Oral History, Hermeneutics, and

Embodiment
Jeff Friedman

Abstract: Oral history can be framed by hermeneutics in order to better under-

stand the elds theories, methods, and practices within that context. In particu-
lar, this essay focuses on two main topics within the new hermeneutics: time
consciousness and embodied communication; both are foundational for the oral
history interview experience itself and for subsequent interpretations of the
interview. I argue that these two ideas can be integrated as a single concept so as
to enliven our understanding of oral history.

Keywords: embodiment, gure/ground perspectives, hermeneutics, quasi-

time, time consciousness

Embodiment
Embodiment is a tricky concept, because we are always already embodied. Some
philosophers, such as phenomenologist Maxine Sheets-Johnston, reject the term
em-bodiment because it implies, erroneously, a previous state in which we had
no body or sense of bodily experience; she prefers the term animate form.1 I
agree, but currently in most disciplines we use the term embodiment to suggest
that, while much of our contemporary experience seems to occur as and through
mental states, our entire bodily systems are the source of thought processes,
concept production, and actions in the world. Rather than reinforce an outdated
sixteenth-century Descartean split between mind and body, we can now, in the
twenty-first century, conceive of experience in the more integrated way of an
embodied mind, or a minded body. In other words, embodiment is currently

Id like to thank the US and German Fulbright Commissions for supporting this inquiry; the International Oral
History Association and Charles University, Prague, for the opportunity to present an interim version of this essay;
and OHR editor Kathryn L. Nasstrom for her editorial support.
1
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement, 2nd edition (Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing
Co., 2011), 1832, and 299328.

doi: 10.1093/ohr/ohu034
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 Oral History, Hermeneutics, and Embodiment | 291

used rhetorically to reflect a contemporary re-situation of bodily experience as

primary and pre-reflective, even primordial.
My particular interest in embodiment lies in articulating the nonverbal or
embodied channels of communication in oral history interviewing. As I (and
others) have argued elsewhere, in addition to the individual semantic meaning
of the words spoken in an interview, the role of the body constitutes a factor in
the expression of experience conveyed in the interview.2 Many oral historians
are satisfied with the print transcript as an interpretive representation of the
audio-visual recording of the interview event. I suggest, however, that layers of
meaning are co-constructed from the embodied interaction of interviewer and
narrator. As such, embodied communication channels are a significant part of
the performance of the oral interview and can provide important cues for under-
standing a narrators intentions and for subsequent interpretation of the oral his-
tory interview. While admittedly difficult to represent in transcript format, these
channels include, first, the physical production of vocalizations: how our bodies
produce sound through breath and the internal and external vocal apparatus of
the body. Voice, an important symbolic trope of oral history, is, first and fore-
most, produced by the bodyindeed, is of the bodyand meaningful embodi-
ment is reflected in changes in volume and pitch, the complexities of timbre and
tone, and the accompanying facial gestures that help shape voice, such as smil-
ing, frowning, and emphatic use of lips, teeth, and tongue in the production of
vocalization. Second, additional facial gestures, such as use of blinking, winking,
and raising one or both eyebrows, etc., should be included in any interpretation
of vocalizations; we know that a wink can indicate sarcasm and irony, thus re-
versing the meaning of semantic text. Third, extensive study of body language
since the early 1970s reveals that accompanying gestures of the limbs, such as
arms, hands, and fingers, can comment on vocal production in ways that both
support and contradict spoken words.3 Fourth, movement analyst Warren
2
The question of oral history and embodiment has been addressed in a variety of disciplines, beginning with
ethnopoetics and paralinguistics and opening out to include folklore, dance and performance studies, feminist
and gender studies. and disability studies. Works include, among others: Paul Ekman, Body Position, Facial
Expressions and Verbal Behavior in Interviews, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 68 (1964): 95301;
Dennis Tedlock. Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians (New York: Dial Press, 1972); Elizabeth
Fine, The Folklore Text: From Performance to Print (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Sherna Berger
Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Womens Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York/London:
Routledge, 1991). I have written on the topic in: Jeff Friedman, Muscle Memory: Performing Embodied
Knowledge, in Art and the Performance of Memory: Sounds and Gestures of Recollection, Richard Candida
Smith, ed. (London/New York: Routledge/UK, 2002), 156180; Oral History A-Go-Go: Documenting
Embodied Knowledges, in Are A Hundred Objects Enough to Document the Dance?, Janine Schulz, ed. (Leipzig
University Press, 2010), 168197; and Spiraling Desire: Recovering the Lesbian Embodied Self in Oral History
Narrative, Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History, Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque
Ramirez, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 7394.
3
In Towards Understanding the Intrinsic in Body Movement (New York: Arno Press, 1974), nonverbal commu-
nication and dance studies scholar Martha Davis provides a substantial literature review on nonverbal communica-
tion studies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including evolutionary biology; communication studies;
292 | FRIEDMAN

