Living Voices: The Oral History Interview as Dialogue and Experience

Based on the experience of field research in oral history, this article describes the oral history interview as an exchange of gazes and a cocreated narrative between subjects—the interviewer and the interviewee—who are both observer and observed and speak to each other across the line of their significant otherness. The interviewee is both a tool for historical research and the opening of a narrative space for the subjectivity of the interviewee, which becomes in turn a significant historical fact.