tecoctctpdeceeodoctetacneecodctacnchcodoctechcncodfedeetadn cs fonds Lookin’ for a Home Independent Oral History Archives in Italy Alessandro Portelli heeded dododestosedoebede decode doco eoehoehe do oocdocdoctocl [raze ste scorn and cultural organizer anni Bosio wrote, in his description of the work of the Istituto Emesto de Martino, Italy’ first and most im- portant sound archive and research center for people's cultures, Just as the advent of the printing press marked the pas- sage from the city-states to the Signoria, from a mainly oral shared culture to the use of means of communica- tion as an expression ofthe ruling clas, the advent of the tape recorder once again provides the culture that rlies on oral communication with the means to emerge, to be come aware of itself, and thus to unravel all those forms of expression that can be placed against, not alongside, the forms and genres of the ruling culture. The analogy with the advent of the press was crucial. [As writers from Eric Havelock to Jack Goody have shown, the advent of writing accompanied and acceler- ated the development of Western rationality by making language available for analysis and study and therefore for self-awareness.* The tape recorder, Bosio points out, does the same for the voice: speech finds a stable and re- producible support that allows it to be objectified and analyzed. The voice, a universal means of communica tion, can thus achieve the same degree of self-reflexivity and self-awareness that was earlier reserved for a more restricted medium such as writing. Bosio was less inter- ested in the fact that the tape recorder allowed scholars a closer study of nonhegemonic cultures than in the fact thar it enabled the working classes to study themselves, their culture, and their history. The working class might use the tape recorder not just co speak for but also about itself and most importantly to listen to itsel. The tape recorder, then, would not merely provide an- other source for historians and anthropologists but would indeed disrupt the categories, hierarchies, divi sions of labor in history and ethnology in the academy, in the labor movement, and in the Left. When the work- ing class speaks for itself and hears itself, leaders and scholars are less necessary. “There are many in the Left,” Bosio went on, “who think the tape recorder is an irrel- evant, useless, oF diabolical instrument... When the ‘working class movement generates leaders and officers ‘who attempt to exorcise the tape recorder, it is time for the movement to grow up and exorcise its own leaders.”* ‘The idea that the tape recorder allowed the working class t0 speak for itself also blurred the distinctions be- tween disciplines and sources. Named after Ernesto de Martino, the great Italian ethnologist who first recog. nized the historical and political significance of southern Italian rural culture as well the role of what he described as “progressive folklore” in the north, the institute iden tified all forms of oral culture and tradition as sites of working-class memory, For example, the rediscovery of the extraordinary tradition of anarchist song ereated a heightened awareness of the importance of this half-for- gotten movement and provided radical movements and leftist dissenters with a songbook that remains very effec- tive today. [As Bosio put it, the hegemonic and academic division of “folkloric man” from “historical man” had to be over- come by placing folklore in history and using it as a his- torical source as well as by recognizing its bearers as his- torical agents—“citizens of our own country” in de Martino’s phrase. This generated one of the most peculiar traits of the Istituto Ernesto de Martino and of its related220 Hk: Ancuives ap SoctaL Memory institutions: the unification of music, oral history, and other forms of expression. This is a consequence of the global approach to research: the same field encounter may yield both music and stories.> The tapes in the de Martino archive, then, hardly ever fall neatly into the cat egories of ethnomusicology, folklore, oral historys it was necessary to develop a brand-new method for cataloging them, since established systems were inadequate. Conversely, this meant that the history of the working class, through its own forms of expression, would re place the history of the party and of the union, While leftist history took into account only experiences that could be represented as leading to the formation of the Communist Party, Bosio and his colleagues resurrected the memory of “heretical” groups (from anarchists to nonorthodox Marxists and religious utopists) and stud~ ied such aspects of working-class life as religion, ritual, and social life. Inevitably, the Istituto de Emesto Martino remained somewhat suspect both for academic scholarship and for the bureaucracy of the Left, for its stubborn and nonsec- tarian independence that refused to identify with any group or party and thus both included and antagonized them all. This