Self

The oral historian knows that when a respondent tells a story about an event or an experience he or she is directly or indirectly telling us something about him or herself. In an interview that tackles the whole life course or life history of the individual, the respondent is given the opportunity to tell a story that reveals their present sense of self. This is a view of their self as the culmination of a life. The life-story interview invites the narrator to dig deep, to reflect on the inner self, to reconcile any conflicts and then to reconstruct the self as a coherent whole in the form of a single narrative. In an interaction with the interviewer, the interview becomes a process in which the respondent actively fashions an identity. And even in an interview where the declared aim is merely to gather information it is rare for the respondent not to reveal something of themselves. The revelation of the self, understood as the autonomous and self-

contained individual who possesses a rich and complex inner life or consciousness, has become one of the key aims of oral historians. The use of personal or subjective documents – from autobiography and memoirs to oral history – across the social-science and humanities disciplines was traditionally a means of accessing empirical information and as a window into culture. But in the past thirty years or so the use of life narratives of all kinds in research and in popular culture has constituted a methodological and interpretive turn. This is constituted by a celebration of the subjective and an understanding that life stories are complex and revealing narrative performances which can offer an insight into both identity formation and the relationship between that and larger historical forces. Indeed, it has been said that people in the western developed world inhabit a confessional culture in which the public divulgence of aspects of the self hitherto regarded as private are normalised via public consumption of celebrity interviews, personal accounts of triumph and tragedy in the popular press and intense media focus on the personal lives of anyone in the public eye. At the popular level, the success of American President Barack Obama’s two-volume autobiography is evidence of this turn to the personal in popular culture, the notion that an understanding of what

made the person who he or she is can open a window onto the cultural forces that shape our lives.1 The study of the self therefore is seen not only as a means of accessing subjectivity but as a way of studying culture and the relationship between the two. The focus on the life story as an approach to investigating the relationship

between personal experience and culture emerged from anthropology. That discipline began to challenge neutrality and objectivity within its practice and to embrace what has been called anthropological biography.2 The eliciting of a life story in order to offer a less scientific and more literary interpretation of a culture also provided information on aspects of that culture or perspectives on it rarely encountered via traditional techniques.3 Marjorie Shostak’s biography of Nisa, a woman from the !Kung San hunters and gatherers of the African Kalahari desert, is a prime example of this biographical turn. Shostak reflects that she chose this approach as a means of getting closer to a people whose language, way of life and understanding of themselves was otherwise extremely difficult to access.4 Within history, in contrast with some other disciplines, autobiography and other kinds of lifewriting have always been accepted as legitimate sources, and the writing of historical biography has existed as a respected sub-discipline. However, the use of a life story for another purpose, to offer an alternative perspective on past events was traditionally regarded as unreliable, mainly because the account was subjective. Even the collection of American slave narratives in the 1930s did not attract serious attention from historians until almost half a century later because they were regarded as untrustworthy and unverifiable as historical sources. In recent decades, the significance of the self has become more prominent

in historical writing. Marxist historians in the 1980s saw the self as a site of resistance to structures of domination.5 At the same time, the rise of feminist, gay and lesbian, black and subaltern histories has challenged the ‘white, male and middle-class’ perspective of so much historical narrative, often from a personal perspective and likewise stressing agency, the capacity to make personal choices which in turn affect events. Historians of women in particular have been to the fore in putting the personal into the historical, often taking their own personal experience as a starting point as in the case of Carolyn Steedman whose (auto)biographical study of her own engagement with the life of her mother offers a challenging perspective on our historical assumptions about maternalism, class and childhood.6 Others focused on personal testimony and life-writing as the way to access expressions of the self on the part of historical actors. Decades of oral history practice have taught us that interrogation of an

individual’s life history does much more than offer us empirical evidence about past events. The telling of a life story is a complex narrative performance which requires attention to the use of language, the deployment of narrative structure, the articulation of memory, the context within which the life is narrated; in other words, all the devices by which a person represents the

self in oral fashion. Having blazed the trail for the use of life-story narratives within the historical profession, oral historians found that these sources, while certainly offering data, had to be studied as documents of interiority, as expressions of consciousness. Moreover, the life history as told in an oral history interview is not just an opportunity for the respondent to articulate a pre-existing or ready-made sense of self to which the interviewer then proceeds to gain access. Rather, the interview itself is a means by which subjectivity or the sense of self is constructed and reconstructed through the active process of telling of memory stories. These days, oral historians privilege interiority; we try to encourage our respondents to produce coherent narrative selves in interview though often we have to acknowledge they find this very difficult to do. This chapter considers how the conduct of oral history both elicits the

expression of a self and facilitates the shaping of a sense of self in the narrator via the telling of the life story. It summarises some of the theories about the self, looks at how the self is narrated via the life story and considers some of the ways in which these theoretical positions on self and self-narration may be translated into oral history practice.