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Comment: The Uses of Reminiscence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

David Gutmann
David Gutmann
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

Like Dr. Zenner, I have carried out field research in the Galilean region of Israel, and like him have had to rely mainly on older respondents—in my case, exclusively Druze—for basic data. But where Dr. Zenner is an anthropologist with historical interests, I am a psychologist; as such, my thoughts on the kinds of materials that we both collected may provide a worthwhile complement to his. Faced with the fact that memories of Aqiili Agha continue to echo through the Galilee long after his death, the historical scholar asks, ‘what manner of man engendered these accounts?’ while the psychologist asks, ‘why do these memories persist, and in what ways are these memories distorted by the same motives that keep them alive?’. Accordingly, Dr. Zenner uses his subjects as informants on an historic figure, Aqiili Agha, a person external to themselves. As a psychologist I use equivalent materials, from a similar respondent group, as projective data.

Type
Charisma
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , March 1972 , pp. 188 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1972

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References

1 Dr. Zenner dealt with both Muslim and Druze informants, whereas mine were sought in traditional and exclusively Druze villages of the Western Galilee and Carmel regions.

2 Erik Erikson has recently made brilliant psychological use of historical accounts, furnished by surviving associates of Gandhi's early years. Because he used these materials to infer the nature of the informant's relationship to Gandhi, as well as the personality of Gandhi himself, Erikson could present a more varied, multi-dimensional picture of that personality, and a clearer picture of Gandhi's early colleagues. See Erikson, E. H., Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence. New York: Norton, 1969.Google Scholar

3 The Druze research was part of a larger, ongoing study of the comparative psychology of the aging process. The overall program has been supported by a Career Development Award (No. 5-K3-HD-6043) from the National Institutes of Child Care and Human Development; and the studies of the Druze tribe were funded by grant No. 66–345 from the Foundation's Fund for Research in Psychiatry.

4 Informants who knew that I was Jewish probably tried to flatter and manipulate me through these demonstrations of affection for Israel. But this explanation of the Druze preference for Israeli over British and Turkish administration does not really hold up: the same subjects who praised the overall quality of Jewish administration were also quite ready to criticize the Israeli government on particular and not unimportant points (land expropriations, for example). Accordingly, the wish to flatter me could not have been very strong, and we can have some confidence in these Druze ratings of the various administrations.

5 In this sense, Nasser was a modern heir to sheikhs like Aqiili: he too moved constantly towards his own ‘Egyptian’ purpose, and he used the competing Russian and American powers to help him get there.

6 Gutmann, D. L., ‘The Country of Old Men: Cross-Cultural Studies in the Psychology of Later Life’. Occasional Papers in Gerontology, No. 5 (Donahue, Wilma, ed.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 04 1969, pp. 1–37.Google Scholar

7 Thus, a seventy-two-year-old resident of a traditional Druze village in the Galilee offers this version of the ‘generation gap’: ‘I don't make mistakes. I live economically. If you give your neck to a child, he will kill you. If you give him responsibility, he will ruin you. This is because he's not prudent in his expenditures, and he doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know how to spend the money and how to do his work. So I will not agree to give away any authority. I feel that I am wiser than my children, and so I have to keep this responsibility’.

8 This interpretation is of course highly speculative, but I find that it is worthwhile to think this way as I conduct interviews. By regarding my subject's historical accounts as metaphors of their present psychological situation, I sometimes spot persistent themes, reflections of a present trouble, and am thereby enabled to ask more accurate and ultimately more helpful questions. And it often turns out that these more personal questions are precisely those that the subject wants to consider.