Living with Stories: Telling, Retelling, and Remembering (review)

Normally, edited collections of essays are so difficult to assess within a book review that it is virtually impractical and unhelpful to do so. However, Schneider’s collection of essays is different. Within this collection, he has assembled a group of leading theorists and practitioners in different fields (folklore, anthropology, history, literature, and museology) who employ similar methods and objectives revolving around oral tradition. Involving scholars who specialize in story and then inviting a relevant respondent to participate in a conversation on each essay, Schneider provides a salient and profoundly provocative casebook on different approaches to narrative and, most importantly, to understanding them. The central motive in creating this work, which originated from a planned session at the 2004 Oral History Association conference, was to investigate the character of narrative construction and meaning during and after interviews. While the home fields of the scholars differ, they all work with the understanding that interviewing sessions produce situational responses, and that tellings, retellings, and remembrances are not only conditional but convergent in creating a full response. The major point of this collection is that the act of retelling narratives is the crucial narrative act since it formulates meaning within a social context and shapes itself situationally.

Each essay and each response is excellent in its own right, which is another reason edited books of essays are difficult to review: too much pithy material exists to comment upon adequately. The lingering of my response on any entry does not imply that others within this collection is lesser; in all probability, it implies that I have chosen what I have chosen to comment upon simply because it speaks to the point being made. Others will find personal gems in all the contributions.

Schneider provides a typically clear, concise, and informative introduction: his overview of how oral history as a practice emerged, how to understand the different approaches to narrative, how people in all societies live with and embody their stories, and finally, how this entire project developed in 2004. His conclusion is likewise an excellent summation. Two contributors are long-practicing and widely published oral historians: William Schneider himself and Sherna Berger Gluck. Quite impressively, Schneider has brought together for this volume some other very highly respected interdisciplinary researchers in narrative: Holly Cusack-McVeigh, Klara Kelley, Kirin Narayan, Barre Toelken, Joanne Mulcahy, Barbara Babcock, Aron Crowell, James Clifford, Ted Swedenburg, Lorraine McConaghy, and Karen Utz. The latter two document fascinating examples of museological inclusion of oral histories, including having visitors revoice stories in order to embody the narrator’s original experience, thus enacting a “re-telling” that allows the reader to walk in the original narrator’s shoes, so to speak. Another collaborator in this book was Estelle Oozevaseuk, a Yupik Eskimo who presents an important Native interpretation of a historical famine on St. Lawrence Island. Her presentation of the Native interpretation, as Clifford notes, is part of the significant development of native voices being added to the “official” historical record. In fact, her narrative within this text is representative of Schneider’s underlying intent: to show how stories, being situated in the present, reflect current personal, cultural, and differential understanding through their retelling.

Gluck’s essay, along with her conversation with Swedenburg and Schneider, focuses on the importance of retellings. Even though she received different responses to similar questions from her Palestinian narrators in 1985, 1989, and 1994, each response represented a different aspect of the whole answer. She identifies this as a validation for reinterviewing narrators because different political, social, cultural, or other significant contexts will cause narrators to emphasize different facets of their perspectives. She likewise notes that narrators will respond differently to the interviewer, depending on how comfortable they are with that interviewer and how much they feel they need to conform to what they think the interviewer wants to hear.

Most of the contributors are grounded in anthropology or folklore, evident in the foci of their articles and conversations, in...