1. Oral History
Oral history has variously been described as: “the interview of eye-witness participants in the events of the past for the purposes of historical reconstruction,” as “hidden history,” the “history from below,” or as “spoken memories.” Why hidden or from below? Since the official historical record has been produced by educated elites dependent on writing, from clay cuneiform tablets forward, any alternative testimony (of subjects rather than rulers, of the unlettered, Gramsci’s people without History—“gente senza storia”) has not normally figured therein. Why should history be considered from various perspectives? Compare an account of war written by generals to that recounted by soldiers in the trenches; of Southern life in the memoirs of plantation owners to those narrated by slaves (to whom literacy was actually forbidden); or of immigration as assembled through government records and statistics, as opposed to personal experience narrated by immigrants on trans-Atlantic freighters, most often in steerage class, and therefore literally told “from below.” But if the “why” is apparent, the “how” is infinitely less so. First-person narrative, the basis of oral historical research, can, among other things: reveal alternative perspectives (e.g., ethnic, class, gender, political, geographic), thereby supplementing the historic record, viz. creating a historical record where none previously existed (cf. Una storia segreta); validate personal experience; and document emergent realities.

Since multiple perspectives help balance the historical record, oral research becomes critical to social history (family or community-based) that aims to focus on the “fabric of daily life.” For all their revolutionary commitment to documenting and reconstructing peasant and proletarian conditions, the Annales School of social historians were, with rare exceptions, forced back on sources such as baptismal records and climatic indices which lend themselves to statistical analysis rather than full-fleshed narrative. Oral historians, on the other hand, have the advantage of the subjective, viva voce testimony of common people and can therefore interrogate history directly through the first-hand narratives of those who experienced momentous events—collective and private alike. Of course, documenting these engaging human voices can profoundly empower marginal social groups, whether the economically disadvantaged or the politically-silenced, and thereby strengthen democratic discourse and process. The oral record can become a particularly forceful tool for groups whose primary mode of consciousness and expression is not written (e.g., indigenous peoples, peasants), or for those who have been denied a voice for socio-political reasons (e.g., slaves, women, minorities). Still, however benign or desirable we may judge it today, such empowerment is a collateral benefit of oral history, not its driving cause: to record and remember our origins, lucidly, for uses that will evolve into the future.

One of the most important early oral history projects, directed by a unit of the Library of Congress, the Federal Writer’s Project (1936-38), produced, among other results, a vast collection of narratives from ex-slaves living in 13 southern states. Processed and assembled in 1941, the Library of Congress Slave Narrative Collection, according to Benjamin A. Botkin, 1901-1975 (editor-in-chief) represented a “veritable folk history of slavery.”

For the first and the last time, a large number of surviving slaves have been permitted to tell their own story, in their own way. In spite of obvious limitations—bias and fallibility of both informants and interviewers, the use of leading questions, unskilled techniques, and insufficient controls and checks—this saga must remain the most authentic and colorful source of our knowledge of the lives and thoughts of thousands of slaves... (“From the Slave Narrative Collection,” in Southern, Readings in Black American Music, p. 117)

Although, the questions of objectivity in oral memory generated much debate in its earlier days, oral historians no longer apologize on that account. As Portelli has stated so eloquently:

The discrepancy between fact and memory ultimately enhances the value of the oral sources as historical documents. It is not caused by faulty recollections…but actively and creatively generated by memory and imagination in an effort to make sense of crucial events and of history in general. Indeed, if oral sources had given us ‘accurate,’ ‘reliable’, factual reconstructions of the death of Luigi Trastulli, we would know much less about it. […] Oral history sources tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing and what they now think they did. (Portelli, Luigi Trastulli)

(excerpt from: Luisa Del Giudice, “Speaking Memory: Oral History, Oral Culture and Italians in America,” forthcoming publication. All rights reserved.)

Further reading:
Dunaway, D.K. and W.K. Baum (eds.), Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 1996
Perks, Robert and Alistair Thomson (eds.), The Oral History Reader, London: Routledge, 1998
Portelli, Alessandro, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, SUNY Press, 1991
--- The Battle of Valle Giulia. Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, Wisconsin University Press, 1997
--- L'ordine è già stato eseguito: Roma, le Fosse Ardeatine, la memoria,
Rome: Donzelli, 2001. (The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome, New York: Palgrave 2003.

2. Oral Culture – Folklore
Folklorists study forms of knowledge and expressions of culture that are transmitted from one generation to the next by word of mouth or by example, such as lace-making, stonecutting, family narratives, recipes, games, songs, or proverbs. Folkways, folklife, traditional culture, oral traditions, folk art (or material culture) are terms associable with the discipline of “folkloristics.”

