|
Oral history and its increasing value
 |
The most important profit of oral history is historians’ access to firsthand information. The narrator of a memory is a non-mediated witness; books, newspapers and report-writers are not the transformers of information.
Historiography in the method of oral history is considered a new form in preserving the events and incidents. The method has spread in recent years and is used by some centers which are involved in compilation of history. In this method, the historian does not deal with tablets, inscriptions and the works taken from excavations, speculations or manuscripts, the tourists’ reports and so on. He or she deals with deals with the names which are alive and the result of the memories for which the historian is looking. Oral history covers memoirs of the individuals who have witnessed the events which have made them unique with the passage of time or because of their few witnesses. In oral history, before we face with the generalities ruling over a historical period, we are facing with the details of the existing events and relations in it. Here, the person who retells his or her memoirs, he or she talks about what has happened to himself or herself or at least to his or her friends in the past. Oral history is the translation of our close past; what is called contemporary history. The historian faces with profits and disadvantages.
The most important profit of oral history is historians’ access to firsthand information. The narrator of a memory is a non-mediated witness; books, newspapers and report-writers are not the transformers of information. Sometimes, the memory-teller acts beyond a non-mediated witness as the creator of an event. The feature turns the oral history into a source in which the historian tempts to obtain it. Moreover, the memory-teller completes and or polishes an incident. In most cases, the events which are dependent on documents and evidences are lack of the cause and effect ruling over an incident. Documents usually say an event lonely and are inefficient in retelling the factors and results. The memoirs which shape oral history have the power to complete the beginning and end of these documents as well as to polish the event through going to details. Another feature of memoirs is to help the historian in recognizing the documents; that to what extent such and such a document has the credibility in narrating such and such an event. Here there is neither the toughness of historical reading nor the historian’s consecutive arguments for proving the reason behind the occurrence of the event. The reader is facing a text for which is looking despite its ups and downs.
But there are some disadvantages in this method of historiography. One is political. For example, all the centers which deal with expressing the events of the revolution after the victory of the Islamic revolution – whether inside the country or abroad – with oral history have had political aspects to some extent. The groups which have resorted to collecting memoirs abroad usually have faced with the people who are against the revolution; they have been either fugitive or played a role in toppling the revolution or dignitaries of former Shah’s regime all of whom had lost their material and spiritual sources with the victory of the revolution. Another group was affiliated to the left wing that left Iran after the victory of the Islamic revolution without finding any status domestically. Inside the country, the centers which were involved in expressing the revolution’s events in the form of oral history had political tendencies due to their attachment to the revolution. Thus, it seems difficult to consider the results came out of this method of historiography as neutral. Although, this disadvantage exists, it does not face the historian with much difficulty in practice, because one of the skills of a historian – historian in its real meaning of word – is to stay away from advertising challenges. He or she can recognize the criterion of every memory, and documents it correctly. Another disadvantage that can be considered for oral history is the domination of “narrator’s ego”. The pivot of a memory-teller from every guild and class is his or her own ego not another “he or she”. Self-overestimating and underestimating others is one of the negative symptoms of oral history. However, this is the wise historian who finds out the pureness level of a memory by resorting to the frequency of the events in various memories and finding evidence. In fact, all the efforts a historian tolerate for receiving an old text, he or she spends equally in the memories which shape oral history.
There are more profits and disadvantages concerning oral history. But it should be said that this form has been used a lot for expressing the Islamic revolution and the Iraqi eight-year imposed war against Iran. Most titles which have been released with regard to the two major phenomena have been somehow created with the mediation of oral history. Fortunately, the abundance of the existing resources has entered the oral history experts into a new phase of theorizing the result of which is its increasing consolidation. As time passes, we can see the increase of being scientific and accuracy in the truth of memoirs in such books. This has caused the experts to criticize and assess the works continuously on one hand, and on the other hand it has made oral history into a very serious arena for the Islamic revolution and the eight-year war.
Translated By: Mohammad Bagher Khoshnevisan
|
