The Heavy Hand of the State in Oral History...Until we go to the Museum?

                This week’s Book “Oral History and Public Memory” was another collection of essays focused on detailing the successes and challenges of utilizing oral history in public history professions. One bone I had to pick is with the chapter on the Smithsonian’s use of oral histories in the presentation of Japanese internment in the 40’s. Basically, as I read through the book I got an overwhelming sense of the state presence in the funding and proposal of oral history projects such as in Canada and Singapore. In Canada the state was attempting to craft a narrative which attempted to show the region’s historical past with Aboriginal people. However, emphasis kept falling back to the state’s use of these oral accounts to fuel the idea that this region emerged as a community through the founding of the French and English. Likewise in Singapore, the state started an oral history project, but because all of the communists had been driven out of the country, a lot of the stories of Japanese occupation there went untold. The account of the Ottoman Empire after WWI, the area had been leveled and the only histories to be told were the new people who populated the area, the shifting of state powers had once again limited the histories that remained to be told. 

                Then all of this was followed by the chapter on the Museum and the wonderful success of the Smithsonian in creating a good use of oral history. This chapter began by outlining the museums role as a cultural and educational institution, but said little about the National History Museum’s direction by the US government. Although I think this was an excellent example of the use of oral history to tell a difficult story and get a realistic sense of the past, where did the state go? I would be interested to read an article on how the Smithsonian funds research, such as oral histories, and what narratives are able to be told and which are simply marginalized or ignored. For instance, the Enola Gay exhibit had a great deal of oral history interviews and recordings of presidential speeches, and American soldiers in the war, yet this exhibit would be greatly problematized by such an exhibit as the one on Japanese interment. This, I feel, would be a truly contextualized approach that gave a more holistic view of the past and truly sparked discussion. Also, it would have been useful to have an analysis of the ways the state functions within  large museums like the Smithsonian in order to determine a better way to understand the rationale of governments shaping history to deliver their citizens ideology…but I guess I’ll just have to do that myself ;-)