Oral History and Interviewing More Generally

I was part of a panel with oral historians because of the television show and archive I do. The appearance forced me to think about the relationship between my strategies and also my ethic and the strategies and ethics of oral historians. What emerged is pretty rough, but it is the best I have done so far in defining the historical dimension of my work. I cleaned up the transcript substantially.  This is the whole panel discussion.

Heritage Collaborative:  Oral History Workshop and Panel

March 28, 2014

Peter Shea

Panel discussion on Oral History Theory and Practice

About 20 years ago I wanted to do a television show that would put out to a million people, many of whom were asleep, the lives of creative and thoughtful people, who would also model civil, long conversations.

I held onto the tapes, but that was my mission, that was how I presented it: you’re talking to a million people, and you’re telling them about your life.  And then as I worked with the Institute for Advanced Study, a couple of things happened.  One, these things clustered a bit.  I started getting 40 electronic musicians, or seven interviews with the same art historian.  I began to get some things that were really exciting clusters and the archival possibility emerged, the streaming possibility emerged.

And so I find myself providing a service to history as I produce primary source material, but I don’t take responsibility for it in the same way that oral historians do, because I‘m not writing about it, I may never write about it. That’s not my game. 

So I’m sort of weird. And I want to give some advice from a weird perspective, and then let people hit me.  Because I’m not them. They’re not doing what I’m doing; I’m not doing what they’re doing, but I still want to give people advice, even though.  So I’m going to give some advice under three headings:  prepare, preserve, and personalize.  Or if you prefer, get ready, get it all and get serious.  You can fill in the other letters yourself.

Prepare. 

I come into a room and there’s a woman sitting here, and I say: “What do you do?” and she says, “I’m the premier Haydn scholar in Canada”, and I recall  that Canada is to the north - I was there once for a few hours - and that Haydn did a symphony about a clock.  Now it is possible in that situation to do a decent interview.  You just have to make sure that you let the person talk long enough, and you’ve got to make sure that they see themselves as talking to ignorant people, yourself first among them.

So they begin telling you what their story is: “How did you come to do what you’re doing?”  After about 10 minutes, you begin to get some ideas that you can work on. I want to say the scary thing, that it isn’t necessary to prepare: it’s nice. I certainly prepare when I can, and as much as I can. Sometimes I end up being very prepared, because I have worked in exactly the area that someone is working in, but it isn’t a prerequisite.  One day I do Asian film, and the next day I do Haydn, and the next day I may do the deputy zoo keeper at Como Zoo.

So, where does this go?  You don’t have to prepare.  It’s great to prepare. It’s great to know what’s out there, so that you can know that you’re adding something.

 

Here’s the odd piece of advice I will give you.  Have something going on in your head, around about your interview.  I think is more important actually than being prepared.  Be thinking about something.  Have Dickens’ Hard Times playing in the car, or McCullough’s biography of Truman, or something that gives you a train of thought.  Life really is interconnected, and if you’re thinking about something, it will give you an immediate connection, in weird ways.   It will give you ways of getting what they’re saying, ways of making what their saying interesting.

Preserve

I think in oral history we are basically where archeology was just at the cusp of radio-carbon dating.  We know that there is an immense amount of information contained in these interviews. We don’t quite have the technology to get it out yet. But someday we will.  You can imagine an archeologist saying “I think I’ll go and excavate this mound; if people don’t like how I do it, they can come re-excavate it --  no big deal.”  Well it’s a huge deal, because once you’ve moved stuff around, they’ll never find that fine-grade information that we know is necessary.   Or an archeologist says “Lots of people are really fussy about documentation, but I believe in simple things.  There was a hole; there were some pots. Some were red; some were white. There were some bones. It was all kind of jumbled up, and it was about a foot and a half down.”   Nobody in archeology would do that now, because we know what you can do if you know exactly where something was and exactly how deep it was and exactly what it was in relationship to.  Well I think we are at that stage where we know there is something there in interviews but we don’t have information to get at it.  For example, Ekman’s stuff on micro-expressions tells us that there is huge information to be obtained in how someone speaks and gestures.

Communication theory stuff says that there is information contained in the dance that goes on in a group like this, between our various gestures, and all of that requires analysis: it takes a very long time to do 120 seconds, but it’s out there.  And that means, preserving responsibly means you’ve got to get video, probably from a couple of cameras. And you’ve got to get audio, and the audio has got to be available together with transcripts.  Not because what you do may need it, but because you’re the person who got the shot at this person, and you don’t want to be cursed into eternity by more sophisticated investigators a hundred years from now for not having preserved the important stuff.  I think you just have to do that.  I’ve been to some extent a sinner with audio; at least I’ve been better with video.

