Alessandro Portelli · 2011 · PDF · Calibre ID 2627
Resurfaced in Only That Which Is Said (2026-10-11).
Role in the triad
The rulebook: the oral historian’s ethics, and error as evidence
Why this book
Introduction states the rules the other two books bend or break (no words put in mouths; cutting-room liberties; translate rather than transcribe) and says plainly that belief and forgetting are evidence. Title is the Herodotean ‘they say’, from Florence Reece’s song.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “There is no such thing as a neutral transcript: each comma is an act of interpretation” (PDF 19 / p. 10)
- “never putting into people’s mouths words they did not actually say (insertions are in brackets)” (PDF 19 / p. 10)
- “What people believe and what they forget is as significant as what people recall accurately.” (PDF 20 / p. 11)
- “the most important things I had to offer were my ignorance and my desire to learn.” (PDF 16 / p. 7)
- “Much of the meaning is in the gaps and in the silences, to be extracted or filled in by the readers’ cooperation and imagination.” (PDF 20 / p. 11)
- Annie Napier: “They say sometimes something favorite of somebody’s, their spirit will attach to it, but, now, I don’t know if that’s true or not.” (PDF 35 / p. 26)
Themes
coal · editing ethics · error as evidence · fieldwork · Florence Reece · Harlan County · oral history · transcript