An oral history in three times: relationships, narrative constructions, practical uses of memory

This article is the result of a project that collected oral history interviews, in the 2010s, with women who had already narrated their stories three decades before, in a different research context. The testimonies of one of the narrators, Marialice, recorded in 1981, 1983 and 2015, are discussed here, in four steps. First, using a methodological approach, we discuss the intersubjective relations established in research projected over time and in dialogue with the development of oral history scholarship between the 1980s and the 2010s. Then, in an interpretive approach, we evaluate the syntagmatic construction of Marialice's narrative; the narrative patterns she mobilizes; and, finally, the practical uses to which she puts her own personal history.