ORAL HISTORY: MIGRATION AND LOCAL IDENTITIES - Academia

Migration and NarrationSome couples exhibited what Wegner, Erber, and Paula (1991)have called „transactive memories,” where one spouse completes theother’s remembrances or reminds their partner about other, similaroccurrences that they had not mentioned yet.Occasionally the presence of family members made the tellingof one’s story more difficult for a group member, or in some cases,may have inhibited it altogether. For example, one participant startedher comments with „I have been sitting here all afternoon, biting mytongue, because my mother is sitting here, next to me, and I know thatshe will disagree with everything that I say” (3x3, 2006). But then sheproceeded to say at least part of what she had wanted to express.Her case illustrates one of the limits of group interviews, especiallywhen the group consists of people from one’s community. 10In addition, an open forum, such as a group interview, is not conduciveto an intimate type of conversation, where the narrator mayeven forget that his story is being audio taped. The group interview,just as a video recording, fosters the perception of the narrative as aperformance with a „conscious presentation of self” (Portelli, 1997,p. 14) and a stiffer, more thought-out narration.In our case, however, the group setting elicited a deeper, morevaried, and more critical discussion of certain controversial or significantissues than had been voiced in individual narratives. The groupdiscussion facilitated the creation of a multifaceted collective narrativein which „instances of negotiation, disagreement and consensus makethe reconstruction and resignification of experience and the elaborationof meaning possible.” (Riano-Alcala, 2008, p. 282) In the rest ofthe paper I will deal with one example of this.6210I encountered similar experiences as an outside interviewer in the fieldwork project in Latvia (Hinkle, 2001, 2003). In several cases authors askedthat their testimonies not be made available to the local historians. In onecase where I was accompanied by a local interviewer-trainee, the authorrefused to tell me about a painful episode during the war, which had beendescribed to me by her relative in the USA (Astra Murniece, Viesite, Latvia,June, 2000. Interviewed by Maija Hinkle).