Oral history
The appearance of the term "oral history" has been associated to contemporary social history. It deals with the production and use of non-documantary sources (mainly oral and graphic) in the reconstruction of history. This new prespective, in which the absolute supremacy of the written document is no longer so, brings into focus the persceptions of sectors and most diverse social groups that very often were not considered by the traditional approach to history. In general, we should differentiate between oral history and memories. Historical remembrance are the memories, perceptions and experiences of living people about their past, the conjunction of testimonies involved in oral history for the reconstruction of that recent or contemporary past. It is important to insist on the fact that the testimonies involved in oral history are above all first hand testimonies, eye-witnesses, although sometimes peceptions about a much more remote past are registered as a result of intergenerational oral transmission. Throughout oral history we can approach daily life and ways of living not registered by traditional sources; they show us how they thought, how they interpreted and constructed their world, and they are a perfect introduction to understanding individual and collective experience. This way, history is humanized and personalized, because it holds the expectations, the emotions, the feelings and wishes of the people. This subjectivity, far from being a citicism, is a starting point for understanding the society in which we live or somebody has lived. All the same, we should be aware that oral testimonies reveal more about the meaning and value of the 
facts than of the true facts themselves, because the memory of informants is fragile and historic, in other words, the present clarifies the past, the selection of memories exists and generally it is more or less unconsciously concealed which alters the image that we have of ourselves and the social group we belong to. Oral testimony therefore, has to be assessed so much in terms of internal consistency as compared and contrasted with the evidence of other sources. For all this, the problem of the representativity of testimonies has to be solved to overcome human value, the most common of them all, in order to search for relevance in the historic resonstruction. In the Archive of Immaterial Heritage of Navarre, we have grouped memeories and experiences in a series of sections: anniversaries and catastrophies; memories on guilds and crafts; peceptions about the recent past; testimonies transmited over generations about the remote past; and memories and experiences about daily life. In the case of life stories, which are analysed in folklore narrations, all are integrated under biographical stories.
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- Download PDF 2 Studies of oral history in Navarre and Lower Navarre
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