Who Uses Oral History Projects and Why
Fields that use oral history papers include history, anthropology, and other
disciplines that study the
experiences of specific social groups such as women or ethnic groups. The goals of each field affect the ways they use this kind of project.
History: Historians use evidence to understand the experiences of people in the past. Oral history can be an invaluable source of evidence for understanding individual experiences, or experiences of a group within a certain historical period. Oral testimony cannot be used as a surrogate for analysis of traditional historical materials (official documents, letters, newspapers, secondary sources, etc.). It can, however, reveal the role of
individuals in shaping the past, and/or how larger trends impacted the individual. When an oral history essay places the experiences of the individual within the context of the period, group, or other influencing variable, oral history can help illuminate both the individual''s experience and the historical period.
Folklore: Folklorists study culture as it is expressed in everyday life, and often use oral history projects to gather materials to preserve and study. Interviewing individuals is one of the primary means of accessing folklore; for example, you may learn important information about a culture''s musical traditions or festivals.
Anthropology: An archeologist might use oral history to learn more about the lifeways of peoples who have living descendants, or as a way to locate sites for archeological excavation. A cultural anthropologist could use oral history as a way to understand the ways that individuals think of themselves in relation to the rest of the world. This technique can help anthropologists understand the ways that culture shapes individuals either consciously or unconsciously, on the one hand, and the ways that individuals contribute to the production of culture, on the other hand.
Fields that study marginalized social groups (such as women, African-Americans, Latino/as): In these fields, conducting and analyzing an interview is a way of uncovering experience that might be underrepresented in mainstream culture. Dominant cultures have a tendency not to notice or acknowledge the experiences of certain subgroups, viewing them as peripheral rather than central-in other words, marginalizing them. Academic fields have emerged to explore the experiences of marginalized groups, and these fields tend to value experiential knowledge (as opposed to various kinds of professional or academic knowledge, for instance) and oral history projects can be a way of accessing this resource.