Which priority?

Receipt of memories or truth discovery

Hamid Qazvini
Translated by Natalie Haghverdian

2018-1-16

Targeted interview within the framework of a specific subject is one of the prominent features of oral history. Accordingly, the oral history scholars are requested to maintain respect towards the narrator, open their mind and patiently listen to the narrator and ask questions in due time within the limits defined.

Acknowledging this features raises a question: “Is the only task of the interviewer, steering and directing the interview towards the goal of receiving memories?” or “The interviewer is tasked to maintain a parallel dialogue with the narrator to discover the truth?”

This question is highlighted in discourses around the interview where the necessity of building and maintaining dialogue and its requirements with the narrator are analyzed.

In order to find a proper answer to this question we have to acknowledge that the main objective of oral history in the first place is to receive memories and record observations of the narrator as an historical document. In fact, the scholar meets with the narrator in order to add a new narrative to the existing ones and record new truths to complement and modify the existing literature. Subsequently, in such settings, recording memories is of highest priority.

However, the dialogue formed during an oral history interview might be challenging and critical and the scholar engages not as a passive audience but an active researcher, but this dialogue is not of the same quality of the classic dialogues in political and cultural and social arenas which occurs in between the experts and elites of the field.

The most important point is that in other dialogues the parties to the discourse try to share and transfer their ideas and thoughts maintaining and equal status and receive the discourse of others with flexibility and open might; however, in oral history, one party (the interviewer), despite all the information they might have over the subject (sometimes even more than the narrator) does not enjoy an equal status with the narrator. Equal status would not necessitate a discourse and record of memories. Originally, the narrator has not agreed to an interview in order to listen to what the interviewer has to say but the narrator is willing to receive and respond to the interviewers questions in a targeted and challenging interview.

In fact, the interviewer, based on information available and identified gaps, makes the effort to build a dialogue and receive the narrator’s unique information. Hence, the discourse differs in type from any other customary dialogues in other fields.

Accordingly, it has to be stated that the oral history scholar is mainly tasked to record memories however his/her mere task is not searching for the memoirs and recording the preferred stories of the narrator but builds and maintains a conducive and mutual interaction through a targeted dialogue to create a new and verifiable chapter in the history so truth discovery is a priority.