Samdok - Nordiska museet

connecting collecting: jensen & walle
came to Norway from Pakistan in the 1970s, and their
wives and children, as the first group to be interviewed.
The Norwegian Pakistani population is the largest nonwestern
immigrant group in Norway, making it an obvious
choice for a project of this kind. Secondly, the men
that came in the 1960s and 1970s are beginning to grow
old. We needed to record their stories before it was too
late. Turkish people constitute another large group that
came to work in Norway in the 1970s, and for the same
reason as mentioned above, we saw an urgent need to
document the life stories of an ageing first generation.
Contact had also been established between museum staff
and the Turkish community before the project, thus facilitating
the process of recruiting people for interviewing.
As people migrate for various reasons, we also wanted to
interview refugees and chose Bosnian refugees as a third
group. While this group came to Norway much later,
they reflect the changing pattern of migration to Norway
after restrictions on non-refugee immigration were introduced
from the mid-1970s onwards.
We have realised that in order to understand what
it is like to be an immigrant, it is necessary not only to
understand how people experience life in Norway, but
also understand what life was and is like in their country
of origin. It is important not only to get a selection of
stories from various ethnic groups, but also to secure a
range of material concerning the individual reasons for
breaking away and travelling to Norway. The motivating
forces behind migration will also affect how you experience
your encounter with Norwegian society and how
you behave accordingly. While the recorded life stories
centre very much on the early phases of life and thus are
rich in information about people’s countries of origin, we
also found it imperative to visit these places.
The research material
Interviews
The purpose of a life story interview is to cover the interviewee’s
life span from childhood to the present. The informants
tell about their childhood in their native coun-
tries, the experience of breaking up and settling down
somewhere new and very different. They relate how
they cope with a new language, the upbringing of their
children, with matters such as education, religion and
family, and negotiate between different cultural values.
Interviewing as a method is time-consuming, as much
staff is needed and the processing of these interviews for
archive purposes also takes time. We still find it, however,
the best method for our work, and the interviews will
also be an excellent source for future researchers.
Private photos
Private photos enlighten and reinforce the informants’
life stories and are also important memory-keys to be
used during interviews. They are valuable sources in
understanding an individual’s personal life at different
times and places, and as illustrations of the past. Much
energy and time were used to select, duplicate and administer
the acquisition of this valuable material.
Field observation
For each interview, a small contextual report was written
as a guide for future use. Some interviews were supplemented
with pictures taken by the museum’s in-house
photographer. In addition, the field trips to the country
of origin were documented by long reports, by diaries,
and an abundance of photographic material.
So how did we approach the various ethnic groups?
For the interviews of people of Pakistani descent, an early
immigrant from Pakistan was engaged to function as
a ‘door opener’ and as an interviewer alongside the museum’s
curators. He had a wide range of acquaintances,
but being a Pakistani man, his circle of female acquaintances
was more limited. Furthermore, we realised that
the people we interviewed came from the door opener’s
personal network, thus reducing the potential for variation
that could otherwise have been achieved.
Partly due to this experience, and inspired by other
projects on oral history, we chose another method for the
interviews within the Turkish and Bosnian ethnic groups.
People recruited by the curators alongside voluntary amateurs
were trained in personal one-to-one interviewing
and in private photo collecting during a three-day
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