100 Questions/ 4
Translated by Mandana Karimi
2025-11-14
We asked several researchers and practitioners in the field of oral history to share their views on key questions in this field. The name of each participant appears at the beginning of their response. All responses will be published on this portal by the end of the week. The goal of this project is to open new perspectives on a shared issue and to promote academic dialogue in the field of oral history.
In this project, a new question is posed every Saturday, and experts are invited to express their views in a short text (around 100 words) by the end of the week. All responses are published together so that readers can compare and analyze different viewpoints.
The views expressed belong to the contributors and do not necessarily represent the stance of the Oral History website. Although the responses are expected to be around 100 words, longer ones are accepted when needed for politeness or completeness of discussion.
This time we asked the scholars the send their answers until Sunday so we can publish all of them on Tuesday.
Question 4:
What is the reason for the public favor of oral history?
Mohammad Mehdi Behdarvand:
The public acceptance of oral history is due to the fact that this method presents a human and living face of the past. Unlike official texts, oral history records the feelings, personal experiences, and perspectives of actors and recounts reality through the eyes of eyewitnesses. By reconstructing collective memory, this method eliminates the distance between people and history and, in societies with incomplete or distorted documents, provides the opportunity to discover hidden parts of history. Also, hearing narratives in the tone and language of the narrators is more attractive to the new generation and strengthens deeper understanding, identification, and cultural participation in the writing of history.
Gholamreza Azari Khaksatar:
The appeal of oral history narratives has attracted different segments of society. Many people who do not have the opportunity or ability to write, will recount their memories and experiences of historical events through conversations and interviews. Therefore, recording family history, customs, folklore, and social developments is important for people. Preserving family heritage, recognizing roots, and introducing genealogies have also always been of interest. For this reason, participation in oral history projects is accepted by all segments of society, and narrators, aware of the importance of the subject, express their memories and role in social developments.
Hassan Beheshtipour:
Three methodological points are essential in examining the “public acceptance of oral history”:
1. It must be clarified what exactly is meant by “public acceptance”; is it the increase in the audience for oral history books or the attention of the media, the growth of academic and scientific activities, or the expansion of executive projects in this field? Without determining the semantic scope of this term, any causal analysis may be incomplete or general.
2. Asking about the cause of the acceptance creates the assumption of the existence of such acceptance in the mind; whereas it must first be determined where and on what scale this acceptance is seen—in Iran, at the regional level, or in the world—and then be confirmed with statistical evidence and reliable data.
3. To validate this claim, it is necessary to specify the type of data and the statistical population: for example, sales statistics of oral history books, survey results, or an examination of the extent to which this approach is promoted among academic, cultural, or social groups.
Assuming that this claim is true, four key factors can be considered effective in public acceptance:
1. The impact of the digital space on recording and preserving memories more accurately,
2. The possibility of recording the history of strata and groups that have been ignored in the official narrative,
3. The narrative and human appeal of the conversations,
4. The role of oral history in filling the gap between written and official documents.
Mohammad Mehdi Abdollahzade
The need to represent the voices of the silent and unseen led to the spread of oral history, and this need was the main factor in the public acceptance of this method. While traditional historiography was largely the monopoly of powerful groups, oral history provided the possibility of participation and agency for different segments of society. In this method, the interviewer plays the role of historian, facilitator and guide, and the result is a narrative from the mouth of a direct witness and observer of the event. This feature allows the hidden layers of history to be revealed and the audience to feel more identified and closer to human and living narratives.
Hamid Ghazvini:
Several factors can be speculated for this issue:
1. The literature of historical books and their structure do not attract many audiences, but oral history works are more likely to attract audiences due to their fluent text and simple structure.
2. Breaking taboos and making it easier to encounter many historical phenomena that were previously less paid attention to.
3. Interest in obtaining information from the language of narrators and primary witnesses who provide their information to the audience without intermediaries and establish communication with them.
4. Participation in the compilation of history, which involves different social classes, and this is an issue that is attractive to all members of society.
Seyyed Mohammad Sadegh Feyz:
It seems that there is both acceptance and rejection of it. Since it has perhaps transformed history from a dry and formal state to a mass and public one, it has separated the upper classes from the lower classes, it has transformed dry texts into attractive texts and formats, and etc., is one of the reasons for its acceptance. On the other hand, the lack of sufficient documentation, mistakes or discrepancies in expressing important points, the centrality of the individual instead of the process or event, and the lack of a verification mechanism are factors that reduce its acceptance. Although in the current atmosphere of the country, the two important events of the revolution and the war are among the most important topics of attention for oral history; but local and specialized areas in professions or topics that have been addressed less often have been noteworthy and worthy of reflection.
Mohammad Mohsen Mashafi:
In a time that can be considered the era of the emergence of the masses of experts, oral history has broken the monopoly of historiography and opened a wide field to this field. The masses of experts welcome this valuable opportunity to express their views in the form of oral history. On the other hand, oral history has caused the presentation of multiple and diverse historical narratives to the society and the reflection of perspectives arising from different value systems (unlike the traditional method of historiography). This diversity in presentation naturally attracts a wider audience from different cultural and intellectual layers. Each person finds something in the oral history market in accordance with their belief system and taste. Through the plurality of narratives, if a hidden angle of an event is revealed, this attraction will be doubled.
Number of Visits: 29
http://oral-history.ir/?page=post&id=12916