Lambs research on posture-gesture mergers reveals on how, even in a sitting

position, shifts in torso movement forward, backward, or sideways, especially as
they accompany similar movement trajectories with arm, hand, finger, and even
lower limb gestures, underlay personal investment in concepts expressed vocally
in interview settings. Lambs studies in the corporate sector have revealed longi-
tudinally stable data on how these posture-gesture mergers reveal decision-
making traits necessary for the success of corporate business teams.4 While most
oral historians now accept the performative aspects of oral interview as one
aspect of processing, interpreting, and using oral histories, I argue for a deeper
understanding of embodied expression as foundational to fully grasping the
complexity of the various levels of communication expressed in oral history and
for the possibilities of interpreting oral history narratives.
In the next section of this essay, I frame these embodied communication
channels first through a theoretical discussion of general and new hermen-
eutics. I show how the new hermeneutics, particularly in the works of philoso-
phers Martin Heidegger and Jan Patochka, articulates time consciousness as an
important aspect of the oral history interview. In the subsequent section, my
main goal is to generate a case for the importance of embodied communication
in oral history interviews. Using philosopher Elliot Jaquess reconceptualization
of space and time as, instead, a figure-and-ground perspective on time, I inte-
grate my previous argument about the importance of time consciousness with
Jaquess points on the crucial role of embodied communication elements in
understanding human intentionality. I argue that, rather than merely providing
additional information, a perspective on oral history narratives that emphasizes
them as embodied communication makes an integral contribution to our under-
standing of oral history interviews. In the conclusion, I briefly suggest the impli-
cations of my analysis for oral history practice.

Oral History and Hermeneutics

The communicative process of oral history interviewing occurs through the
embodied co-presence of both the interviewer and narrator, but this process is
psychology, psycholinguistics and paralanguage studies; and psychotherapy and dance therapy. Subsequent
works on the subject include, among others: Marianne LaFrance and Clara Mayo, Moving Bodies: Nonverbal
Communication in Social Relationships (Monterey CA: Brooks/Cole, 1978); Ted Polhemus, The Body Reader:
Social Aspects of the Human Body (London/New York: Pantheon, 1978); Aaron Wolfgang, Nonverbal Behavior:
Applications and Cultural Implications (New York: Academic Press, 1979); Klaus Sherer and Paul Ekman, eds.,
Handbook of Methods in Nonverbal Communication Research (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press,
1982); and Jeff Friedman, unpublished certification project manuscript, Verbal and Non-verbal Expression of
Oral Interviews with a Dance Subject: A Labanalysis of Verbal Semantic, Verbal Production and Postural/Gestural
Movement Phrasing, Integrated Movement Studies, University of Utah, 1999.
4
Warren Lamb, Posture and Gesture: An Introduction to the Study of Physical Behavior (London: Duckworth,
1965) and Warren Lamb, with Elizabeth Watson, Body Code: The Meaning of Movement (Princeton: Princeton
Books, 1987).
 Oral History, Hermeneutics, and Embodiment | 293

also situated both in place and in time and is immersed in the interactants sub-
jectivities, as informed by their respective histories. Oral history theorist Eva M.
McMahan cites historians, communications studies scholars, and philosophers,
who corroborate the ways in which the performance of oral history is situated
within these variables. For example, McMahan cites historian and Africanist
scholar David Heniges concern for the transactional aspects of interviewing:

Henige pointedly observes [that] our fieldwork experiences as oral histo-

rians force us to recognize the transactional nature of collecting oral
data . . . the person-to-person contact itself affects very much the nature
of the materials gathered.5

