Great Oral History resource

Oral History Online is available via library electronic resources:

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Click on this link to external resource for Oxford Oral History books to purchase. 

Studying epidemiology, you can use your reading of oral histories to enrich your understanding of the epidemiological phenomenon you choose to study, in addition to patient, client, and community member encounters you must structure as part of your educational process and career development plans. Without building beyond family and personal experience, and beyond what you can read, you will have a narrow view of the phenomena -- typically not enough for transformative science.

The oral histories you read in preparation for these experiences can help you know what questions to ask, to create mental structures for recall of what you cannot transcribe or record on the spot, and to recall that our discipline's search for variation within pre-specified population boundaries is complemented by anthropology's disciplined search for the beginnings and endings of those boundaries (i.e., via deliberate anthropological search for sameness, lack of variation, and the edges of group membership and identification that are signaled by appearance of variation where the prior inquiry showed sameness). Recall the analogy from ecology: each flock of birds settles in the branches of old forest trees, ignorant of the county line. Possibly the 14th way of looking at a blackbird. 😉

Learn from the oral history tradition how to conduct your own interviews, en route to formal education and workshops on interviewing for ethnography.

I use such methods when I travel by myself, go to bus stops, sit, and wait for people to come ask me what I am doing there. I tell them, and we start sharing connections. They often take me home to visit with their families and share a meal after we stop at the market so I can bring something.

[Do not try this until/unless you are savvy about personal safety. I also have some robbery and extortion stories to tell.]

It's how I have learned about life in many places, including remote villages of Samoa, where to find their magic mushrooms (growing on 'cow pies' out in not-too-remote farm fields near Apia), etc.

Enjoy!

Photos by J.C. Anthony, all rights reserved:

Savai'i, ferry	Apia, rural family compound

Sometimes I get lucky, traveling to a place where a former research fellow looks after me. That was true for my study visit to Kerala State, India, a wonderful place.
The late Dr. V.S. Mani hosted my visit, took me up into the Southern Western Ghat mountains to meet local villagers, and for a cruise out of Alapuzha, and also taught me about Aryuvedic medicine, the Kalari fighters, and many temples in both Kerala and Tamil Nadu (e.g., . Here is a memorial web site for Mani, who completed but died too soon to publish his community survey of psychoses in Kerala:  http://www.thrani.com/mani1.htm

Here are (1) photos of three brothers in a mountain village we visited en route during an overnight trip to a temple in Tamil Nadu, near Vikramasingapuram (with waterfalls and monkeys), as well as (2) snaps taken in his lovely home, where his family hosted a dinner and sat for a portrait: