Oral History Theory (review)

Oral History Theory is a book of large ambitions. It seeks to winnow through the increasingly large and varied literature on oral history and the body of theory that underlies and defines the practice in order to “provide a user friendly guide to [that] theory” (viii). That Lynn Abrams is successful in so many ways is a testament to her wide and astute reading of works based upon oral history interviews in both historical and cultural studies, various social sciences, and newer fields such as performance studies (although, curiously enough and probably of some interest to an older generation of oral historians, not much folklore), as well as her ability to draw from them the theoretical implications embedded in such a wide range of methodologies. While I have some reservations about the details of the story as presented here and some considerations of where we can go now, based upon the conversation that Abrams has initiated, none of that should diminish the achievement.

A good part of the accessibility of Oral History Theory lies in its organization. Abrams starts her analysis with the conscious attempt to move the discourse from projects to process—the necessary first step toward a discussion of theory—and by trying to pull together the wide range of definitions and practices that define oral history. She then traces out the transformation in thinking about oral history and fieldwork practice that came in the wake of the movement among oral historians from a drive to accumulate data to a concern with the creation of texts (from information to culture). Next, based on many sources, but heavily reliant on the work of Alessandro Portelli, Abrams outlines the unique characteristics of oral history as a genre and follows with chapters concerned with the ways the presentation of self, subjectivity, memory, narrative, performance, and power have been theorized and the consequences for our practice and our thinking. Whether or not these discrete chapters cover all of our concerns is an open question. To my mind, maybe because I have become invested in the issue, the absence of a chapter on conversation, and the centrality of conversational dialogue in all of the various aspects of oral history fieldwork and theory, is a problem. It is all the more a problem because her comments on conversation scattered throughout the book are quite interesting and thoughtful.

Oral History Theory does not seek to develop any particular theory of oral history. Its unique strength is Abrams’ ability to clearly bring to the fore a variety of middle-level theories to show how oral historians have become, over the past half century, more and more conscious of the theoretical implications of their work, and to bring to their attention what theory can tell them about the nature of the documents that are produced by the confrontation of interviewer and interviewee. Thus, the book lays the foundation for a more elaborate parsing of our theoretical understandings, often much more implicit than explicit.

To Abrams, as to most of us, the key moment of transformation in our thinking about oral history occurred in the 1970s in what she describes as the move from social history to cultural history, which was also a shift from a concern with what was said to how it was said, what I have described elsewhere as a transformation from a concern with data to a concern with text; a shift from a focus on the object of investigation to the subject of the investigation, from history to historiography, from what happened then and there to what the here and now thinks happened in the then and there or remembers of what happened (Thomas L. Charlton et al., eds., Handbook of Oral History [New York: AltaMira Press, 2006], 43–103).

Abrams is on target, but with two considerations: First, it is important to keep in mind the complexity of the tradition out of which the practice of oral history emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, in particular the debates over history as...