Book Reviews

ENTREVERSE. TEORA Y METADOLOGA PRCTICA DE LAS FUENTES ORALES. [A GLIMPSE OF OURSELVES: ORAL SOURCES THEORY AND METHODOLOGICAL PRACTICES.] Edited by Miren Llona Gonzlez. Bilbao: Universidad del Pas Vasco [University of the Basque Country], 2012. 244 pp. Softbound, 16.73.
Downloaded from http://ohr.oxfordjournals.org/ at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, A.C. on September 25, 2013

As the use of oral sources grows in stature as a legitimate foundation for historical, anthropological, and social research, editor Miren Llona addresses in this book a still prevalent and troubling lack of rigor and method, not only in the conducting of the interviews but also in the use and analysis of remembrance and memory. ASpanish-language oral history work published in 2012, this book focuses on theory and methodological practices in oral history and is a promising reference for current and future practitioners in the Spanish-speaking world of oral history. In a critical and self-reecting fashion, the preface provides a glimpse of the challenges confronting oral historians. It addresses a major reticence among contemporary historians and social scientists due to the desolate panorama of the teaching of the use of oral sources. While the book mostly explores experiences in the Iberian peninsula, the concerns addressed and solutions proposed shall be well appreciated elsewhere. Enriched by a carefully balanced selection of multidisciplinary contributions, this book openly confronts a common point of contention against the use of oral sourcesnamely, the fact that they often rely on emotions and subjectivity as a framework, which seems to compromise seriously the possibility of an objective, valid, and reliable study of the past. According to Llona, using oral sources is about confronting what Jacques Derrida has labeled homohegemonythat is, the hegemony of the homogeneous. While the postmodern critique has debunked traditional historiographys overbearing pretension of its objectivity, the acknowledgment of oral history as a useful and complementary discipline depends on developing with rigor and clarity the theory and methodological practice that are required to treat memory as a valid object of studyand source at the same timeof the recent past. The book challenges the notion of memory simply as a repository of experiences. Rather, memory is a dynamic system constantly apprehending and reinterpreting information, modifying it and producing new interpretations (21). To understand the nature of memory and develop a rigorous approach to oral sources, Llona proposes to pay particular attention to the role memory plays in

The Oral History Review 2013, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 378479 The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oral History Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

Book Reviews

379

the construction of the subject: Understood as a contingent reality, subjectivity is subdued to the time factor, and as such assumed as a fact to be made part of history (un hecho historizable), and a product of memory (23). The intersubjective nature of memory leads to the discussion of the concept of collective memory as an important heuristic device and a eld of inquiry where new narratives are capable of addressing the contradictions and distance between dominant ideals and individual aspirations in what Raymond Williams (with Michael Orrom, A Preface to Film [London: Film Drama,1954], and in later works) and more recently Michael Pickering (History, Experience and Cultural Studies [New York: St. Martins,1997]) have dubbed the structure of feeling. Llona does not stop at giving consideration to the understanding of memory from a theoretical perspective but soon leads the reader to understand what this means as a reective and intersubjective event in which the source is the very outcome of the interaction. This is by far the most powerful aspect of Llonas contribution; she offers the reader deep understanding coupled with the practicality of interviewing in oral history. The introduction is followed by six chapters with dissimilar intention and depth but that, as a whole, provide a satisfactory selection of themes and foci to illustrate the main orientation that Llona provides to this book. She clearly designs three of the pieces as contributions to the main pedagogical nature of this text: Rosa Garca-Orelln explores the bibliographic intention of orality; Jordi Roca-Girona and Lidia Martnez-Flores explore the determinant elements in the conguration of the narrative structure of life stories; and Pilar Daz Snchez explores the relationship between oral sources and biographical narratives. Mercedes Vilanova and Pilar Domnguez-Prats add two important pieces related to longstanding research work in Europe and America, respectively. And the selection of materials also includes an interesting piece from Carlos Sandoval-Garca questioning prevalent images constructed on and around immigrants and immigration. Garca-Orelln in her article and Roca-Girona and Martnez-Flores in their article contribute to this book from the methodological perspective of anthropologists. Garca-Orelln explores in depth the importance of the intersubjective character of the oral source that is being created as a result of the interview process, while Roca-Girona and Martnez-Flores dig deeper into the very narrative structure of the life histories. Vilanova explores the experiences of Spanish Republicans deported to Mauthasen to endure the unspeakable experience of Nazi concentration camps. Pilar Domnguez-Prats goes back to a theme that has been at the center of her research interests for many yearsthat is, the narratives of the Spanish Republican exiles in Mexico. Her stance and focus on the experiences of women go hand-in-hand with the chapter from Pilar DazSnchez on oral sources and the construction of biographical narratives. The book closes with an interesting piece from Sandoval-Garca whose work critically

380

ORAL HISTORY REVIEW

challenges prevailing imaginaries of immigration, as he refers to prevalent views on immigrants, and explores the potential among immigrant communities to create alternative discourses as tools for the positive transformation of public policy(228). The reader might nd as a weakness of this book a level of disconnection between the more theoretical and methodological aim of the book and the topical focus and development of some of the chapters. Ibelieve this is indicative of the moment the oral history movement is living today in the Spanish-speaking world at large, struggling with the task of building a strong foundation for oral history as a disciplinary eld in its own right, while also creating a corpus of works as the basis of the discipline, and all this in the midst of turf battles stirred by the arrogant insularity of impermeable local and regional groups. Juan Jos Gutirrezlvarez California State University, Monterey Bay

doi:10.1093/ohr/oht063

THREADS AND TRACES: TRUE FALSE FICTIVE. By Carlo Ginzburg. Trans. Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. 328 pp. Hardbound, $45.00. Carlo Ginzburg is a noted historian of the early modern period who has published on a wide variety of topics related to shamanism, early modern folk beliefs, and historical methodology. He is best known, however, for The Cheese and the Worms (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980; orig. Torino, Italy: G.Einaudi, 1976), a study of the religious beliefs of a sixteenthcentury miller by the name of Menocchio, who was eventually tried by the Inquisition and condemned and executed as a heretic. The book was remarkable both for the way it evoked a network of popular debate that existed outside of, and in opposition to, official church teachings and for its nuanced and creative approach to its source materials. Ginzburg relied not on documents produced by Menocchio himselfwhich simply did not existbut on the transcripts produced by his interrogators. He thus read the documents against the intentions of those who had created them, stubbornly probing them for evidence of the very beliefs the inquisitors were working to suppress. The Cheese and the Worms quickly became a classic example of the approach known as microhistory. In contrast to historical approaches that assumed that periods for which little written documentation existed could be studied only at the macro level of large demographic shifts, microhistory focused on individual