"I'll tell you later on": Collaborative structuring and glossing of the narrative practice during oral history interviews
Abstract
Oral history interview (OHI) is generally accepted historiographical method of obtaining spoken accounts of past events from eye-witnesses. My basic question is: "How do the interview participants practically achieve the intelligibility of the interview recording as a comprehensible account of certain past?" This involves several practical issues and problems of action formulation and action description.
In my paper, I focus on just one of these, namely the problem that there are many things to be possibly told in OHI, but not everything can be told, and not in completely arbitrary fashion. Both participants of OHI apparently know that not every aspect of a remembered event or experience can be brought up and discussed at any time (if ever): this is what I call narrative regulation.
In relation to narrative self-regulation, four kinds of "problems" or "limitations" emerged from analysis of the recordings. First, there is the problem of significance: some things could be said, but would not be relevant in the context of the particular interview.
Second, there is the problem of scope: some (relatively) pertinent things could be said, but there is not enough time. Third, there is the problem of structure: some significant things are to be said, but there is an "appropriate" point of time during the interview for mentioning them (see excerpt above).
Fourth, there is the problem of the setting: some relevant things could fit easily into the time-frame of the interview, but there are ethical, moral, personal or other "external" reasons for omitting them. In general, members act out - and gloss - their narrative accounts of their past actions.
Analysis of narrative self-regulation shows how people organize interactional achievement of a certain social task, in this case the production of an oral history, or telling one's life story, in specific institutional setting with a particular focus.