Today’s folklorists are no longer only interested in the lore and behavior of people of the backwoods or mountaintops—remote, rural, and isolated—but in all aspects of the traditional culture of the “folk”—urban and rural. Popular misconceptions of what folklore is—frequently taken to mean something quaint and colorful, antiquated, false, or relevant only to the poor, uneducated classes—prevent many from recognizing folklore as a more encompassing discipline, as much concerned with popular culture in the present as in the past. Tales, myths, jokes, handcrafts, even “superstitions” (=beliefs) persist because they continue to be meaningful to us. Were they mere archaïc survivals of a more "primitive" way of thinking, they would have been long forgotten. As Italo Calvino, for instance, discovered, in the course of compiling his collection of Italian folktales in 1956, le fiabe sono vere—`fables are true’.

Folk or traditional cultural expressions tend to be associated with specific groups whose identity is either defined ethnically, by religion, by gender, by geography, by occupation, and so forth, so that we most often speak of Sicilian puppet theater or fishermen's festivals, Molisano shepherds’ zampogne tunes, Toronto Italian vernacular architecture, Burano women’s needlework patterns, Argentine Italian stereotypes, Colorado Italian cowboys, or Lombard narrative songs.

Italians have known diversity throughout the centuries: from the patchwork of individual city states and republics within the peninsula, to foreign occupations, overlaying pre-Latin and Latin tribes. Italian Americans therefore, have inherited this cultural complexity. Today we divide Italy roughly into North, Central (following the La Spezia-Rimini line) and South, although at the micro-level many more regional and dialectal Italies exist, including ethnic minorities (Albanian, German, Greek, Slovene, Provençal and so forth). Finally, where large Italian diaspora populations scattered to the four corners of the world (but most numerously in North and South America and Australia), cultural contact and successive waves of immigrants further contributed to the diversification of Italian culture, as did regional location once on American soil (e.g., East vs. West-coast). Thus Italian Americans are differentiated according to immigration dates as well: from the earliest 18th-century immigrants to the 13 Colonies to the mass migrations of the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, to the more modest influx after WWII, up to the arrivals of the 1980s and 1990s, part of the latest Italian “brain drain.”

The majority of Italian Americans were of peasant origin, even if now at several removes, and thus in addition to their regional (and to their varying degrees of national) Italian identities, many were bearers of an archaic European folk culture which they imported directly to the New World. Here the old (their regional and national Italian identities) might sometimes interact dynamically with the local, regional, and national American realities to create new forms of cultural expression. Some examples are: Northern Italian vernacular architecture as it was adapted in the Western ranch environment of Colorado or in the wineries of California; the Sicilian St. Joseph’s Day altar/table as it interacted with the New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrations (later to be adopted by African-American Spiritualist churches). But the harsh anti-peasant bias running through much of Italian history, and producing a hierarchic society, contributed to the immigrant’s often ambivalent attitude toward his own folk culture. Southern Italians, who experienced the feudal system and foreign domination longest, were especially marked by this oppression, in some instances making their culture more insulated and resistant to change. Add to this psychological mix, the initial prejudice experienced by the vast wave of Southern Italians, the social reform programs designed to help alter everything from diet to their medical and religious practices, the negative stereotypes linking Italians to Prohibition-era organized crime, and Fascist-era despotism, and one can begin to appreciate some further reasons for this ambivalence. Media stereotypes are compounded by the nationalist and internally-adopted stereotype of the red, white, and green flag-waving ethnic-prider. Although the experiences of, for instance, San Francisco and New Orleans Italians may have differed from those of the largest and most compact communities of the Northeast, such as New York and Chicago, negativity from without, reinforced by regional and class prejudice from within, still have ordinary Italians confused. Finally, the devaluing of Italian folk culture has often been reinforced by representatives of “official” Italian culture to the New World, as well—government officials and functionaries, media representatives, Italian cultural offices, University Italian departments, and even the Church. The “boom” of Italian culture in the last decades has frequently represented a continuation of this anti-peasant bias, since contemporary Italian commercial and high-end cultural interests derive little benefit from Italian folk culture—save, perhaps, on the labels of food products. Concurrent factors such as these conspire against an appreciation of Italian folklife and have been offset only moderately by recent trends of ethnic revivalism and cultural ecology.

A prime requisite to the study of Italian American folklore, therefore, is an understanding of the complex intersection of local, regional, and national Italian cultures with socio-cultural forces which shaped and transformed the emigrants’ culture in diaspora contexts, e.g., factors such as the attitudes of Italians toward their folk culture, intergenerational dynamics, biculturalism, commercial and professional pressures, the role of the media, the alternate effects of affluence and penury, the dynamics between “old” and “new” immigrants, local geography, and history, as well as religion, occupation, class, and gender.

