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As a genre of history and a method of studying history, the biggest difference between oral history and traditional written documents is that it collects past oral history by recording people's voices, and the interviewer leads the living people to recall and describe what they have experienced and record it [1].
Many times, when choosing the interviewees of oral history, they tend to choose the people at the center of the event, which may be of great significance to the experiencer or a traumatic experience. Trauma research has proved that one of the possible stress symptoms of people who have experienced trauma is memory invasion: "(normal memory) ... is essentially a story-telling activity ... not just an external reaction through action; We should also respond to our hearts by what we say to ourselves, by organizing events about others and ourselves, and by putting this statement in an appropriate chapter of our personal life history ... So strictly speaking, if a person stays in a fixed mind, he can't be said to have a' memory' ... At best, for convenience, let's call it a' traumatic memory'. [2] The experiencer will repeatedly reproduce the traumatic scene. [2] Trauma will completely affect a person, even control his inner world, and lose his sense of self and the sense of security between people [3]. They need to go through the process of mourning and reconstruction to slowly recover from the trauma. Some of this process is very short, while others take a lifetime and cannot be completed.
If the traumatic experience is not properly treated, he will not be able to recall the scene clearly and make a logical narrative. This is also the reason why many oral records are proved to lack historical value: when the trauma is still there, it is impossible to recall the past, and his stories or fragmentary fragments cannot be used as historical materials, or need to be pieced together with other knowledge, which proves to be of no reference value.
Oral history is a process from personal memory to language. This process often has a decisive impact on the quality of oral history data collection, so at present, the academic community has realized that interviewers need to receive necessary oral history training and accumulate a lot of experience. At the same time, the interview process often has a profound impact on both parties. In the interview process, the interviewee often needs to tell all the stories he doesn't often tell others, and the emotions he touches can't be clearly explained in a few words; Interviewers often reflect on their personal life because of interview interaction.
In the post-modern context, the process from memory to narrative language is full of power interaction, story and identity reconstruction. Individuals are shaped by the power and knowledge in their cultural context, and weave their own experiences into "stories" through speech and competition and interaction with mainstream discourse, thus giving meaning and confirming their "identity" [4]. The process of being interviewed is also a process in which the "subject" reconstructs the narrator. In the practice of oral history, because it often involves topics that have great influence on individuals and the home country, its derivative influence can not be ignored, especially the occurrence of secondary trauma [5].
Since wound healing is the professional field of mental health workers, I won't go into details here, but it is worth noting that the healing process is directly related to the narrative of memory. The goal of trauma therapy is to acknowledge the experience and promote the rebirth of individuals or groups. In this process, injured individuals and even groups need to gradually retrieve their memories and sort them out, making them a part of the new life story [6]. Therefore, to some extent, wound healing does not conflict with oral records, and even can be synchronized. The key lies in how to promote wound healing step by step in a safe environment, and at the same time, retrieve memories to form narratives, and then organize them into oral materials.