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What is Oral History? Discuss the merits and demerits of Oral

History.

What is Oral History?

History passed down through spoken word may be one of the oldest methods of maintaining a
record of the past. Stories of ancestors have been told in myths, fables, parables, and folklore.
While there are many fantastical elements to these myths, many of them originally contained
some grounding in reality.

Oral History Projects in the 20th Century:

It’s been noted that formal attempts to document and archive personal experiences for posterity
through interviews are a relatively modern undertaking. One of the early efforts was the Federal
Writers’ Project in the late-1930s and early-1940s. This was an agency of the New Deal’s Works
Progress Administration that sought to document the diversity of America and various personal
experiences during the Great Depression. Unfortunately, the Federal Writers’ Project fell victim
to budget cuts and the coming of World War II. Since early formalized efforts at collecting oral
histories lacked video and audio recording technology, they had to rely on human note-taking.
Naturally, this method raises questions about the reliability and veracity of the accounts. Early
interviews were also idiosyncratic and conducted with little preparation. Ultimately, there was no
concerted effort to develop a permanent archival collection.
In the 1940s, Allan Nevins, of Columbia University, was one of the first to develop a systematic
methodology for recording and preserving oral histories. He also made efforts to conduct
interviews with people of recent history to supplement the written historical record. In the 1960s
and 1970s, the scope of oral history widened in response to social movements and growing
interest in documenting the experiences of the non-elites of society. In other words, blue-collar
workers, minorities, and people who typify the social experience but have otherwise been
rendered silent by the bulk of history focusing on the elites of society. Despite the fact that some
of these non-elites are illiterate, too busy, or feel that they don’t have anything valuable to say,
recording their accounts helps to democratize the historical record.

Oral History Goes Online:

Technology and the internet have provided unprecedented access to oral history, either in audio,
video, or transcript form. However, this freedom of access does present issues for accounts
originally published in the days before the world wide web. If the narrator never intended for
their account to be a wide publication, then they may feel that their distribution rights are being
violated. Also, the internet allows anyone to publish anything regardless of quality. Still, the
internet allows for the rapid search of relevant material without researchers having to sift through
hours of audio recordings or mountains of transcribed pages.
With regard to recorded audio interviews, Alessandro Portelli argued that oral history is oral in
that “the tone and volume range and rhythm of popular speech carry implicit meaning and social
connotations which are not reproducible in writing…The same statement may have quite
contradictory meanings, according to the speaker’s intonation, which cannot be presented
objectively in the transcript, but only approximately described in the transcribers’ own words”.
Indeed, Portelli has a good argument for the aural quality of audio/video documentation, in
general. Speech has a way of conveying emotions and meaning in ways that simply are not
possible or too cumbersome for the written word.

How Historians Use Oral Histories: Merits and Demerits:

As with any type of source or information, the use of oral histories by historians presents certain
merits and demerits. Let’s examine some of them.

Merits:
Accessibility: To make any historical documents the data and information of oral history are
easily accessible. Oral traditions are easily accessible to communities that rely on them, as they
do not require literacy or specialized skills to understand.

Cultural Preservation: Oral traditions play a crucial role in preserving cultural practices,
customs, and beliefs that may not be recorded in written sources. To defining any historical
context of a hidden cultural beliefs Oral History is a first source to define a history.

Flexibility: Oral traditions can adapt and evolve over time, allowing for the incorporation of
new information and interpretations. To review a Oral History Historians can redefine or can
give a proper research on a particular historical context.

Emotional Impact: Oral tradition can convey emotions, nuances, and personal perspectives
that may be lost in written records. Due to lack of proper deep historical documents the Oral
History’s are becomes main focus point of a historical findings.
Historical facts: Oral histories can provide historians with new information and new
interpretations of topics. Social historians provide insight into the lifestyles and mentality of
populations that are not available in traditional histories. Effectively, as personal accounts, oral
histories function as a type of primary source.

Personal agency & immediacy: Oral histories emphasize personal agency. People become
the main protagonists of the past and talk about their experiences in unique ways that defy the
preexisting analysis. For interviews that don’t focus on social history or the life of the narrator,
oral histories can highlight the relationship between people and historical events. It can also be
argued that in highlighting personal agency, there is a more immediate tone to oral histories than
more traditional or secondhand accounts.