I’ll give you a couple of examples of why it’s important.  One of the guys I interviewed was John Davis.  He was probably the best administrator that Minnesota has ever seen, and the evidence  of that is that Macalester College still exists, the Children’s Theatre still exists - I think Minnesota State Mankato was another one of those organizations that was about to go down for the third time until he came along.  The Minneapolis public schools woke up to integration a whole lot earlier than they might have otherwise when he was superintendent.  Everyone who knows him says this guy is a hero.

He comes in, he does these things, he leaves.  He doesn’t stay around and weight down the institution.  What’s up with this? I got the interview. He comes to the door wearing one of those Harvard bow ties, and I think I understand in a certain way how he can pull it off.  He’s got something I would call “Brahman courtliness.”   “Brahman”’s important; he’s from the upper class and you will never miss that fact.  And he’s also giving you the most intense attention you’ve probably have ever gotten since you were courted.  He moves with incredible grace. And those things have got to be part of what your audience sees.  And only video would capture it.   If you don’t like “Brahman courtliness,”  the video’s on the IAS web site. You’ll see what he does.

Anybody who’s trying to run an organization needs a blood transfusion from the guy.  He died of mad cow a couple of years ago, so he’s not around to help anymore.

Or another one that moved me: I interviewed a very smart farm couple in southwest Minnesota, and they  had done something every farm couple in southwest Minnesota wants to do but hasn’t been able to pull off.  They had gotten their kids, their boys to come back to the farm.  They’re there for supper most of the time. Most weekends anyhow. Some of them are there all of the time.  

How did they do it?  They built the damndest diversified enterprise you’ve ever seen. If a nuclear bomb hits that place, they’ll be selling souvenirs three years later. It’s that strong. Each of the kids has his own workshop within a very large building that has fiber optic cable.  It’s got bays for cars.  It’s just a magnificent setup.  They were totally killed by a tornado a few years ago.  They used the insurance money plus sweat equity to build this very complex structure that is like an economic model for holding a family of diverse interests together.

 

I got the wife and the camera in front of me and had a wonderful conversation, had it transcribed. I looked at the transcription and was appalled because she sounded stupid.  It was wandering and rambling: what’s going on?  This has to be one of the smartest people I’ve met, and she’s sounding stupid.  Then I listened to the interview again.  She doesn’t use grammar; she uses other devices to hold her discourse together.  She uses music; you’d have to put her speech on a musical scale to get straight what she’s doing because the lengths and the shortnesses and the pitches are what hold it together. When you read it, it looks like a mess.  So it’s a tribute to a kind of intelligence that you don’t see very often.  It’s absolutely invisible in writing.

So you’ve got to preserve what you’ve got. And you’ve got to start with a non-intrusive interviewer.

The third point is: you‘ve got to personalize.

Scholarship is important, but it’s not very important. What is more important than scholarship is having a soul, if you don’t have one; saving your soul, if you do.  Those are the big things.  Scholarship is secondary to that.   The question that matters when you’re talking to people and asking for their stories is: what voices do I need to have in my head to become the person I want to be? Who do I need to hear from to balance things out, to inspire me, to warn me. 

  

My own experience, one last point. 

I took 26 years to get a PhD. It set a record. And during that time I developed a certain animosity toward graduate students, reflected in the way I used the words “graduate student.”  It had a kind of poison on it, by the time it got out of my mouth to the other student, it had poison on it. Also, assistant and associate professors bothered me. And I had images about them - of course you do when you’re outside a club - you have all kinds of images about the people in the club. That’s just natural. But I decided that it was important to get beyond that by actually talking to a bunch of them.  And some of them are just as trivial as I thought they were, and some of them are just as confused and out of it as I thought they were. And a great many of them aren’t. A great many of them are just what you want in the community as leaders. So now I know. I can’t speak that way anymore.  I tried to meet my fellow panelists before I came here today, because I knew I would say something offensive, but I thought I would be offensive in an ignorant way if I didn’t actually like the people I was sitting next to. That’s the important thing. It’s an important thing for me. You can always make a salary.  I would really like to die with a soul.  It would be nice if they could put it on my tombstone, “had a soul.”  Don’t tell anyone you’re doing it. It’s probably good, if the cameras are running, to speak angrily and forcefully against the denigration of scholarship.  Get yourself quoted.  But never forget that scholarship is a very dicey game, and that you’re basically here to figure out who you are, and that means who you are in relationship to a some other people on the planet.