Papers

• Oral History as a Relational Practice: Actors in Fieldwork and Knowledge Production in Southeast Asia Kisho Tsuchiya Kyoto University

  Based on documentary and oral history research in Timor-Leste and the Philippines, I reflect on how both the contents of archival documents and oral history interviews are negotiated by various positionalities, ethical expectations, and stages of mediation across different mode of source production at different locales. In my field, often due to the lack of architectures that allow “privacy,” interviews often occur as social events involving family members, neighbors, and interpreters. The narratives transmitted, therefore, are often co-produced as individual life history in the communal context. The ethics of consent, interview process, the mode of transcribing and publication are also negotiated. Oral history thus becomes a co-knowledge producing process by several actors, performative and negotiated testimonies tailored for “public history.” In turn, such experience of oral history production enables more critical view of the more traditional archival tradition. By examining how voice, narrative and authenticity are negotiated in several locales, I argue that oral history in Southeast Asia as a site of critical epistemology of relational and multi- authored knowledge production. This presentation reconsiders widely accepted ethics of oral history research and invites a reconsideration of the relationship between academic history, orality, and public history.

• Ethical Engagements with Refugees Narrating their Traumatic Journeys - Understanding Disruptions, Silences, and Tropes Miriam Jaehn Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies, Academia Sinica

  In my presentation, I talk about my engagements with Rohingya refugees in the context of trying to understand their journeys of displacement from their homeland across the Bay of Bengal region into displacement. Enquiring and listening to their oral narratives, I noticed that many Rohingya struggled with speaking about their journeys in a coherent, uninterrupted, and detailed narrative. Many remained silent on personal traumatic experiences while utilising tropes of suffering and trauma that afflicted the whole community. I argue that the utilization of silence and tropes is a coping mechanism and also serves community-making - of protecting oneself from retraumatisation and at the same time, giving voice to a shared, communal suffering. In encountering such narratives, it is necessary for a researcher to react with care and not probe into ever more detailed narratives of trauma. The researcher has a duty to respond attentively to the way in which and why refugees fleeing persecution are unable to narrate and communicate their traumatic experiences. First, refugees’ disrupted narratives speak of a deep sense of disorientation during their journeys due to the unfamiliarity of the terrain they cross and the people they meet. Second, their individual experiences of violence might remain indescribable to protect their sense of dignity when care and support in a fight for justice remain scarce.

• When Does the Ethical ‘Happen’? Rethinking Ethics in Oral History Rommel Curaming Universiti Brunei Darussalam

  When ethics in oral history is discussed, it is customary to take it for granted that the ethical responsibilities of oral historians are confined to the question of how strictly one observes the protocols for data collection, archiving, analysis and access. Whatever happens afterwards ceases to be the oral historians’ concerns. Considering that a set of information obtained following strict ethical standards could be and perhaps often enough they may, sooner or later, be misused and in the process could harm innocent people, and given that advances in technology allow putting online transcripts or actual interview clips in a grander scale, the potential harm is greater than ever. On the other hand, oral sources that were unethically obtained may be used ethically, for the benefit of many. It is pertinent, thus, to ask, when does the ethical actually happen? Is there really a particular moment when one can pin down where the ethical ends and the unethical begins prior to the actual knowledge use, as normally assumed in the conventional IRB-style ethics clearance? Drawing from the use of oral history data in Grace Leksana’s brave, nuanced and penetrating book “Memory Culture of Anti-Leftist Violence in Indonesia” as exploratory case, I wish to reflect on why is it that oral historians, or scholars in general, tend to have a restricted notion of ethical responsibility, how this tendency manifest in the widely accepted ethical practices, and what adverse but often ignored consequences this tendency might have. I will argue for a need to embrace a holistic view of ethical responsibility, which entails the re-thinking of the ethics of doing scholarly practice.

• Who is the researcher? Reclaiming the intersubjective nature of oral history Marisa Ramos Gonçalves Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra

  Drawing on my experiences of conducting oral history research in Timor-Leste and Mozambique on people’s historical understandings of living under colonialism and participating in independence movements, I will address issues such as the inadequacy of certain research protocols imposed by global north institutions versus the relational ethics present in the communities. Ethnographers and oral history researchers have been claiming that the “datification” and juridification” of the research relationship are representative of worldviews that overlook the “intersubjective sociality and co-production of knowledge” inherent to ethnography (Moors, 2026). Instead of protocols designed to attend to legal liability concerns by university administrations, oral history researchers have been developing ethical practices based on “good manners and personal respect” (Portelli, 1997) that are culture-sensitive and that are focused primarily on the people who are our interlocutors. On the other hand, I reflect on practices of knowledge co-production that emerged from research, such as intergenerational dialogues, where East Timorese and Mozambicans make sense of their historical experiences and the researcher-researched line is blurred.

• Narrating Stories of Overland Chinese Migrants of Burma Wen-Chin Chang Academia Sinica

  In 1986, Clifford and Marcus published their celebrated edited volume, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. The book points out the shortcomings of conventional ethnographies characterized by the writer’s mono voice and authorial invisibility. In a similar vein, several important anthropological works have discussed the significance of polyphony and of individuality. These “experimental” writings challenge traditional interests in using collective structures for the presentation of a coherent society and stress that individuals bearing different facets of selfhood in relation to multiple positions present an alternative focus. Anthropologists who have adopted a narrative approach especially have attempted to work from this orientation. In my own research on the migrant Yunnanese of Burma (or Myanmar), including those who are residing in Burma and the ones who have moved from Burma to another country, especially Thailand and Taiwan since 1994, I have listened to numerous of their life stories as well as traced their migration routes as far as possible. In the process, I have learned to see how the divergent threads of lived experiences have impacted their subjectivities, embracing facets of determination, ambivalence, repression and alienation. In my two published ethnographies, by adopting a narrative approach and using first-person narration as much as possible, I have tried to preserve the “thickness” of the stories. Specifically, informants’ personal accounts (in different narrative genres—letters, essays, poems, records of family genealogy, and autobiographies) compose the main body of the ethnography. Unlike a large number of anthropological works whose subjects are faceless and voiceless, I have delineated individual narrators by illustrating not only their lived experiences, but also what they expressed of their thinking, feeling, intimacies, courage, ambition and despair. While revealing their personal pasts, their narrations also constitute something of a shared historical background across vast upland geographies of Southeast Asia.

Abstract

Keywords

• Archives
• Indonesia
• Mozambique
• Philippines
• Timor-Leste
• disorientation
• ethical protocols
• ethics
• experimental ethnography
• intergenerational interviewing
• journeys of displacement
• knowledge production
• life stories
• migrant subjectivities
• narrative polyphony
• oral history
• oral narratives
• silence
• tropes