Epistemic competitions over Jewish Holocaust survivors’ stories in interviews

Abstract

In this article, we scrutinise epistemic competitions in interviews about World War II. In particular, we analyse how the interlocutors draw on their epistemic authority concerning WWII to construct their interactional telling rights. On the one hand, the analyses illustrate how the interviewers rely on their historical expert status – as evidenced through their specialist knowledge and ventriloquisation of vicarious WWII narratives – in order to topicalise certain master narratives and thereby attempt to project particular identities upon the interviewees. On the other hand, the interviewees derive their epistemic authority from their first-hand experience as Jewish Holocaust survivors, on which they draw in order to counter these story projections, whilst constructing a more distinct self-positioning to protect their nuanced personal identity work. Overall, these epistemic competitions not only shaped the interviewees’ identity work, but they also made the link between storytelling and the social context more tangible as they brought – typically rather elusive – master narratives to the surface.

Reflecting and forging master narratives: A discursive analysis of a Belgian WWII museum's curatorial selection process

“…shared understandings of widely known historical facts – affects not only curatorial collection processes (see e.g. Schoofs & Van De Mieroop, 2021, on the role of interviewers in Second World War (WWII) memorials' data collection processes; Van De Mieroop & Bruyninckx, 2009), but also the ensuing selection process. As museum visitors typically do not have the opportunity to look behind these ‘front stage performances and representations of heritage displays’ (Coupland & Coupland, 2014, p. 497), this leads to an inevitable ‘homogenisation of plurivocality’ (De Jong, 2018, p. 18), with memorial museums often constructing narratives that revolve around collective identities – e.g.…”