Voices in the Field
Voices in the Field
In this chapter, I try to explain why it was necessary to conduct interviews and fieldwork in Central Asia. Essentially, the voices of the Koreans and their “agency” was very difficult to find in the Soviet archives. By going to Central Asia, I confirmed what I had read previously by Dr. Khisamutdinov, that there were Korean NKVD officers who took part in the repression and deportation of the Soviet Koreans. I interviewed four such families. Interviewing subjects in their native land (vs. émigrés) helped me to understand and record the variance and variety of opinions and experiences. Memory work also displayed the “multivocality” within the individual subject, that is, the subject in various interviews exhibits a wide variety of roles, voices, personages and influences (e.g. subject A speaking from their experience as a child, adolescent, soldier, mother, and welder and accompanied by changes in body language, attitude and voice).
Keywords: memory, oral history, fieldwork, interviews, multivocality, Alessandro Portelli, Soviet archives, instrumentalist history
Hawaii Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
