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

“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.