Toward an Ethics of Silence? Negotiating Off-the-Record Events and Identity in Oral History

Abstract

Silences are a constitutive part of oral history interviews. Silences may express individual or collective forgetting, collaborative remembering, discomfort, reluctance, (self-)censorship, noncompliance, confrontation, reticence, politeness, fear, anger, deceit, taboos, secrets, contemplation, concern for the other, reflection, conformity, or that which need not be told.1 Some silences are explicit or obvious, others are not. Interviewees’ silences may be an effect of oppression or agency. Interviewers may use silence to give narrators space to remember or to make them talk. Silences in an interview may be consensual or express a communicative struggle. This chapter attempts to address, in a preliminary, tentative way, oral historians’ troubled and troubling relationship with silences.

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