Similarity, Difference and Selfhood: Narrative Expression of Collective Identities in the Holocaust Survivors' Testimonies
Abstract
The topics of memory, identity and narrative are deeply intertwined. Since John Locke (1632-1704), it is quite widely acknowledged that the very sense of one's personal identity is based on (autobiographical) memory.
During the 20 th century, study of collective identity and collective memory emerged in the social sciences, along with questions about possible analogy between the mechanisms of individual identity/memory and collective identity/memory. The dialectics of memories and identities have also been connected by the notion of narrative.
Therefore the identity is articulated (or even constructed) by linguistic means as a meaningful life story on the basis of past experiences and biographic work. In case of oral historical interviews, the triad of identity-memory-narrative takes on specific features.
I will focus on the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive as a data resource and try to provide answers to several questions, including: How are different social identities manifested in the audiovisual oral histories? Is there a narrative expression of plurality of identities, conflicts and tensions? Are these topics somehow present in the testimonies of the Holocaust survivors? How is the sociological point of view contributing to this kind of research? As we will see, oral history is indeed a rich data resource for researching the social aspects of collective and personal identities. However, because language is privileged in oral history, we might be missing another important means of identity expression (in non-verbal ways of individual or collective action).
To a certain extent, this may be overcome due to the increasing number of videotaped oral history interviews.