Doing Field Projects

15 Life Histories (and Oral History)

In this chapter, you will practice the ethnographic fieldwork technique of collecting a life history through interviews. Life history interviews are useful to ethnographers because they help us appreciate an individual’s agency throughout their life course. They illustrate how a person perceives and experiences their life in the context of their larger culture and society. Importantly, they also highlight the ways that change and continuity interplay and shape a person’s life.

Learning Goals

1. Record and effectively transcribe a life history from a single individual over an extended time period
2. Analyze its content critically.

A life history, a particular subset or type of oral history, is a personal narrative recounted orally to someone else. It is, strictly, neither autobiography nor biography. It is autobiographical in the sense that it is a person’s self-construction (and derives meaning and power from this fact). But it is told to someone and not simply created as a general work for universal consumption. Often the narrative would not exist in any preservable form were it not for the person that it is told to, and who that person is, is vitally important in the construction of the narrative. Life history interviews are a dialog between two people.

It is important to remember that life histories, while written and edited, are still essentially oral documents. Such oral documents have a long history. The oldest known so-called autobiography ...