McMahan specifically notes that the intersubjective person-to-person nature

of oral history is contained in both verbal and nonverbal communication chan-
nels. Interviewee and interviewer use both types of behavior improvisationally
and in nonpredictable ways to coordinate and negotiate two separate worldviews
about historical events in the past.6 McMahans recognition of the essential
nature of nonverbal (or, as I prefer, embodied) communication is important;
however, McMahan and the colleagues she references are most concerned with
the metalinguistic transaction between interviewer and narrator, by which she
means a form of metanegotiation between interview interactants (for example,
how they express comfort or discomfort by moving towards or away from one
another) and not necessarily the actual important content generated by those
subjects, nor as indicators of anything like historical consciousness as it used in
the interview. My critique of McMahan and others continues below after a brief
discussion of how oral history is part of the tradition of hermeneutics.
Hermeneutics is a subdiscipline within philosophy that addresses how one
both understands and interprets ones life-world (erlebnis), that is, ones subjec-
tive and dynamically changing understanding of the objects and conditions of
the world. Beginning with the earliest form of hermeneutics, which limited itself
to the interpretation of religious texts, this system of thought was modified in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to address all kinds of texts as an ex-
pression of an authors world of signs, including literary signs, such as words and
speech, but also visual cultural production and embodied gestures. Finally, the
new hermeneutics of the early twentieth century detached itself from textual
interpretation completely and entered into a discussion of ontology, that is, how
one addresses ones own be-ing, focusing on interpretation as central for onto-
logical understanding of the self within ones life-world. While a full explication
5
David Henige, Oral Historiography (London, New York/Lagos: Longman, 1982), 22, quoted in Eva M.
McMahan, preface to Elite Oral History Discourse: A Study in Cooperation and Coherence (Tuscaloosa and
London: University of Alabama Press, 1989), xiv.
6
McMahan, Elite Oral History Discourse, 101102.
294 | FRIEDMAN

of hermeneutics is beyond the scope of this essay, of particular note for my pur-
poses is Martin Heideggers perspective on time consciousness within his new
hermeneutics. In Being and Time, Heidegger focuses on temporality as the
ground for existence. He suggests that temporality, a persons ability to integrate
past, present, and future tenses, allows him or her to become involved in care
(sorge) for his or her own be-ing, that is, concern or solicitude for what it means
to be or exist: The primordial unity of the structure of care lies in temporal-
ity.7 This care for ones own be-ing results in what philosopher Hubert Dreyfus,
citing Heidegger, terms an ecstatic temporal structure opening up the past, pre-
sent and future.8
How does temporality generate care for ones own be-ing? Heidegger sug-
gests that when one is absorbed doing any task, one is acting in the most au-
thentic possible way as a self invested in ones life-world: one is doing ones
life-world, constructing it through action. Heidegger notes that those activities
involve equipment, that is, the with-which needed for those activities. To
make these absorbing activities possible, one must seek out equipment through
a circumspect survey of what is available. In this process of searching for useful
equipment for our tasks, whether a hammer, the ability to gather ideas, or an at-
titude toward the task, we have an intention to accomplish a physical task, or,
more abstractly and of particular relevance to oral history, to understand or
interpret better our actions within our life-world. Intention emerges from an
existing need and this need emerges from the dynamic relationship between
ourselves and our life-world in our past. At this juncture in his analysis,
Heidegger first makes time consciousness explicit, wherein intentions implicate
ones past. Then, in the present, one must search for and then must cope with
that equipment, using it by working away at the activity, fully engaged in the
present. This application of equipment is what Heidegger calls the in-order-to.
Then, all of these activities are directed toward an outcome, that is, an adjust-
ment to our life-world. These outcomes are Heideggers towards-which,
wherein the activitys main goal in the future fulfills our intention that grows
from our past experience and consequent needs. Here we see the integration of
all three time tenses into an explicit sense of full temporality where care for
ones be-ing is produced.9 Consequently, as Heidegger scholar Hubert Dreyfus
notes, one creates a clearing, an existential location where all the time tenses

