2024 Oral History Association Annual Meeting

Oral History and Philanthropy Study
Huitan Xu, Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy

The paper seeks to examine how researchers use oral history to inform studies exploring philanthropy topics and to enrich our understanding of individuals, organizations, or events pertinent to philanthropy.

ABSTRACT: This paper delves into the use of oral history as a methodology to explore philanthropy. Initially, it reviews literature from Scopus, a multidisciplinary abstract and citation database, examining how oral history has been utilized in philanthropy studies. The paper then shifts to a case study, presenting the research design for an investigation into the organizational history of the Amity Foundation, a notable faith-based organization established in 1985 in China. This section highlights the methodological approach and potential contributions of the study. The final section summarizes existing oral history resources and projects in the philanthropy field in the United States and China, revealing a significant scarcity of such sources despite the rapid growth of the philanthropic sector in both countries. This gap underscores the need for more oral history to enrich the available resources and deepen understanding of the evolution of philanthropic culture and practices in both countries.

Visual Oral Histories from East Indonesia: Reverberative Trauma and Healing
Julie Gaynes, University of California, Los Angeles

In sharing visual vignettes from the researcher’s forthcoming graphic novel featuring verbatim oral history transcriptions from East Indonesia, Gaynes proposes that artistic-symbolic expressions of oral histories (including surrealist fine art, sculpture/installation, and symbolic photography) complicate popular assumptions that material archives stifle the vitality of oral testimony. This presentation invites discussion about how artistic and particularly surrealist expressions of oral histories can enhance empathic connections between oral historians, narrators, and readerships in ways that help narrators’ voices “travel” across time and space.

ABSTRACT: Historians for centuries have documented cyclical violence over land disputes on the island of Adonara, East Indonesia. Until today, retaliative violence persists beyond control of the national justice system. So long as war etiquette conforms with local ontological understandings of divine justice, Adonara islanders consider violence in service of their “nara” or kinship circles justified. In Adonara, oral history provides the only means for reversing the stigma surrounding the region German anthropologists once reduced as “The Killing Island.” Education theorists Nicholas Ng-A-Fook and Kristina R. Llewellyn’s visions for community-directed oral history inspired field methodologies for “re-storying” narratives of trauma and kinship in the Solor Archipelago. Over thirteen months of oral history research in Adonara (2023-3034) led to four dozen life history recordings from victims, witnesses, and perpetrators of domestic violence, violence against purported communists, and inter-village warfare. Propelled by Miriam Hirsch’s insights on “post-generational memory”, the graphic novel version of my dissertation textures the reverberations of violence and presents research in an accessible format for my field collaborators who prioritize orality and visual media over the written word. Hirsch insists that memory is a “living connection” that can be reflected in literature, photography, and testimony, and can affect readerships who wish to understand the reality of trauma by proximity. In doing so, art expressions of oral history connect past, present, and future. In sharing visual vignettes accompanying verbatim oral history transcriptions, I propose that artistic-symbolic expressions of oral histories enhance empathic connections between oral historians and narrators, and additionally evoke humanistic connections between narrators and readerships across time and space. I conclude that creative combinations of orality and literacy on difficult pasts can expose complex historical factors that enable violence; meanwhile, artistic research expressions in oral history can also extend the reach of indigenous knowledge central to identity conservation.