did not keep ic from amassing the most im- portant oral archive in Italy and perhaps in Western E rope, including folk music, oral history, and events of po- litical significance (demonstrations, rallies, meetings); the collection now holds more than six thousand tapes and sixteen thousand recorded hours. The institute generated a network of organizations and projects that included a record label, Dischi del Sole; a publishing outfit, Edizioni Bella Ciao; and a cluster of folk and political singers, Il Nuovo, Canzoniere Italiano. ‘These groups were instrumental in creating the inde- pendent and antibureaucratic spirit among students and workers and the urge to speak for themselves that led t0 the 1968-69 uprisings. But as Woody Guthrie once said, “Folk song is big if labor is big,” and to some extent the same applies to oral history. The growing sectarianism of the New Left in the 119708, the rise of terrorism, the Communist Party’s in- creasing drift toward the center of the political spectrum, and the decline in political activism brought the Istituto de Martino to the verge of disappearance. It was kept to: gether by the stubborn passion and underpaid work of few people, foremost among them Franco Coggiola. In the 1990s, it received a new lease on life when a grant and an offer of space from the city of Sesto Fiorentino, a suburb of Florence that has had a leftist movement since the 1880s. The institute has become one of the rallying points for much of what remains of the Left and has been helped by a slight revival of interest in folk music. The Circolo Gianni Bosio was established in Rome as an independent local branch of the Istituto de Martino.¢ ‘While it adopted the same basic approach as the parent organization, the Circolo’s work differed in important sways. First, we had a local and regional rather than a na- tional perspective (which did not prevent it from carry- ing out projects in other regions of Italy, such as Umbria or Calabria, and even abroad, from the United States 10 China; conversely, the Circolo can hardly be labeled “local” when it is situated in Italy’s capital and largest city). As a consequence, we were involved to a greater extent with the question of the forms of expression of the urban working class and urban folklore, Rome was an ideal environment for this approach. Its nearness to the rural south and the ongoing massive migration of south- em rural people enabled us to follow the changes in rural folklore in the urban context; for example, songs of reli gious pilgrimage were reinterpreted or remade into songs of struggle. The pilot project, conducted even before the ‘group was formally established, resulted in the documen- tary recording Roma, la borgata ¢ la lotta per la casa (The Slams of Rome and the Squatters’ Movement), which included interviews with migeant workers, songs, street rallies, and encounters with the police. While we continued to research music, other forms became more important; the Circolo Gianni Bosio developed many of, the more original current approaches to oral history in Ialy and internationally. However, the Circolo struggled with problems of ‘money and, most importantly, of space. Like most alterna- tive cultural groups in Rome in the 1970s, the Circolo was, literally underground, housed in a roughly refurbished cel- lar that was almost adequate for concerts, seminars, and music classes bue certainly was no place to store precious tapes. Thus, while the creation of an archive constituted ‘our foremost aim, it remained unfulfilled. The lack of an archive and the project-oriented ap- proach to fieldwork converged in shaping our interviews. Rather than all-purpose oral histories and life histories, ‘we collected interviews that focused on specific themes— war and resistance, work, education, and so on. Indeed, one peculiarity of oral history is that historians contribute to the creation of their documents, which gives all oral history documents a personal signature. Because oral his- torians are not only the users but also the creators of their archives, they retain a peculiarly intense relationship with their material—indeed, they are-often reluctant to part from their tapes, which thus remain scattered in smallerIndependent Oral History Archives in Italy ar or private archives (a matter to which I will return shortly), as if ft only for use by their collectors. ‘No matter how project oriented, however, oral history materials lend themselves to multiple uses and users. Rather than carrying out single-issue interviews, in fact, wwe always saw the theme of the project as an angle through which the interviewee’s experience took narra- tive form. On the one hand, we believe that the histo- rian’s agenda must be placed in the broad context of the narrator's life experience and in the history of the place and the community; on the other hand, in a dialogic in- terview, the historian’s agenda must make space for the narrator's, thus broadening the scope of the dialogue. Narrowly focused