7
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 375 [originally published in German
as Sein und Zeit (Tubingen, Germany: Max Neimeyer Verlag, 1953), 327].
8
Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heideggers Being and Time, Division I
(Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1991), 244.
9
Ibid. [E]quipment, as what is already taken for granted as already a resource (the with-which), applied in
present coping (the in-order-to), and directed toward some outcome (the towards-which), forms a clearing.
 Oral History, Hermeneutics, and Embodiment | 295

are present simultaneously.10 In this existential place, one gains access to a

sense of ones own be-ing, the process of knowing ones self through doing,
a process of self-interpretation. In this process, Heidegger suggestsand I
emphasizethat each state of past, present, and future is fully engaged as an
integrated time consciousness in order to achieve care for ones be-ing.
Philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who studied Heideggers text Being and Time, wrote
his own three-volume work, titled Time and Narrative, to suggest the next step
in this process of making time consciousness explicit. Ricouer suggests that
awareness of be-ing, which is accomplished through explicit time consciousness,
generates ones ability to narrate. We are able to generate narratives using all
three time tenses in order to story and thereby transform the objective world
into a subjective life-world in which we find and care for ourselves by doing.11
Oral history interviews can be thought of as a specific bracketing of the
dual but related processes of Heideggers time consciousness that produces a
clearing and Ricoeurs narrativization of that consciousness. By bracketing,
I mean that oral history is a particular activity that sets aside the typical
storytelling experience and is focused instead on explicitly using bracketed time-
consciousness to produce a Ricoeur-type narrative with all three time tenses
past, present, and future. By integrating these two processes, oral history inter-
views are a type of absorbing task in which one accesses temporality by narrat-
ing ones life experiences. In doing so, oral history interviews demonstrate a
powerful form of hermeneutics and, as such, give both narrators and their inter-
viewers access to care for be-ing, or ontological authenticity.
In particular, an oral history interview uses what Heideggers student, Czech
phenomenologist Jan Patochka, calls quasi-time:

Humans, by the attitudes they assume, are constantly placing themselves

into situations other than the directly present ones, into the past, into the
future, with all their quasi-structuresquasi-present, quasi-past, etc.
Remembering is going into the horizon of the past where a course of life
that once had been present is repeated in tokens; we move in the past as
if it were present, hence, quasi-present.12

Oral history interviews, as one form of narrativization of our life experience,

have a peculiarly explicit approach to time consciousness. Quasi-time can be

10
Ibid. Dasein [i.e., our ontological self] opens a clearing for itself because its being is an issue for it and
That by which this entity is essentially cleared, in other words, that which makes it both open for itself and
bright for itselfis what we have defined as care (Ibid., 165).
11
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vols, I-III, Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, trans. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984).
12
Jan Patochka, Body, Community, Language, World, Erazim Kohak, trans. James Dodd, ed. (Peru, Ill: Open
Court Press), 33.
296 | FRIEDMAN

construed as a form of Heideggerian equipment, a conceptual tool that narra-

tors, with the support of the oral historical situation, use to accomplish the task
of creating an existential clearing of explicit time consciousness. Quasi-time is a
framework for helping narrators access time integration in order to perform the
absorbing task of performing an oral history interview. Narrators use time tenses
as a form of equipment to accomplish the task, the with-which for becoming
historical. In other words, quasi-time tenses are the with-which used to gen-
erate an oral history narrative, in the present, about the past. For example, dur-
ing an oral history interview, as narrators, we become aware that, while in our
current present, we must access the past as a kind of quasi-present so that we
can tell that story from the perspective of the past. Consequently, that story,
told from a temporarily bracketed quasi-present, also has its own quasi-past,
wherein intentions can be rediscovered to motivate our deliberations and actions
in that time period. Within this quasi-present, we then access our past desires
for certain outcomes in the quasi-future (again, at that time, in our past). These
multiple uses of quasi-time in oral history interviews become a form of inte-
grated temporality using the entire complex of quasi-time tenses explicitly as
equipment to articulate the past from within its own past-ness. However, since
the interview itself takes place in the current present, as narrators, we can also
comment in the present on that bracketed set of quasi-time experiences, as well
as project uses for that narrative by future historians. Heidegger and Patochka
provide us with concepts about time consciousness that serve our ability to in-
terpret our life-world.

