When talk data are about long past events or from cultures that rely more upon the knowledge technologies of orality than those of literacy (see Ong, 2012), additional considerations may come into play. Rather than calling your data oral history, you may speak of it as part of oral tradition. That is, consisting of cultural knowledge such as laws, legends, proverbs, origin myths, and children’s play songs, that have been passed down without having been recorded in writing. The foundational text to consult is Jan Vansina’s (1985) Oral Tradition as History, which provides additional strategies for assessing the messages from the past, such as asking whether maintaining the reliability of these messages has been culturally rewarded, or whether there are material objects, such as treasured heirlooms or marred landscapes, that serve as mnemonic devices.
Psychologists’ studies of memory can also be useful to oral historians – but within limits. Oral historians are interested in memories based in natural settings, be they factories, homes, or battlefields. Most psychologists, however, prefer to study memories created in laboratory settings, where they can control the stimuli to which subjects are exposed. Oral historians are often interested in long-term memories accrued over the years. However, few psychologists study such long-spanning autobiographical memories. In fact, psychological studies of autobiographical memory need not cover years of lived experience. Studies of it can assess how well subjects remember events that might be only a few hours past. (Psychologists distinguish such memory from working memory, which lasts for just the few seconds needed to write down a telephone number.) Thus, relatively few cognitive psychological studies can help us understand particularities of how the more remote past is remembered.
To assess sources, we can factor in these studies’ insights about the broader processes by which memories of personal experiences tend to stay stable or alter. Autobiographical memory researchers have found that memories of events are generally more likely to be accurate when the events are more recent, distinctive, or highly emotionally charged (Bauer, 2007), and when the memories have frequently been retold (Neisser and Libby, 2000). Further, in what’s termed the reminiscence bump, events experienced between the ages of 10 and 30 are more available and reminisced about than others, perhaps because these ages include distinctive and important changes in social roles (see Bauer, 2007). Meanwhile, common errors of memory include hindsight, which makes us believe we always could have foretold what has come to pass, consistency bias, wherein we tend to remember our past selves in ways that make them more predictive of our present ones (see Albright, 1994), and misattribution, wherein we cease to unite information about an event into a whole, and thus confuse one event with another (Schacter, 2001).
As an example, we can consider how co-author Katherine’s mother Johanna once said that she remembered gathering with her family around the radio so as to listen to the first shots of World War II being fired on Poland (see Bischoping, 2014), a distinctive event, but one that was over 30 years past by the time that Johanna told Katherine about it. Johanna’s memory does not entirely make sense, since German radio would hardly have announced a surprise attack as part of its programming. However, it’s possible that she had mixed elements of this event up with a subsequent radio dramatization. Indeed, it is sometimes to an astonishing extent that what narrators report as vivid personal autobiographical memory can turn out to be filled in with media and mass cultural depictions (for example, see Figes, 2008).
Moving beyond errors in memory, Martha Howell’s (2001: 60–8) From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods can be consulted for its excellent overview of historians’ strategy of assessing the accuracy of sources through several criteria. These include trustworthiness (i.e., whether narratives are shaded by vanity, fear, political preferences, and the like), competence (i.e., the term that covers how factors such as individual interests, expertise, and capacity for comprehension can influence accounts), and authority (i.e. whether the writer was an eyewitness to an event or providing a hearsay account). Whether the account is internally consistent and plausible in light of other information is assessed too.
To see how these criteria of competence and authority work in practice, we focus again on Johanna’s not-quite-plausible story of what she had heard on German radio. It makes sense to wonder about Johanna’s competence to understand what she might have heard on the radio: born in 1935, she had been not quite four years old on the day that Germany began its attack. Further, because Katherine had herself heard this story in her childhood, her own competence to understand it can be questioned. Finally, we have the issue of Katherine’s authority in transmitting Johanna’s story second-hand. Although precisely what had been playing on the radio cannot be known, stepping back from that matter, the story can be thought of as offering a vivid and plausible fragment of information about how one German family had understood the importance of the attack on Poland.
For a stronger claim to be made would require additional narrators’ voices, but all that Johanna’s older sister could remember is that they had been away on a northern island, convalescing with whooping cough. When multiple narrators speak to the same events or era, you can consider the criteria discussed above as you pick out their stories’ common thread, a process called triangulation. More specifically, we can use Denzin’s (1989a) labels of data triangulation in instances when cross-checks are made among narrators, across spaces, or over time, and of methodological triangulation when cross-checks are made among kinds of data sources, be they narrators, documents, monuments, mementos, mass graves, or scars. As you triangulate, be explicit about how you are choosing among differing possibilities and how confident your choices are. Alagoa (2001: 100) does so very clearly in explaining that his rule of thumb for working with oral histories of the Okpoama community in Nigeria was to accord greater credence to a narrative of an eyewitness that was corroborated by at least one other narrator and that was plausible in relation to other known information, with ties broken by looking for the greatest consensus.
The Case of Testimonio
A specific genre of oral history to which the positivist paradigm fits less than easily is that of testimonio, originating in the Liberation Theology-informed social movements of Latin America. In testimonio, ‘[t]ruth is summoned in the cause of denouncing a present situation of exploitation and oppression or in exorcising and setting aright official history’ (Yúdice, 1991: 17). In this definition, we see that testimonio is decidedly positivist, laying claim to truth with a capital ‘t.’ Readers may be leery of putting this label on testimonio, because positivism and related Enlightenment sciences have been used to promulgate other so-called Truths that now appear repellent, such as racial categorization schemes.
However, Hardt and Negri (2000: 155–6) turn this concern on its head, arguing that Enlightenment means of seeking Truth become quite palatable when they can be put to the ends of justice. This formulation displaces the standpoint of positivism’s knower from one that is objective and neutral to one that is simultaneously objective and avowing an ethical and political position. In one way, this change in standpoint works. When vast ominous silences have been produced by the destruction of (or failure to create) archives, the fabrication of data, or harm to would-be narrators, a positivist faith in incrementally discovering truth by relying on the sources that are most plausible ‘in light of other information’ appears naïve. But, this formulation has built-in contradictions, which come most to the fore when narrators’ testimonies come under close scrutiny. When narrators are speaking to extraordinarily painful experiences, such gentle doubts as we earlier cast on Johanna’s memory of hearing the first shots fired on Poland could well seem heartless, undermining, and unethical. And yet, truth claims in positivism depend on rigorous scrutiny of their bases.