projects widen as fieldwork proceeds: a history of post-World War Il labor struggles in Terni became a full-fledged oral history of the town from the 18308 to the 19808; a study of the Fosse Ardeatine mas sacre (Rome, 1944) became the fulcrum for an oral his- tory of the city of Rome from 1870 to the r990s. To this should be added the fecund polysemy of oral discourse and narrative discourse: there is always more in an oral narrative performance than either the interviewer or the interviewee intends or is even aware of. A third party is likely to look at the material from another angle and find unforeseen information and insights. Thus, project-oriented material becomes archive-wor~ thy material: a great deal of material on the tapes does not refer exclusively to the original topic and may be use ful to scholars, activists, and citizens looking for some- thing else. The Terni tapes will become the core of an oral archive in Terni, while the Fosse Ardeatine tapes have been used in a number of projects on the history of twentieth-century Rome. In fact, our ambition is to use this material, together with other tapes amounting to more than five hundred recorded hours, as the core of a Central Archive for the Oral History of Resistance and War in Rome and event ally for a general Central Archive for Oral History. Our idea is that just as scholars automatically use more tradi- tional archives for their research, they may also have one place where they can go (and therefore must go) to check ut oral history material, After this material is gathered in one place and made available, there is no longer any justification for overlooking it: oral history and its voices gain a place in the broader field of historiography.’ However, what do we mean exactly when we speak of “oral sources?” We have assumed that the source is the person, the narrator her/himself (which is why oral his- torians can go back any number of times to the same source and dig out more information and insights). The tape and the eventual transcript are representations, cre- ated jointly by the source and by the historian, of the di- alogic performance of the field encounter. Any third party using this material in an archive, then, finds docu ‘mentary sources originated in oral fieldwork rather than oral sources proper. Whether these documents are in the shape of “envelopes of sound”® or whether they come in written form as transcripts, they present themselves as texts as opposed to the dialogic performance of the inter: view. The users of oral history archives cannot perform the essential act of the oral historian in the field: they cannot ask questions and get new answers. (Of course, they interrogate these texts metaphorically, as any reader does with any text. But here I am talking about the ac- tual conversation, the interview, the mutual exchange of gazes and words between two or more actual persons.) “These, then, are not oral documents but rather docu- ‘mentary texts originating in orality, a definition that can actually be applied to any number of documentary sources, such as trial records, minutes, parliamentary records, police interrogations, public speeches, and so forth. I think historians would do well to remember that so much of what they take for granted as written docu- iment is indeed a transcript—we do not know how accu- rate—of oral speech acts. The main difference, of course, is that the act of writing these words down often has & performative quality: words spoken in court, in Con- gress, in a meeting do not become effective until they are included in the record—as opposed to the recording. To make them more impersonal, they are often weeded out of whatever trace of dialogic orality they originally had: the language becomes standardized and official, the structure is monologic. The meaning of oral history doc uments, conversely, lies precisely in their oral dialogic ‘means of production, and users of these documents should always be aware of the dialogic and oral origin of the material they are using, no matter how many times removed they are from the original source, This is not to demean the function of orally generated archival documents; indeed, it is a way of making oral history a part of the tool kit of every historian—not just oral historians—and thus to inject, albeit indirectly, the infection” and the “inflection” of the voice into written historiography and to force the writings of institutions and authorities to confront at least the echo of popular speech and the points of view it represents, However, the original oral source is the person, and most researchers and scholars therefore tend to create their own interviews and ask their own questions. This, believe, is an attitude to be encouraged, at least because———— EO 222 Uk: Arcutves aN Soctat Memony some firsthand experience of interviewing is essential to a proper understanding of interviews found in archives. [Also, from an activist perspective, the interview itself is a transformative experience for both sides involved. Of ‘course, the misconception that all it takes to conduct an interview is two persons and a tape recorder may gener- fate a naive, superficial approach to interviewing, yet a bad interview is better than no interview at all, and even an incompetent interview can work wonders in the hands of a competent user. But the real problem arising from this state of things is the extreme dispersion of oral sources, The bulk of the existing tapes are stowed away in forgotten drawers in private homes, in union or political offices, in culeucal clubs and such, or on back shelves in other archives. 