The Role of Embodied Communication in an Oral History

Hermeneutical Method
Hermeneuticist and Heidegger student Hans-Georg Gadamer notes that living
speech [is] the spoken word interpret[ing] itself to an astonishing degree by the
way of speaking, the tone of voice, the tempo, etc. but also by the circum-
stances in which it is spoken [my italics].13 Here, Gadamer implicitly critiques
McMahans timid statement regarding nonverbal communication as only signify-
ing metalinguistic signals, when she says the relationship of interviewer and nar-
rator is conveyed primarily through the nonverbal cues of voice tone or pitch
[and] body language.14 Instead, Gadamer notes the astonishing degree to
which the embodied content (the way of speaking) of those communicative
events contributes to interpretation, in addition to the interview circumstances.
For Gadamer, the role of language is not only to communicate representation of

13
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method. Garrett Borden and John Cumming, eds. (New York: Continuum,
1975), 355, quoted in McMahan, Elite Discourse, 11.
14
McMahan, Elite Oral History Discourse, 7.
 Oral History, Hermeneutics, and Embodiment | 297

thoughts and concepts but also to disclose life-world. As philosopher Richard

Palmer notes, What is understood through language is not only a particular ex-
perience but the world within which it is disclosed.15 To a large extent, that dis-
closed world is involved with embodied activity; active engagement with the
objects and conditions of the world discloses life-world.
Philosopher Elliot Jaques implicitly supports Gadamers approach in The
Form of Time. Jaquess project is to break down an abstract binary structure of
time and space and replace it with a figure/ground model of lived-world experi-
ence. Jaques argues that our perceptions oscillate between figure and ground
approaches to the lived-world, generating semantic speech (figure) that is sur-
rounded by embodied context (ground) for that speech. Especially relevant to
my argument, Jaques notes that the ground approach to communicating experi-
ence is particularly undertheorized. Communication has been primarily under-
stood through a figural approach that privileges semantic content in speech. To
her credit, McMahan notes that semantic content is a limited scope of interpre-
tation. She cites David Heniges point that the print transcript of an oral history
interview represents only what Jaques would call the figural approach. In con-
trast, the original recording, what Henige calls the primary source, provides those
figures (in the case of an oral history transcript, only the words themselves)
within their context or ground. As Henige notes, only tapes provide such useful
signals as pauses or other hesitations, variations in inflection, or interruptions
and indications of dissent. Henige adds, the quizzical look or important ges-
ture will be lost.16 Heniges statement, however, does not address how the
transcript could be enlivened into what Gadamer has described as living
speech.
Jaquess theory of oscillating between figure and ground approaches ex-
pands the scope of McMahans linguistic possibilities by articulating Gadamers
call for living speech in more specific terms. Jaques calls for parity between
the figural approach and the equally important ground approach, a parity that
brings the somatic ground of the spoken word into awareness:

The unbounded field organization allows for the fullness of meaning in-
herent in the intentions lying behind the choice and use of discrete words
. . . the meanings and feelings behind words as things . . . accompanied
by the nonverbal expressive communications in tone, timing, movement,
and gesture which may reinforce or contradict the explicit verbal contents,
but in either case will extend their meaning [my italics].17
15
Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 56, quoted in John Stewart, Interpretive Listening: An
Alternative to Empathy, Communication Education, 32 (October 1983): 37991, quoted passage on 386.
16
Henige, Oral Historiography, 122, quoted in McMahan, Elite Oral History Discourse, 11.
17
Elliot Jaques, The Form of Time (Crane: Russak, 1982), 219220.
298 | FRIEDMAN

Whereas McMahan characterizes this extended meaning as merely metalinguis-

tic, Jaques suggests a more foundational role for his new approach to communi-
cation wherein

the idea that verbalization might emerge from the oscillating interaction
of [figure/ground] [. . .] modes of cognitive organization is a proposition
which it might be worthwhile to record for future consideration. We need
to keep strong contact with our intuitive sense of movement episodes in
an unbounded fieldfor, without that contact, we lose our sense of pur-
pose and we lose our sense of contact with the intentions and the pur-
poses, the desires and will, which make human episodes human [my
underscore and italics].18

