About me
Oral History for Writing a Subaltern History of Modern Iran
Abstract:
Historical Studies of Modern Iran have been largely focused on politics and political and national identities, which methodologically focuses on the elites’ point of view. Oral history is also a pretty young discipline in Iran. Most oral histories collected since 1980s include interviews with prominent political figures and activists. A major gap on both historical and oral history studies of Iran calls for engaging the non-elite into historical writing. Exceptions include recent studies about the 1979 revolution, such as the works by Naghmeh Sohrabi who includes the “non-participants” in the revolution into her account of the revolution. Despite the invaluable contribution of such research, one could argue that the focus on the revolution still defines the oral history interviewees with their connection to a major political event, limiting our ability to study social and cultural aspects of peoples’ everyday life. In this poster, I argue that oral history can be an effective method for filing the gap in our knowledge of 20th century subaltern history. Through interviewing elderly citizens about their perceptions and experiences, and possibly inquiring about their generational memories passed down from the previous generations, one can offer a more inclusive narrative of Iranian 20th century history. I take my own dissertation research as an example to demonstrate the prominent role of oral history in providing a history-from-below narrative of Iranian mid-20th century history. In my research, I investigates mid-20th century discourses of health and well-being in Iran, and aims to understand the non-elite perceptions of mental health, madness, and abnormality between 1920s and 1960s. Relying on a variety of primary source genres including oral history interviews, unpublished archival documents, periodicals, pamphlets, memoirs and movies during the 1920s to1960s, I aim to reconstruct people’s daily experience of mental health discourses. This poster also addresses ethical dilemmas and practical difficulties in conducting and preserving oral histories in Iran.