Emotional resonance: For those people who find traditional historical narratives to be
“boring,” oral histories can be easier for them to identify with. Oral histories provide a way to
link more professional histories with vernacular stories. They can be used to introduce people to
a new perspective in a non-threatening way. A good oral history is, effectively, a good story that
resonates with others and generates sympathy. When oral histories are given adequate context,
then they can help people understand how personal experiences are linked to events.

Demerits:
Reliability: Oral traditions are more prone to inaccuracies and distortions compared to written
records, as information can be altered or lost through repeated retelling. Not every first-person
account is reliable. That being said, the closer an account is to the time of the event(s), the more
useful it is as a primary source. Yet, even for those who directly experienced the event(s),
incomplete or inaccurate information at the time may have skewed their perspective. In the case
of interviews conducted decades after the fact, a person’s memory risks being distorted by the
ravages of time and ideological change. We’re all human, after all.

Subjectivity: Oral traditions are often influenced by the perspective and biases of the
storyteller, leading to potential distortions of historical events. Due to rely on oral history not in
the written format the chances of distortion of history is increased day by day. Just because of the
process of the continuance of oral history is various methods of story telling and so on, the oral
history is getting distorted.

Vulnerability: Oral traditions are at risk of being lost over time due to changes in language,
cultural practices, or the death of key storytellers. Somewhere due to changes of the believe
system of the society the major oral histories are getting lost form the societies. Due to changes
of time the Oral histories are getting distorted and vanished from the society. Just because of
vulnerability of the Oral History the chances of distortions and being lost of the Oral History is
becomes more than the written history.

Limited scope: Oral histories can frustrate historians who are looking for a broader picture of
the events. In fact, some argue that oral histories, particularly those focused on social history,
overemphasize personal agency and ignore the workings of political and cultural power in
society. Hence, they also muddle the narrative on how political and cultural forces influence
individual thought and action. Oral histories are also inherently biased since the narrators are the
most vocal ones to tell the story. Thus, only their perspective is heard.

Hindsight bias: Narrators can benefit from more current information on the topic or
subsequent ideological shifts in thinking which may have influenced the recalled facts. This is
otherwise known as the benefit of hindsight or the historian’s fallacy. The fact is that nobody
ever sees the entire picture with 100% clarity at the time of the event. This can result in the
narrator recollecting facts that they didn’t know at the time.

Personal bias: Another issue that can skew the account is that the narrator, and in some cases
the interviewer, can have a personal stake in presenting a certain version or viewpoint. In some
interviews conducted late in a person’s life, this can probably be attributed to nostalgia. “Aww…
those were the good ‘old glory days of youth when everything was so much better.” Other people
carry the scars of their experiences which manifest as personal prejudices. Some do realize this
and try to correct themselves, while others are seemingly locked into the thinking they had from
a bygone era. (How many times have we encountered some old veteran of WWII who, decades
later, still refused to buy any product manufactured in Germany/Italy/Japan because they were
the evil Axis powers.) In other cases, the interviewee may be embellishing and/or omitting
certain details in their story in an attempt to paint a more positive picture of themselves or a
particularly positive/negative picture of someone else. Again, that’s just the nature of personal
accounts.

Short length: Most interviews cannot go on long enough to exhaustively cover all the facts.
Even in a 1-2 hour interview, there’s not much room for an enormous amount of detail, and as a
result, some of the personal narratives can seem disjointed. Compare the amount of detail in
short oral histories versus the amount of detail in longer, book-length, autobiographical memoirs.
It’s worth noting that many of these drawbacks apply equally to written history, as well. The
degree to which they apply, of course, varies. In general, hindsight and personal biases are some
of the more difficult pitfalls to avoid when creating a historical record.

Conclusion:
To discuss on the various merits and demerits of the Oral History we can find the Importance of
Oral History. One can easily say that Oral History has several biasness and it is non reliable to
make a proper historical document. But when you going to find a history and you have no
information about that but you have to initiate or conclude the history you have to rely on Oral
History. Basically To Initiate a historical research at first the researchers need a basic information
about the history at that time only the oral histories can help the researchers to initiate the
process. Oral histories are not only lost history some times this are the emotions of several
society’s. In the old vedic ages the basis of knowledge are oral forms, then the scholars of Vedas
are learned from the oral process. So we cannot say all oral histories are distorted.