ABSTRACT
I begin this chapter with a confession. As a cultural anthropologist who studies contemporary American society, I never used to think of the interviews I do in the course of my fieldwork as ‘oral history’. This changed when I discovered that the most promising source of funding for my ethnographic study of a farming community in western Minnesota was not one of the traditional anthropological foundations, but the Minnesota Historical Society. Thus, in my grant application, I wrote of my intent to conduct ‘oral history’ interviews, choosing to use this term instead of the more familiar ‘ethnographic’ or ‘in-depth’ interview. Under the circumstances it seemed wise to appear as historically minded as possible.
