If the folklorist moves outside genre collecting and the oral historian moves beyond interviews with the political and business elite, the two can meet in recording folk prejudices, rumors, biases, awes, hatreds,loyalties, phobias, stereotypes, obsessions and fantasies, argued American folklorist and Professor of Modern Languages and folklore at Western Kentucky University Larry Danielson. What remains to be properly addressed is what oral history, anthropology and local history have in common and how they are different? Can they resort to common resources for historical research? Can the data from oral history and anthropology be considered in local history? Is oral history doomed to preserve and nurture recognition of specific historical events, or it can be used for the review and transferring content as well?
This is a fact that oral history and interdisciplinary studies are largely overlooked in Iran;the lack of sufficient oral history theoreticians, indolence of universities and academic bodies in laying out the boundaries of oral history research properly, and over-concentration of oral history activities and projects on topics related only to the Sacred Defense and the Islamic Revolution have restricted the capacity of oral history practice to expand into other fields of study in communications and have prevented convergence of the discipline with other areas like local history, anthropology and sociology.
Concepts like local cuisine, entertainment, recreation, daily life, leisure, personal dreams, nostalgias, famine, diseases, happiness, traditional medicine, business and religious mourning are behaviors that make human life and societies meaningful and can help link oral history with local history and anthropology.
Concepts like life history, common history, community history, people's history, local history, oral local history, oral testimony, oral traditional history, oral tradition, folk history, oral folk history, and personal history are other concepts that can play a part in this linkage pretty well. There are always social topics where anthropologists, local historians and oral historians can cooperate.
A local history research can never lead to an understanding of a given community without considering it past, so long as there is always a logical interrelationship between human psyche and historiography and studies of livelihoods of masses or a group of people in a certain period of history. All these considerations need to be accounted for in historical assessments of narrations and oral recollections.
Furthermore, a local history project can take into account social beliefs and psyche for localization or personification of narratives and oral traditions in anthropological studies.
It should be noted that with regards to the relationship between local history and anthropology, every place enjoys a specific space-time identity and local characteristic which can be partly drawn from common beliefs. By focusing on personal accounts with an empirical or historical nature, local history and folklore can reconstruct the history or culture of a locale by personalizing personal narratives even with a tint of legendry.
Negligence towards oral, unsubstantiated accounts and narratives is equal to ignoring individual and collective identities, historical anthropology and is disrespect towards people's understanding of their past life, behaviors and written heritage which are the foremost resources for reconstructing the past and oral traditions.
By and large, oral history can be exploited as a means for varied research grounds on people's history. Oral language replaces writing where emotions overcome reasonability; and people's history for people, common, unfettered historiography and presentation of people's life with all its merits and demerits in a certain historical period in a certain place can be both absorbing and set the ground for cooperation of oral history, local history and anthropology.
Astan Qods Razavi Oral History Archives with 13,000 hours of interviews on society and city studies is the greatest oral history archive on urban oral history in Iran where oral history projects based on anthropological data in a local history setting are being preserved and can be referred to by interested researchers.
By Abolfazl Hassan Abadi
Translated by Abbas Hajihashemi
