Кога е "едно време"? Устни разкази и колективна памет
When Was "Once upon a Time"? Oral Sources and Historic Regimes

Summary/Abstract: Oral biographic narratives are created and perceived in a special context that influences considerably both their creation and perception. The rules and pace of communication, the human memory's automation, the establishment of an emotional link between the participants in the conversation, the context of the meeting, are among the factors that should by all means be taken into consideration when texts, generated orally are to be analyzed. The transcribing of an interview in written form certainly takes it out of the circumstances surrounding a conversation but in exchange it offers an opportunity to read carefully through the vocabulary, the morphology and the syntax of the oral discourse in details unavailable during the communication. The use of oral narratives in historical reconstruction is debatable but in this author's opinion — too valuable to be neglected. The individual remembering offers not only new facts and new versions of the events but, more important, interpretations which define differing modes of experiencing history and types of collective memory. The discussion on the usage of expressions such as "upon a time", "then", "those times" and others, proposed here, is an attempt to illustrate the potentiality of the discourse analysis and anthropological interpretation in working with texts that occupy a position marginal in many respects and, therefore, offer a vast field of study for everyone interested in reading the past experience.

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