Some thoughts about Oral history

Oral history is an very interesting topic. It reminds me of one of my classmates' dissertation that oral resources are archives. As an archives researcher I disagreed with her based on a core archival principle: archives are the spontaneous products along with the process of a certain event in terms of written-paper, tapes, videos and other forms of media, and obviously, oral history is out of this concept, because it is not produced spontaneously, but delayed in time. My viewpoint invoked a big argument among the professors, guest session chair and my classmates. And it turned out that only one of the professors clearly agreed with me. I still insist in my position and I don't think it is a good idea to put oral history into the category of archives.

First of all, to put the oral history into the category of archives reflects an intention to expand of the concept of archives. It is not deniable that archival work gets more and more social recognition in China since 1980s, and the completion or construction of archives in city capitals, universities, companies, and other institutions  are undergoing smoothly and quickly, but it doesn't mean the role of archives as the social "information foundation" has ever been changed, and it is not a wise step to collect as many kinds of materials as they can by vesting them in the category of archives while isolating itself from museums and libraries. The problems, such as the capacity of archives, the cost and maintenance, the human and physical resources, etc would be big burdens for archives to take into account. I still think the most   emergent and challenge thing for archives to do is to give more accesses to the collections already in existence to the public, in which Chinese archivists have already done a good job.

Oral history offers more aspects about a story or event, and this is the most attractive thing for me. Alessandro Portelli in The Peculiarities of Oral History says that "there are no "false" oral sources", but it is really hard to abandon the concept of "false". When I was doing research in the June Fourth 1989, I watched a video Tiananmen by Carmelita Carma Hinton, wellkonwn as Carma in China, an American author who was born in China and participated in Cultural Revolution as a member of Red Guards. One interviewee in this tape gives me a lot thoughts. His name is Wang Dan, one student leader in that student movement. According to this video, Wang told the interviewer that he advocated the students to give up the occupation of Tiananmen Square at the end of May 1989, because the Square at that time was a real dump and the spirit of that student movement seemed to be lost. However these words were later refuted by another important student leader, Feng Congde, saying that Wang was one of the student leaders advocating to go on occupying the Square until the end, and Feng questioned that Wang's purpose was to deny the democratic nature of the student movement and made conformation with the CCP for his own image.  Leaving Carma's background and purpose of making this video, this video is kind of a good example to reflect one nature of the oral history, that is interviewee's views changed with time, either on purpose or not.

After all, oral history is a very interesting and unfamiliar area for me, and I would like to explore funny stories about it.