How is Oral History Possible? On Linguistically Universal and Topically Specific Knowledge

Abstract

Conducting oral history interviews or using them as research and educational resources requires the (mostly tacit) background knowledge necessary for understanding an interview or its excerpts. Taking the topic of commemoration and remembrance as a case in point, and analyzing fifteen interviews in the Czech and Slovak languages from the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, this article aims to consider the oral history interview as an interactional accomplishment. I argue that in producing oral histories, the interviewer and the interviewee draw on linguistically universal and topically specific knowledge, which are also the resources audiences use to grasp what the interview addresses. The article concludes with a discussion of the relationships between these notions and their connection to different temporalities of oral history interviews and levels of understanding. Finally, I outline future research directions and questions inspired by this framework. By studying the linguistic and interactional constitution of oral history interviews, we can arrive at a better understanding of the very nature of oral history that can inform the use of archived interviews in research and education.