1 keep coming across small treasure troves of memory that, like the boll weevil in the ballad, are literally lookin’ for a home. Bringing them together under one roof, tran- scribing and cataloging, making them available is in itself an important task of re-membering, putting scattered ‘memories together, making them part of a whole through which they can speak so us, The project—or, perhaps more realistically, the dream—of the Central Archive of Oral History was born with this vision in mind. “The special relations chat exist among the historian, the source, and the archive means that the creation of the tape and of the archive are part of a broader project i volving activities both up- and downhill from the inter- view and the tape. In Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed writes of museums as “art detention centers”; in the Ital ian experience, archives have long been document deten- tion centers: libraries, archives, and museums have often hesitated to let their collections be used, and only re- cently have they developed a degree of interactivity and openness.’ In the case of the Istituto de Martino and the Circolo Gianni Bosio, music was a vehicle that helped generate public use of the collection through records and concerts. The archive is not a separate institution where tapes are held in custody but rather a wheel within wheels of cul tural, artistic, and political creation and organization ranging from concerts to record production to scholarly research to grassroots organizing, For example, the most innovative and influential group in the Italian folk re vival, the Canzoniere del Lazio, developed its initial repertoire entirely from the collection of the Circolo Bosio, The musicians connected with our movement al: ways rooted their performances in the historical vision founded on their relationship to the archive and sought not only to entertain their audiences and raise their con- sciousness but also to renew their historical memory. We have often brought our “oral sources” back to speak or played excerpts from the archive in seminars and classes; the research on resistance has generated a successful and effective one-man theater show as well as countless sem- inars and meetings with students in schools all over the city (and an award-winning book). ‘Another problem, however, is intrinsic to the sound shape of the archive. Using a sound archive is such a time-consuming and cumbersome affair that researchers are often discouraged and just go through the tran- scripts, thus missing the essence of the documents. To fa- cilitate access to the actual documents, then, a painstak- ing process of indexing and referencing is needed so that users can have quicker access to the topics they seek. Such indexing ought not merely list topics but also give some hint as to sound quality and narrative quality. This confirms that all operations concerning the tape are alk ready ctitical and interpretive—from the myriad deci- sions confronting the transcriber to the judgments that must be made in indexing. Cataloging tapes is much more time-consuming than cataloging books or documents. Tapes do not come with the paratextual material—ttles, names of authors, place and date of origin, index of contents, index oF names— that help librarians or readers figure out what books oF documents are about. Instead, all of this material must be created by historians and archivists, which means that creating a catalog card for a tape requires listening to the ‘whole thing, possibly more than once. Two or three hours of listening ultimately may yield one catalog card. This is not a matter only of time but also of money, The state archive system gives grants for the cataloging of private or independent collections but has a set rate for each catalog card based on the time and work re- quired for a paper document. The idea that archival doc: uments may be based on supports other than paper is now rapidly making headway in the public system and affecting legislation. We are now negotiating one such gant, trying to convince the funders that what is already low pay for books and papers is widely off the mark when it comes to oral history tapes. Conversely, a num ber of our operators are volunteers, or—alas—unem- ployed, so that even that pittance may ultimately be bet- ter than nothing The other problem is that tapes are very delicate