‘Wailing for purity’

Abstract

This article gives a critical overview of recent trends and developments in the academic use of oral history. The paper focuses on some of the deep‐level assumptions guiding this work. The first of these is that the medium of the evidence — its ‘oralness’ — often confers a privileged status on the material being examined. Arising out of commonsense views of language which portray speech as authentic and intimate in contrast to the supposed deadness of print, these ideas have often privileged orality as the pure and authentic essence of national cultures. In relation to oral historiography, this valorisation of the voice manifests itself in a number of ways, one of which is that scholars view their informants as ‘oral people’ apparently untouched by literacy, media and the like. The article probes how these shortcomings can be overcome and suggests a range of methodological routes for bypassing these problems.