Paper short abstract:

Paper long abstract:

My paper examines the transformative tasks of interviews as they move between the dualities of voice towards a text. Jonathan Ree in I see a voice reminds us of the dual qualities of voices: they are both expressive and symbolic /communicative (2000).

Interviews offer us the opportunity of getting closer to experience through the presence of voice. Voices are used to moan, to sigh, to yell as well as to communicate via a symbolic verbal system. Thus voice has a dual nature, at one and the same time bodily and ideological. The bodily voice can be used to subvert the explicit meaning.

Voices unfold both in time and in space. Texts exist only in space. Saussure spoke of langue and parole which we can roughly translate as language and speech. The difference can be understood in terms of a chess game. The interview is where these complex dualisms come together.

In transcribing and analyzing our interview material we both reveal and conceal. The concealment is facilitated by the readiness with which aural documents are transcribed and turned into visual documents. The oral historian Alessandro Portelli writes of "the disregard of the orality of oral sources" and compares it to doing art criticism on reproductions (1981:97). In translating oral/aural documents into visual objects we open up new possibilities for their analysis and understanding but at the expense of other more personal, embodied meanings. Indeed, in order to pass ethics committees these days researchers often have to guarantee that they will destroy aural tapes. In so doing they are of course left with a much diminished version of voice.

In creating an interpretive text on the basis of interviews the ethnographer is leaving behind the physical voice and moving into a different order of reality: one where issues to do with the democratization of creativity, the politics of quotation and the hermeneutics of suspicion dominate. According to Aristotle the basic linguistic conjunction of noun and verb mirrors human action. But of course, language is not a mirror. The idea of mirroring has long since been discarded as a misleading metaphor. The complexities of interviewing occupy this interstitial space between experience and language.