Elite Oral History Discourse: A Study of Cooperation and Coherence
192
Elite Oral History Discourse: A Study of Cooperation and Coherence
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Overview
Over the past thirty years, oral history has found increasing favor among social scientists and humanists, with scholars “rediscovering” the oral interview as a valuable method for obtaining information about the daily realities and historical consciousness of people, their histories, and their culture. One primary issue is the question of how the communicative performances of the interviewer and narrator jointly influence the interview. Using methods of conversation/discourse analysis, the author describes the collaborative processes that enable interviewers and narrators to interact successfully in the interview context.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817389666 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2015 |
| Series: | Studies in Rhetoric and Communication |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 280 KB |
About the Author
Eva M. McMahan is a professor emeritus of communication studies at James Madison University. She is the coeditor of Interactive Oral History Interviewing.Ronald J. Grele is the former director of the Columbia University Oral History Research Office. He is the author of Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History and editor of Subjectivity and Multiculturalism in Oral History.
Read an Excerpt
Elite Oral History Discourse
A Study of Cooperation and Coherence
By Eva M. McMahan
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1989 the University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8966-6
CHAPTER 1
The Oral History Interview as an Interpretive Communicative Event
(01) R: Okay, let me ((uh)) ask you about the relationships with other agencies then. ((uh)) To what extent were you directly or indirectly part of the National Security Council? I'm particularly interested in whether there was a special relationship there, of course, with Bill Bundy and Mac Bundy.
(02) E: ((uh uh)) Well, of course, you couldn't avoid a direct relationship between Bill Bundy and Mac Bundy.
(03) R: Right.
(04) E: But I don't know that this really affected the way things were handled. We worked very closely with State and had representatives from State in the Pentagon, ((uh)) for various meetings, although more often I was over at State.
R: [uh huh]
E: =In connection with these problems we got to know the ((uh)) AID people as well as the State Department people rather well because ... always worked closely together ((uh)) the military assistance and the economic assistance groups. We tried to mesh them as closely as we could the ((uh)) objectives sometimes differed, country by country.
(05) R: In what way?
(06) E: Well ((uh)) I thought of that when I said it. Now I've got to come up with an example.
I begin this chapter with this excerpt in order to illustrate my belief that oral history interviewing is most appropriately viewed as an interpretive communicative event. By that I mean the oral interview method involves the interview participants actively coping with the communicative performances of self and other. In this excerpt, the interviewee eloquently illustrates this performance by saying, "I thought of that when I said it. Now I've got to come up with an example." Throughout this book I will turn to oral history discourse as the primary object of scrutiny, thereby demonstrating how oral historians can add to their understanding of the oral interview method as an interpretive communicative process.
My purpose in this chapter is to lay the groundwork for subsequent discourse analyses by explaining the communicative features of the oral interview method when viewed within a hermeneutical or interpretive framework. The chapter contains an explanation of the nature of historical understanding vis-à-vis philosophical hermeneutics, an examination of the communicative experience of the oral history interview when viewed as a hermeneutical situation, a discussion of oral history discourse as rational action, and an explanation of the constraints that operate in oral history interviewing.
Philosophical Hermeneutics, Historical Understanding, and the Oral History Interview
Strictly speaking, philosophical hermeneutics refers to the science of interpretation. The following discussion, however, is based on the "new hermeneutics," growing out of the works of philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Martin Heidegger, and Paul Ricoeur. Adoption of this paradigm as a basis for understanding oral history involves the acceptance of a nontraditional approach toward interpreting the meaning of historical phenomena.
The traditional approach, exemplified in the works of E. D. Hirsh, views the "true" meaning of a work — such as a historical text — as residing within the intentions of the author of the text. The claim is that "while the importance of any work may vary with time and within different interpretive contexts, the one underlying meaning of the work does not change. The meaning of the text — which, on this account, is the author's willed meaning — is said to be self-identical, determinate, and reproducible (that is, sharable rather than private)." To interpret the meaning of the text, therefore, requires that historians be "objective" and eliminate all prejudices associated with their present understanding of the phenomenon. The goal is to reorient oneself back in time to the context in which the text was originated. By so doing, the historian is able to "discover the true or intended meaning" of the phenomenon — what was meant by the author.
Philosophical hermeneutics rejects this traditional paradigm of historical understanding because of the "ontological primacy" it gives to human historicity: "the historicity of the historian's interpretation is one of the necessary pre-conditions of his hermeneutic understanding. ... There is no neutral standpoint outside of history upon which the historian could found himself."
Here, three presuppositions of hermeneutic theory are pertinent. First, "the oral historian must realize that the interpretation of any historic phenomenon is always performed within the universe of linguistic possibilities, and that these linguistic possibilities as performed mark out the historicality of human experience." Human experience, hence human understanding, are temporally and culturally bound by the linguistic possibilities available to members of a given culture, for example, oral historians and respondents. The term linguistic possibilities refers to the diverse forms that language assumes in its diachronic development. It is through the linguistic possibilities that humans experience and understand their existence.
