about oral history.

So I’m both a researcher and an oral historian who’s really interested in how we shape history, by the stories that are told, and whose voices were allowed to hear.

So I want to think about oral history as my approach of that of being a backward traveller.

Really, since its inception is a specific approach to recording history in the ’50s and ’60s, oral history has been focussed on reclaiming the past, a history from below ethos.

Importantly, trying to give voice to the dispossessed of the oppressed, the historically silent, offering people previously unrecorded a real place in history.

So it’s challenged official histories, and has questioned the neutrality of history making, and who gets to make that history?

There is also a danger, of course, in thinking that this kind of testimony is somehow natural and unmediated, so we do have to think about the interviewer and the interviewee, and their position in relation to one another, and the power that one or the other holds.

We have to not assume that ordinary people and inverted commas are instinctively in possession of the truth.

So we need to acknowledge that, although it may be natural, telling and writing stories, is, as Riesman says, invariably situated and strategic, it takes place in institutional and cultural context.

So oral history for me, as an important role to play, in emphasising the importance of society, and the situated context, over a celebration of the idiosyncrasies of the individual.

So I think is important to locate life, history, in contradistinction to life’s story, with the researcher and the person giving the testimony, the storyteller, who are working collaboratively, to achieve an intertextual, and an intercontextual account.

A Steph, Lola stated, a focus on narrative challenges the concept of the atomised individual, and replaces it with a concept of a person enmeshed in, and produced within, webs of social relations.

The process of remembering for all of us requires us to filter and interpret our experiences.

The stories we tell cannot be regarded, therefore, as simply neutral, natural, and unmediated, or a kind of simple truth.

And, as Hes Bieber and Levy said, an individual story is narrated through memory.

This means that their recollection of their experiences, and how they give meaning to those experiences, is about more than accuracy.

It is also a process of remembering.

And as they remember, they filter and interpret.

Our stories are not always liberating in themselves.

Sometimes our stories constrainers.

Bounded as we are, by the powerful discourses of a culture, and unconconscious processes are wanted to appease, or please, as Wes said in 2016.

And this applies, too, in my mind, to the role of the researcher.

We are constructed as much by our own experience as researchers, as the people we are interviewing.

At best we work collaboratively and interactively, as interviewer and interviewee, to produce an account, which is shaped by our twin experiences of history and identity.

And this is really pertinent to my own use of oral history approaches, in which the human story is parallel paramide, a person’s history, the biography, the gender, social class race, and ethnicity, all of those are important in this setting.

George Ewer Evans, the oral historian whom I mentioned earlier, has been a significant influence on my thinking and methodology, and he described oral history this way.

He said, A move into the past gets the best start from the shore ground of known and felt facts about one’s immediate environment, and the main task, and probably the most difficult one. Is to help the backward traveller, not so much know the past as feel it, for history is not the mechanical acquisition of knowledge about the past, it is more than anything else, the imaginative reconstruction of it.

And that’s been my absolute watchword.

Evans explores two means of gaining access to the past, travelling inwardly, or feeling the past, rather than just knowing it.

From one’s own immediate environment, as he puts it, and the process of engaging in imaginative or narrative reconstruction.

I’ve been helped a lot in my thinking in this area, by the work of Lyndon West, who described the ways in which people make, and are not just made by history, and has used narratives as a means of engaging, as he put it, the psychosocial, historical, and educational imagination.

So we have to be reflexive, and we have to think as researchers, be aware of our own impact on the process and the outcomes of the research project.

This has been really central to my approaches as an interviewer.

Bruce McFarlane in 2010 described a process of researching with integrity.

His argument was that real research is about the stuff of human life, with all that entails hope and disappointment, loyalty, and betrayal, triumph, and tragedy, and it cannot be formulaic, ’cause it has to be responsive, reflexive, and the result of a co production between the researcher and the interviewee.

This is really relevant to my own use of all history approaches, as I’ve said.

So, this focus on narrative is all important.

Arthur Buckner, communication theorists, suggests, as a counter to scientific rationalism and abstraction, which looks for generalisable laws, and a syntax for governing our actions, which isn’t always there.

He says, We are not scientists seeking laws that govern our behaviour.

We are storytellers seeking meanings that help us cope with our circumstances.

Personal narratives are not so much academic as they are existential, reflecting our desire to grasp, or seize the possibilities of meaning, which is what gives life its imaginative and its poetic qualities.

Buckner argues that narrative connects the social sciences, to literature, and to history, bringing all those disciplines together, the process of imagining and reconstructing the past to give meaning to the present, life’s imaginative and poetic qualities, as he puts it, and this enables us to better understand ourselves, both individually and collectively.

As someone who studied English literature, I have a focus and interest in many literature, literary works, and I think of the playwright, Arthur Miller.

He argued in his analysis of the tragedy, of tragedy generally, called Tragedy and the Common Man, that the human condition should not be conceived, either purely psychologically, with an emphasis on the individual, or sociologically, focussing on context and social relations only.

