Through the Thick of Tito’s Revolution and Thin of Oral History

Abstract

This paper is located at the intersection of interest in the (meta)theoretical aspects of oral history, life stories, (auto)biographical narratives and family oral history, as well as in the representation of a reflexive relationship not only to one‘s own experience of field research, but also to the understanding of the context that made possible the articulation and transmission of voices in the background of the great narratives of the National Liberation Struggle and the Socialist Revolution. What comes to light is that the archetypal matrices of patriarchal culture (and not just structuring the narrative on traditional narrative-rhetorical-plot models) are paradigmatic and influential in the process of shaping the referential and, especially, the evaluative level of the narratives about the Second World War and the Revolution, as recorded in the village of Javorani in the period between 2012 and 2022. It is concluded that in the narrative organization of personal and collective memory, narrators often reach for traditional patterns that provide an acceptable interpretation (acceptable for family identities as well as personal ones) of foundational events and actions that have been degraded from the positions of the officially promoted, ideologically acceptable discourse, placing the narrative in clearly identifiable sociocultural and ideological context of traditional culture.