“The Ethical Murk of Using Testimony in Oral Historical Research in South Africa,” Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice. Palgrave Studies in Oral History, edited by Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki. New York,...
more“The Ethical Murk of Using Testimony in Oral Historical Research in South Africa,” Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice. Palgrave Studies in Oral History, edited by Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki. New York, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 201-218.
Based upon my experiences conducting ethnographic and historical research in South Africa, this chapter delves into the fraught terrain and “ethical murk” of using testimony for the production of scholarly and public knowledge. The South African context highlights the ways that interview processes must be seen – as they are often experienced by interviewees – as taking place within a broader domain of related and overlapping practices. I use the term “testimony” to denote the retelling of personal experience that occurs not only in the collection of oral histories, but at other sites of cultural and historical production. In South Africa, these include the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), museum work, documentary projects, media coverage, and the publication of scholarly and literary works, and often feature stories from a relatively small set of individuals, particularly (but not exclusively) in post-conflict settings. With its extensive publicity and the vast array of social and cultural industries that it has generated and sustained, the TRC raised the stakes of telling stories of trauma in ways that impinge upon both the storytellers and the researchers, journalists, and public culture workers who produce knowledge based on engagements with others’ experiences of the apartheid past. As the subjects of such scholarly work increasingly articulate their concerns, anxieties, and frustrations with the manner in which they have been represented and the political economy of the representations themselves, they force to the surface many dilemmas that have in fact always been present in the practice of oral historical research. While interviews and public testimony form the foundation of much of the knowledge production within the fields of history, anthropology, and even more practically-oriented arenas like transitional justice, my experiences in South Africa reveal that the fundamentally extractive process of collecting and analyzing testimony is rife with tensions and ethical ambiguities that cannot be resolved.