Second, "the interpretation of a historical phenomenon always is guided by the biases that an interpreter has at a specific moment in time. When such biases, as they induce meanings of a historical phenomenon, fail to provide direction toward what the phenomenon actually means for the interpreter's own culture, they must be reformulated."
Third, "an act of interpretation must always be concerned directly with the historical phenomenon itself, e.g., not with an interviewee's intended meaning, but with what the intended meaning is about. Because any understanding of a historical phenomenon varies over time due to the linguistic possibilities that interpreters perform when signifying the phenomenon's supposed meaning, all interpretations of the phenomenon are to a certain extent subjective"; for as Gadamer reveals, "understanding is not so much a method by means of which the enquiring mind approaches some selected object and turns it into objective knowledge, as something of which a prior condition is its being situated within a process of tradition."
From this viewpoint, the historicity of human experience precludes the possibility of the view of historical understanding put forth by traditionalists, where "truth" can be discovered by identifying the author's or the agent's intended meaning. On the contrary, historians/interpreters are constrained by their historicity in that "every putative re-cognition of a text or a pattern of behavior is really a new and different cognition of which the interpreter's own historicity is a constitutive part." As Ebeling observes, the nature of interpretation is "to say the same thing in a different way and, precisely by virtue of saying it in a different way, to say the same thing. If by way of pure repetition, we were to say today the same thing that was said 2,000 years ago, we would only be imagining that we were saying the same thing, while actually we would be saying something quite different." Hence, "a generation will not only understand itself differently from the way a past generation understood itself, it will also understand that past generation differently from the way the past generation understood itself."
According to philosophical hermeneutics, then, the process of interpretation that occurs in oral history is manifested in the communicative performances of the interactants. The interpretative acts of thinking and speaking signify the meaning of the linguistic possibilities within the particular communication context. Historical understanding of data generated from an oral history interview must be predicated on an understanding of what occurs during the interview as the interactants negotiate the meanings of their lived-through experiences through their speech performances. Grele concurs, noting that "the documents [oral historians] produce are artifacts of the time of their creation, not the period under discussion." Moreover, those data must be regarded as the joint intellectual products of interviewer and interviewee.
The Communicative Experience of the Oral History Interview
As defined earlier, oral history is a conversation with a person whose life experience is regarded as memorable. This conversation, however, cannot be regarded as comparable to other documentary modes of inquiry. This is because the oral interview is a form of inquiry in which the evidence originates in the act of oral, face-to-face communication. The oral history interview is the joint intellectual product of a process wherein understanding is aided through speech and counterspeech. It is the intervention of the historian qua interviewer that serves as the impetus for the production of such historical data. The historian is the catalyst for as well as a participant in the creation of the historical record.
The most singular characteristic of an oral history, and by far its most significant for the historian as both creator and user, is its creation through the intervention of the historian. ... An oral history, unlike an autobiography, and unlike oral traditions, would not exist without the active intervention of the historian. It is a document created as a result of the interests, questions, values, ambitions, ideas and drive of the historian. The story, the tale, the explanation, of course, exist without the historian, but the record and its particular form exist only through the active agency of the historian interviewer.
Thus, contrary to Hans Jonas's claim that "historical understanding has only the one-sided speech of the past," oral history as an investigative form provides the entry point or wedge into historical understanding that, like present understanding, is aided by both speech and counterspeech. The result is "a different kind of text, based to be sure upon the stories we have been told but elaborated upon under our questioning." The process by which that unique text is created is the communicative experience of the oral history interview. In order to elucidate the features of this communicative process, certain presuppositions derived from an interpretive orientation toward human communication must be presented. The question to be answered is this: What does it mean to conceptualize the synchronic interview event as an open system? To characterize the oral history interview as an open system means that the elements of the face-to-face interchange are related in such a way that the system cannot be understood by analyzing its discrete elements alone. Rather, there is a complementary relationship between the whole and its parts wherein "The anticipated understanding of the whole is to be complemented and deepened by means of a better understanding of the parts; and yet, it is only within the light of the whole that the parts can play their clarifying roles." So it is with understanding a communicative event as an open system. Such a characterization implies that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, that the parts exist in an ongoing synergistic relationship, that the interactants engage in a process of reciprocal influence, and that their goals, be they shared or individualized, can be reached through a variety of paths that will be discovered while in the act of communicating. In other words, the synchronization of the speech performances by the actors calls all of these elements into play in light of the whole and vice versa.
In addition, the interview as an open system must be understood as developmental or evolutionary. There are two senses of development that are pertinent. The first pertains to the transactions that occur between interviewers and interviewees. Here the development or evolution simultaneously occurs within two message dimensions: (1) the content of the discourse, or what is said about the topic; and (2) the relationship dimension, or that which is expressed about how each individual is regarded by the other. This multidimensional process is conveyed simultaneously through verbal and nonverbal cues and continuously evolves during the course of an encounter. Indeed, just as one cannot walk in the same river twice, so the interactants cannot cover the same propositional and relational ground twice. Instead, they build on their experiences. In this way, all communicative experiences, including the oral history interview, are evolutionary or developmental in nature.
