Quotes from Alessandro Portelli

oral history is ultimately ... a document that we do not find but rather cocreate inside the interview

An inter/view is an exchange of gazes, persons both seeing and listening to each other.

The interview is two things at once: a tool for research, and the opening of a narrative space.

The root meaning of the word dialogue is "to speak across," "to speak beyond." This suggests that the crucial element is space, both social and geo- graphic: the distance, the difference, the otherness between the two partners involved

it is important that we enter the interview with a great degree of flexibility, ready not only to accept the narrator's agenda but also to modify our own.

The interview is not a question-and-answer session, but the offer of a narrative possibility

The inter- view is about the past—like all other historical sources, it provides us with factual information that can be verified and critically scrutinized—but is of the present...These are living voices, voices that speak with us now

An interview, then, is a moment in a relationship between times: the time of the events, the time of the telling, and, when we factor in the archive, the time of listening.

The interview gives us access not to the experience but to a verbal rendition of the memory of that experience, generated by the presence of the interviewer.

The interview, then, is a historical and social event ... In the interview, we are the coauthors, the cocreators of a document that, to some extent, is about us as well as about the persons we interview.

but the image of a "fatal" disappearance of the "vanishing American" allows Indian ancestry - as opposed to African American "blood" - to function as nostalgia and pride rather than shame. Somehow, by claiming the Indians as ancestors, whites can legitimate as lawful inheritance the taking of their land.

The handling of poisonous snakes in church is a test of faith and grace, just as catching them in one's yard is a test of prowess and courage. The deathly presence of the snake parallels the daily danger in the mines, and the culture takes a sort of ironic pride in its ability to handle it. … The snake is both something radically other and a household presence.