Intro: Hi, I’m Zack Daniel Schiavetta, of the 2020 OHMA cohort, and for this blog post I’m writing about applying utilitarian ethics, which seeks to provide the maximum good for the greatest number of people, to oral history to make the field accessible to as many people as possible.
Emma Courtland’s master’s thesis, Finding Fathers, wasn’t the typical oral history project. Finding Fathers wasn’t about hearing interviewees telling their life stories, but rather, exploring what they didn’t know about their life stories, in particular, the fathers that left them. In her “Notes on Methodology,'' Emma writes, “The oral history encounter requires an atmosphere of safety and trust, which this [interviewing approach] does nothing to nurture. At best, this methodology offers an attempt to formalize a specific part of our practice within more securely equal encounters,” (Finding Fathers, Page 10).
This made me ponder the ethical principles of doing oral history. Oral history students are taught in their classrooms that oral history interviewing should happen in a safe and accessible environment. But how safe and accessible? What boundaries are to be drawn?
Would utilitarian ethics be an answer?
Founded by the 18th century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, utilitarianism is the ethical philosophy that prioritizes any action that produces the maximum good for the greatest number of people. For example, if I had a drug that healed ten people for every one it killed, and I label the drug a successful healing device, that’s a utilitarian act.
Therefore, Bentham’s philosophy would guide us historians to prioritize audience access. We want to make sure that the largest possible number of people can easily find that interview, or that project, and consume it for their own uses, or entertainment. Make sure every interview can be heard, seen, and read in as many ways as possible (for instance, by translating the transcript in a different language, or in braille, subtitled video, etc.)
There are certainly problems that could arise because of this goal to produce the most useful interview, or oral history project, as possible. One is practical and one is more theoretical.
For instance, an archive that contains thousands upon thousands of oral history testimonies may not have each and every one of those oral history testimonies transcribed, as that would require too much time and money for the archive to handle. But even more to the point, some people may think that those testimonies shouldn’t even be transcribed in the first place, as transcription in and of itself is a subjective artform (How do you transcribe? Do you put timestamps in? Should you also write down how the interviewee sounds, and not just what they say?). To transcribe may distort, mischaracterize, or offend the interviewee. Maybe it’s best to leave that audio or video recording as it is. To subtitle or convert it into a transcript is to mess with the original character (or as I’ve come to call it, “Auditory Umami”) of the interview/interviewee.
Again, Bentham’s philosophy values maximum societal benefit over individual concerns. All oral historians consider audience, but the scale of that varies. It can be very specific, like the community the project is based in (think our own director Amy Starecheski’s Mott Haven Oral History Project), scholars, or younger generations (as in the Civil Rights History Project). But I’m defining “audience” way more broadly. Coming from my experience in journalism, to me, audience means any average English-speaker that may find my work interesting, entertaining, and/or educational.
If the goal is to reach as many people as possible one may look at the concerns I have raised in the paragraphs above and say, “I risk the possibility of mischaracterizing the interviewee by transcribing in [insert whatever style here], but I do it as I feel a lot more people will understand this interviewee more.” That’s the give and take of it all. Extra time and grant money could make an interview or project more accessible to a whole lot of people. Hire transcribers for multiple languages, make the content accessible for the visually impaired or hard of hearing. That could provide more opportunities for the incredible information we are working with to be distributed to so many people. But it’s hard to get funding for oral history projects, and you better have a lot of time to kill to send off 100 grant applications a day if you want that project to reach its most accessible peak. What I’m trying to say is at that point you’ll have to pick your own battles, and priorities.
By viewing oral history via the lens of utilitarianism, oral history practice has a lot to gain. I feel there is certainly a need to be as accessible and as useful as possible to reach people beyond our graduate school, beyond the Oral History Association, and beyond the eggheads. Bentham’s philosophy I think gives me at least a framework, and a motivation to do the work I’m doing in this program. To do oral history work that touches people. The intense attention to ethics and authenticity, all of that focus makes it hard to do sweeping work. If you define your work or audience really narrowly, you’re going to turn off a whole bunch of people who may actually be interested in your work. Without accessible materials for the general public to obtain and understand, the potential impact of a project declines exponentially.
Zack Daniel Schiavetta: I drink too much soda and say “Hella” a lot. I also play music. For more readings on Utilitarianism, check out the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy for some in depth stuff about moral ethics. If you want to be edgy, check out philosopher Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. It’s a famous essay on Utilitarianism that raised a lot of eyebrows back in the 70s.
This post represents the opinion of the author, and not of OHMA.