Portelli thus came to the realization that oral histories possessed an untapped potential to explain how the longings and politics of the present shaped memories and narratives of times past. In pressing oral histories into the service of envisioning the past, positivist historians had been discarding as errors the very meanings that Portelli proposed to cherish. It is important to note that with this radical suggestion, he was not taking a purely constructionist position of the type that Trouillot (1995: 4–6) says would call all accounts of the past equal fictions, and thereby depoliticize them. Rather, in contextualizing his analysis with the newspaper report that set Luigi Trastulli’s death in 1949, Portelli’s constructionism was firmly anchored in realism.
Since Portelli’s study, narrative researchers with oral history data in hand choose to what extent to focus on the past versus on its present-day meanings and the social processes that influence them. Sometimes the data will almost choose for you, as is our reading of Johnson’s (2005) analysis of an oral history-based report on New Zealand’s Whanganui River. She describes a passage of the report as follows:
[it] offers many ‘reasons’ for the lack of fish in the rivers such as sewage discharge, farm run-off, sedimentation and so on. Any discussion of possibly supernatural or non-scientific explanations is excluded from this list. Yet turn the page and under another heading, ‘sacred waters’, we are told of the ‘moving accounts’ offered concerning the river’s purifying and healing powers. (2005: 266)
With no unified ‘real’ truth about the Whanganui River’s history in sight, the jarring differences in the narrators’ ontologies cried out to be investigated. But in other instances, as Kennedy argues (1998), the two choices can be complementary. Kennedy shows how oral histories with lesbian narrators can both establish a fact about the past, such as that a working-class lesbian community had been publicly visible in Buffalo, New York in the 1930s, and reveal how narrations were configured by the myth that no one could have been openly homosexual in the US until the 1969 Stonewall demonstrations.
While realist historians treat memories as though they are retrieved from some haphazard, corruptible archive of the brain, constructionists’ understandings of memory align with more recent work in cognitive psychology, in which the act of remembering is posited to entail a creative process of reconstruction, carried out by a generative, ever-changing brain in response to circumstance and social context (Brockmeier, 2010). To explore how reconstructions of the past change in changing contexts has proven an effective strategy for illuminating this. Portelli’s ‘The Death of Luigi Trastulli’ essay can also be read as an exemplar of this strategy because it compares what had been documented in 1949 to how it was reconstructed by numerous narrators 30 years later.
This strategy can be extrapolated in a number of ways, for instance, to focus on the history of multiple reconstructions of the past that are made by a single individual. An exemplar here is Curaming and Aljunied’s (2013) perceptive study of the public statements made by Jibin Arula, who was the sole survivor of a group of mutinying Filipino military recruits who were massacred by their trainers. Curaming and Aljunied emphasize that the statements Arula made between 1968 and 2010 were largely consistent, especially those depicting the massacre and his life as tragic struggles; in realist terms, he could be considered a generally reliable narrator. Arula’s overall reliability makes the instances of variations in his statements all the more interesting. At one point, he emphasized that the mutiny had been class-based; at another, that it was based on the recruits having been Muslim; and at yet others, he expressed remorse for having told anyone what he had gone through. Arula’s shifting reconstructions, Curaming and Aljunied propose, could be related to the emergence of a myth that Christians in the Philippines had long been attempting genocide against Muslims, and to an escalating and deadly inter-religious conflict.
Other strategies for examining how the meanings of the past are inflected by the social pay less heed to individual-level memories. More attention is instead given to collective memory, a tremendously influential concept developed by French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs (1950). Collective memory, Halbwachs theorized, transcends and extends beyond the memories of the individual members of a group, and is profoundly affected by social location. A strategy derived from this conceptualization is to map out and seek to understand the divides in collective memory and, hence, between the groups involved in remembering. Carole McGranahan’s (2010) research on the role of Tibetan women in battles against China in the 1950s and onward is an excellent illustration. Although McGranahan consistently found Tibetan men to deny that women had any role in these battles, several Tibetan women narrated that they had indeed fought. McGranahan interpreted this difference in relation to patriarchal views that women’s fighting emasculates men and to Buddhist views that menstrual blood is a dangerous pollutant. It should be noted that this strategy can be applied to investigate the differences between researchers’ and research participants’ interpretations of the past, an issue that has especially interested feminist oral historians who are uneasy about privileging their own interpretation over participants’ (Arat, 2003; Sangster, 1994). We will be taking this up in Chapter 4.
Another common strategy for oral historians is to explore the dynamic between a state’s official history, i.e., its public narrative of its history, which it bolsters with commemorations, museums, monuments, and so forth, and a multiplicity of possible histories from below. Such histories are based on memories of the everyday lives of disenfranchised groups or – in postcolonial contexts – of subalterns who fall outside the power structures of both the colony they inhabit and their colonizers’ homeland. In some instances, such as Johnson’s (2005) Whanganui River example, mentioned above, a history from below unambiguously contests an official account: there is no singular past here, but rather, pasts that are plural, local, and contingent. (For an accessible discussion of the postmodern vision of multiple histories to which this is related, we recommend Keith Jennings’s (2003) Re-Thinking History.) But, in other instances, dominant narratives are so constraining that histories from below do not emerge fully fledged so much as in ambivalent fragments, contradictions, and silences, for which an analyst should be alert (Jennings, 2004: Loh, 2013; Stoler and Strassler, 2006). If the relations of power to knowledge and to what can be expressed interest you, then so will the Part III discussions of discourse analysis strategies, which can be applied to oral history data.
Following from the formulation of Halbwachs and those working in his tradition, when autobiographical memories turn out to differ from official history, a useful tactic may be to examine whether families, distinctive for combining an intergenerational structure with passionate bonds and day-to-day transmission of memories, shape how the differences are negotiated (see Assmann, 2008; Erll, 2011; Mason, 2008). In Dhooleka Sarhadi Raj’s (2000) valuable formulation, this might be better expressed in terms of the transmission of ignorance, than of memory. Studying Hindu families in Delhi whose first generations had arrived as refugees from Pakistan at the time of British India’s Partition, Raj shows how the refugee generation avoided speaking of the hardships of their displacement. She traces this generation’s strategy of deliberate forgetting to its desire for successive generations to fall in with India’s official history, which depicts state formation as a glorious moment of independence. Although Raj’s example is of a generation forcibly aligning the memories it transmits with what official history would endorse, such is not always the case. In other settings, as in post-World War II Germany, family loyalties and affections have fostered narratives in which family members are glowingly painted in terms that contradict an official history critical of the Third Reich (Welzer et al., 2001). Within families, it may be the weak, those positioned as most easily disturbed by harsh truths, who paradoxically are positioned as holding the greatest power over what is narrated in other settings.
Textbox 2.2: A Summary of Strategies for Knowing the Present through Oral Histories
In any use of a constructionist paradigm:
Explain how you’ve addressed the likely gaps between the meanings narrators have experienced, and the narratives they’ve provided.
Choose