(excerpt from Luisa Del Giudice, “Italian American Folklore, Folklife” (237-245), in S. LaGumina, F. Cavaioli, S. Primeggia, J. Varacalli, eds., The Italian American Experience: An Encyclopedia, New York: Garland, 2000. All rights reserved.)

3. Methodologies: Fieldwork
With the growing interest in oral history, family, community, and national event-oriented history (e.g., Civil Rights Movement, war veteran history), scores of guides to fieldwork now exist for the general public (from school children, to local enthusiasts, to community scholars). Oral history societies frequently provide public awareness and consulting as community outreach, besides easily-accessed Web sites (see: Online Resources). The American Folklife Center, Library of Congress (www.loc.gov/folklife) offers: Folklife and Fieldwork: A Layman’s Introduction to Field Technique, by Peter Baris. More specialized guides to fieldwork are available within the disciplines of oral history (Grele, Ritchie, Yow) and folklore (Ives, Jackson, Georges & Jones). These sources provide nuts-and-bolts information on: preparing for fieldwork, recording and videotaping equipment, interviewing techniques, ethical and legal issues (informed consent, ownership rights, release forms), elaboration of field data (transcription), to archiving and preservation (storing, converting media, indexing, cataloguing), to modes of presentation and interpretation. In addition to “how to” guides, anthologies such as Dunaway & Baum (1996) or Perks & Thomson (1998; esp. Part II “Interviewing” 101-182), raise theoretical issues all across this spectrum of activity: the interplay between interviewer/interviewee, culturally-determined parameters for the best results, insider-outsider, gender perspectives, social hierarchies, as well as thornier questions such as: how to interpret nuanced communication (muted channels of thought, meta-statements, listening for silences), how to witness to trauma, who controls the interpretation of the narration, how the “facts” are verified, how sensitive information is handled, what biases operate, and so forth.

(excerpt from: Luisa Del Giudice, “Speaking Memory: Oral History, Oral Culture and Italians in America,” forthcoming. All rights reserved.)

4. Fieldwork Guides
“Oral History Primer,” University of California, Santa Cruz: http://library.ucsc.edu/reg-hist/ohprimer.html

“Oral History Techniques: How to Organize and Conduct Oral History Interviews,” Barbara Truesdell, Indiana University Center for the Study of History and Memory: http://www.indiana.edu/~cshm/techniques.html

“Learning About Immigration Through Oral History,” Barbara Wysocki and Frances Jacobson, http://www.memory.loc.gov/learn/features/immig/resources

Bartis, Peter, Folklife and Fieldwork: A Layman’s Introduction to Field Techniques, Library of Congress, 1979 (revised and expanded 1990, 2002). (Also online: http://www.loc.gov/folklife/fieldwork/)

Hunt, Marjorie, The Smithsonian Folklife and Oral History Interviewing Guide, Smithsonian Institution, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
(http://www.folklife.si.edu/explore/Resources/InterviewGuide/
InterviewGuide_home.html)

Georges, Robert A. Georges and Michael Owen Jones, People Studying People: The Human Element in Fieldwork, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980.

Grele, Ronald J., Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History, Chicago, Precedent Publishing, 1985 (orig. ed. 1975).

Ives, Edward D., The Tape-Recorded Interview: A Manual for Field Workers in Folklore and Oral History, Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1980 (rev. ed.).

Jackson, Bruce, Fieldwork, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Ritchie, Donald, Doing Oral History, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.

Yow, Valerie Raleigh, Recording Oral History: A Practical Guide for Social Scientists, Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage, 1994.


5. Online Resources
American Folklife Center: http://www.loc.gov/folklife

Association of Personal Historians http://www.personalhistorians.org/

Circolo Gianni Bosio: http://www.circologianibosio.it/archivio

Ellis Island Oral History Project: http://www.internationalchannel.com/education/ellis/oralhist.html

Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota: http://www.ihrc.umn.edu/

International Oral History Association (IOHA): http://www.bcn.es/tjussana/ioha/

Italians in the Gold Rush and Beyond: http://www.igrb.net

Italian Los Angeles, http://www.ItalianLosAngeles.com

Italian Oral History Institute (IOHI): http://www.iohi.org

Mediterranean Section, American Folklore Society: http://www.afsnet.org/sections/italian/

Museo Nazionale delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari, EUR, Rome (Italian National Folklife Museum): http://www.popolari.arti.beniculturali.it/

Oral History Association (U.S.A.): http://www.dickinson.edu/organizations/oha/

Oral History Program, California State University, Long Beach: http://www.csulb.edu/depts/history/relprm/oral03.html

Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles: http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/special/ohp/ohpindex.htm

Oral History Society (Britain): http://www.oralhistory.org.uk/

Save Our Sounds: America's Recorded Sound Heritage Project: http://www.loc.gov/folklife/sos/

Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation: http://www.vhf.org/

Una storia segreta: http://www.segreta.org/