Within and Beyond

Abstract

Any review of the current state-of-the art in any scholarly field requires some historical remarks.Since doing science (including humanities) is a cultural practice, the legitimating of any discipline means the creation of its roots and foundations.I'm not going to discuss the process of "creating the discipline" here, but I'd like to bring up a few points on the international history of oral history studies to make the Russian case more clear and my own views more evident.The founding declaration of oral history itself was made much later, after the general taxonomy of the social sciences was acknowledged, approved and confirmed.Even the struggles for "sociology" and "anthropology" had passed when the first appeals for the new field of oral history were pronounced.oral history was raised as a public voice, a loud-speaker and a microphone for those who had no other means of telling their histories.Such a social turn was firmly tied to the broader processes of the mid-20 th century: human rights movements, youth movements, etc. Oral history was not interested in merely offering people the chance to tell their histories; it wanted these stories to provide new, alternative viewpoints to the official historical writing.The idea was not just to share the individual understandings of the past with a wider audience, but to make the multiple memoirs equal to the grand historical narrative.More or less simultaneously with the rise of interest to memory studies (1) and its relationship to the study of history, some important developments in the academic world were under way: the so called "pragmatic turn" in history studies itself and the "linguistic turn" in social sciences.These developments brought attention to "other" voices about the past.These voices were heard or even initiated by active leaders whose primary goals were far beyond the narrow descriptions of peculiar historical issues.In the preface to his book: The Gateway to History (1938), which predates the official foundation

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