The Oral History Reader ed. by Robert Perks, Alistair Thomson (review)

In its third edition, The Oral History Reader lives up to the expectation set in the first two—it assembles articles about foundational concepts, emerging debates, and relevant developments in the field of oral history. This new edition continues to provide significant content for newcomers and experienced practitioners alike. The basic organizational breakdown of the book has not changed. It begins with an aptly named section—”Critical Developments”—that serves as an overview the field. The volume begins with an introduction to fundamental theoretical concepts, such as those in Allesandro Portelli’s “What makes Oral History Different,” followed by essays about currently popular or new theoretical debates in oral history, such as Mark Cave’s “What Remains: Reflections on Crisis Oral History,” on recent concentrated attention on trauma work, and Douglas Boyd’s “‘I Just Want to Click on It to Listen’: Oral History Archives, Orality and Usability,” on the continued debate about technology and access. While “Critical Developments” highlights insightful theoretical discussions, it is by no means the only part of the book with provocative content. Articles that present thoughtful debates and conceptual challenges are interspersed throughout the remaining sections: “Interviewing,” “Interpreting Memories,” “Making Histories,” and “Advocacy and Empowerment.”

In each section of the book, Perks and Thomson follow a format of juxtaposing core instructional perspectives with broader cases of use and theory, all while updating the content for contemporary audiences. For example, in this third edition the editors make a concerted effort to provide reflections on a wide array of creative techniques used to publish oral history work in the section “Making Histories”: the authors examine more recently-deployed methods of dissemination such as documentary film and mobile mapping, while also refreshing ideas about more familiar uses of oral history in exhibitions, radio, and publications. The Oral History Reader manages to present an effective combination of both basic informational pieces and complex, difficult, and vital debates about topics in oral history in a broad-based collection. While I see the applicability for classroom use in this edition (more on this below), as in previous editions there is also content for more seasoned practitioners that can help renew interest, inform work, and expand theoretical reflections.

In the introduction to this edition, Perks and Thomson note the popular use of previous editions in higher education classrooms and their decision to ensure broader topical, technical, and experiential pieces in this latest edition, stating, “We are acutely aware of a responsibility not to shape the field in a particular narrow direction, but to introduce contrasting and cross-disciplinary approaches . . . while also stimulating debate and challenging convention” (xv). One prime example of this is Graham Smith’s piece, “Remembering in Groups: Negotiating Between ‘Individual’ and ‘Collective’ Memories,” an article that highlights the logistics of conducting an interview and also focuses on the often-contested discussion about group interviewing. Smith argues that group interviews can help us recognize that individual memory is shaped not only by cultural contexts, but also by lived social environments. This suggests that one-to-one interviews “may simply encourage interviewees to suppress memories that do not fit their perceptions of established ways of recalling the past” (207). Smith thus engages with something that oral historians are often uncomfortable with; we have traditionally favored—and built our best practices around—a more intimate experience, while pushing back on the “interference” of the group dynamic in group interviews.

Another example comes from Alexander Freund; in “Toward an Ethics of Silence?: Negotiating Off-the-Record Events and Identity in Oral History,” he discusses silence within an interview as a form of interviewee control, stating, “In sharing authority with the interviewee, the interviewer accepts that oral history is not just ‘history-telling,’ but an interactive communication guided in part by the interviewee’s objectives” (264). Freund suggests that rather than interpreting silences as an interviewer’s deficiency or failure to capture information on the record, we should probe for deeper meaning in this silence to understand...