Life History

Life History as Both Record and Event

Strictly speaking, what the researcher listens to directly is the life history. What the researcher produces from this collected oral account is the record of a life history, usually transcribed within an analytical framework and reconstituting the narrated account. The resulting record, whether in the medium of film, tape, or print, is also generally referred to as a life history. Whether the life history referred to is the recorded document or the actual spoken word is generally clear from context.

Tradition or History?

The account can refer to the tellers' own lifetime experiences, or it can be an account of the more distant past, handed down through oral transmission over generations. Some historians, including Jan Vansina, make a distinction between oral histories (or life histories) as first-person remembrances of events, and oral traditions. This distinction, however, is not necessarily held to by the subjects from whom accounts are elicited, and researchers have not found tradition and history to be so clearly separable; to have a record of one that excludes reference to the other would significantly reduce the comprehensibility of the narrative. For example, Julie Cruikshank found that the Yukon and Tagish elders she interviewed explicitly incorporate traditional stories about their ancestors into their stories about their own lives, to explain to her, as the anthropologist not yet familiar with these stories, how they are guided by the values and actions of their ancestors. Because the term oral tradition can also be taken to refer to the traditional manner of telling a life story, for example, through chant, song, or other standardized oratorical form, or to a designated ceremonially recognized audience, the distinction and the ways the terms are used by social scientists are multiple. Because many oral accounts interweave an individual's past experience with that of the more distant past as a way of explaining reasons for past events or practices, narratives designated as life histories are necessarily combinations of explanations of past experience and the contextualization that allows the interviewer (and the interviewee) a way to make sense of the story.

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