Oren Bowes
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Oren Bowes is a third year student at the University of Guelph. While he is majoring in Theatre and scenic carpentry, he has always had a love of history and should probably just apply to be a history minor at this point.
He has had a very interesting time learning about oral history through this class and would like to express thanks to Dr. Kim Martin for organizing such an enriching experience. |
Oren Bowes' Reflection
One of the sources I found when doing research for the various assignments throughout this course was Everyman His Own Historian by Carl Becker. In his article, Becker talks about how every person, no matter how supposedly “average” or “mundane” they are, is a curator of history.[1] This history could very well be some hidden nugget of truth or insight into a historically significant event of the past or it could be their lived experience and life story. While some historians may argue that the former is of higher historical importance than the latter, I would say both are significant in their own way. Before taking this course I likely would have agreed with the historians that claimed that an “average” person’s life history carried less weight but after meeting Dennis Kearns and listening, analyzing, researching, and documenting the life he has lived my opinion has certainly changed.
We often touch on Sharing Authority with Baba by Stacey Zembrzycki, but it really does do an excellent job of capturing what my own experience conducting an oral history, as well as the experience of many of my classmates. Like Zembrzycki, I found it difficult to translate the effectiveness of the techniques from the books and articles we read throughout the semester into practical results.[2] I’ve spoken about what I expected this experience to be like in a past assignment. I talked about how I imagined a little old lady who would tell me about some piece of history and would provide me with everything I needed to conduct an oral history. I thought it would be easy, if I am being honest. What I got, however, was a man who has lived a very interesting life. Dennis has worked on Canadian icons such as the CN Tower, repaired important infrastructure such as the Bruce Power Dam, and had fascinating interpersonal relationships with his family. |
I found working on the transcript to be a surprisingly enjoyable and rewarding experience despite some of the fears I had on how long it would take to get it finished. It was almost relaxing slowly and methodically going through the motions of reversing the recording to type the next few words before my fingers couldn’t keep up and I had to once again go back. It was also rewarding to finally nail down a sentence that was particularly elusive. In class we talked about how difficult it can be to transcribe our participant’s words faithfully and accurately but while I was transcribing, I found my own words to be the most laborious. I believe the reason stems from the fact that I have an abnormal way of speaking in that I occasionally repeat the same word or phrase a few times while I collect my thoughts and decide what I want to say next. For example, I say the phrase “at the” 4 times in one sentence as I attempt to try and grasp the words I need to say next.
The process of transcribing even just 4 minutes of an interview in an accurate way really does put into perspective for me why some historians put so much emphasis on the importance of transcripts. While I still maintain that the recordings are just as important, the level of detail I, as an amateur, had to put into the transcript was surprising to me. Although I don’t agree with it, reading sources such as The Peculiarities of Oral History where Portelli talks about how “Scholars are willing to admit that the actual document is the recorded tape; but almost all go on to work on the transcripts, and it is only transcripts that are published."[3] I realize now that, while the transcripts are more important than I thought, they must be presented alongside the recordings to provide the consumer of your interviewee's oral history with the most accurate and ethically faithful presentation of their words.
Oral history definitely has pros and cons. The benefits of doing an oral history consist of getting the stories of people like Dennis. These are stories that will fall by the wayside and be lost to time unless someone like an oral historian documents them. While, yes, it is impossible to document everyone’s stories, it should be obvious by now that I believe there is intrinsic value in every person’s individual history. The other major benefit is actually hearing the voice of the person talking about their lived history. This is especially important for marginalized groups as it is not just providing them a voice through text but literally taking their voice and projecting it out to the consumers of an oral history. There are, unfortunately, some negatives to doing oral history. The one that springs to mind immediately is that of the single greatest disease afflicting humans, old age.[4]
In Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide, Ritchie talks about the necessity of interviewing the oldest interviewees first when conducting an oral history.[5] Age is what extinguishes stories and oral traditions. A good example of how age afflicts the practice of oral historians is by examining how frequently languages die out. There are about 7000 spoken languages on Earth and approximately half of them are in danger or dying out.[6] In fact, a language dies every two weeks due to the last remaining speaker passing away.[7] Even if a historian can conduct their oral history while a vital participant is still alive, there is the issue of memory. Every time a person remembers an event, they are not remembering the event itself but merely the last time they remembered the event. Every time that memory is brought up, small details can distort and with enough distortion the memory becomes completely different, sometimes to the point of being false (Freed, 2018).[8] Memory can also be imagined, a good example of this is my own memory of 9/11. At the time I would have only been 4 years old, not nearly old enough to concretely store those memories, yet I have memories of my father being worried for my mother’s safety as she was on a business trip in America and had flown there. When the human brain hears the same stories enough, it begins to fabricate memories to go along with them (Freed, 2018).[9] Though there are some significant detriments to doing oral history, the benefits far out-weigh them in terms of how useful oral history can be for marginalized voices and everyday stories of significance.
As successful as I believe the oral history I conducted on behalf of Dennis was, I believe it, like all things, could have been better. If I had the opportunity to do this again from the start, I would like to spend more time talking to Dennis to get more detailed information out of him over many more sessions. I know that due to this being a class with limited time and the fact that a snow-day severely impacted our schedule it would not have been realistically possible to provide each person in the class more time with their participant. If I had the opportunity to conduct this independently of a semester’s time constraints, I believe it would have been better. That being said, I think I did my best with my amateur skills and the limited time I had to faithfully interpret and present the oral life history of Dennis Elmer Kearns.
Click here for Oren's interviewee, Dennis Kearns' page and a link to the audio file of the full interview.
Endnotes
[1] Becker, Carl. “Everyman His Own Historian.” The American Historical Review 27, no. 2 (1932): 221-236. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/37.2.221
[2] Zembrzycki, Stacey. “Sharing Authority with Baba.” Journal of Canadian Studies 43, no. 1 (2009): 219-238. https://doi.org/10.3138/jcs.43.1.219.
[3] Portelli, Alessandro. “The Peculiarities of Oral History.” History Workshop Journal 12 no. 1 (1981). https://doi-org.subzero.lib.uoguelph.ca/10.1093/hwj/12.1.96.
[4] Bulterijs, Sven, Raphaella S. Hull, Victor C.E. Björk, and Avi G. Roy. “Is it time to classify biological aging as a disease?” Front. Genet. 6 (2015). https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2015.00205.
[5] Ritchie, Donald A. Doing oral history: A practical guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
[6] Wilford, John Noble. “Languages die, but not their last words.” In The New York Times. September 18, 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/health/19iht-19language.7561402.html
[7] Wilford, “Languages die, but not their last words.”