I’ve just completed a nine-month contract as the Project Manager of an oral history project. Reflecting on this experience, I realized many people have misconceptions about the potential of oral history and about the nature of history itself.

My own comprehension has grown over the years. As a student, I learned that the archaeological record reveals the errors and oversights of historic documents. As a historical archaeologist, I came to see that the reverse is also true; history illuminates the archaeological remains and puts them in context. This dual nature of historical archaeology highlights the benefits of combining different resources when studying past events.

In order to appreciate the role of oral history, one first has to understand what history actually is: a story about what happened in the past. It most assuredly is NOT a sterile statement of the Truth. Even if you read it in a book. Especially if you read it in a school textbook. 

Studying history is really like doing a giant puzzle where some of the pieces have been intentionally destroyed, accidentally lost, or temporarily misplaced. The pieces themselves are imperfect: the edges are worn and most of the images on them are blurry, with only the occasional little piece showing fine detail. As a result, an individual piece might fit in more than one place, and the resulting picture varies depending on the angle from which it is viewed.

The best history combines multiple sources of information, from a variety of perspectives, and makes plain what those sources and perspectives are. Primary sources are created when an event occurs, by the people involved — like a marriage register. Secondary sources might quote primary sources, but are created after the fact and add interpretation — like a family album created for a wedding anniversary. 

Perspectives vary based on the motives of the people recording and interpreting the information. The stories of the past found in secondary sources vary based upon the primary sources selected and the writer’s interpretation of them. Generally, primary sources are considered more accurate. However, even with primary sources perspective is important. Think of witness statements at an accident scene. The witnesses were all there and saw the same thing, but their statements can vary widely. 

Now we come to the role of oral history in telling the story of what happened in the past. Oral history is merely an auditory, rather written, source. It has the same strengths and weaknesses as any written record. It is more accurate when recorded closer to the event in question. It is a primary record if the person is speaking about their own experiences, or a secondary record if they add interpretations to a narrative.

Years ago, oral histories were dismissed as inferior to written histories, particularly by colonial powers that failed to recognize the value of cultures that were different from their own. They argued that written records were more accurate and less changeable. As already discussed, there is no guarantee a source is accurate just because it is written down. However, alterations are visible in the written record, as the example of my granny’s birth registration shows: a notation in the margin, referencing a school record, corrects the spelling of her name sixty years after her birth.

People may imagine oral history as a game of Telephone, where the message changes with each repetition. However, in cultures without written symbolic communication, there is great emphasis on memorizing the details of oral histories and passing them through the generations unchanged. For example, lineages were memorized because they could determine position in society, land ownership, or alliances. Memorizing details of land and resources were life and death matters, such as learning celestial navigation between islands over vast ocean distances, or knowing how to distinguish edible from toxic plant variants and remembering where each grew. 

Ensuring an accurate transmission of information and perspective falls to select individuals in a society. In a culture that relies on oral transmission of history, sometimes groups of elders consult each other and come to a consensus about specific details of a past event. Similarly,  professional historians debate the interpretation of written documents and publish their results.

We are all consumers and creators of history, whether we realize it or not. From childhood, we are told stories of our own development, stories about our family ancestry, stories about our culture’s past. It is our job to evaluate the sources of information in those stories and to assess the perspectives that are used to interpret them. The broader our perspective, the more sources and viewpoints we incorporate into our story, the more accurate our history becomes and the greater our understanding of the past.

This article was originally printed in THE BERGEN NEWS and is being reprinted with permission.