What is so dangerous in speech? The emergence of contemporary Oral History

Abstract

The paper discusses the emergence of the contemporary movement of Oral History, connected to Allan Nevins and the Oral History Research Office of Columbia University. Despite the recognition of previous experiences in the social sciences of the twentieth century and the search of precursors, like Herodotus, in Ancient World, the analysts prefer to locate the beginning of the Oral History movement in post-war United States. Therefore, efforts have been made to identify the reasons for this timing and location – context in which is situated the discussion of this paper, wich uses Foucault’s tools to define the mode of production of an oral history subsequently designated as “Columbia paradigm”. Realizing that the attempt to introduce the discipline in Brazil, in 1975, was under the aegis of this model, the hypothesis that our oral history has emerged as a history of elites is submitted to analysis.