Life History Interviews

From OHA Wiki

            Conducting life history interviews requires the prospective interviewer to research not only the person or persons they plan to interview, but some of the theoretical processes surrounding the interviewing process itself as well. Sidney Mintz’s article, “The Anthropological Interview and the Life History”, looks at the interviewing processes of different scholarly disciplines. When conducting anthropological or ethnographical life history interviews, Mintz finds that spending time or “conducting fieldwork” with the “informant” prior to the interviewing process can produce a more fruitful and relevant interview. ¹   Mintz seems to concur with Klimis Navridis’s opinions toward using the psycho-sociological approach to, in some extent, the interviewing process, as well as the analysis and formation of the final autobiography in “Social Change, Family Histories, and Attitudes to Money in a Rural Community in Epirus,” asserting that “The psycho-sociological perspective entailed an examination of the relationship between the psychic and the social on the individual, group, and intergroup levels – the three fundamental levels present in an autobiography. Individuals present in their life stories an expression of specific individuality which also to some extent personifies the experience of their social relationships”. ²

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Sources

1. Sidney W. Mintz, “The Anthropological Interview and the Life History”, The Oral History Review, Vol. 7, (1979), 40.
   
2. Paul Thompson and Daniel Bertaux, Between Generations: Family Models, Myths, and Memories (New York: Transaction Publishers, 2005), 70-71.

Shared Authority and The Production of an Autobiography