Ieuan franklin
Oral History and Authority
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4.9 Oral History and AuthorityIn a seminal essay folklorist Alan Dundes indicated that stories contain at least three elements: text – what the story is about; texture – the way that the story is told; and context – the circumstances surrounding the telling (Dundes 1964). As Schneider has observed, the corresponding “tension between structure, creativity and meaning” is easily lost in oral recordings, especially when they are made at one point in time and broadcast at another, to an audience that is not familiar with the speaker and his or her culture (quoted in Mazé 2006: 248). Especially with the loss of communicative context that occurs with the broadcasting of oral history, the radio producer is faced with the same responsibilities as the oral historian: In editing oral history, we, as authors, have to balance responsibility to the narrator, to the audience, and to the content of the stories (Jones 2004). In oral history what has been termed the epistemological problem – the question of how historians are to use their ‘sources’ – is inevitably a problem of human relationships. The processes involved in oral history and radio production may reproduce social divisions that are relations of power and inequality, even if what is at stake is cultural power rather than economic or political (Johnson and Dawson 1982). Even when the oral historian or radio presenter or producer attempts to ensure a relationship of equality during the process of ‘cultural production’, it is still his or her name that appears on the jacket of the monograph or is recognized in award ceremonies; it is his or her career that its furthered and status that is enhanced; it is he or she that receives a portion of the royalties and almost all the cultural capital bound up in authorship. To what extent the radio producer can overcome this imbalance by extending ‘shared authority’ beyond the oral history interview, however, is a difficult question to answer, not least because there is a scarcity of ‘models of best practice’.158 In an interview with the present author, the oral historian and radio producer Alan Dein admitted that collaboration with interviewees beyond the actual interview is rare even in oral history work: It’s one of the great dilemmas that faces community oral historians as well as professional broadcasters and professional documentary makers. What is the relationship between you and the interviewee, and what input does the interviewee have in the making of the programme? I remember I was at a community oral history conference, giving a talk a while back, I’ve been doing an oral history project on King’s Cross, in London. And someone put their hand up and said ‘Did you allow your interviewees to participate in the editing session? Did you play them the stuff before it went out, or when it was put on CD?’ And the answer was no… (Dein 2008).159 The question again emerges about whether the mediation involved in radio production - such as the artistic process of montage - mitigates or diminishes the honesty of the ‘raw product’ of oral history. Undoubtedly this is the case, but what is crucial here is how the notion of authenticity in this context can be perceived as an arena for the negotiation of power and cultural identity: Under these conditions, struggles over meaning are also struggles over resources. They arbitrate what is permitted and what is forbidden; they help determine who will be included and who will be excluded; they influence who gets to speak and who gets silenced (Lipsitz 1990: 632). The ability to wield editorial control, of course, derives from the culturally institutionalized power of the radio producer or scholar in radio broadcasting and oral history: this entails the power behind technical and production knowledge; the power to obtain access to materials; and the power to be able to disseminate them. The most successful oral history or local cultural initiatives are frequently those where the collective involvement of the community is emphasized and the feeling of ‘theft’ by an outsider is minimized (Silver 1988: 176), as we have seen from the example of the Fogo Process. The participatory potential in self-representational documentary or digital storytelling may challenge established patterns of authority based on various forms of institutional legitimacy (Lundby 2008: 369). The exclusion of the oral by the written has often accurately been perceived as reflecting the cultural and historical exclusion from documentation of those people least likely to contribute to printed publications (that is women, the working class, and cultural minorities). Oral history has therefore often seen its goal as being to document the lives and experiences of those who would otherwise disappear from ‘history’. This communal approach not only occurs in opposition to the literal [sic], as Ong has pointed out, but also confronts professional media operations and commercial ‘product’ (Silver 1988: 177). The National Public Radio producer David Isay has implemented such an independent ‘communal approach’, securing the participation, collaboration and even autonomy of the ‘subjects’ of his radio documentaries and sound portraits. In the pioneering Ghetto Life 101 (1993), for example, he gave recording equipment to two African-American teenagers from a suburban ghetto in order that they could record their own ‘audio-diaries’, in an example of shared authority and collaborative production which was a clear progression from the gestures towards collaborative production in Mitchell and Acton-Bond’s features (see Chapter 2): Recognizing that what many of his programs do is allow NPR listeners, an audience that despite NPR disclaimers is predominantly white and middle class, to hear the human side of people whom the mass media usually portray stereotypes, Isay involves members of the