Etnográfia és oral history
Ethnography and Oral History

Summary/Abstract: Stories narrating about the past, as a research object and/or a method, have been part of cultural anthropology, as well as of history for more than 80 years now. In the last couple of decades, especially since the 1970–80’s, signifi cant changes have occurred in the approaches, methodologies and theories of both disciplines, which can be best described by the criticism concerning the bases of modern scholarly reasoning, such as the existence of meta-narratives or the existence of neutral, objective social science knowledge. Simultaneously, this is the period when the two abovementioned fi elds have started to show intense interest in each other’s theoretical and methodological problems. In my paper, I do not intend to trace the history of oral history in cultural anthropology and history studies, I rather attempt to briefl y discuss the following issues on the standpoint of anthropology: 1. the question of cognition, that is the nature of anthropological and oral history knowledge, and, in connection with this, the different ways how these kinds of knowledge are acquired (empirical experience and conducting an interview), 2. the process of creating a text, the practice of writing an ethnography in anthropology, and, 3. the ways of comprehending the contents of interviews, the process of interpretation. The reason for choosing to discuss these three topics is their capacity to raise important epistemic, theoretical and methodological questions in historical researches applying the oral history method.

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