Because so much of the relational development in oral communication is conveyed nonverbally (e.g., voice tone or pitch, body language), an understanding of this developmental feature as it occurs in interviews must be predicated on the interviewer's deliberate attempt to capture that relational development and to convey same to subsequent users of the data. This can be accomplished through the use of audio/video recording, through note taking on the part of the interviewer, and through noting the nonverbal cues for the record. Such information can serve as a partial foundation for eventual judgments about the quality of the data as historical evidence.
The second sense of development or evolution that is pertinent to this discussion of the oral history interview pertains to the hermeneutical relationship between historian and respondent as they seek to probe the lived-through experience of the informant. That hermeneutical relationship is understood as a dialectical structure. The fundamental dialectic is between creativity and tradition wherein "the social reconstruction of reality is seen to involve an interplay of individual and socially constituted processes and contexts." Even in the synchronic moment of communication, there is the dialectical relationship between tradition and creativity for both participants. In that instance, the tradition is the "happening" of the episode between self and other (the interlocutors); the creativity occurs as the interactants transcend the constraints of tradition. There is a "fusion of horizons" that, in turn, becomes the basis for the next episode of the encounter. The episodes of the interview, therefore, provide the opportunity for the interactants to develop, or to transform, or to "fuse" their interpretations; and by so doing, they create a historical tradition of the experience itself. This is because "understanding is circular and not linear, since understanding is necessarily situated, and as the situation changes, so does the understanding (a change in understanding bringing about a change in the situation)."
Consequently, the historian as creator and user of oral history interview data should be sensitive to the systemic nature of face-to-face, oral communication. For example, as a participant in the communication process, the interviewer must try to be sensitive to the particular synergistic relationships that constitute each synchronic moment as well as to the underlying dialectical structure of the dialogue. One way to tap this complexity would be to conduct debriefing sessions with the interviewees in which the topic would be the lived-through experience of the interview. Here both historian and respondent would listen to or view the taped session in order to articulate their perceptions of what was happening between them. In addition, users of the data must try to preserve the complexity of the communicative event. Such a goal can be accomplished through the use of audio recordings in conjunction with the written transcriptions. In fact, there is no justification whatsoever for considering the written transcription to be equivalent to the interview process. Such action transforms the product into a phenomenon that is antithetical to the essence of oral history as an open, developmental system wherein historian and respondent jointly create a historical record.
The notion of joint creation stems from the view "that there is more to communicating than mere behavior exchange and the transmission of messages in some code." In the synchronic interview event, there are two levels at which this joint intellectual effort, or joint construction of reality, takes place. The most basic level is the interaction situation itself. Generally, such explicit construction of reality would focus on the purpose of the interview, the time allotted for interaction, the use of recording equipment, legal concerns, and so on. Implicit in this construction process would be the situational identities of both parties, the interpersonal relationship between the two (e.g., the immediate social relations based on variables such as race, gender, and status), and the situational and cultural constraints applicable to the oral interview such as rules of turn-taking and topic selection. As Rommetveit explains, "We are ... speaking on the premises of the listener, and listening on the premises of the speaker. And we are engaged in all these activities under conditions of variant, though most often institutionally taken-for-granted or personally familiar I-you coordinates of human interaction." All of these elements will remain implicit, or taken for granted, until either party makes them the focus of the interaction. The second level of reality construction pertains to discourse about the interview topic. Through their communicative performances the interactants construct, coordinate, and negotiate their perceptions of the topic of conversation as well as their perceptions of the communicative performances that take place during the interview. Turning again to the excerpt that begins this chapter, certain expectations that govern the interaction situation itself are made explicit by the interviewee's commentary, "I thought of that when I said it, now I've got to come up with an example." In other words, the respondent anticipates that a particular type of answer will result in the need for further elaboration through an example. The interviewer confirms that expectation by asking for such a response. In addition, the discourse itself is topically oriented. Hence both parties engage in focused discussion until a new topic is introduced.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Elite Oral History Discourse by Eva M. McMahan. Copyright © 1989 the University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Ronald J. Grele,Preface,
Acknowledgments,
Transcription Notation System,
1. The Oral History Interview as an Interpretive Communicative Event,
2. Achieving Cooperation and Coherence in the Single Role of Information Elicitor,
3. Achieving Cooperation and Coherence in the Dual Roles of Information Elicitor and Assessor,
4. Storytelling in Oral History as Collaborative Production,
5. Communication-Related Issues for Oral Historians,
Notes,
Glossary,
Bibliography,
Index,
Interviews
Scholars and students of rhetoric, communication studies, and discourse analysis.