Editors' Introduction

The foundation of oral history is relationships: most obviously between interviewer and interviewee, but also between the interviewee and the collective memory of a culture, between the interviewee and future audiences of their testimony, and within the community an oral history project serves. Sometimes, an interview illuminates relationships among nonhuman participants, as our opening piece by Carrie Hamilton reveals. The overarching theme emerging from this issue—the inaugural one the newly appointed OHR editorial team edited—is these relationships that emerge out of the process of doing oral history. Our editorial team itself is an outgrowth of the relationships forged within the vibrant profession of oral historians, initiated through conversations at annual meetings of Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region and solidified through shared moments at the annual meetings of the Oral History Association, the parent sponsoring organization of OHR.

The act of interviewing can provide interviewers a glimpse at some of these relationships. What do we experience when we enter someone's home to conduct an interview? We see pictures of friends and family hanging on the wall, the legacies of lives lived—diplomas, artwork, books with their spines creased. Maybe we smell freshly baked bread or the lingering aroma of last night's dinner. We hear the hum of a refrigerator, the creak of the floor beneath us, a car engine idling outside. We then use many of these experiences in our interview to think of questions to ask, topics to explore, memories to resurrect from the depths of an interviewee's mind. In this act, we as interviewers are forming relationships with our interviewees.

Oftentimes, though, while we may reach down to scratch the head of a cat rubbing against our leg or feel the warm breath of an excited dog on our outstretched hand, we do not think to ask our interviewee about these ever-present, other-than-human animals who play a prominent role in her or his everyday life. In the opening piece to this issue, Hamilton looks closely at these human-animal relations. She does so using the lenses of witnessing and mourning to explore not only the roles that animals play in our lives, but also what we may learn about animals' lives by speaking with the humans who care about them so deeply.

While we often think about memories as being unique to an individual interviewee, a construction of history based on personal experiences and perspectives, what does it mean when individual memories become collectivized such that different people in the same social group form almost identical recollections? By looking more closely at interviews she conducted with the daughters of a Mexican family, Jennifer Nájera shows the role that collective memory plays in the daughters' telling of their family history, especially as it relates to their gendered experiences of migrant farm work and labor in the 1950s and 1960s in the western United States. Nájera also uses her article to demonstrate how such collective memories lead to a collective consciousness. This consciousness permits these same women to critique both the exploitative practices of migrant farm labor and dominant ideologies about migrant workers broadly and Mexican migrant workers specifically.

This issue's special section, that Andrea Hajek and Sofia Serenelli edited, is titled "Inside the Interview: The Challenges of a Humanistic Oral History Approach in the Deep Exchange of Oral History"; it presents pieces that examine more deeply—look "inside"—the interview to understand the intricacies of the interviewer-interviewee relationship better. After an opening piece from Alessandro Portelli that reflects on his interactions with interviewees throughout his extensive career in oral history, Hajek and Serenelli bring together four articles from researchers working in widely disparate geographical areas—Oxfordshire and Berkshire, UK (Davis), Sri Lanka (Thoradeniya), Northern Ireland, UK, and South Africa (McLaughlin), and the US (Sheftel). These authors each discuss the dynamism of the interviewer-interviewee relationship and the methods they have deployed to manage the spoken and unspoken assumptions and beliefs layered into every interview they have conducted.

The relationships that emerge out of the process of doing oral history extend beyond the dialogue between...