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The paper edition of the Anthropology of History Yearbook is the definitive version

2015, No. (8), Anthropology and History

Piotr Filipkowski
Oral history as actual history, or how to ‘de-anthropologise’ stories about the past?

PDF version
Keywords: oral history, Polish contemporary history, master narratives, anthropologization, methodology and theory of history

Abstract:
Oral history – understood not only as specific research method, but also as a social movement – has been gaining popularity in the last years in Poland. Despite its raising presence, Polish oral historians have not managed, so far, neither to fully legitimate the method within historiographical craft, nor to offer serious historical narrative, that could substantially influence, if not change, dominant historical interpretations of our recent past – or historiographical practice as such. I am trying to explain this unexploited potential of oral history – even when compared with its successes in ‘western’ historiographies. These explanations are twofold. On one hand – I briefly present rich and differentiated (multiparadigmatic) oral history tradition in the ‘West’, that we do not share. On the other hand – I problematize the impact of “linguistic turn” (and subsequent “turns”) in humanities and social sciences on oral history, that leads to “anthropologization” of the latter, and, consequently, to making it historiographically and politically powerless. Dialoguing with Tomasz Rakowski’s text (in the same volume) and the interview he had conducted with local ‘activist’ from South-Mazovian village, I am to show still-existing, transformative potential of oral history practice for constructing our historical narratives on the recent past.

About Author:
FILIPKOWSKI PIOTR - sociologist, Assistant Professor in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Email: pfilipkowski[at]ifispan.waw.pl

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