community he is documenting as collaborators and co-recipients of proceeds. For Ghetto Life 101, Isay, who produced the program in New York, involved LeAlan [Jones] and Lloyd [Newman] in each stage of production, playing sections over the phone for the boys to hear and approve. They also wrote and recorded their own narration (Hardy III and Dean 2006). The resulting documentary was remarkable for its sense of penetration into a social world. The sense of injustice and social deprivation perceived by the listener is not induced through commentary or montage editing but by the sheer transparency of the form.160 To illustrate the radical and conceptual implications of such an approach we can refer to Enzensberger’s ‘theory of the media’: There is no such thing as unmanipulated writing, filming or broadcasting. The question is therefore not whether the media are manipulated, but who manipulates them. A revolutionary plan should not require the manipulators to disappear; on the contrary, it must make everyone a manipulator (Enzensberger 1970/1976: 29). Archie Harding (discussed in Chapter 2), who began the long struggle for the voices of ordinary people to be heard on the radio when he was appointed Programme Director of the North Region in Manchester in 1933, had come to this realization decades earlier. Harding was to inspire Geoffrey (D.G.) Bridson to give voice to the voiceless with “the revolutionary statement that, since all broadcasting was propaganda, all the people, not just their spokesmen, had the right to use it.” (Black 1972: 129): All broadcasting, he insisted, was propaganda; because it did not attack the anomalies of the capitalist system, it became propaganda in support of them […] In Harding’s view all people should be encouraged to air their views, not merely their professional spokesmen. And that went for the Working Class no less than for the Middle and Upper Classes” (Bridson 1971: 30-31). David Isay is, as Archie Harding was, an advocate of mass microphone access, and in 2003 he set up StoryCorps, a national (American) project designed to inspire people to record each other’s stories. It began when Sound Portraits Productions – the non-profit production company founded in 1994 by Isay – teamed up with the Library of Congress and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to make digital recording accessible to the general public. This occurs through several means – there are a number of ‘Story Booths’ installed in a variety of public spaces, such as New York’s Grand Central Station, inside which two friends or relatives can interview each other (guide by a StoryCorps facilitator), or inside which an individual can be interviewed by a facilitator. Alternatively, a StoryCorps mobile recording unit often travels across America, harvesting stories. For every interview session, one copy of the resulting interview is given back to the participants as a CD (for a nominal fee), and one digital copy is archived at the Library of Congress. The most interesting or touching stories are then (with the permission of the interviewers/interviewees) edited, broadcast, and podcast on NPR. Since 2003, approximately 35,000 people have recorded their stories, resulting in more than 10,000 interviews. The resulting collection is one of the largest collections of documentary oral history in the US (Isay 2003). However, whether or not the recordings have truly lasting value or can really be classed or classified as ‘oral history’ has recently been disputed by some in the oral history movement (Abelmann, Davis et al. 2009; Perks, quoted in Burgess 2009), as the interviews (which have a forty-minute time limit) are often predominantly an opportunity (for StoryCorps) to elicit emotional candour and revelation, or (for the participants) to repeat an anecdote or oft-rehearsed chapter of family history, and the interviews certainly lack the methodological rigour of oral history. Oral history recordings and transcriptions often bear the ‘tracks’ of the investigator (interviewer or transcriber), as with the transparent elements of Dein’s radio features, and by contrast StoryCorps broadcasts are seamlessly edited to leave little evidence of their construction. As with many of the radio producers and folklorists discussed in this thesis, oral historians are typically interested in how an interviewee draws creatively on their community’s past and traditions, rather than in emotional and ritualized forms of confession (Abelmann, Davis et al. 2009). In many respects Isay’s earlier radio programmes (such as Ghetto Life 101) offered greater authority to participants, and were embedded within the concerns and values of their particular communities: Isay’s use of community members as interviewers, shared authority in project design and interpretation, and equitable division of proceeds demonstrate some of the synchronicities between the audio documentary and community oral history movements (Hardy III and Dean 2006: 540). In the next and final chapter, we will focus on examples of local and national oral history collection/circulation projects in the UK, which, like StoryCorps, have involved collaboration between broadcasters and archives or libraries. A project like (the BBC and British Library collaboration) Millennium Memory Bank (MMB), which we will discuss in Chapter 5, is characterized by a greater degree of methodological ‘rigour’, at the expense of not providing the degree of ‘open access’ that characterizes the use of StoryCorps booths. In the next Chapter it will be demonstrated, chiefly through the example of the case study of Commonwealth FM, that UK community radio stations may be able to obtain the right balance of ‘rigour’ and ‘access’ in carrying out such oral history projects, through collaboration with local and oral history groups and other partners in the arts, education or heritage sectors. Notes
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