Den aktiva källskaparen : en studie av Riksarkivets inspelningsverksamhet under 1980-talet

Sammanfattning

This master’s thesis studies several interviews conducted and recorded by the Swedish national archives in the 1980s. The interviews in question were carried out by a department at the national archives focusing specifically on acquisition and mapping of private archives. Between 1980 and 1991, employees at the department interviewed at least 20 people and recorded their stories, which were then archived within private archives of the interviewed individuals or an affiliated association. This recording practice is in this thesis analysed as a practice of oral history and put in relation to Terry Cooks (2013) archival paradigms to provide a context useful for archival science. Conclusions about the specific recording practice have been reached in terms of the scope and size of the project, an organisational reason behind the selection of interviewees, a view of the recorded interviews as complementing the written records of the private archives and a practice that’s somewhat aligned with the oral history practice suggested by Paul Thompson (1980) and fitting Terry Cooks (2013) description of the archival paradigm of memory, with certain aspects of the evidence and identity paradigm also present. The oral history practice of the department did however differ from that of Paul Thompson (1980) and other contemporaries in the field of social history in terms of who was selected for interviews. A majority of people interviewed were Swedish missionaries, most of them previously active in Asia, with politicians and rightwing extremists being other prominent themes in the selection of interviewees. The study also shows that the recording practice of the Swedish national archives during the 1980s carries a resemblance to earlier American oral history projects at archival institutions in how the recorded interviews resemble the literary genre of memoirs.