Oral History and the Study of
Communities: Problems, Paradoxes, and Possibilities

Linda Shopes

Definitions and Delimitations

"Community oral history" is a protean term, invoked by scholars and grass-roots historians alike to describe a variety of practices developed for a variety of purposes. The term "community" itself is vague and conceptually limited, with generally positive associations and not entirely deliberate implications of commonality and comity. A community oral history project typically refers to one defined by locale, to a group of interviews with people who live in some geographically bounded place, whether an urban ethnic neighborhood, a southern mill village, or a region of midwestern farms. Yet "community" also refers to a shared social identity, and so we speak of interviews with members of the gay community, the black community, the medical community. In fact, many community oral history projects combine the two meanings of the term, focusing on a particular group's experience in a particular place—steelworkers in Buffalo, Chicanos in El Paso, jazz musicians in Los Angeles.	1
Distinctions exist among broad genres of oral history. One axis of difference is defined by the provenance of interviews: At one end, there are interviewing projects developed by grass-roots groups to document their own experience; at the other, interviews conducted by scholars to inform their own research or to create a permanent archival collection for future scholarly work. In practice, most oral history projects fall somewhere between the two poles: historical society volunteers develop a project to document some aspect of local life in collaboration with the local college; a scholar, working on his own research project, makes contact with the retirees' group of a union local as a means of entrée for interviews he wishes to conduct about the union's history and along the way agrees to participate in a union educational program.	2
The second axis is defined by voice, that is, the extent to which the narrator's voice or the historian/interpreter's voice dominates the final product of the interviews. At one end are archival collections of interviews that are almost entirely in the narrators' voices; at the other are scholarly monographs in which the historian incorporates interviews along with other sources into his interpretation of the past. In fact, most oral history projects fall somewhere along this spectrum of possibilities.1 Thus a filmmaker can produce a film about a community's experience using testimony from participants, contemporary accounts, and scholarly "talking heads" in various proportions; an author can organize evidence from interviews in multiple ways to construct a historical argument; a museum exhibition about a neighborhood can use short quotations from interviews as label text or play extended excerpts from the actual audio- or videotapes.	3
The multiple ways voice gets rendered in community oral history projects open up a range of interpretive questions. The intersection of voice and provenance further complicates matters—my point here is simply to map the terrain over which this essay roams. In the following discussion, I will address both practical and interpretive issues involved in using oral history to study communities, considering first the use of extant interviews and second the conduct of one's own interviews.	4
Using Extant Interview Collections
No comprehensive survey of extant oral history collections exists—the enormous number of collections, their diverse points of origin, and the rapidity with which new projects develop render this a futile exercise. While more specialized finding aids exist, the best tool for identifying interview collections relevant to a particular community study is the World Wide Web. A broadly defined search can easily turn up thousands of references: a quick review of those will generally identify the largest, most important collections; a more systematic review can often turn up more localized or idiosyncratic groups of interviews.2	. . .