Entreverse. Teoría y metodología práctica de las fuentes orales ed. by Miren Llona González (review)

As the use of oral sources grows in stature as a legitimate foundation for historical, anthropological, and social research, editor Miren Llona addresses in this book a still prevalent and troubling lack of rigor and method, not only in the conducting of the interviews but also in the use and analysis of remembrance and memory. A Spanish-language oral history work published in 2012, this book focuses on theory and methodological practices in oral history and is a promising reference for current and future practitioners in the Spanish-speaking world of oral history.

In a critical and self-reflecting fashion, the preface provides a glimpse of the challenges confronting oral historians. It addresses a major reticence among contemporary historians and social scientists due to the desolate panorama of the teaching of the use of oral sources. While the book mostly explores experiences in the Iberian peninsula, the concerns addressed and solutions proposed shall be well appreciated elsewhere. Enriched by a carefully balanced selection of multidisciplinary contributions, this book openly confronts a common point of contention against the use of oral sources—namely, the fact that they often rely on emotions and subjectivity as a framework, which seems to compromise seriously the possibility of an objective, valid, and reliable study of the past. According to Llona, using oral sources is about confronting what Jacques Derrida has labeled homohegemony—that is, the hegemony of the homogeneous.

While the postmodern critique has debunked traditional historiography’s overbearing pretension of its objectivity, the acknowledgment of oral history as a useful and complementary discipline depends on developing with rigor and clarity the theory and methodological practice that are required to treat memory as a valid object of study—and source at the same time—of the recent past. The book challenges the notion of memory simply as a repository of experiences. Rather, memory is “a dynamic system constantly apprehending and reinterpreting information, modifying it and producing new interpretations” (21). To understand the nature of memory and develop a rigorous approach to oral sources, Llona proposes to pay particular attention to the role memory plays in the construction of the subject: “Understood as a contingent reality, subjectivity is subdued to the time factor, and as such assumed as a fact to be made part of history (un hecho historizable), and a product of memory” (23). The inter-subjective nature of memory leads to the discussion of the concept of collective memory as an important heuristic device and a field of inquiry where new narratives are capable of addressing the contradictions and distance between dominant ideals and individual aspirations in what Raymond Williams (with Michael Orrom, A Preface to Film [London: Film Drama, 1954], and in later works) and more recently Michael Pickering (History, Experience and Cultural Studies [New York: St. Martin’s, 1997]) have dubbed “the structure of feeling.” Llona does not stop at giving consideration to the understanding of memory from a theoretical perspective but soon leads the reader to understand what this means as a reflective and intersubjective event in which the source is the very outcome of the interaction. This is by far the most powerful aspect of Llona’s contribution; she offers the reader deep understanding coupled with the practicality of interviewing in oral history.

The introduction is followed by six chapters with dissimilar intention and depth but that, as a whole, provide a satisfactory selection of themes and foci to illustrate the main orientation that Llona provides to this book. She clearly designs three of the pieces as contributions to the main pedagogical nature of this text: Rosa García-Orellán explores the bibliographic intention of orality; Jordi Roca-Girona and Lidia Martínez-Flores explore the determinant elements in the configuration of the narrative structure of...