By Valerie Raleigh Yow. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 1994. 284 pp. Hardbound, $42.00; Softbound, $19.95.
More than a half century has passed since, so legend goes, a graduate student of Allan Nevin's coined the phrase "oral history" to describe the recorded interviews Nevins and his proteges were carrying out. More than a quarter century stands between us and the first edition of Willa Baum's Oral History for the Local Historical Society, the book that was, if not the first attempt to codify the practice, certainly the most lasting.
Since the early 1980s, when we were prodded to do so by the work of Eva McMahan and others, we have come to look at oral history in increasingly complex ways. Perhaps because oral history serves so many fields of study in such divergent ways, few manuals have survived long past their initial publication, being, paradoxically, either too specialized or too basic to appeal to a general audience of oral historians.
Now we have two additions to our bookshelf of manuals, both destined for a long shelf life, although for different reasons: Recording Oral History: A Practical Guide for Social Scientists, by Valerie Raleigh Yow; and Doing Oral History, by Donald A. Ritchie. Each book provides a comprehensive look at oral history methodology with references to a wide variety of practitioners, though each represents a different point of view. Yow, who is trained in the social sciences, explores the theoretical underpinnings of oral history methodology, while Ritchie, who is among the leading public historians, catalogs the many approaches to its practice. Yow describes oral history as a tool for gathering information, while Ritchie presents a field of endeavor called oral history.
Valerie Yow has degrees in history, including a Ph.D., from the University of Wisconsin, and she tuned her oral history skills at the University of North Carolina's important Southern Oral History Program. In addition, she has studied adult development at the Harvard School of Education and psychology at Boston College, and she maintains a practice in psychotherapy in addition to working as an independent scholar. While she has worked in oral history for twenty years, her last six years have seen the publication of books on a college, a women's art cooperative, and a historic house, and a history of a hospital will be forthcoming. This diverse mix of disciplines and skills enables her to apply to Recording Oral History a sense of thoroughness that is impressive and reassuring. She roves widely in all the fields that employ the interview technique, but she always returns to the universe of her own experience to offer suggestions and analysis.
Her subtitle, "A Practical Guide for Social Scientists," is deceptive, because Recording Oral History is as much concerned with theory as with practice and because it has value for anyone--humanist or social scientist--endeavoring to undertake an oral history interview or series of interviews.
The book begins with an introduction to the in-depth interview. The author is frank about the strengths and weaknesses of oral history, which both derive from the fact that it is ultimately a highly subjective process. The interview means what the participants choose it to mean, intentionally or otherwise. "In collating in-depth interviews and using the insights to be gained from them as well as different kinds of information from other kinds of records," Yow concludes, "we can come to some understanding of the process by which we got to be the way we are." (25)
Yow next discusses preparation for the interview project, from choosing a subject to conceptualizing the project to selecting narrators. Her advice is most debatable when she discusses equipment, though it is hard to dispute those suggestions that have arisen from problems she herself has faced. Nonetheless, to use one example, most oral historians would choose a plug-in system rather than rely on battery power.
In a long chapter on interviewing techniques, Yow covers the basics as well as the subtleties. She draws on recommendations from psychology and ethnology, but she always returns to the special problems of the oral historian and such techniques as Charles Morrissey's clever (and difficult to master) two-sentence question.
She then discusses legalities and ethics. For the former, she draws extensively on the Oral History Association pamphlet Oral History and the Law. (Because she did not have access to the second edition at the time of writing, her comments are based on the 1985 publication.) For ethics, she turns first to Kant and then to her own experiences, reminding interviewers of their responsibility both to the narrator and to the practice of history. When working in public history, we should, she says correctly, insist that our work be independent and free from manipulation by a client or sponsor. Her next chapter, which follows logically, breaks important ground by drawing together, from a variety of points of view, considerations of gender and power that remind us of the complexity of our process.
She presents in-depth, chapter-long analyses of three types of oral history projects--community studies, biography, and family research--describing the challenges peculiar to each. The book concludes with a chapter on indexing, transcribing, and publishing that is too brief and perhaps misplaced because the procedures a project will follow must be determined when it begins. This chapter and a useful series of appendices are drawn from a variety of projects with which she has been affiliated.
