ABSTRACT
For a long time, oral history methodology was accompanied by an almost total neglect of the problems of language, meaning and context-problems which are critical to understanding how interviews work. Influenced by the movement of ‘history from below’ and by social-scientific perspectives on interviewing in general, the standard oral history frame was based on the assumption that life stories of the people who had actually experienced past events revealed the past ‘as it actually was’. As a consequence, most oral historians were content simply to interview and transcribe, making little effort to comprehend more than the literal meaning of the words. The only methodological problem to be concerned about was the problem of standardization.1
