Oral history in Southeast Asia: Memories and fragments

摘要

For an historian who for so long has drawn primarily on written sources, reviewing this book is a challenge as well as a stimulus. Written sources, it is true, are inflected at origin by feeling, by prejudice, by purpose. And subsequently they are open to interpretation, since what they convey -by precision or imprecision, by inclusion or omission - may mean different things at different times to different people: they can be read along the grain or against it. Juxtaposition with other sources may help; so, too, may experience. Even so, the reader may come by habit to share too much of the rhetoric or even the modes of thought of the sources or, perhaps less likely, to reject them too firmly.