Donald A. Ritchie is among our most prominent oral historians, having served as president of the Oral History Association and chair of its committee on standards and guidelines. As associate historian of the Office of the U.S. Senate, he has written several books, won numerous and varied prizes both for his writing and his service to oral history, and edited the Twayne series on oral history that has brought the work of community oral historians to a wide audience.
Doing Oral History, unsurprisingly, brings the historian's point of view to the subject at hand. Ritchie draws on his personal familiarity with the oral history landscape and its architects to offer citations and samples from nearly everyone (this writer included) who has ever interviewed or commented upon interviewing. He intends the book to be a practicum, and it is; he ventures only rarely and tentatively into the realm of the theoretical, and when he does so, his aim is to illustrate a point of technique. His style reflects his long record as a teacher and lecturer: he employs a question-and-answer format, in which he is able to present his material as though he were speaking before a group of new initiates. It is simple, straightforward, and effective.
Ritchie begins, logically, with a chapter on starting an oral history project. Here, as through much of the text, his aim is demystification: oral history isn't hard to do, he points out, and it is especially valuable if it is collected properly. "Oral history," he writes, "is about asking questions. While researching the history of Methodist camp meetings in southern Mississippi, Charles Sullivan tried to visit every campground still operating. One day, he mentioned to a student each of the camps he had identified. `Yes, and Mt. Pleasant, too,' the student responded, explaining that it was a black Methodist campground established after emancipation from slavery. Astonished, Sullivan wondered why no one had ever mentioned this camp before. `Probably because you never asked,' came the reply. That is the reason for doing oral history: to ask the questions that have not been asked, and to collect the reminiscences that otherwise would be lost." (21)
Ritchie then leads the reader on a tour of the oral history process, simply and directly, always referring to the wide range of projects that have come within his view. In his discussion on the use of oral history in research and writing, he includes a section on publishing that is particularly valuable in light of his work with the Twayne oral history series.
The tour proceeds with a synthesis of current opinion on videotaping oral histories, preservation in archives and libraries, and teaching and presenting oral history. In each chapter, he explores the historiography of his subject matter as well as practical applications, all within his question-and-answer format.
Because Doing Oral History covers so much ground, the points of view that Ritchie presents are sometimes provocative. I disagree, for example, with his opinion that video history is too expensive to undertake; videocams are now nearly as ubiquitous as cassette recorders. But the author hedges: even as he warns of the cost and faithfully addresses the concerns of video historians, he offers sufficient information and guidelines that the canny reader will be able to conduct a videotaped interview, albeit at a level below that of the documentarian. In another instance, Ritchie appears to dismiss oral history theory, even while he defines it. Perhaps he is correct that an interviewer should "gain some experience in conducting interviews before plunging too deeply into theoretical issues." (9) Perhaps not. Even a beginning interviewer, it seems to me, should be somewhat conversant with the relationship between language and power that is inherent to oral history, or should at least have the opportunity to explore those issues.
But these quibbles only show that Doing Oral History is a stimulating and formidable work, quite nearly the omnibus it sets out to be. It is indeed a guide to practice, but it is much more: it is a stepping-off point into the increasingly large universe that oral history practitioners occupy.
The wide range of information presented in these two books and the broad scope of their sources remind us that the practice of oral history is anything but standardized. Doing Oral History and Recording Oral History are like two chapters of The Sound and the Fury (as oral histories can be themselves): two ways of looking at the same story, from completely different perspectives. Ritchie is more genial, perhaps; Yow more rigorous. Ritchie speaks to a general audience; Yow to an audience with academic background and training. Ritchie tells us how to do oral history; Yow tells us what it means to do it.
Together they reinforce the realization that we who practice oral history have many different objectives, and we comprise many types of interviewers interviewing many types of interviewees, so we must constantly reflect on what we do. We owe it to our interviewees to know as much as possible about what our colleagues are doing and thinking, so we can approach the task of interviewing with intelligence and purpose. These two works help light our way.
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