ABSTRACT
A specter is haunting the halls of the academy: the specter of oral history. The Italian intellectual community, always suspicious of news from outside-and yet so subservient to ‘foreign discoveries’—hastened to cut oral history down to size before even trying to understand what it is and how to use it. The method used has been that of charging oral history with pretensions it does not have, in order to set everybody’s mind at ease by refuting them. For instance, La Repubblica, the most intellectually and internationally oriented of Italian dailies rushed to dismiss ‘descriptions
“from below” and the artificial packages of “oral history” where things are supposed to move and talk by themselves’, without even stopping to notice that it is not things, but people (albeit people often considered no more than ‘things’) that oral history expects to ‘move and talk by themselves’.1
