Oral History Review Advance Access originally published online on September 11, 2009
Oral History Review 2009 36(2):207-230; doi:10.1093/ohr/ohp076
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Reticence in Oral History Interviews
Dr. Lenore Layman is Adjunct Associate Professor of History at Murdoch University and an historian of Australia and Western Australia in particular. She has published Organise! A Visual Record of the Labour Movement in Western Australia and Rica's Stories as well as numerous articles on aspects of industrial, labor, and health history. She is an active oral historian currently engaged in two collaborative research projects which make extensive use of oral interviews. The East Perth Power Station project is creating an oral history archive, web site, and book. The "Asbestos Stories" project, being undertaken with Murdoch University journalists and in cooperation with medical researchers, will produce a web site of people's stories of the impact on their lives of asbestos exposure. Layman is president of the Professional Historians Association (Western Australia) and active in promoting public history. E-mail: L.Layman{at}murdoch.edu.au
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Abstract |
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Oral history interviews contain reticences—conversational shifts by the narrator which limit dialogue on particular matters. Reticences indicate points of tension for the narrator and warning signs for the interviewer that dialogue is, to an extent, disrupted. Reticence is an assertion of a narrator's authority in that dialogue. Examining reticence enlarges understanding of the sharing of authority which occurs in interviews and the shared authority, to use Michael Frisch's term, embodied in the completed interview. In a group of interviews with former power station workers on their work and workplace, reticences fell into four categories—that which did not fit narrators’ purpose in agreeing to the interview, that which did not fit within narrators’ bounds of social discourse, that which was painful or disturbing to discuss, and that which did not fit with public, commemorative memory. Analysis of these different reticences illuminates, above all, the negotiation of authority within the interview dialogue.
Keywords: narrators, purpose, reticence, shared authority, social discourse, traumatic recall