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Epilogue • Luisa Passerini
memories of Kosovars. Therefore they participated in transformations of
memory which oral historians and anthropologists can witness only in particular
circumstances.
Let us be clear that this is not an easy task, and its imperviousness accounts
for some of the uncertainties and contradictions which can be found in
these first results. The main problem was, as we shall see, to conceptualize
who the subjects are that give rise to the inter-subjective experience of
the oral history interview in this situation. The problem seems to be insufficiently
answered by simply referring to the original motivations of
oral historians, who were anxious to give words to those who had no voice
in history. Most oral history as recorded in Europe between the 1950s and
the 1980s assumed homogeneity of subjective intents between the interviewees
and the interviewers, or at least assumed that there were no major
obstacles to an exchange between them, thus allowing them to construct a
shareable narrative. Innumerable people were interviewed – and their
interviews transcribed, elaborated, published – on the basis of an assumed
homogeneous subjectivity and homo-positionality of the subjects
involved. The work done with Kosovars indicates that we are now in a
different phase of understanding this form of inter-subjectivity. As Enrica
Capussotti writes in concluding her paper,
One could say that throughout the 1970s, oral history was written from
within a movement which would have liked “to give words” to the subaltern
(the working class, for instance) and women. In our times, however,
oral history is capable of prefiguring the relationships between
different subjectivities and cultures and of revealing the contradictions
between the individual and the community. Oral history can therefore be
used to criticize the mechanism of inclusion and exclusion, and the
process of identity construction based on territories and nationalistic
values.
The underlying hypothesis – which situates itself on ethical-scientific
grounds – can appear hopeful and optimistic; I believe that it is not only
legitimate, but well grounded, precisely because it presupposes a heterogeneity
of subjectivities, which it is essential to recognize today. As
expressed by another of the contributors to this volume, Giuseppe De
Sario:
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It is not only the individuals involved in the conflict who have difficulty
understanding what happened. As researchers, our “position” in the field
and our perception of the conflict, as constructed through our research,
are also significant and carry important consequences. Observers and
scholars should admit the difficulty of using categories adequate to contemporary
conflicts. Unease and a desire to rationalize or escape these
events run throughout the observations of historians and students of