Miller was talking specifically about tragedy, but his broader point, about evincing, quote, the heart and spirit of the average man, is absolutely relevant to moral history making.

Raymond Williams takes Miller’s point further.

In his work, Modern Tragedy, Williams argues against a concept of tragedy, which was based on Aristotelian principles, which focusses on the heroic individual, almost always conceived as the king’s or king.

He argues that it tends to place too great an emphasis, both on the individual floor than on the social situation, and it decouples the individual from the social order.

The class based structures that we all live with him, and their impact on his or her life by focussing on private fate.

In a broader sense, the individualisation of the human experience, and a growing emphasis on smaller scale life narratives, has seen a dramatic rise in the last century, and into the 21st century in Western society in particular.

Bowens described this process as a result of postmodernity, which allows, on the one hand, for a critique of our political and social structures, but, on the other, can leave us feeling increasingly fragmented.

He says, post modernity, seen as a critique of neoliberal capitalist structures, sees the individual as increasingly fragmented, and it has developed a strong critique of all the forces that have shown us that we are not nearly as autonomous as we think, including language and power.

But this process has also left us stranded, as fragmented individuals, without much sense of a direction, forever deconstructing realities, but rarely reconstructing them with much success.

As Ivor Goodson stated, in the life of the rise of the life, I can’t speak, the, no.

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So as Ivor Goodson stated, in the rise of the life narrative, our increasing fragmentation marks a shift away from what we call the grand narratives which define the twentieth century, those great public debates in which large numbers of people were engaged, about religion and science, about political ideology, freedom of trade, the nature and possibility of a well ordered society.

The impact of two world wars, with the deaths and repression of millions of people, and the use of technological and material, I advanced to wage warfare, and perpetrate mass slaughter, left many people unable to see a meaningful connection between material and scientific progress and a better moral order.

As Goodson argued, this prefigured a fall from grace of them, the grand narratives, causing us to lose not only scope and aspiration, but also our underpinning faith in their general capacity, as Goodson puts it, to guide. Or shape our destiny.

Goods can argue that this left space for a rising life story narratives, presaging, the age of small narratives, which leaves us less able, and therefore arguably less willing, to tackle the big issues of collective action, and focusses on the small scale, the narrowly defined, and potentially the less expansive and imaginative.

He said, Into the vortex, vortex left after the collapse of the grand narratives, we see the emergence of another kind of narrative, infinitely smaller in scope, often individualised, the personal life story.

It reflects a dramatic change in the scale of human belief and aspiration.

Alongside these small narratives we also see a return to older, more fundamentalist precepts.

I think we’re seeing this very clearly at the moment.

He went on to say, in our current individualised society, our art, culture, and politics increasingly reflect, I have moved, highly individualised, or special interest narratives, which often draw on the literature of therapy, and personal and self development.

Goodson basically suggests that once the link between individual story lines and collective aspirations for political engagement is broken, that we enter the epoch of small narratives, the world of individualised life politics, of discourse and house and deconstruction would become easily isolated as the objects of self help and therapy.

We experience a kind of cultural encirclement, we become estranged from other interest groups, atomised and rendered responsible for our own subordination, our own potential isolation and loneliness.

And once we become socially isolated, decoupled from our collective understanding of ourselves, from our class, from our families, our attitudes, or dispositions, and tastes, we can become pathologized, and our sense of failure, when that occurs, becomes individualised, and we become responsible.

Raymond Williams argued consistently.

That culture is ordinary, that culture does not have to be great, beautiful, or sublime, and it is not confined, as in tragedy, to the experience of the nobility, or to kings and queens.

Nor is its popular aspect more commercial, necessarily utilitarian, bleak, or reduced.

Culture is, in William’s definition, not just about beauty, or that which transcends the everyday, but is part of the the fabric of everyday life, and the lived experience of all people, and not simply a special kind of people, cultivated people.

They argue that there is a central point between culture as the best, or culture as the everyday, and that working class culture, with its rich associational life, was the best basis for a future society.

He said, there is a distinct working class way of life.

I think this way of life, with its emphasis of neighbourhood, mutual obligation, and common betterment, as expressed in the great working class political and industrial institutions, is, in fact, the best basis for any future English society.

As for the arts and learning, they are, in a real sense, a national inheritance, which is, or should be, available to everyone.

So I think we see in William’s work, this juncture, of all the points I’ve been trying to make about all history, as a celebration, of all aspects of culture, of all aspects of people’s lives.

A sense that it is a reclaiming of history, which is so often only interested in the great in inverted commas, the rich, the powerful, the lords, the ladies, the kings, the queens.

This is about reclaiming history.

And I think this is an important point to finish on, perhaps we’re in that moment, that very juncture at the moment, where we have to recognise the importance of life history.

How situated we are, as well as our individual life stories.

At this conjuncture of COVID 19, which has caused, called so many, aspects of our normal functioning society, if we can call it that. Into question.

So, maybe, we need to think again about the power of all history. And of looking to be the best possible backward travellers.

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