ob- jects, There are minimal requirements for storage, main- tenance, regular replay. Furthermore, each tape is a rare tape, a unique document, and must be treated as such, This means that one cannot offer for frequent publicIndependent Oral History Archives in Italy 233 consultation of original tapes. The cost of making copies and burning CDs for public use is very high in terms of both equipment and time, especially for a self-funded op- eration like ours. One partial solution we have found is to include copying and indexing costs in research grants: this was the case with our projects on the history of mar- ginal youth in Rome sponsored by the Salesian fathers and the Jewish community or the history of water in Rome sponsored by the public water and power agency. ‘On other occasions, when we have agreed to deposit copies of our tapes in other archives, we have stipulated thar the pact include transcribing and/or indexing and extra copies for our own archive. This is part of my agreement with the University of Kentucky and of the cone negotiated with the city of Tern. Finally, the real problem: space. The Citcolo Bosio suspended its activity in 1988 because of lack of funds (we couldn's even pay the rent on that damp cellar) and a crisis in political activism. Tt was reactivated in 2000 with both the old group and newer, younger members. We felt that, on the one hand, the older generation had reached a time in its life cycle when again we had time for volunteer activist work, and whatever we had lost in ‘energy and leisure was made up by the fact that we had more experience and pull (those of us who had been stu- dents in the 19708 were now professors, lawyers, al tects, and so forth, and those who had been obscure un- derground musicians were now nationally known artists), We also fele that the crisis in the Left, the demise ‘of a number of organizations and groups, the systematic demolition of the culture of the labor movement and an- tifascism created a space and a need that we could fil. Bosio’s warning about how cultural work is intrinsically political because it must create the political freedom it needs for its own existence is more stringent than ever, Indeed, the rebirth of the Circolo Bosio met with more success than we expected: in a year not too long, ago we gained more members and generated more events than we ever did when the Left was supposed to be on the rise, pethaps because there isn’t much else to turn to, From the beginning, the archive was the most impor tant item on our agenda, We decided to name it after Franco Coggiola, the soul of the Istituto de Martino and its archive, who died in 1996. We put together a list of ur prospective holdings and on this basis received a cer- tification as an archive “of national historical interest.” We approached che city government for a space and re- ceived many generous promises but no concrete action. ‘A collective that had been granted the use of a building by the city agreed to let us use a room, but just as we were getting ready to put che archive together, we discov- cred that the building had no electricity. In September 12000, we decided to appeal to the solidarity of the na- tional and international activist and scholarly commu nity, Through public meetings and e-mail, we floated the following petition: ‘The Franco Coggiola Archive and Library, established in Rome by the Citcolo Gianni Bosio, has lost its space. This azchive is the result of more than thirty years of fieldwork in oral history, folk music, and popular culture in Rome, in central Iely, and in parts of the United States and other countries. It has been declared an “archive of relevant historic interest” by the regional authorities. Ie includes more than three thousand hours of recordings as well as books, records, and videotapes and has served as the basis for important scholarly work (the Franco Coggiola Archive is the sousce for all the oral history documents published in a recent collection sponsored by the local administeation on the resistance in Rome) as ‘well as for the revival, study, and teaching of oral tradi tions and folk music. The archive had to give up its historic space (a cellar in the San Lorenzo neighborhood) because the dampness was destroying the tapes and books. The goodwill shown in countless meetings with city officials has not resulted in a concrete alternative. The archive was recently forced to remove its collections from the temporary space of- fered by a cultural association (Ex Rialto Occupato} because, during maintenance work, the power cables were cut off and six months of meetings and discussions with city officials and the electric company have not suf- ficed to restore it. A democratic society and its culture thrive on inde- pendent, accessible, highly qualified structures such as the Franco Coggiola Archive and the Circolo Gianni Bosio. The civic spirit of those who keep them going, the knowledge preserved and made available, the activities (stages, seminars, music) that make ita living space, and the resources offered to scholars make them especially important as a democratic cultural resource for the city ‘of Rome and beyond. We therefore invite all local institutions as well as cul tural and political organizations to work coward making, this important resource again available to citizens, cultural workers, artists, and scholars. In a spirit of public service, the Circolo makes the materials of the archive available by arrangement. For information, and for the catalog, e-mail bosiocircolo @hormail.com. In the space of less than a month, we received 397 signatures from twenty-two countries.’ The signatories234 Ill: Arcttves axp SociaL MEMORY included historians, folklorists, anthropologists, musi- cians, archivists, journalists, and ordinary citizens from all over the world. Barbara Dane, a great blues singer, record producer, and political activist, wrote, I is absolutely essential that the Franco Coggiola Ar- chives which was established by the Circolo Gianni Bosio not only survive but chat it be properly housed in order to be available to future generations of scholars and other interested people. This collection i ireplace- able, and without it there will be a very serious lack of information about an entire era of popular culture and life, especially as expressed by those people who lived it. ‘The face that this Archive has been made through the efforts ofa handful of dedicated and foresighted scholars is some kind of modern miracle in the fist place. If i ‘would be los tothe furure, it would be a crime. ‘The world looks to Rome and Italy as fundamental sources of human history, where the highest respect is paid to the past in order to build a better future. Do not fail in your responsibility o preserve and maintain his significant reservoir of information about our collective past, for whatever happens in Tay affects the world. During Rome’s 2001 mayoral election campaign, I ran into Walter Veltroni, the Left's candidate. No sooner had aid hello than he asked, “What's the news on your ar chive?” “I'm waiting to hear from you,” I replied. Our petition has clearly made a number of prominent persons and institutions aware of our quandary yet has yielded no concrete results. Veltroni’s campaign was successful, and we were hoping it would help to put our archive on sounder footing. In fact, the new administration ap- pointed me as the mayor's representative for the promo- tion and protection of historical memory in Rome, an important recognition of the meaning of oral history and of our work, But we have received no assurances about space. We took over an abandoned public school in the center of Rome, cleaned it up, managed to get a gift of furniture and some money for equipment, and started the archive, only to find out that the city plans to reopen the school and evict us (although given the slow pace of action by public institutions, we have some time before anything will happen). It makes a great deal of sense that wwe of the Ciscolo Gianni Bosio, who started out with the squatters’ movement in the 1960s, should seek a rebirth by becoming squatters ourselves. After thirty years, the voices, the oral history, and the music of the people of Rome are still lookin’ for a home, NOTES 1, Eric C, Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections con Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present {New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Jack Goody, The Domes- tication ofthe Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 2. Gianni Bosio, “Elogio del magnetofono” (1970) ia Lin- tellettuale rovesciato (Milan: Bella Ciao, 1975}, 170-71. 3. Consequently, the Istituto Ernesto de Martino had to develop its own techniques for cataloging and describing tapes. 4. See Alessandro Porteli, “Memory and Resistance: A His- tory {and Celebration) of the Citcolo Gianni Bosio,” in The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 40-54- 5. Fora brilliant use of secondhand oral history sources by 4 non-oral historian, see Claudio Pavone, Una guerra civile: Saggio sulla moralita nella Resistenca (Tarin: Bollati Borin- shieri, 1997), In his overall analysis of the Ialian Resistance, Pavone uses my published interviews with partisans in Terni in ‘ways that are both original and correct. 6. Ronald J. Grele, Envelopes of Sound (1975; Chicago: Precedent, 1985). 7. See Archivi sonori, proceedings of three seminars orga- nied by the State Archives in 1993-95 (State Archives Office: Rome, 1999): Atti des seminari di Vercelli (22 gennaio 1993), Bologna (22-23 settembre 1994) Milano (7 marzo 1994) (Rome: Ministero per | Ben ele Ativiti Cultural, Uicio Cen- trale per I Beni Archivistci, 1999). 8, The signatories included 165 from Italy, 120 from the United States, 47 from Britain, 25 from Mexico, and smaller numbers from Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, France, Germany, Israel, Norway, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland. — EEE EE EEE