Historia, Antropología, y Fuentes Orales

Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales (HAYFO) is a Spanish-language journal for the study of oral data across diverse disciplinary traditions, such as history, anthropology, and sociology. The journal is edited by Asociación Historia y Fuente Oral, Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona, and Editorial Universidad de Granada. HAYFO first saw the light in 1989 and is published biannually in Spain.

The thirty-seventh issue of the journal is an exciting mix of articles with a variety of theoretical and empirical merits. This issue is divided into four main sections. The first section is entitled “Denouncement and opacity.” This section comprises four articles: Miriam Nyhan’s “The workforce of a Ford plant”; Verena Alberti and Amilcar Araujo Pereira’s “Racial discrimination in Brazil: Leaders of the Black Movement ”; Christoph Thonfeld’s “Forced labour for the Third Reich”; and José Antonio C. Alcantud’s “Urban memory and its opacity: Maurice Halbwachs. ” Nyhan’s article is based on forty interviews with male workers of a formerly operating Ford plant in Cork (Ireland). Her analysis of prevalent, long-standing “Ford families” suggests a fascinating issue: given that kinship is crucial in the recruitment of workers in the plant, what is the difference in the quality of remembering for workers whose labor and family memories intersect and for those whose memories do not? Alberti and Araujo Pereira interview twenty-seven leader activists of Brazil’s Black movement. The main focus of the analysis is informants’ perception of racism in Brazil. A fruitful follow-up question could be: how do these accounts of racism differ from accounts of rank and file in the movement? Thonfeld’s article originates in an extensive interview sample (almost 600) of forced laborers who were victims of the Nazi regime. Interestingly, the author notes that the identity of forced laborers does not bear a strong imprint on the Jewish victims ’ sense of self, who mainly viewed themselves as “survivors” of Ha-Shoa (41). Finally, this section closes with Alcantud’s theoretical piece on Halbwachs. This is not the first time the journal has devoted attention to the work of the French sociologist, who seems to be a natural for these pages. Alcantud puts forth an exposé of Halbwachs as a trailblazer of contemporary perspectives that connect place with remembering as affective social action.

The second section is dedicated to the transitive form of the Spanish verb for interviewing—“Entrevistarse.” Four articles appear under this section: Jeff Friedman’s “Dramatizing the interview. Annotated scripts,” Claudia Castro’s “The return of Sybila,” Graciela Browarnik and Laura Benadiba’s “Militant artists of the Argentine Communist Party,” and Eugenia Meyer’s “An interviewer.” The first article in this section advocates the use of performance to shed light on the remembering body and the shifting nature of the self. Friedman revisits the life histories of two dancers enacted in his dance Muscle Memory and constructs an annotated script to transcend his previous, ossified and interviewer-filtered version of the lives of these two persons, which placed him near the abyss of “corporal colonialism” (58). The second article is focused on an interview between the author and Sybila Arredondo, who was sentenced to prison in Peru on the charges of collaboration with Sendero Luminoso. Sybila’s answers to the interviewer’s questions are included in the text. The third article investigates the personal perplexities and difficulties arising out of interviews with twenty-six individuals who chose to make compatible their status as activists in the Argentine Communist Party with their status as artists or as individuals with artistic interests. Study participants stressed that revolutionary artists can spread revolutionary ideas through artistic creativity while recognizing that there is no easy translation of adopted revolutionary ideas into revolutionary artistic action. The authors end with an unanswered question: “Is it possible to define art?” (98). Finally, Meyer, a frequent contributor, writes an insightful essay that uses her interviewing experiences to elaborate on the practice of oral history, which highlights the emotional facets of the interviewing process.

The third section has the evocative title of “ Body and memory. ” Two articles are part of this shorter section: Franco Ferrarotti’s “ Body: Sign and field of contradiction ” and Roger Chartier’s “ Past in present. Literature, memory, and history. ” Ferrarotti, another long-time contributor to this journal, provides a lucid reflection on the body, ending with a critique of the visual-bias of science, which Ferrarotti says compulsively eliminates polymorphous sensorial realities. The final article in this section describes literature’s role in the re-creation of past events and discusses the “competition” between literature and professional history over the depiction of the past (127).

The fourth section, “Thirty years ago, ” contains: Gwyn Prins’ “Against invented tradition. An example from Zambia,” Jan Vansina’s “Oral tradition, oral history: Achievements and perspectives, ” and Jack Goody’s “Past reconstruction and oral tradition in Ghana. ” Although the section title is cryptic, the three articles share a common purpose: reviewing or reconsidering in retrospect the field of oral history and its particular developments with attention to Africa. Prins inquires into how tradition has been studied in Bulozi (Zambia) and introduces a fresh perspective into the subject establishing the partiality of past attempts. Vansina defines oral traditions, discusses the academic legitimization of oral history, and identifies some unresolved issues in the oral history literature. He ends by pointing to some gaps to be filled with new work. Lastly, Goody explores the meaning of oral tradition with a comparison of two disparate groups from Ghana—the LoDagaa and the Gonja —each of which has established a very different connection to tradition.

In conclusion, HAYFO is especially suited to those scholars who see themselves as part of an international community united by an interest in oral history. Readers of this journal can familiarize themselves with international scholarship and can enjoy all contributions in Spanish, contributions either originally written in this language or otherwise translated into Spanish for publication in this outlet. By and large, this journal is a must subscribe for oral historians because of its international research value and the exceedingly wide range of topics of concern to oral historians covered issue after issue.