Community and Individual Memory: An Introduction

This group of three papers was given in their first versions in a session on collective and individual memory given at my retirement conference on “Community and Creativity,” which was held at the University of Essex on May 16–17, 2008. By a happy coincidence, we have been able to publish eight papers from the conference as part of the fortieth anniversary issue of Oral History (Vol. 37, No. 2, Autumn 2009) for I had launched its very first issue in December 1969. The newsletter was the seed not only of the future journal but also of the Oral History Society and to an extent also of the future international movement.

I have been very fortunate in those I have worked with since then, and many were present as participants and speakers at the conference in 2008: past and present Essex colleagues and students, coresearchers, colleagues from Oral History, and from Qualidata at the UK Data Archive and National Life Stories at the British Library (both of which I founded) and more broadly fellow activists in the international oral history movement. Altogether participants came from fourteen countries, rekindling some of the excitement of the first international oral history conference also held in Essex in 1979.

Why the themes of community and creativity and communal and individual memory? I wanted a focus which connects with my own main research interests and the interests of those I have worked with and which also has contemporary relevance. My key research areas have concerned family, community and creativity, and also memory. We decided to focus the conference as a whole on community and creativity. How do they connect? Why do some communities generate more creative individuals than others? What is the relationship between social background—community and family—and the individual character and ambition which generate creativity? So family was inevitably part of the question. But what about memory?

Memory has always been a central issue ever since I started working as an oral historian. Originally, I was primarily concerned with the reliability of memory, and a key aim of the first edition of The Voice of the Past (1978) was to assert the validity of retrospective memory as historical evidence. And I would still vigorously defend that position. But since then—particularly through the influence of Sandro Portelli—we have all become much more aware of the subtle layers within memory and of how even distorting and forgetting can offer us forms of evidence and, indeed, influences on present action. It was in that spirit that with Raphael Samuel in 1987, I organized the international oral history conference at Oxford on “Myth and History” and published a collection of papers from it as The Myths We Live By (1990).

In retrospect, I think that volume, like much subsequent oral history work, leans too far toward merely illustrating how memories can be influenced by past collective myths. The giant shadows of ancestral figures from Freud to Malinovsky loomed over the proceedings. This approach does not take us far toward understanding how people use myth in their individual memories, accepting or rejecting or selecting to make sense of their own lives. Only a few papers came close to that: for example, Rosanna Basso on the school children who invented myths within hours to justify and rally their strike; Rina Benmayor and her group on how for younger Puerto Rican women, the life stories of their mothers and grandmothers provided “stories to live by”; or Natasha Burchardt on how some stepchildren seize on the myth of the wicked stepmother, while others turn their backs on it. As she concludes:

What part, then, does myth play in these lives of stepfamilies? Certainly myth weaves a thread, helping to shape the memories both of parents and step-parents. But reality is more various, less tidy than myth. Time and again real personal experience breaks through, at times negating the myth, taking the story in unexpected directions and finally giving its own substance to every life story¹.

If this is so of stepfamily memories, when family myths can without doubt influence both past recollection and future...