The (de)construction of religious identity in oral history research in South Africa

Abstract

Religious identity links a person to his or her religious beliefs or affiliations. However, in a secularised world, religious identity no longer takes the lead in constructing a person’s life. It takes its place among other identities of age, class, (dis)ability, ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, indigeneity, locality and size (Hopkins 2010:8–9). Religious identity, like all other identities, is constructed by social discourses. Oral history is not blameless in this regard, supporting social construction by affirming people’s life stories. However, oral history research in South Africa is well placed to play another role, that of constructing contra-cultures and deconstructing the discourses that keep interviewees captive in the dominant discourses of ageism, sexism, racism and oppression. Apart from deconstructing identities of failure and captivity and reconstructing them as healthy religious identities, some oral history research in South Africa also strives to heal memories with religious identity as dialogic space and intertext. In this role, oral history research is not uncontested locally. In 2008, Sean Field, Director of the Centre for Popular Memory at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, rejected the need of the interviewer to have counselling skills in an article entitled “What can I do when the interviewee cries?” (Field 2008:15). The aim of oral history interviewing, according to Field, is to gather information, and not to heal. In a later article, “Disappointed remains”, he (Field 2011:149) repeats his position that “oral historians generally do not – and should not – have healing or therapeutic aims”, since oral history research is defined by research and not by the political aim of reconstructing a happy nation. Philippe Denis from the Sinomlando Centre for Oral History and Memory Work at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, deviates from this position in his latest book, A journey towards healing (2011) in which the stories of people in KwaZulu-Natal “with multiple woundedness” are told and it demonstrates how their stories were deconstructed in an oral history process towards healing. In the introductory chapter, Denis (2011:14) argues for “story-based interventions” as a means towards the healing of trauma and traumatic memories. This author views counselling skills as a prerequisite for oral history interviewing in the light of the retraumatisation that occurs when interviewees relate traumatic experiences of the past. However, in terms of social construction theory, healing ultimately lies in the deconstruction of the harmful discourses that keep society captive in the name of religion, and in the reconstruction of healthy religious discourses that are based on human dignity. Consequently, this paper describes seven oral history projects recently conducted in South Africa in which the deconstruction of harmful religious discourses and the construction of preferred life stories took place, and in which the aim of healing “trauma” – used here in the broad sense of ongoing deprivation and inhumanity – is presupposed. Not on purpose but incidentally, the oral history projects presented here were conducted in predominantly Christian communities. All the projects described here were conducted by the author as research professor at the Research Institute for Theology and Religion at the University of South Africa. The only exception is the memory box project of the Sinomlanda Centre at the University of KwaZulu- Natal (subsection 4).