Arbetsdelning

Med anledning av skillnaden mellan akademiska frågor och politiska:

This distinction between the facts, incorporated in the slave’s experience, and the philosophy reserved to educated white interpreters and sponsors, is a good example of a misunderstanding that has marred the contemporary social science approach to autobiography, life histories, and oral sources. The division of labor between fieldwork (collecting the data) and analysis (conducted in separate spaces and times) contributes to the perception of testimony as raw material, on which the social scientist performs a verity check and an exclusive interpretative act. The separation between the materiality of the sources and the intellectuality of the interpreter is often wrought with class prejudices and, as in the case of African Americans, with racial ones. The hinge of the division labor is the ambiguous utopia of objectivity, which connects the supposed factual objectivity of the source with the supposed intellectual objectivity of the scholar.

Alessandro Portelli: The Battle of Valle Giulia, s 79