Jaquess notion of the ground dimension of speech involves not only parity, but
also the enlivenment of Gadamers living speech. In particular, he addresses
one of the original premises of the hermeneutics of interpretation, that is, how
the intentions, purposes, desires, and will of the narrator as they are informed
by his or her lived-world can be read through the grounded or contextual
embodied delivery of speech. Because intentionality is specifically linked to the
past, will is linked to the present, and desires and purposes are linked to the fu-
ture and, especially, the quasi-past, -present, and -future in oral history narra-
tives, time consciousness is integrated with embodied communication in the
interview event as a single concept. Extending Jaquess analysis, I argue that
embodied communication, by providing access to intentions, will, desires, and
purposes, is basic to the generation of time consciousness in the oral history
interview. Intentions are the stuff of Patochkas quasi-past, that unique place in
the oral history interview when one returns to ones past to identify the emer-
gence of intentions for choices and action. Will is linked to coping in the present,
accomplishing those tasks with intention. Purposes and desires are the stuff of
Patochkas quasi-future, that unique place in the oral history interview when
one returns to ones past to identify the emergence of future goals for those
choices and actions in the quasi-present. Here we see Jaquess theory of con-
textual ground integrated with oral history practice, in which embodied commu-
nication channels are crucially revealed and made available for analysis and
interpretation. Because Jaquess movement episodes provide a contextual field
that reveals intentions from the past, coping in the present, and projection of
future outcomes, embodied aspects of the interview integrate with time con-
sciousness as a central aspect of the oral history interview. Rather than remain-
ing a metalinguistic operation that only indicates the relationship between

18
Ibid, 220221.
 Oral History, Hermeneutics, and Embodiment | 299

interactants, embodied communication functions centrally within the oral history

content. Embodiment signals the interpretive process of generating ones
temporality, and temporality creates the existential clearing that enables care for
be-ing.

Conclusion
This brief explication of embodied hermeneutics serves as a call for oral histor-
ians to consider two related goals for their interview projects. First, that embod-
ied channels of communication count for something fundamental in the
production of meaning. This acknowledgement suggests that interviews require
video technologies that can support the documentation of kinesthetic expres-
sion during the interview process. With visual documentation of the interviewers
and narrators interactions, embodied communication would be made available
for analysis and interpretation. Such analysis and interpretation of interviews
would require, in turn, training in the observation and analysis of embodied
communication data. This training might entail a review of nonverbal communi-
cation theory and methods of analysis, as well as developing collaborations with
trained movement analysts who can provide skilled observation and graphically
notated data. However, embodied knowledge should be reflected not only in
the visual documentation of interviews and the observation, analysis, and docu-
mentation of embodied communication, but also in the translation of that trove
of data into print transcripts. Editing styles for transcription of oral history inter-
views should expand to represent, or at least signal, the presence of Jaquess
contextual ground for the semantic text of speech.
Second, given the importance of nonverbal communication, the field of oral
history should redress a lack of projects focusing on embodied practices as sub-
jects for oral history documentation. Our lived-worlds are just that: lived, by and
through our living bodies. How those bodies express themselves through every-
day living, and through artisanship, professional practices, and multiple craft and
artistic works, counts as a fundamental way of being-in-the-world. Oral history
projects should be designed to explicitly interrogate the embodied experiences
of narrators. For example, video documentation, along with analysis and inter-
pretation, of movement episodes occurring in the field of narrative medicine
might provide important perspectives on illness, care, healing and curing. Other
projects might be designed to focus entirely on embodied practices, wherein the
life of the body is the central focus of interview protocols. For example, oral his-
tories of performing artists, in particular, might reveal how time consciousness
and care for be-ing are explicitly addressed in practice, as well as in the narrating
of those practices. More generally, all interviewers might ensure that they ask
how to questions that allow narrators to literally incorporate embodied experi-
ence into the interview context. Let our interviews reflect the importance of
300 | FRIEDMAN

living speech that communicates these embodied ways of be-ing, and let us
use that new information to interpret oral history narratives towards full onto-
logical care for be-ing.

Jeff Friedman is Associate Professor in the Dance Department at Mason Gross School of the
Arts, at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. His research focuses on embodied practice,
in particular, modern and postmodern dance, and interdisciplinary research on oral history theory,
method, and practice. He is the founder of Legacy, an oral history program for the San Francisco
Bay Area performing arts communities. E-mail: jfdance@rci.rutgers.edu